Farewell TransmissionBy Damon Hubbs
Abigail’s Party
The Banker’s Son
Damon Hubbs is a poet from New England. He’s the author of three chapbooks and a full-length collection, Venus at the Arms Fair (Alien Buddha Press, 2024). Recent publications include Spectra, World Hunger Mag, Horror Sleaze Trash, Don’t Submit!, and BRUISER. His poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Twitter @damon_hubbs
By GRSTALT
They closed the pisser in the park, so I had nowhere left to go. I used to love hanging out in that pisser, the acoustics in there were incredible, I’d sit in a cubicle all day listening to the guys going at it. It was a real social scene, a true community, you really got to know the regulars – the guys who stopped in during their lunch hour, the guys who hung around all afternoon trying to pluck up the nerve, the guys who liked it in the dark. I really started to root for the guys, I wanted them to get everything their hearts yearned for. When I saw that the door had been boarded up by the local authorities, I was totally distraught, I stayed in bed for three whole days. An entire world had been closed off for me. I started missing the guys, so I went looking for other places where they might have gone. I thought the guys might be hanging out in the woods, so I started going there. But all that happened was a guy kept trying to sell me some orange pills, and I’m not into that stuff.
2. My Own Pisser
The idea came when a guy knocked on my door asking if he could use my bathroom. He was going door to door trying to sell people a new kind of leaf blower and he’d drunk three cans of Barrel Bomb to get himself going that morning. As I stood in the spare bedroom and listened to him having a piss, I thought we’ve all got these toilets in our homes, just for ourselves, and wouldn’t it be nice if we shared them with people who could bring joy and variety into our lives. The next day I put up a sign outside my house that said: ‘Free toilet here!’ At first no one came, I waited in every day just in case, then there was a knock on the door that woke me up. It was 03:26 am. I usually took the sign down before I went to bed, but I forgot that night. We stood looking at each other for a minute, he was hugging himself and hopping on the spot to keep the cold out, then he said: ‘Toilet?’ He pointed over his shoulder at the sign. I showed him up and went into the spare bedroom. I couldn’t hear him doing anything in there, then the lock on the bathroom door unclicked, he went quickly down the stairs and the front door slammed. There were spots of blood on the bathroom floor and in the sink. I got out my chemicals and scrubbed until there was daylight in the window.
3. I Only Wanted to Hear
My friend Raincoat – not his real name – was a surveillance whiz. He told me he’d worked for intelligence in a semi-official capacity, there wasn’t a space he couldn’t penetrate. He once played me a tape of a well-known public figure – I can’t legally say who – using multiple slurs that would destroy them if they ever went public. That was his insurance policy, the masters were in a safety deposit box. He told me he could install a new system he’d been working on, giving me total audiovisual access, but I only wanted to hear, so the bathroom was wired up. I put up flyers in the park. The Flyer said: ‘Clean & Free, Open 24 Hrs’ with my address and a picture I drew of a sparkling toilet.
4. Building a Client Base
My first regulars came at night. I adjusted my sleep pattern for them. They didn’t make a lot of noise, but they left a lot of mess. I didn’t feel any connection to them. I needed to reconnect with my guys. Raincoat told me: ‘If you want to find them, you’ve got to get on the hookup apps. That’s what they use to keep tabs on the homos now.’ He gave me one of his old phones and showed me how to ‘spam’ on it. After a few days, guys started hanging around in my front garden. When I heard them come in and follow the directions, I ran up into the spare bedroom. It was so good to hear those familiar sounds again – the recordings I made were catalogued and stored on a separate drive. I emptied the spare bedroom to try and give it an echo, I kept the window open to make it as cold as possible, I scattered used tissues to create an aroma. As soon as the guys had vacated the bathroom, I hurried in and got on my knees in front of the toilet. I lowered my head into the bowl, reached up for the handle, and cranked the flush.
5. The One-Flush Policy
When I was a kid, my dad instituted a one-flush policy – he got concerned about water preservation after he read a sci-fi novel where Earth in 2037 gets turned into a desiccated launchpad by space travel conglomerates competing to settle Jupiter. He couldn’t park his car in the garage anymore because it was filled with bottled water – I think some of it was his own piss – and he got into three fistfights with people on our street when they used lawn sprinklers. He told us all the time that in the future whoever controlled the water supply would rule the world, and our decadence would come back to haunt us. Dad closely monitored our bathroom habits – if we flushed wastefully, we got a spanking and had to go to the woods to do our mess ‘like a lowly beast’. It only got better when Uncle Vic visited, he showed up every Christmas Eve, even though he was never invited. One year – I must have been about seven – Uncle Vic went to the bathroom, then a couple of minutes later he shouted from the top of the staircase: ‘It didn’t go down in one go, bro. Do I have your permission to give it another go, or should I just let it sit there?’ Everyone at the dining table froze. Dad hesitated, then said: ‘Yes, but just this once.’ Uncle Vic shouted to me: ‘Would you like a bonus flush, Kiddo?’ I looked at Dad, but his face didn’t tell me anything. I slid back my seat and tried not to move too fast. When I got to the bathroom, Uncle Vic was standing next to the toilet. He lifted the seat and signaled for me to look down. The bowl was empty. I looked at Uncle Vic, he smiled and said: ‘What are you waiting for, Kiddo? Crank on that flush!’
6. Expanding the Client Base
I woke up on the sofa with a woman looking down at me. The woman was holding a crying child. The woman said: ‘I’m so sorry, he’s made such a mess. I’ll happily clean it up–’ I cut her off and said: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll deal with it.’ She said: ‘This is such a godsend! He picked up a bug at creche and he’s been shitting uncontrollably for days now. I can’t believe they shut the public bathroom. The perverts ruin it for everyone! I’ll recommend you to the other parents I see in the park. It was spotless when we went in. Honestly, I’ve stayed in hotels that don’t match up.’
7. Handling the Externalities
Baby shit was streaked everywhere, I took a bottle out of my cleaning caddy and set about spraying every surface with the most powerful chemical I had – I bought it from a shop down the road run by a guy who claimed to have fought for the Mujaheddin. I scrubbed until I got dizzy and went for some fresh air on the landing. The front door opened. Two guys came in. They stood in the hallway, talking low so I couldn’t make anything out. Then they started shoving and collapsed onto each other. They rolled out of view. I could hear them bumping into the furniture. I took a bottle from my caddy and went down. They were grappling on the kitchen floor, their skeletal arms wrapped together and grasping. I leaned in and sprayed them in the face. I stepped back and held out the bottle as they separated – screaming, coughing, gagging, rubbing their eyes. I retreated to the foot of the staircase and locked the door when they’d staggered out.
8. The Most Picturesque Pisser
I carried the bottle with me everywhere, but they weren’t the ones I should have been sweating. The parents from the park started showing up, they turned my living room into an outreach centre, they took over my kitchen to bake treats, there were toys everywhere, and they commandeered my cleaning caddy – that’s when I really blew my top. I stood in the middle of the living room and told them: ‘This isn’t what I wanted when I started this thing, and I’m not doing this anymore!’ The house went quiet, then a baby started bawling. I dropped my bottle and left the house. I kept running until I was in the woods. I gave the guy selling the orange pills everything in my wallet and he handed me a bag. The guy tried to stop me when I opened the bag and directed it at my open mouth, but I shoved him to the ground. He got up and ran away, shouting: ‘It’s your funeral, pal! I tried, man, I tried!’ I forced them all down, I knew the only place left for me was underground, a special place where I could be with the blind and spineless creatures. I got on my knees and started digging with my hands, tossing dirt over my shoulders. When the hole got deep enough, I rolled inside and kept going until there was no more daylight. The hole started to pulsate. I was thrown upward by an eruption of foul air. The pale sky filled my eyes. Then a face. It was Uncle Vic! I hadn’t seen him since that Christmas. He never came back after the flush party. Dad said he was sick. I asked him where he’d been, he said: ‘I’ve been hanging out with the guys, Kiddo. Let’s go see them!’ Uncle Vic carried me to a clearing, where there was the most picturesque pisser I’d ever seen! I tried to imagine what chemical could make it sparkle like it did. We went inside and Uncle Vic deposited me in a gorgeous cubicle. The water in the bowl was crystal clear, I scooped up a handful and washed the dirt from my face. Footsteps echoed off the tiles, the lock clicked on the neighbouring cubicle and there was the jangle of a belt being unfastened, I could hear everything with perfect clarity, like the entire place was wired up. The guys had come!
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By Chloe Wheeler
some things i hate
the flavor of the dying vape i found
on Leya’s kitchen table. burnt watermelon.
microplastics. bruised apples, green bananas.
i hate that my I is all knotted up in your You.
codependency. entanglement. enmeshment.
i hate my eyes glued on You, ascending
the steps at 145th St. Station. all my books
and my clothes in crates in your room. i hate
being a Capricorn. talking to CPS on the phone.
poorly affixed coffee cup lids. so many stains.
the sunny Sunday after tragedy befalls you.
inappropriately wonderful weather,
the shrill cries of blue jays, telling lies.
bad cover bands. cryptic tonsils swollen
like fat grapes occluding my vocal tract.
wheezing out an aria. smokers lung.
wasting time trying to understand
its passage. the insidious oblivion
of Youtube shorts. mukbangs.
your big sneezes, smearing snot
on my leg in the absence of tissues.
the absence of You, taking
all of my Me.
i fucking hate Tuesdays.
dear Madi
i can’t help but think daylight wasn’t meant to be saved.
the road is a void, i stop at a red. the tire pressure light is on.
you helped me fill the tires on Luke’s Subaru in New Paltz last February.
he snapped a b&w photo of us doing it on a disposable Fujifilm.
i’ve got a copy somewhere, must’ve misplaced it.
we’re both city slickers now, downtown degenerates.
the scene subsumed us, didn’t it. and as it were,
i don’t remember how to put air in the tires.
checking the Honda booklet while the red still burns…
dashboard. cd player. airbag warnings. moonroof, mirrors.
the sun is too often the main character.
the moon is almost always a symbol of itself,
yet i feel its tug the strongest.
we got thrown out of orbit, didn’t we?
long island is but a quagmire, my dad texted.
i drove him home last week from the hospital in Oceanside,
avoided every pot hole on New York Avenue.
i thought of you, and your dad. how’s Bryon doing?
how are the dogs? how’s Mooney and her thumbs?
it’s only 5:49 and it’s so dark i can’t read the manual.
a flash of green. i’m accelerating. kale mushroom egg bites
on the steps of St. Nicholas park. reading Luke’s poem.
we touched grass. i’m so happy we’re in love.
i’m so happy—i could cry and pull out all my hair,
stuff it in the Nicorette box we kept
on the table at Tompkins, beside the ceramic mallard.
i swear you were there when i saw the green ray
in Saint-Jean-de-Luz. like the click of a laser
beamed into my corneas. irrevocable instant.
the waves broke immediately after it passed.
i ate tomatoes doused in olive oil at a tiny bar
by the beach, and thought of the storm
we were caught in two years ago, on another
coast, clutching you as ozone flooded our olfactory,
clay oozed from the cliffs, and lightning smote the sand.
it’s impossible not to see God in your eyes since then.
at Sunoco it’s $2 per vend, for four minutes of air.
counting change, i open the moon roof for some circulation.
jamming quarters into the slit, i fill my tires with thoughts of you.
home, sick
choppy sea of carpeting,
L-shaped couch,
Led Zeppelin poster.
my high school boyfriend was a painter.
he had a knife on him, always
stowed in the pockets of his cargos.
when i’d sing he’d cry.
he sold a 6×6 foot canvas
to the drummer, the guitarist
didn’t know what to think of him,
and the bassist was always barefoot.
i don’t know what made me stop singing,
when the pitches bent, and i got lost
in some ceaseless caesura.
all i know is that when i’m home,
in Long Island, i hide
under leaf piles, poking my head out
only to watch herds of deer
dash down the hill
in my parents’ backyard.
my ex-boyfriend was in a car accident
and walks with a cane now.
the Mustang was speeding,
and spun out—
it was nobody’s fault.
with his disability checks
he balls out on Grailed.
i just happened to crash out.
it was nobody’s fault, but my own.
i moved to Brooklyn for fucks sake.
it was bound to be a blight, at any rate.
that band? they’re still playing. the guitarist sings now.
i’m happy for them, truly.
but all melody becomes mist.
sound moves at a rate of 340 meters per second,
until it becomes intractable, immaterial, barely an echo.
sound is the ephemeral incarnate.
only light never decays.
Chloe Wheeler writes poems. Her writing has appeared in Expat Press, Hobart Pulp, Don’t Submit, Bullshit Lit, among others. Twitter @sardine_enjoyer
By Joshua Hebburn
I hit send and put the phone down, face up, on the table. Waited, and the phone buzzed. The screen lit. I read. I went to the doorway of my apartment and opened the coat closet, which, since I live in Southern California, I use for storage instead of coats. I walked back over to the table. I positioned the nail true over my phone screen and hammered the notification into the table.
Joshua Hebburn is an assistant fiction editor at X-R-A-Y. From the Farewell Transmission archive he recommends Tyler Dempsey’s “Evidence I’m Mentally Ill.”