Category: Across The Wire Vol. 6

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Across The Wire Vol. 6

Fast-Forward, Rewind, Fast-Forward, Static

By Caleb Bethea

Bruce Springsteen knows something about quantum physics. The way he sets up a dichotomy in a song, a divide between squalor and salvation. Then he hits the last chord before you ever hear the end of the story—the hero’s foot on the gas of his ‘54 but you have no way of knowing if he’ll really make it out of New Jersey or not. A Schrödinger’s Cat on the Boardwalk. 

One of the best examples is “I’m on Fire.” An earnestly horny track just two and half minutes long. The protagonist wants nothing more than to have this woman, but she’s married, and all we end the song with is that he’s up all night thinking about her. A dull knife cutting a valley through his skull.

I saw the music video the same year three of my grandparents died. I was seven-turning-eight, and we had a VHS of all his music videos that we watched at my great-grandmother’s house, rewinding, fast-forwarding to our favorite performances. Among my siblings, the segment of the tape most crystallized as an example of his cool, late-American demeanor was the video for “I’m on Fire.” It kicks off with a busy garage. Bruce’s legs are dangling out from under a car and he’s cranking something into place when the woman walks her heels over toward his boots to ask if he can fix her perfectly functional car and have it ready by tomorrow. 

He’s covered in grease. He smiles, a little timid, saying he can bring it by her place—but he sees the diamond on her finger and she explains they live way the hell out in the hills. 

He was so goddamn cool. A working-man rockstar in the face of death all around me. A cowboy sort of masculinity that had something to do with worker’s unions and gambling debts. So I kept rewinding, fast-forwarding to that video, believing that on the other side of all this death was me as a man who was so goddamn cool. Adulthood would find me behind the wheel of a ‘54 with an Atlantic City sign in the sky.

But now I’m thirty-two, and instead of grease on my hands, it’s seething under my skin and it slides the anxiety from one side of my body to the other, and someone along the way has knifed a valley between me and masculinity. I’m in there somewhere, just trying to keep a lid on the feral cat under the boardwalk. 

It’s fine. No one really thinks one thing or another about my masculinity, that I can tell, but I’m not real into the idea of being a man. Still, I tell myself I haven’t earned the non-binary title, not enough motor oil sliding through my veins instead of blood. And Jesus fucking Christ, I kinda hate that about myself. My looking less like Bruce and more like the person in the Iron Maiden shirt holding the boom over Bruce’s head behind the scenes for the “I’m on Fire” video shoot. But, I like that about myself, too. Still, I fast-forward, rewind, fast-forward, static.

It’s fine. 

As an adult, I watch YouTube videos about gender identity and then I watch the “I’m on Fire” video, and then I read the comments underneath. Half of them sound like “This song always makes me think of my first girlfriend, who became my wife of forty years, and died last week.” And it only takes three or four of these comments before you realize this song about a little sex is a lot about death. And not in a metaphorical way. There’s a gravity to work like this, bringing us back to the first time we wanted someone as we listen after losing them.

And gender might be something like that, a dense, rumbling fucking mystery, a space—or a lack of space—where we lose the shit that once made us who we were. All of us in our high heels rolling under the heavy machinery of a car with a supernova swirling above us. We don’t know whose car it is. We don’t care. We just want to feel so goddamn cool.

It’s fine. 

My grandfather, who was the last to go the year I turned eight, had hands strong as hell, his own pre-Springsteen brand of cool—of being a man. And I think of all my grandparents and all the pictures they took of me, the woodworking they gifted me, the souvenirs they brought me from their travels across the country, and I wonder what they would think about their grandkid’s gender confusion. I wonder how we view people from the other side of this death trap. If we get it. If it matters. 

I like to think we call our grandchildren non-binary after we die. I like to think it matters.

 

Caleb Bethea is a writer from the Southeast. They’re the author of DISCO MURDER CITY (Maudlin House ‘25). You can also find their work in HAD, X-R-A-Y, hex, Bruiser, ergot, Modern Alchemy, and elsewhere. But, mostly, they’re just a family ghoul with a wife and four goblins by the ocean. You can say hi on most platforms: @caleb_bethea_ 

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Across The Wire Vol. 6

three poems

By Lana Valdez

Reminiscing on a Prosperous City You Once Ran Away to

You drank Bellinis at hardware stores with crystal chandeliers and 

tried not to get him in your photos, 

the gluttony on both your faces, 

marked. You had no predecessors, 

only ancestors laughing at you, 

at your silk scarves from the vintage store,

the cheap wallet, a prop. 

A prosperous city, a pseudonym for your socials, 

but he’ll find you anyway, you should never worry, he says.

By Cristal and candlelight 

you take your steaks medium rare, 

the ones that will be his ruin. 

You used to come here with your mother, now it’s a hideout. 

How did you come to own the shelter, you ask, 

the luxury homeless shelter for young girls? 

In the Middle of an Impossible Summer 

where your gums stick to the roof of your own mouth, 

you have a choice. 

Don’t tell me about poison

when all the lizards are hiding, when no one 

rises in the dark to feed the ocean, 

to clean the heaps of trash from her banks. 

There are rocking chairs in the swamp 

eaten up by the storm and this town was never small. 

A sleek slight of hand, our backyards up to our temples. 

Tell me this is true in your mind, 

tell me you understand, it was never your poison. 

Debating on Whether or Not I Should Buy Groceries 

on the first of the month when I still haven’t rewired my brain from last month, a spectacle of sleepless eyes like saucers, of oyster dinners on the bay and dry nosebleeds. When you’re living out of a suitcase you have nowhere, nowhere to put your vanity- tracing lipstick on perfect skin, searching for the perfect spot to sit with your shadow, the shades odd and drawn. If I was worried about buying eggs, I didn’t show it, busying my mind with my reflection, burying the rampant gray hairs down, down, down the drain, shards of glass and pulp gathering at the bottom.

LANA VALDEZ is a poetess and thought daughter currently living in New Jersey. Her debut collection, “I Rot,” is available via Filthy Loot, and her work also appears in Spectra, Expat, Dream Boy Book Club, and others. 

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Across The Wire Vol. 6

A Fixer Upper

by Craig Rodgers

It costs next to nothing. Who would believe, a little old thing. A cabin, some would call it. A fall down, others. This home cobbled so long ago.

He parks out front and just looks. Takes it in. The driveway is broken rock grown over. A reaching arc through the long yard. The once great paved expanse has succumbed to what may come. He steps out among the sprouts and cracks.

Beyond acres away. Farmland once. Now grains shift and lean after long generations. Remains sit somewhere out there. A chimney rising in the grass. Ancient bricks stacked. 

He calls the realtor, it rings and rings. He texts. Where are you, why aren’t you here. More of this. He tucks the phone away.

A dark waits. These first rooms. The walls are caved in places. Rotted all through. He touches, he knocks. Stepping deeper. He turns a knob and a flashlight pops and the dark falls back. He proceeds. Through rooms. On. Dust and flaking. In places falling. All these years.

He talks to himself. Little things, words. Wow or oh. Sometimes phrases. Oh wow. Touching these old walls. He runs a hand along. 

Stairs go down. A basement wide and deep, dug beyond the walls above. Old pillars brace against the weight of stone and the world. The floor goes off into the dark. Concrete in places, dirt in others. He pulls at his shirt. A deeper heat here. In the walls, in the ground. Nooks are packed with shelves now empty, dust caked along.

He walks with the phone shined around. Pale flash lens. A rug is green with mold. Old chairs sit rotting. He touches items as if to be assured they are there.

A pair of boards are nailed over damage. Planks warped by years of rain dripping. He gives one a tug and it groans and pulls loose. He yanks the other and it snaps and falls at his feet.

A void exists beyond. He squats and leans and he shines the light. A hole is dug into the earth. A black reaching down. The light won’t touch the bottom, its glow snatched up along the way. 

He stands on the basement stairs. He dials and calls and when it doesn’t connect he calls again. He climbs two steps and tries again but nothing changes. He curses aloud.

Down again. Past the stairs and on. He shines the light and he moves close and leans but he does not understand. The hole is still there but the boards are gone.

When he reaches in he feels a step. Some sort of rung. He dangles a foot and he turns and lowers himself in and another step matches the first. A crude ladder going down and down. He climbs hand over hand deep into the sunk shaft, phone light put away now, his being swallowed whole by the hot earth.

He doesn’t think to count. It doesn’t occur to him that it could be so far. When sweat runs into his eyes he wipes away its sting. When his arms begin to shake he tells himself it can’t be far now.

Still he’s shocked when the ground is there. He’d started to think the climb might go on forever. Now he stands flat on dirt floor. He turns and turns. There is a light. A trickle of gleam waving in the far off black. He goes that way, there is no other way to go.

At times he must stoop. Sometimes he touches walls for support. Making his way along. Sweating. More a cave than a hall. The light comes nearer as he moves along but it never seems to grow brighter. He calls out with a hollow want. Hello. Hello. He goes on. 

The way ends as it must. A room is there, carved into the ancient stone. A single candle sits on a table, its flicker of flame stirring in a touch of air faint and puzzling. Beyond this there is a man. Bearded and skeletal. Flesh pulls thin across bones with every movement. With long fingers he bends wood and he snaps a piece and this he tosses into a hearth and then he reaches to break apart another.

A step or maybe something more subtle. Maybe just a feeling. But now he is turning, this frail figure. He is straightening as he turns to face this man. His voice is a whisper.

“Oh there you are,” he says.

_____

The realtor steps through the house. Her suit is fine but reserved. No need for pomp in the sticks. She scrolls the phone and calls again. One foot kicks a bucket away.

It rings. Of course it rings. Forever it does. She tucks the phone away. Now she wanders. Through dark rooms and around. The stairs are there leading down. 

Her flashlight is military grade. It splashes the basement in daylight bright. Mud bugs curl into shadow. With a loafer she sifts among refuse. The leavings of a century of squatters. In one corner a molding rug has been dragged into a bunch. 

She climbs steps back into the light. Phone held high like a trophy. She steps out of the basement and then out of the remains of the structure and she scrolls and calls again, turning and turning still. The phone clicks and the signal connects and now it rings and rings and in time the call goes nowhere. She thinks she might call again but she does not. She puts away the phone and now only stands, eyes falling closed for seconds at a time, feeling the soft presence of air on skin. Not a breeze, something gentler, more slight. She breathes in. Abrasive morning air. She takes it in deep gulps. She smiles, eyes closed. Maybe she laughs, it’s such a morning. 

There is a faint air. Just a hint. In that morning freshness only the barest waft of something other does come. Smoke. She opens her eyes. She turns and turns and far off in a spread of open field there stands a chimney ancient and crumbling, some remnant of a once grand estate centuries lost, and from this relic there now trickles gray plume. She takes a step that way and then another, but she finds herself slowing, halting, and now she is sitting in the grass, now she is but an observer as the furnace is ignited once more. 

Craig Rodgers is the author of several books, dozens of stories, countless notes, and one convoluted plan to fake his own death.

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Across The Wire Vol. 6

Magnolia from The Heartbreakers

By Dan Duffy  

Her cheekbones sat sharp—right up under her water colored eyes. Her cheeks pooled into loose hounddog jowls. Her skin, the rough and tanned leather typical of smokers late in the game.  

painting courtesy of Red Danielson (2025)

She wore pink scrubs and an old pair of white tennis shoes. She drank black coffee from a mug printed over with an image of a steamboat chugging up the Mississippi. White steam clouds floated over the boat against a baby blue sky. Her hand was steady as she lowered the cup back to the table.  

Folger’s is shit, she thought.  

Her legs crossed like stilts at the knees. She sighed and crossed her hands in her lap. She looked across the blank yard. The veinlike limbs of varied hardwoods thicketed grey and tan beyond the tall black iron fence at the bottom of the hill. Them trees are pitiful, she thought. 

She checked her black Casio and saw it was 7:07. She pushed into the thin cushions of the plastic lawn love seat. She picked up her cigarettes and lighter from the glass table. The smoke felt dry in her lungs and she wretched wetly before her chest settled into regular albeit ragged breaths.  

She reflected back on her thoughts beginning before she crawled out of her bunk into the darkness. She thought about how they started before her spirit had time to orient itself in the black morning room. She hated the thoughts. She thought they were a total nuisance. Thoughts no one normal would ever think. 

She drew from the deep background of her mind the knowledge none of these things were true. Yet she found herself unable to let go of this new copy of the old story. Every morning was like starting over in this way. She breathed in through her nose. An old trick learned in the Midwest recovery scene. 

Here I am, she thought.

I am alive. I have my Kamels and the lawn is alive and them trees are alive and the Folger’s is shit but it is still black and warm and warmin me and givin me one of the two remainin buzzes. Folger’s and Kamels and the trees and the cardinal just landed there on the feeder. Barnfire’s soul come to see me in the morning. 

She slurped her coffee and let her breath out after an eight count. She accepted her and her suicidal brain would dance this dance of breath and neurosis until the end of days. She laughed at them. She imagined their voice was a wooly faced man in a suit in the fetal position sucking his thumb on the membranelike bottom floor of her brain. She imagined brushing his hair and cooing him as he trembled and wept. An old ego vision from the early days. 

A breeze washed up from the south across her nose, her crowsfeet, the lines around her mouth as she smoked. A clump of ash fell to the concrete patio as she lowered her hand. Lightbeams played through the leaves. The sky smoky blue. 

It all reminded her of the morning in Dixie, Alabama when she’d stolen Deddy’s cigarettes off the Formica counter. She’d stared at them under the yellow light overhead of the stove, where they sat next to his gold keys, for a long minute, before she snatched them up and walked out the back sliding glass door. She’d busted six matches before she got one to stay lit on the front end of the Winston. She’d remained proud for years on account she hadn’t coughed on the first one.  

She thought the house they’d grown up in a poor one. All shingles and no roof. The backyard full of beer cans and spent propane tanks—cigarette butts, dog shit and ashes. She still cringed at the thought of it. She thought she’d tried to talk straighter, clearer, whiter—more like some person from New York would talk—on account of the house. The clapboard painted a dark emerald. She always thought the guy who painted it must’ve been drunk or high as hell as the coats were as swirled and thick as Van Gogh’s buttermilk impastos over olive trees. 

They lived after a few empty lots at the end of a road at the edge of Dixie. The city came in and turned it from dirt to oystershell in ’68. The houses up the street were mildly better than theirs insofar as their paint jobs were cleaner and their boards were straighter, and their yards were free of the trash so dominant in hers.     

She was halfway through the first Winston as she felt hands bury into and grip her shoulders and skin touch cool against her cheek as she smelled a rosy waft from the sweet olive bush near the door. 

“Hey!” said a voice like a bell.  

A smile wrapped her head. She turned and looked up into the pale diamond eyes, the suddenly strong jaw, the round nose, the dirty blonde hair in loose curls draped around the face of Barnfire. Her warm breath on her breath. 

“The hell you doin smokin a cigarette?” 

“Bein a man,” Chastity said. 

“You a man now?” 

“I am today.”   

Chastity felt a darkness in the center of the morning as she watched the cardinal hop up on the powerline. She slurped her coffee. Her bestfriend Rebecca Barnfire had come to see her from up the road.  

They’d run the town with boys in trucks till they were old enough to leave. The big trees’d all been logged out before they were born. The Service-planted-pines were just starting to grow back once they got older.  

Chastity’s father drank Bud heavies and smoked dope on the back porch when he was home in the mornings and nights. He slaughtered cows down at the slaughterhouse. The oystershell ran out by the time the road got to their house and there were big washed out holes in it and he refused to pay for the dirt work.  

He, her daddy, Charles Lee, liked to sit with his shirt off and stare at the moon. The FM band was set on 98.5 and the presence of the eternal darkness beckoned across the yard and into the fields which stretched out to the baby pines at the edge of Monroe County. He was not without the loving thoughts any man may have of his child and the universe from which she emerged. His tears ran silent down his crooked face in the moonlight and Charley Pride played on the radio. 

Chastity and Rebecca played with the dirt clods and cigarettes until they were old enough to pick up whiskey and pills. Once they’d found those—in Doctor Mellingham’s offices, in the plasticwood cabinetry, in the fields—they relied upon them the way they saw the girls growing up across the street rely on Jesus. The headlights of the old Fords lit the path to the beer joint on Friday nights down at Bill Bleaker’s Creekbed Jamboree.  

Rebecca wolfwhistled at the Southern rock four piece from Montgomery. She made her face sparkle and lowered her eyes and picked up her rose patterned cotton dress and spun once she felt the shaggyheaded frontman’s eyes. 

Chastity bit the aluminum bar at Bleaker’s with a fury her ancestors would understand. She heard stories of her grandaddy drinking the county dry through the wars—too drunk to report for duty. Back then her face was sharp and clear: like a mirror on fire. Light freckles covered the high cheekbone, the hard jaw and the hawknose. Her eyes the color of some mystic sea water. The boys from the schools the county over didn’t know what to make of her and she and Barnfire bit their heads off at their leisure.  

Once they drove west for Orange Beach under the cover of more moonlight. They watched the world turn from pure pine wood to saltwater and sand. The beach was eternal on either side and the sea went on forever in front of them and the beach disappeared into the pines at their backs. Gas lanterns burned from where they hung under the eaves of the fishing huts out on stilts at the end of long and winding piers over the water. They got naked and swum out in the saltwater. They kissed and fell asleep that way in the wet sand under the moon.

There was no evilness between them on the drive back and the air was as clear as Alabama itself. There was a silence between them which was longer and greater than the world. They stopped at bait shop for burgers and made love in the parking lot after running their hands across the neon rainbow of plastic lures, under a canopy of nylon lines. They put more ice in the Playmate and bought another sixer of Miller once they’d toweled down. The beach highway burned under the truck and the sea oats stubbled the sand on the sides of the road.  

They left everything behind and moved to Pensacola and lived in the beach bars up and down the coast. Barnfire’s folks wondered where she was. They shot bottles like skeet with twelve gauges on the beach with roughnecks in from the rigs one night. The road hummed under them wherever they went and they gave no care for trouble. Barnfire’s face grew rounder and they got jobs in the kitchens and rented a bungalow. They spent their money on beer and cigarettes and lived for the sight of the beach and night unoccluded by condos or casinos.  

Crank broke up the scene in ’78 and she remembered the feeling of the morning she left for the north with no idea where she would stop next. She saw Rebecca crying with her top off on the teal motel comforter—her palms upturned to the ceiling and her blonde hair a darkstreaked beautiful mess of waves. She’d kissed her on the forehead and put the bag in the back of the truck as Magnolia from the Heartbreakers debuted on the radio.  

Chicago was a mean city and she’d found a new side of herself called heroin  which she hated. It was a total loss of confidence which forced her into the denizened Midwestern nights like black steel burning on the highway. She fought with several men and lost and her face took on a crushed bruisedness in the silver mirrors. You could see the outline of her bones in her arms, and the thin cotton dresses from home she’d once  been loved in went grey and ragged. 

She flew a sign on the interstate. The mega highway wind would blow her hair back and she remembered crying without tears more than once as she waited for the dollars of strangers.  

One night she found herself with enough money to enter under the Christmas lighted ceiling of Robichaux’s in the old Polish part of town. Past a row of clapboard houses not unlike the ones from the street she grew up on. There was a warm brownness to the night air. She’d seen a father and son throw a ball back and forth with a dog in one of the dozens of chainlinked backyards on the walk to the bar. She’d heard about it  through her new friend Henry James who was a night thief and a busker in the central city.  

She ordered a shift beer and looked up at the lights. A ball game played in the crook of the ceiling and she let her eyes drift past it. She flexed her jaw and felt like she’d been kicked in the mouth. She felt the cold come in from the door and turned to see a man in a black leather jacket and blue jeans brush powder from his shoulders and take off his beanie. She was overcome with the sensation of life having eclipsed her entirely. It was as if the last breath of her childhood self had blown out the door with the man’s entrance. She felt slurried as she nodded her head toward him. He was brickjawed and grey stubbled and he walked past her to the other end of the bar.  

She watched him finish his one beer. Magnolia leaves in sunlight against a blue sky blurred in the back of her head as she was overcome with the old desire for Alabama. The depression was a deep navy. There was no one to call in the homestate any longer. There might as well have been no Alabama.  

She covered her pint glass with a coaster and put her hat on and walked out to the sound of Bocephus singing notes on fishing from the jukebox. She sat on the cold black iron bench out front and felt nothing as she smoked. A boxtruck pushed through the slush and cast golden beams on the wet black road. She wanted to go to the mission and sleep. She wanted to never have another drink. She cursed the old man with his shirt off in the backyard in the moonlight.  

I got what he got. And it’s all I got.  

The truck pushed back by going the other direction and she thought of flagging it down for a ride to the mission.  

She blew her hands and looked up to the clear black sky. She began to walk toward the mission with the vision of the field beyond the trash of her youth in her mind like a warm spirit guiding her feet in the direction of the sense of a sound mind. Her pulse quickened and her body warmed. She was all of a sudden sure of what was going to happen next. She would walk all the way to the mission: the clear five miles. She would pay the dollar fifty for the bed and ask to borrow one of their towels. She’d get on her knees and pray next to the bunk, her elbows at rest on the baby blue waffle blanket, like she did as a baby in Dixie. 

She’d wake up the next morning at six to beat the crowd. She’d pray again, and have another shower, and see if she could get a comb for her hair. If she could, she’d comb it out slow and easy like the rain which then fell on her as she walked. She’d hit the eight o’clock meeting at Southland. She’d make the ten block walk there from the mission. She’d hope to see one of the women she knew there with some time. One of  those pure women in the golden light of God—their steely hair healthy, well brushed down to their shoulders and secured by expensive clips.  

She’d ask the one which called to her to guide her and she’d call her everyday and do what she said. She’d find a way to get the dollar fifty for the mission and live there the rest of her life if she had to until she found somewhere better. If she never found anywhere better it would be okay as long as she didn’t drink whiskey or get high ever again. She’d fly a sign for an hour or two a day and look for a job the rest of the time. If she had to she’d fly a sign for the rest of her life. She’d try and buy a better shirt as soon as she got the chance.  

And it all went as close to this as one could imagine. She stayed at the mission for three months and got a job in one. She sold coffee off a street cart at less than minimum wage and saved up enough in three months to move into an Oxford House further north. She worked the cart for another three months before getting on at the Donton Square McDonald’s where she made manager in two years. She kept her hair pinned back and her hands clean at work. She watched the odd reflective grey towers of the city in the mornings on the train on the way to work. The sun hit the sides of the towers and she felt alive through her muscles and face. Lightbeams fell through the shadows and crossed her face in diagonal lines those mornings on the train.  

One morning five years in she was cleaning the windows in the front of the restaurant when her pocket buzzed and she answered her phone.  

Her sister’s voice on the other end of the black line asked if she’d “heard the  news” about their father.  

“No,” she’d said.  

“He killed himself this morning with a knife in his bedroom. Stabbed himself in the heart three times and fell back on the bed and died. Dixie police found him stomach up.” 

Chastity watched a shirtless man, with a dirty blonde beard, in swimtrunks, cross the street. He knelt on one knee. She heard him cry out like a hurt bear through the plateglass over her sister’s static voice on the line. 

She met her sister three days later, down in Dixie, at a grey hotel on Highway Eight. It was a small, sad service. There were only a few Presbyterians the old bastard had long since abandoned. Chastity thought his head was bloated to unreasonably red and wide proportions even for an alcoholic. His hands folded on top of one another like a schoolboy’s on his football field of a chest. His shoulders met the white padding interior of the casket on either side. His mouth drawn in a thin anti-smile and the black holes of his nose erupted in pubic-like hair. She crossed herself at the sight of him and kneeled by his casket. She said the old prayers under her breath and the new ones she’d learned in Chicago.  

She couldn’t bring herself to kiss his forehead; the specter of this failure would haunt her for decades. They closed the box and drove him out on Highway Eight to the Dixie Historic Cemetery. She rode with her sister in her silver sedan behind the hearse. The church people only made one more carload. Highway Eight emptied out into the fields past the Sonic and the Advanced Autoparts. The fields were bright green; to  Chastity, they looked more alive than all of Chicago combined. Her sister’s car windows were oilstreaked and the clear coat on her hood had come off in two big boils of rust and sunbaked metal.  

The cemetery backed up to a soy field. It was encircled by a couple scraggly pines and a half dead cedar in which a couple turkey vultures’d made their roost. The two Hall brothers from Hall Funeral Home brought out the riser cart and set it up for their father. They wore matching auburn and navy check sportscoats, navy slacks, shiny black loafers and salt and pepper hair trimmed down to a neat half inch. 

The older brother, James, opened the back of the hearse. “Awlright Miss Chastity, now, let’s gone head and get yah daddy home baby.”      

The younger brother, Beau, pulled the casket out of the back and slid it onto the riser, in one precise pull, as James held the riser steady.  Chastity turned and watched the two Presbyterians pile out of a big white pickup.  The young, skinny one—with his thick brown hair combed over in a quaff—pushed his checkered shirt deeper into the belted waist of his khakis and curled his lip as he squinted. A bald man who drove strowed right up to the casket and patted it like a dog with a pale hand. 

“We’re gonna miss ol Charles Lee down at the chewch,” he said. “He was a helluva card, but I believe the man had a good heart. People are gonna say what they say about anybody, but I believe Charles Lee had a good heart.”  

Chastity brushed some hair away from her mouth where it’d been caught. A breeze blew through and kicked up dust in their faces. Her sister threw her hand up and guarded her eyes.  

They found themselves over by the hole in the ground the Halls dug before dawn. James Hall held his slim, leatherbound copy of the Gospel against his chest with his dark and shining hands. He wore a forlorn look of patronage as he looked over the small crowd with his back to the field. He looked as though he was prepared to deliver a life sentence to a man of equal nobility. He opened his mouth to speak but it was so dry he mashed his tongue against the roof of his mouth before he opened it again and spoke.  

“The ribbon of life is cut in the dyin days of a dyin land.”  

His tongue felt thick and pasty against the dry roof of his mouth. He gulped what spit he had left down before he spoke again. 

“It is through this ribbon we walk, and cross this ribbon we mus live. It is in the mornins, alone fields such as this, where we mus pray and say, ‘I too am a man in this land. I too will cast my seed across the clean of the earth, and ass Gawd to provide whatever providence he may deem suitable to my existence.’”  

He took a small step forward. He rocked back on his heels as he lifted his toes and then tapped them down against the dirt.  

“’Jesus was a cross maker’ it has been sung. ‘Jesus was a cross maker.’ A man amongst men. A fishermen of men amongst fishermen. The Leaven carryin the secret of the Leaven to the unleaven flock of the world. Charles Lee was one of the other. He was in one of these two camps, and only Christ knows the difference, and  Charles Lee of course was made of Christ as we all are. The Brother is at rest now. He has found his heavenly home. He is in the sky of diamonds. He is in the teal pull of the universe. For us, here on earth, there are only the two commandments to remember and  practice daily. There is no truth outside of those truths.”  

James looked over at Beau where he stood, arms crossed, at the corner of the grave plot, under one of the sickly cedars.  

“Amen?” 

“Amen,” the small gathering said in broken pieces.  

On the car ride home, her sister asked her to come and live with her after the funeral and she was struck by the clarity in which she felt the conviction to agree. She hugged her and flew back. She sold most of her things, swept the floor and bought a car to drive down to Fairhope. She went to the mission and served a meal and thanked the staff there. She visited the grave of the steelhaired woman who helped her and left a gold coin on her headstone. 

Her windshield and rear window were clean and clear as she headed south out of the Midwest. A twenty year career in the Fairhope public schools, a turn of the century cottage in a quiet neighborhood drowned in green oaks, a life in the church, her sister’s eventual release in the arms of cancer in hospice care—this was much of all which stood between her and that long drive she made out of Chicago. 

The cardinal hopped down from the feeder into the grass. It was preening itself. It twitched its head. It reminded Chastity of a smile. It spread its wings and paused. It flew blackeyed across the yard and into the sky. She touched the coffee. It had gone cold. The birds in the trees had gone quiet. There was no sound but the wind. It was 1976, no 1978. It was her, it was Rebecca Barnfire, it was her sister. All of them in the car. All of them turning the radio up to the right level. The trees burning way to give rise to the rest of the country. She coughed her wet cough and lit her last Kamel. She took three drags and a smile crossed her face in the reverie of the morning. She coughed and she  coughed and she laughed as she fell from the chair—arms wide open to all the women of the universe. To Alabama herself. 

Dan Duffy is a writer from Gautier, Mississippi. A graduate of Ole Miss and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he lives in Gautier. 

Red Danielson, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is a poet, screenwriter, and painter. His work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Haiku Journal, CERASUS, Three Lines Poetry, and Subterranean Quarterly, among other publications. This piece, an earlier version of which appeared in Little Village magazine, was adapted from an ongoing project pairing his prose with portraits of poets, writers, and artists.

Categories
Across The Wire Vol. 6

Pure Life Journey

by Tom Ianelli

AJ looked at the pile of soiled food and felt bad for it. The bread had worked okay. Microwaved bologna too. But the mayo was a mess, and he had cut his penis on the rotisserie chicken.

He crossed off “food play” from the list in his journal and thought of his failed attempts. Feet, tickling, blood, hot wax, ASMR, men. None of them turned him on. But there was hope. Group play, findom, claustrophilia, clowns. One of those had to get him going. 

He dialed Genevieve. “Humiliation” was next. He shared his thoughts with her and she said she would google some stuff and come over the next night. 

AJ was thankful for Genevieve. She worked at his gym and was as naïve about kinks as he was. He could tell she didn’t like him much as a person, but she agreed to help him because he paid her a couple hundred dollars per session, which he could more than afford. 

“But, like, I only do stuff to you, okay?” she had said when they first started. 

Since then she had choked him and pegged him. She had popped a balloon on his balls and sat on a cake in front of him. 

When she came over the next night there was no preamble. She slapped him in the face and made him put on women’s lingerie. She wore a leather jumpsuit and as she swatted him with what looked like a small leather fly swatter, he felt the first inklings of pleasure come over him. She pushed him onto the couch and he laughed.

“No laughing,” she said.

She grabbed on to the front of his hair and yanked so hard some came out.

“Ow, don’t do that!” He had told her that losing his hair was his biggest fear. 

“Oh, poor baby,” she said and yanked out some more.

“Genevieve, stop, please.”

“Say anything other than ‘yes ma’am’ and I’ll rip every hair out of your head.” She took a water bottle, pulled his head back and sprayed it in his mouth. He coughed and spit it out. 

“What is that?”

“My piss.”

“Oh my god.”

“You love it.” She grabbed the front of his hair. 

“Yes ma’am!”  

“Get up!” 

He did as he was told.

She made him try to twerk. She made him do the worm and laughed at his flailing. She made him smoosh his privates against the glass so the whole city could, as she put it, “see how weird it looked.”

While he obliged her, he tried to understand how anyone could find this sexy or enjoyable. Still, he didn’t use the safe word. Perhaps the pleasure came later.  

She made him bend over and be her furniture. 

“Where do you work again?” she asked, sitting on him, cleaning her nails. 

He didn’t respond.

“Answer me.” She slapped him.

“I’m a project manager at Chewy,” he said.

She laughed for a full minute. “AJ, do you realize how pathetic your life is?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“And now you think that if you can find some kink it will make you interesting?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You think a sexual depravity will shield you from the fact of your complete uselessness?” 

“Yes ma’am.”

She got up. “Lay down,” she commanded.

“Yes ma’am.”

She tied his hands behind his back and then tied his feet to them. “Even your parents hate you,” she said. 

“Genevieve—”

“Shut up.” She pulled out a gag. “I’m sick of your whining.” She shoved the ball into his mouth and strapped it tight. “Now you’re in time out.”

He realized he didn’t know how he would say the safe word with a gag in his mouth. His eyes bugged.

Just then, Genevieve’s phone buzzed on the counter. She glanced at the screen, frowned, and snatched it up.

“Hello? What? Wait, what happened?” She began pacing, ropes creaking as AJ strained to follow her with his eyes. “No, no, no, don’t hang up. Fuck. Okay. I’m coming.”

She swept her things into her bag with shaking hands, yanked on her coat.

“Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god,” she kept muttering as she bolted for the door, never once looking back at AJ.

The door slammed. The latch clicked. Then silence.

–

Three years later, AJ was standing behind the podium at the Pure Life Journey meeting with 100 expectant faces staring up at him. 

“Genevieve forgot about me there,” he said. “I laid on the floor of my apartment, bound and gagged in women’s underwear for 72 hours, soiling myself over and over. If I hadn’t hired my cleaner that week, I might have died. But in the end, it was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

The crowd looked up at him proudly.

“The day after being freed, I was driving to the doctor and I saw a billboard that read:

I’M COMING—JESUS

and I realized that the answer had been there all along. I went online, found Pure Life Journey, and once I reclaimed my virginity, all my anxieties floated away.”

His own words made him blush. He felt their truth, their purity. 

“Celibacy became my purpose,” he went on. “I dedicated myself to it, and after a year, I was leading the program.”

When AJ finished speaking, he shook hands and smiled at the followers. 

“I’ll be having office hours until 6,” he said, and went to his office. He shut the door behind him and went behind his standing desk. The desk was customized, four and a half feet tall with walls that went to the floor so that visitors could only see the top half of his torso.

He stood there for a moment, sighed and then pulled down his pants and underwear in a practiced motion, letting the cool air hit him. This was his favorite part of the day. He cupped his bare ass, fingers spreading, and closed his eyes. 

There was a knock at the door. 

“One minute,” he called. 

He opened the laptop on his desk and there was a still image of a porn video there, a woman hunched over, aggressively climaxing. He pulled his shoulders back, straightened his shirt and, pants still down, he called, “come in.”

A young man entered. Early thirties, nervous red face. AJ welcomed him warmly and gestured to the chair on the other side of the desk. The man sat and divulged his problems. 

He had a porn addiction and his wife recently found his browser history. “I can’t help it,” he said. “The more I hate myself, the more I turn to these sites, to these women.” 

It was the same shame and panic AJ had seen countless times.

“You’re in the right place, my friend,” he said with a smile. “Porn addiction is simple. Once you can understand, really understand, that it takes so much more than it could ever give, you’ll find that you’ll want to give it up.”

The man smiled, flushed and grateful, and said he would come back next week. When he left, AJ shook his hand, and then used the hand that had touched the man’s to cup his balls. 

The secret nudity had started by accident, a year earlier. It was ten minutes before his office hours started. His fly was unbuttoned and he was checking a mole on the top part of his thigh, when a new member burst in without knocking. AJ was so caught off guard he dropped his pants and stammered a greeting to the new member. Mortified, he didn’t know how to pick up his trousers without getting caught, but after a minute, he saw that the member had no idea that his pants were down. His bare legs were a total secret. Something about this excited him, so he stood like that for the entire meeting. The member never caught him, so he left his pants down for the next meeting, and the one after that, and then the rest of his meetings that day, and soon he was doing it every day. 

After a few months, however, AJ found the thrill of his secret was wearing off. He wanted higher stakes. AJ didn’t use porn. He didn’t masturbate. He was as sexually pure as he purported himself to be. But he reasoned that to use porn for this purpose wasn’t related to his own sexual gratification, and that made it okay. So, he began to have images and videos of various sex acts on his laptop, their depravity projecting secretly out to him as he nodded along to what his visitors divulged.

There was another knock.

“Come in.”

This time a woman in her late fifties. She wore a modest blouse and she kept laughing uncomfortably, her hands trembling. 

“I just want to feel clean. To feel innocent. I call sex hotlines in the middle of the night and talk for hours, I don’t even know why.”

He gave her his whole speech. Recovery, devotion, realignment. He used the words she wanted. Words he knew were helpful and true. She left with tears in her eyes.

AJ exhaled and looked down at his naked lower half. There was no arousal. It didn’t turn him on in the moment or later. It wasn’t about that. He hardly knew why he was doing it, other than that it was a secret. That it was something no one could know he was doing. 

He often felt bad about it later in the evening. He knew it was a sin. He wrote about it in his diary, repented in his prayers and vowed to stop. But the next day, when he got back to his office, his pants came off, the porn came on, and he took in his visitors. 

A third knock. 

“Come in.”

It was Katherine Meyer, his biggest fan. An avid soul saver, she showed up to every meeting.

“Mr. Donald, my nephew is addicted to video games and needs your help,” she said. She stayed standing. 

“Please call me AJ,” he said for the 100th time. “Tell me about your nephew.”

She did. She went on about his sinful teenage behavior. AJ’s eyes glossed over and dropped to the porn on his screen. He angled the laptop towards him and Mrs. Meyer didn’t seem to notice, so he scrolled and clicked some other videos, pressing play, checking first to make sure the volume was off. 

“These video games, they’re soiling our youth,” Mrs. Meyer was saying. 

“Mhmm,” AJ said. 

“I saw a music video my nephew was watching and it was just butts. Not a single face.”

“It’s terrible,” AJ said. He pulled his shirt up around his waist and stroked his hips. 

He glanced up and saw Mrs. Meyer looking at the framed poster behind him. It showed Jesus dunking a basketball and said, “HE IS RIZZIN,” underneath.

“What do you think? I just hung it up.” he said, smiling.

She looked closer and her face contorted. She looked confused.

“Rizzin’ is a slang term, Mrs. Meyer,” he said.

“Dear Lord,” she said.

He laughed, “What, you don’t like it?” He turned around and he saw what she had seen. The way the poster hung from the nail the angle of the glass reflected back a perfect frame of his naked ass, the porn. The others hadn’t seen it because they had been sitting.

“Dear Lord Jesus.” Mrs. Meyer approached the desk.

“Mrs. Meyer, it’s not what it seems,” he said, shutting the laptop quickly.

“Pervert!” She screamed.

He tried to reach down and pull up his pants but she was quickly around to his side of the desk.

“Pervert!” she screamed again. 

She pulled out her phone. The first flash of the camera came and he reached up to try and stop it but this made him stumble and he fell over as the flash went off. As he lay there, pants at his knees, she took another one and then she opened his laptop and took a picture of that too.

–

AJ’s parent’s house upstate had a massive lawn in the back that spread beautifully down to the lake. There was a boat house for their power boat, pontoon, schooner, and the various small sailboats and skiffs. 

At the top of the lawn, Mr. Donald was sitting on a cushioned lawn chair reading. He was tanned and healthy, with a nicely graying head of quaffed hair. He wore tortoiseshell sunglasses and his white linen shirt was opened a few buttons. He reclined with such a simple, elegant calm it was almost impressive.

Mrs. Donald came out with an equivalent air of tranquility. She wore white linen pants and a loose blue blouse and carried two drinks in cut crystal glasses. The ice in the glasses caught the sun as it shone through the brown liquid of the Arnold Palmers, each with the red dot of a cherry floating on top. 

“Here you go,” she said, handing him the drink.

“Thank you, my dear,” he said, smiling up at her.

“Who was that on the phone?” Mr. Donald asked. 

“AJ.”

“Mm,” Mr. Donald let out and kept reading.

“The team pulled the story from our outlets. It’s on some smaller channels but it won’t matter,” Mrs. Donald said. “The Chewy people said they will take him back.”

“Mm,” Mr. Donald said again, then laughed at something he read and turned the page. 

She sat down in the lawn chair next to him. They were silent together for a moment. Dense trees hemmed in the lawn. The grass was all one length, nature’s immaculately manicured carpet. The late afternoon sun was creeping down slowly, still warm and radiant. It was a gorgeous day. Mrs. Donald took a sip of her drink, the ice tinkling, and Mr. Donald looked over at her, smiled and took a sip of his. 

They basked in the sun, enjoying the day, until Mr. Donald sighed. “The fuck do you think is wrong with him?” he asked, his voice lilting and disinterested. 

Mrs. Donald sighed, also disinterested, “Who knows,” she said. She opened a magazine and scanned it. 

After a while Mr. Donald lowered his book. He turned to his wife and looked at her over the top of his sun glasses. 

“Hey,” he said. 

She lowered her magazine. He stared at her for a moment and then smiled. “Do you have any of those edibles?” 

She laughed like a schoolgirl. “Yes, of course.”

He laughed too. 

“You know you could just buy some for yourself,” she said.

”I know. But I like pretending you’re my drug dealer.”

She giggled again. “I like it too.”

“You want to take them and watch Love on the Spectrum?”

“It’ll just make me cry,” she said. 

“Come on.” 

“Fine.”

They clinked their glasses, took big sips, and turned down to the lawn in front of them. The sun was soft and gold and bathed everything in warmth. It seemed to enter and emanate both Mr. and Mrs. Donald, who were both in their 50’s but looked decades younger. 

“Look,” Mr. Donald said, nodding his head down the lawn. 

Mrs. Donald followed his gaze and gasped, “They’re back!” she said. 

Three deer, a mommy, daddy and baby, walked through their yard. The baby was still small and stumbled awkwardly. 

“Oh, isn’t it lovely?” she asked.

Mr. Donald looked out at the sun setting on his beautiful property. He saw in his mind the house in Aspen, the apartment in Chelsea, the Hamptons house, the house in Hawaii that his wife knew nothing about. He thought of Chewy and the various other subsidiaries he owned through RH investments.

He laughed to himself. “It’s fuckin’ beautiful all right. Fuckin’ goddamn beautiful.”

Tom Ianelli is a fiction writer and street bookseller in Brooklyn. He asks the questions for the Lit Chat series at @peterbooksnyc. He has written for The Panacea Review, Quartersnacks and Bruiser Mag. 

Categories
Across The Wire Vol. 6

Wash Cycle

by dizzy turek

That was the note. The note from Faith to Art that got dropped and Dado got a glance at but didn’t ask anything further that got retrieved by Marina who had a huge crush on me but that’s not of interest and I was really happy at the time nothing happened to it other than hair and dust and a bit of wetness. 

That was the note that I speculated was a love note because everyone said Faith was in love with Art. I speculated that because I didn’t know anything about anything especially not love whatever that meant. When I told my first girlfriend I loved her, it was a total guessing game. I was guessing that whatever is supposed to happen will happen as it should so that meant when we were together all the time and we kissed and did stuff that meant something was happening between us and that something must have a name and love works well enough. She did not agree. Everyone speculated Faith was in love with Art because that’s what you guess is happening when people spend a ton of time with each other and you have nothing better to do then not ask them and speculate. Who knows? People send notes for all other reasons than love.

That was the note that I found forever ago going through jeans that don’t fit me. It made me think about how we live apart because pieces of paper can be the link between people not near each other or email but email is a skeuomorphic imitation. I took out the note at the time and put it in a drawer with other pieces of paper like cards from my grandma, grocery lists, plays, degrees, prayer books, scrap, playing cards, self help, fake suicide notes, bands I’m trying to not forget.

This note that was from Faith to Art is earthshatteringly embarrassing. I won’t be reading it. My grandma asked what it was when I found it in my jeans a few years ago. I didn’t lie, said it was an old note. She said she had a note from years ago that she always wondered where it went until one day she found it and then she lost it again and wondered where it went. I told her I was glad she found it and was sad she lost it. It was from my uncle. I see, I said and I played the rest of my hand and got shuffling. It was an apology, she said.

That was a note, to give this, from myself to myself. That this note is a fill-in-the-blank. This was a place to place what was between Faith and Art. Faith was Nate’s cousin. Art turned out to be gay. I never asked him what he meant by that. The note to myself was that the note was a fill-in-the-blank because I can’t speak for them. I’m the messenger which makes me responsible for the message not what’s in the message. The note I’m giving myself is watch out and give it room. After all, it’s a message I never wrote and as it so happens never delivered. 

With this note, I was like Pheidippides. I ran when I was young. I don’t run anymore. What for? Back then, it was a marathon everyday. Everybody had steam. They would go from one edge of the playground to the next. They’d race on the concrete. Nate would cheat. We would run to get it all out. We would run as far as we could to the edge where the houses started. We’d run back except Dado would stay out there and I knew Ms. Hartman was going to give him detention. Nate would be back already. Where’s Dado? I warned him but he just stayed out there getting smaller as I ran back.

That was the note and it reminds me when I saw Art last at his brother’s graduation party. I had been invited for some strange reason by his brother. His brother said hello which was strange because I don’t really know his brother. His brother was nice enough, pointing me to the catering and the dessert table. I saw Art. It had been years. We sank right back into something like it had been. Art did instruments. All kinds and when a person can do instruments, it’s a miracle. It’s another language. I wanted to hear him play at some point but we stopped talking because I had somewhere else to go that evening and my brother picked me up and that was the last time I saw Art.

That was the note Art played. A piano on a YouTube video. He made it in Australia on a fellowship. A simple note played on a piano. It sounds about right on the YouTube video. It makes me long for the real thing. Each note is similar to the last but different in a way that I don’t have the words to describe because I don’t know music at all. Similar yet different. Art the common denominator.

That was the note Faith gave to me, after galloping up from the big tree near the playground after looking at bugs. Faith was a gal who was a bug looker. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Bug lookers are as a part of society as any other person. Bug lookers have a distinct Pokémon quality to their pastime. Nothing wrong with being a person who watches the ground to find its tiny inhabitants to pick them up and pin them to styrofoam. My friend Harvey did that. He had a GameCube which I tried to play as much as I could to make friends with him. Faith was a bug looker of the highest order. A loner and a freak and a girl freak which is extra painful as boys are meant to be alone. Alone girls are too sad to be pitiable and when they have notes to send, most people read them and publicize the information. Faith was a friend or at least a friend of Art’s so I kept the secret. Faith trusted me with a note after looking at bugs and barely said where it was to go to. I found out by the “to Art” that it was for Art. 

This was the note that I held on to through middle school, lost in high school, found again in college, and found again here on the other side of college. 

That was the note that Dado got a glance at and I never asked nor was close to him enough to ask what was on the inside. Dado is out there, somewhere, living a full life. He knows something about my friends I don’t know and I hope he thinks about it from time to time. Then again, people forget things all the time.

This note is turning into a prayer. A message goes to heaven. When the soul of a message is lost it goes to heaven if it is good and hell if it is bad. If it goes to heaven, it’s read by God and any who were expecting it up there. In hell, it just is never read.

There was not a note as far as I was made aware. Someone sent me a text message which is like a note but slick and plastic. There were several posts, there was even a website for the funeral, emails. Notation, passing back and forth. There’s a grave, a mark, a note somewhere that I need to visit. One of the last things I wrote about Art was a note that I sent in an email with as many memories as I could pull from my mind. Even then, there are memories missing. Simply a fill-in-the blank. A space where you feel a memory used to be.

I’m just grateful no one will ever read this. It’s between them, Faith, Art. I just hope they got to say whatever it was they needed to say to each other without me getting in the way.

After all, that was the note and now it’s nothing but a bunch of washed up pieces of paper. Left it in my jeans, through the wash. Flat, weak, worn, and I just have to throw it away now after all this time.

dizzy turek writes in Chicago but is originally from Ohio. he also does theater. 

Categories
Across The Wire Vol. 6

Dear LORD

by Colin Gee

Pester’s lawn was overgrown with chest-high grasses and vines and scrubby little trees, except you could sometimes make out the little nests in there where he would roll with his bottles of Schnapps. The sharp grasses were punctuated like Moby Dick every hundred pages with what you suspect is a joke with a hideous towering thorned weed like a praying mantis, with veined and baubled pods and gooey leering fissures, that hung in the grasses.

The barf-green carpets in Pester’s house, long flattened by his hairy flat feet, his bigfoot feet, reeked sourly of Vacation Bible School in the 1970s: frantic onanism, candy corn, and TV dinner. Pea/carrot medley with beef stroganoff, turkey with cornbread stuffing, buttered sweet potatoes and gravy, tender fried chicken pieces with butter-basted veggie platters, Yukon gold potatoes mashed with real milk by real milkmaids, thought Pester, in virginal Swiss hose and bonnets that they always take off. Now for a limited time only with mom’s blueberry muffin or apple pie, jammed into the top of the tin. But Pester’s mom had been dead for thirty years, gone dead.

Mr. Rufus lived on the same block with his partner Timothy in the immaculate three-story Queen Anne Victorian mansion with the Rapunzel tower on the corner. Leaded glass windows, parquet floors, and the gorgeously sculpted, meticulously trimmed lawn with tidy paired flower and vegetable gardens and the famous twin oaks. One time Pester puked all over their topiary and it was chunky mushroom tomato sauce and green beans, we speculated. Everyone saw it happen and went to look at the mess. Timothy came out on the porch, made it to the planters, and rushed back inside.

Later on I hooked up their hose and sprayed the chunks off the bush, across the sidewalk and into the gutter, but that was not enough. I had to get a pushbroom and nudge the chunks down the gutter to the drain, and run a lot of water until everything was shipshape.

How did Pester get into heaven? Who let him in here? And how can we get rid of him?

Colin Gee (@ColinMGee on X) is founder and editor of The Gorko Gazette. 

Categories
Across The Wire Vol. 6

Three Stories

by Joel Tomfohr

On the Eve of My Hospitalization

Here is a short list of the dead: uncle by hanging in a hospital room, G’s suicide by gunshot to the head under the pink Sandía Mountains. My own father who said no to life when the time came. Say hello. Shake their hands.

Once I liked to throw the baseball with my dad. I stayed up late in summer playing capture the flag. I liked to hide in the woods and climb trees. I watched Nightmare on Elm Street. I liked when my mom made smoothies with orange juice concentrate from the freezer. I liked the sharp ice pick of brain freeze when I drank them too fast. I liked to laugh about how much it hurt with my younger brother. I laughed about it all. 

I see that the third floor of the hospital is a long empty corridor with doors to rooms. A social worker has faded tattoos up and down her right arm. I have two tattoos on the inside of my right forearm. The pale white of a pale white fish belly turned up at the tepid shore of a lake. Two coffee cups my younger brother drew. One for him and one for me. We drink hot coffee together outside a café during a blizzard while our mom works late into the evening. While our stepdad drinks Scope in his office downtown. The snow accumulates all around us. Great chunks of it like buttercream frosting on a cake.

My older brother tried to kill himself twice, but it didn’t work. Here is what happens when someone in your family tries to kill himself twice. Go to the hospital for family week. Watch red-eyed adults drink stale coffee from a carafe, with powder cream and little packets of granulated sugar. Sit in a circle in a gymnasium on an uncomfortable metal chair with your younger brother. No school for a week. What a relief. 

See the snow falling into the black river. See the snow again for the first time every time it falls again, but that same old feeling of something breaking apart inside violently, gently. A hammer wrapped in velvet. See the snow fall again for the first time. So long, long ago. 

——————-

The Veld

I only write this because if you know someone who has done it, I guess that means that you are more likely to do it yourself. I write a short list of the dead. So, what does that mean for me? 

There is my uncle in the tall grass and, can I go find him, Dad? Will you join me? Will you help me find him in the tall grass this fall morning? I am so young I don’t remember anymore. I am too young to remember. Please do not go, Dad.

The grass is tall and dry like a faraway veld from a world unknown to me. Like the realm of the dead across a black river. We walk along the river on an orange and red fall afternoon and now I am the one who is hiding in the tall grass. Where is Carmichael? Where is he?

Shh.

Later we will throw the ball, and I can see him in the shade of the trees of my grandparent’s backyard. Over there stands my dad. My dad has a mustache. My dad wears glasses. Sometimes he shaves his mustache and then I don’t know if he is my dad. My dad is the tallest man I know. My uncle is the second tallest man that I know. I am in love with them both.

Ghosts haunt the corridors of these pages. These pages are written. They were always written. I didn’t write a thing. 

————————

Gun Collecting

I have a collection of pictures of G in my head, and I try to write about them so that I can release them. I write them down and then they come back up to haunt me in the silence of the morning when the light is low, and it is hard to see the words on the page. 

I am done writing about G I say to myself, and so I am done thinking about him. Except he doesn’t go away, which is what I was talking about in the program yesterday to my group when I was talking about how when I write about someone, I release them. Except even though I have written hundreds of images of him, it’s not possible for me to not see him in my mind’s eye sometimes in the morning.

He has long shiny black hair. He has a black goatee. He has round, brown, sad eyes. He cinches his camo jeans with a snakeskin belt. He keeps a python under a heat lamp in an aquarium next to his bed. He feeds it rabbits from a chicken wire coop next to the garage. He has a serious gun collection. Sometimes he takes them out to the desert with his older brother and fires off a few rounds. Hahaha. I am not supposed to love a person like this. 

Square this detail though: he drives a sweet Galaxie 500. It is brown and it shines under the red sun. He takes me for a spin on Tramway Road underneath Sandía Peak. Time stands still and we roar past it. The desiccate desert beneath us. The sun detonates in the sky. I think about pythons and rabbits and gun collections and firing off rounds at lost coyotes out on the mesa. 

At night he doesn’t sleep and so he sits in my living room and when I come out to say hello, he says hello and then shows me memories of myself where I am in their living room, and I am watching him circle the kitchen island counterclockwise beneath the fluorescent light as if he could reverse time. As if he could return to an age when he wasn’t so afflicted. He knows I am sitting there on the couch in the living room studying him and he knows how scared I am of him. Carmichael, he says. Don’t be afraid.

But maybe he doesn’t know that I love him, because how can you love a gun collector who feeds rabbits to his python that he keeps locked up in an aquarium for its entire life. How do you love someone like this? You might be able to love him because he takes you on joyrides in the desert in his Galaxie 500 with the windows rolled down, blasting Alice in Chains for all the coyotes out on the mesa to hear. 

————————————————

Joel Tomfohr is a writer living in the Bay Area. He is the author of the chapbook, A Blue Hour ​(Bottlecap Press). His story, Sandia Is Spanish for Watermelon, was the winner of the RUNNR Residency Challenge (August 2025). His fiction has been featured in Maudlin House, Bright Flash Literary Review, Short Beasts, Bending Genres, Joyland, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, X-R-A-Y, BULL, Hobart, and others.

Categories
Across The Wire Vol. 6

The 9/11 Roadshow

by Jon Doughboy

We’re the 9/11 Roadshow. Brought to you by Saudi Jihadis. Brought to you by George W. Bush, by decades of clumsy Middle East intervention. Shia? Sunni? Step right up and spin the Mesopotamian roulette wheel! Brought to you like a tray of hot kabsa, whether you want it or not, by the dissolution of the British and Ottoman Empires. What is it, my fellow Americans, that attracts you to the desert? And brought to you, of course, by oil. Black gold seeping through sand all the way to the surface, to your gas tank, to the furnace hiccupping heat in your basement, to your technical outerwear fleece $99.99 while supplies last, while the earth still giveth up that sweet, sweet crude that we love.

We ship the remains of the Twin Towers, shattered glass and charred steel and melted bolts. Respectfully, we ship them, grieving with unipolar solemnity. Employing a caravan of patriotic Teamsters operating under stormy skies, we load the debris and bring it to Americans across the land so they can experience the awesome terror first hand. Make way. We’re following an executive order. We have bipartisan support. Trauma binds a nation and its people. We wear black armbands but our blood, dear sirs and madams, flows red, white, and blue. No one can doubt our loyalties. They’re incontestable, known knowns.

In the mountains we greet you, America. We remove the remains from our trucks and lay them out at the foothills. A nearby creek gurgles white with glacial till. Varmints slip through chicken wire. A derelict barn shakes in the wind. Hikers stop by on their way to the trailhead. They weep. They ask us if we know anyone who died that day. They ask us if we’re cops or firemen or if we’re with the CIA. Locals pull up in rusty pickup trucks and ask about enlisting. Do you think we’ll catch Bin Laden? Do you think they’ll execute Saddam live on tv? What really happened to Hoffa? When we pack up later, lashing America’s woes and fears and rickety hegemony back on the trucks, we notice a few bolts are missing, even a shard of steel beam that was closest to the second plane’s collision. We double check the inventory but don’t notify the higher-ups. We’re American too. We mourn with you. 

The debris looks ancient installed in the prairies. People gather round like it’s a carnival, like we’re clowns and carneys and all this fear and heartache is part of the show. Children scramble over what was once a symbol of American might, their fingers sticky from cotton candy. At night, the grass murmurs with insect life. The light above crosses the sky steadily, an NSA satellite keeping vigil over this fair land.

Gradually, as our journey continues across towns and cities in this great and fertile country, we lose more and more of our precious cargo. America is eating its molten horrors, sucking them back within its crust. Land to sea, day to dusk, people scurry over in the dark and clamber onto the truck feasting on the remains of 9/11 as if our role all along was simply to set this table, to serve this feast. Streetlamp twilight reflects blue in their bared teeth until dissolving in shadowy maws. They ingest glass and steel and concrete, gnawing the bones of empire until all that’s left is one tiny bolt lashed carefully to its bed. The half-sated crowd pauses to examine this tiny remnant. We went to war for this? they ask. Is this a joke? But this anger, too, is a form of grief. We remain silent. We let them mourn as they see fit. The night passes. Waves break foamy on the shore. 

Come morning, even the final bolt is gone. Ratchet straps lie in a tangle in the middle of the flatbed like a chalk outline marking where the bolt had been. A moment of silence. Then, even though our cargo is gone, we roll on to our next destination for we have a mission to accomplish and even if we wanted to, none of us can recall the way home. 

Jon Doughboy is a story installer and docent at the Museum of Unpublished Prose. There are no visiting hours. @doughboywrites

Categories
Across The Wire Vol. 6

Single Speed Summer

By Jon Berger

I moved to a new town last summer where I didn’t know anyone. Drank a lot of beer and ate a lot of weed edibles and didn’t shave or get a haircut. I looked homeless and I loved it and I was losing weight because I couldn’t afford food and I’d been riding my mountain bike over 100 miles a week on endless gravel roads and single-track trails and doing pushups and ab-wheel and kettlebell workouts in my 600 square-foot studio-apartment while staying hydrated on tap water.

I accidently ripped off 4 door handles in my hipster apartment. Frank Lloyd Wright did not design my apartment. I could’ve designed my apartment, dude.

This one guy rode his bike around town and honked his horn. He rode up and down Center Street late into the night. I watched him from my big window. He rode an electric bike. He’d stop at the four-way and try to direct traffic and everyone ignored him. He had a cognitive impairment or something.

One morning I was in the parking lot of my apartment building with my mountain bike turned upside down, oiling the new chain. I broke my old chain a week ago while riding single track. 8:30 at night, one last lap, and my chain snapped on a sharp rocky incline. I had to walk my bike home and didn’t get back to my apartment until 10 pm. I had the bike shop do a tune up and give me a new chain. 

I loved my bike as much as I hated my car. My bike is a single speed 4130 Chromoly frame from a small frame builder in Arizona. The bike was assembled in Colorado. I started riding when I lived in the Western UP.

I have a high engagement hub that makes a loud clicking sound. I was running the chain lube across the chain as I cranked my pedals with my other hand, letting the hub purr wide open, feeling the deep clicks of the hub echo off the walls of the surrounding buildings.

Electric Bike Guy could hear my hub clicking from across the street and rode his bike over to me. I was finally going to talk to this local legend. He sped up to me then sat there on his bike and watched me, slack jawed. He was skinny and looked to be about 50 years old. He was wearing a winter hat even though it was 85 degrees outside.

He started pointing at my bike and making a funny noise. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to imitate the noise of my hub or what. He started waving his hands around. 

“Hey, bud. How ya doing?” I said with a wave over my shoulder.

He started telling me something I couldn’t understand. I think it was about a crash he was in because he kept making big explosion sound effects with his mouth and waving his arms around and then flying into another wave of explosions like the rhythm of the ocean.

Everyone who lived in my apartment building knew each other but they didn’t know me and they didn’t talk to me but this guy did and I was fine with that. 

I stood up. “You wanna ride around the block with me?” 

He went into another fit of sound effects and hand gestures. 

“Alright, let’s go.” I threw a leg over my bike and off we went. He was following close behind honking his bike horn and squawking and making sound effects as we rode through the quiet neighborhood and people in their front yards stared at us. 

My bike felt good but the pedal tension didn’t feel the same. It somehow felt weaker. I rode across the street to get a tallboy from the gas station. I sat my bike up against the side of the building. He did the same. 

We entered the gas station like two barbarians on an impromptu quest to destroy the town. The gas station was nice and cool. As we walked in, the cashier yelled, “Hey, Bobby, you can’t be here!” She was talking to my new friend. His name was Bobby. In response to being yelled at, Bobby took his winter hat and pulled it over his eyes and mumbled something inaudible and extended his hands out in front of him like he was blind and then started walking around the gas station like Frankenstein.

“No, Bobby! Get out!”

Bobby ignored her and started walking down the candy aisle like Frankenstein. There were a few small children in the candy aisle and they feared Bobby. They cautiously shuffled away from him.

I walked back to the fridge to get my beer. I decided to let the situation with my new friend Bobby and the cashier and the children play out on its own. I grabbed an All-Day IPA six-pack and walked back up to the clerk. “You!” she said pointing at me. “You and Bobby can’t be in here. You bother all the customers. I’ll be reporting you two to the foster home.”

I stopped and stared at her and my brain flexed and pumped green toxic sludge through the gears of my mind and I realized she thought I lived in the adult foster care home with Bobby.

I gave her a blank look and said, “Okay.” I sat my beer on the counter. She looked at me like I was a hologram. 

“I shouldn’t let you buy that.”

“Okay,” I said absently and showed her my ID and gave her cash. 

She exhaled sharply, sucked her teeth and shook her head and gave me my change. I left the gas station. As I left, she yelled, “Hey, take Bobby with you. You have to stick together.”

I kept walking. I waved back at her. “Okay!” I said it like I just won a stuffed animal at the county fair. 

I left Bobby in the gas station to scare the children. This is what he decided to do at this certain point in time on earth and who am I to say otherwise.

I rode my bike back home and loaded it on the bike rack hitched to my Ford Fiesta. 

I was going to ride the trail by my apartment called the Jail House Trail but figured it would be a better idea to get out of town for a bit. I pictured a grumpy fat guy with a big net and a tranquilizer gun in a dog-snatcher-styled box-truck driving around town looking for me and Bobby so he could catch us and bring us back to the Adult Foster Care Home.

It was a beautiful day. I went back into my apartment and changed into my mountain bike clothes and grabbed my helmet, a cooler for the beers and ate a weed gummy.

I decided to ride a trail in the town over. A smaller, easier trail. The trailhead was somewhat busy. A river nearby with people fishing. I offloaded my bike and put on my helmet and pedaled hard down the trail. The trail is a 4-ish mile loop. 

I tell myself it’s a 5-lap minimum for this trail. I tell myself I will drink one beer after each lap. 

The trail has a sign at the trailhead and it says which direction to ride for each corresponding day throughout the week. I ride whatever direction I feel like.

I do the things I tell myself I am going to do. 

The trail is sandy and has a lot of tight turns. My bike is long with a steeper headtube angle, so I have trouble on tight turns. It rained the night before so the soil is sticky and I can fly down the trail at top speed before slamming on my brakes at the turns. I listened to my hub click through the silent woods, my mind and body free.

A few miles in, my bike was riding different. Maybe the handlebars were at a different angle. I needed to break the bike in. That was my goal for the day. To make all the parts settle back into each other like layers of the earth beneath my feet.

I saw a guy through the woods, also riding a bike. He was not wearing a helmet. He was going slow and struggling. He was going the wrong way on the trail, or I was going the wrong way on the trail. I’m not sure.

He didn’t seem to notice me. I’m breathing hard, pedaling rotations through a 19-tooth cog. 

I pedaled around a corner and he finally saw me and I veered off the trail and into brush and rode through the brush like a deer in rut. The guy stopped completely in the trail and stared at me. I kept riding.

A few more miles down the trail, on a small log section, I came around a corner and hit a patch of sand. I tumbled over the handlebars and landed on my forearm and elbow. I thudded to the ground and my bike clanged into a tree. I was super fucking pissed I crashed. My bike never had a tune up before and now my muscle memory of how to ride was gawky and misplaced.

I got up and picked my bike up out of the bushes near the tree it hit and I got back on and finished my lap.

I’m leaning against my car, drinking a beer and watching people walk around the cemetery. My shins were covered in dirt and my right side had streaks of dirt and my forearm had light little lines of scratches that bled. I drank some fucking IPA. You drink IPAs when you mountain bike because you can drink them warm. IPAs were invented by the British because they didn’t go bad when the British Empire shipped them out of India. 

I got back on my bike and rode two more laps. I drank a beer after each lap. The air is getting cooler. A family of 4 was walking on the trail and I waved at them and they stared at me like zombies.

I was 3 beers deep and on my 4th lap. I built up speed. The time of dusk was floating through the forest and I breathed its thick coldness.

I was maybe a mile into the 4th lap, trying to build up speed for this one section I really enjoy riding that has some little dips in it and you go through a little stream that splashes mud. 

The bike was still riding wonky but creaked less.

I crashed again. I sailed over the handlebars and felt my shin hit the top tube of my bike. I heard a vibration tear through the dusk air like a gong. I sat up. Blood trickled down my shin and flowed over the specks of dirt and hair. I picked my bike back up and kept riding. 

A sharp pain, like a nail pounded into my shin bone sideways, weaved and pulsated. The start of a hematoma. I’ve had so many I know the familiar pain of them forming. A hematoma is like a little trickster goblin fucker growing out of your body who mocks you every time you bump it or move just right or breath too hard and they stick around just long enough to where you get used to it and then one day it is gone and you miss it.

I made it back to my car and got off my bike and leaned it alongside my car. I checked my leg and there it was, a pulsing hematoma forming on my shin, covered in dirt and blood. My shin throbbed as the hematoma grew and drenched my sock in blood.

I opened a beer. The sky was the brightness of a night light and I still had another lap to ride.

The other guy I saw riding his bike, going the opposite direction of me, came out of the trail, slow and crouched over, not pedaling. He coasted down the slight hill to his very own junky vehicle parked near mine.

I nodded at him as he approached.

He avoided eye contact with me.

I took a sip of my beer and watched him get off his bike with a groan. He was doughy and not used to riding a bike.

That is okay. 

I took another sip from my beer.

His bike was silhouetted against the lamp shining above doors to the bathrooms behind us. I could tell there was something wrong with it.

He bent over his bike, looked down at it and didn’t seem to know what was wrong. 

I approached him slowly and asked if he needed a hand. 

He looked up at me with round startled eyes. His mouth moved up and down like a bad translation in a foreign film. “I just bought this bike.” He had a speech impediment and he sounded insecure.

I walked over to his bike and looked at it. I didn’t recognize the brand and the bike was falling apart. The brake caliper had come off, the seat was bent down, the handlebars were bent down. It made a grinding sound when he cranked the pedals.

“Where did you buy it from?”

“Oh… Walmart.”

“Alright.” I walked over to my car and opened the back seat and got out my set of bike tools.

I walked back over to his bike and took out a few Allen wrenches. I tested the sizes until one fit the fastener on his seat. I propped his seat up and tightened the screw. 

“Um… you’re not going to break it are you?”

“No, man. Just tightening it up for you. A lot of the workers at Walmart who assemble these bikes don’t do it right,” I said, leaning over the seat and finishing up the tension so his seat would stay still.

I started working on the handlebars next. I reefed them up and adjusted them until they were snug. 

I stood back and looked at his brake caliper. The world was dark now. Fully dark with the cemetery next to us, the dark woods on the other side, and I heard ghosts whispering to each other as they shambled out of the ground and the deer whispered to themselves about us as they stood motionless in the thick brush. 

I was still sweating. Sweating all the beer out, I could smell the hoppy IPA beer seeping out of my pores and whispering back to the deer as it evaporated from my skin into the night sky above me.

“I’m not sure about the brakes, dude,” I said, taking out my phone. 

“Oh.” He said this like he had no idea what I was talking about.

I handed him my phone with the flashlight on. I told him to shine it on the brakes. He didn’t really shine them on the brakes but I didn’t say anything. 

I fumbled with his brake calipers. They were sidewall brakes. I clipped them back on so they would work but it wasn’t a permanent fix.

I picked up the rear of his bike and cranked the pedals and heard the drivetrain grind and hobble. 

“I can’t fix that. Take it to the bike shop in town. Have them fix it.”

“Oh… maybe I’ll just take the bike back.”

“You can try, friendo.”

I helped him load the bike into his shitty minivan.

I picked my beer up off the cement and finished it and tossed it into a garbage can by the bathrooms.

He was climbing into his minivan as I was throwing a leg over my mountain bike. 

“Where are you going?” He asked me with that blank look in his eyes. He had the same look as Bobby.

“I’ve got one more lap to do,” I said as I started to slowly pedal away.

“Oh… it’s dark out and you’re bleeding.”

“Yeah.”

“Why are you doing another lap?”

“Because I hate the world.”

“Oh… well… be careful.”

“You too.” I gave him a salute as I rode away.

I pedaled up the hill, past the cemetery and into the dark cold woods. I could hear the deer leap away from me in the dark to make room as I pedaled forward.

Jon Berger is a teacher in Rural Mid Michigan. His short story collection Goon Dog and his poetry collection Saint Lizard are available at Gob Pile Press. He has work forthcoming at Southwest Review. He tweets @bergerbomb44.

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Across The Wire Vol. 6

These Days

By D.T. Robbins



Jackson Browne said these days he's doing more walking than talking, but I want to take it one step further—I want to pour concrete over my mouth, walk into flame, eyes wide and head high and chest out and… goddammit, that’s a lie. I’m sorry.

Let me start over…

When was the last time I cried? Face painted wet under blue skies, pleading with angels.

When was the last time the earth carried me? Caked in dirt and play and promise.

When did I quit trying? That drive from madness, beautiful, into a golden horizon.

When was my mind last quiet? A chorus hopeful even in dream.
When was the last time I woke up proud? Don't answer that. 
When was the last time you could look me in the eyes? Don't answer that.

When was the last time I cried? Heavy-laden, eyes bloodshot and guttural and godly.

I could use a good fucking cry. A cry to drain every drop of sorrow and shame and guilt and horror and echo and void and yesterday and always and nowhere and nothing and the weight of it all and the weight of it all and the weight of it all and the weight of it all and the weight of it all and the weight of it all and the weight of it all and the weight of it all.

These days, it's hard.

D.T. Robbins is the author of several books and founding editor of Rejection Letters. 

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Across The Wire Vol. 6

Before the Sunrise

By Wilson Koewing

The morning his daughter turned seven months old, a vision of suicide overcame Price. While lying in bed he imagined entering the kitchen of their hilltop home, gazing out at the shaved hills of Marin County and pulling the trigger of a pistol raised to his head. He saw his body jerk back against the pantry then fall to the hardwood floor. He watched blood trickle across the floorboards and pool in the kitchen’s northeast corner, as the house tilted slightly in that direction. He observed Delancey rush in, stare at his body without emotion, and dial 911. 

Despite how real the vision felt, Price did not own a pistol and had only fired a gun on a few occasions in his youth. He was also too cowardly to kill himself and knew this as deeply as he knew anything. 

He rolled out of bed and entered the kitchen. He brewed coffee, cracked a window and smoked a joint. The sun had not yet risen, but its light crested the eastern hills. A thick fog crept just below the trees. Stoned, he turned the shower on and waited for the steam. In the shower, he masturbated. Fully enveloped in steam, he came. 

In the kitchen he poured coffee. Cream and local honey. He cut a slit in the top of a blueberry muffin and slipped butter inside. He glanced up as Delancey entered the kitchen and tried to stare at her in a way that he believed to be seductive. 

When she noticed him, she could not stop laughing until she disappeared into the bathroom.  

Price sat in his armchair and listened to Delancey’s laughter drown into the sound of the shower. The morning was cold, so he walked over to the fireplace and started a fire. He sat back down and sipped his coffee and tried to resist the urge to unlock his phone. His daughter would be awake soon, screaming for his attention. Sitting with her so many hours a day, he found the phone beckoned to him like the pipe or a needle does an addict. It wasn’t just the socials, but the ads, and the news on socials, and the clipped videos—politics and war zones and hurricanes and floods and extreme heat events and fires and plane crashes burnt into minds in fifteen second intervals—that he could not stand to see but could not stop watching. 

Delancey hurled open the bathroom door saying she’d been summoned to Tokyo for work at once. She would be gone a week, but there was nothing to worry about, Price would be fine. 

Don’t you think you’ll be fine, Price realized she was asking. 

Yes, of course, dear, he croaked out.

Delancey disappeared back into the bathroom, and Price, feeling the ghost notifications from his phone, let his gaze drift to the mortar between the bricks of the fireplace. He stared at the mortar and tried to breathe calmly. He’d never thought about how simple the term fireplace was. Fireplace, he said out loud and forced a laugh. How effortlessly simple. Fireplace. Something about it calmed him. Fireplace, he kept saying out loud. Fireplace. Fireplace. Fireplace.

Wilson Koewing is a writer from South Carolina. His books JADED and QUASI are available from Main Street Rag/Mint Hill Books and Anxiety Press, respectively. His newest short story collection ROLLING ON THE BOTTOM is available from Cowboy Jamboree Press. His fiction and essays have appeared in Wigleaf, Pembroke Magazine, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Gargoyle and New World Writing. He lives and writes in Marin County, California.

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Across The Wire Vol. 6

Colossal pt 1

By Josh Boardman

colossal pt 1 by josh boardman

How to describe that human face the broken neck stolen from its original placesetting and fitted onto a new pair of shoulders. The lowered ears and the narrow mouth and the Aquiline nose of Roman Empire. Crowsfeet around the eyes and a receding hairline and the defined slash above the chin so like a man who is accustomed to barking orders. The sculpture in all can be divided into three parts, the first of which constitutes the form of the face its boundaries and the space it inhabits, another the features, and those which in his own language were called the sentinels of the highest place of the body, in ours the eyes, the third. Of the first the massive borders reach from our shins to a few windowslats short of the ceiling and from ear to ear the width of a human wingspan. The ponderous skull is supported by a pick of a neck which bears a winding slice that looks like a river dividing provinces or a scar that has birthed from the throat of one man an idea—one lopped off then reattached to bodies of new marble as generation after generation lopes on like lemmings into the present. The complexion has tarnished over time from porcelain white to a tawny brown that blotches the chin and cheeks where millions have fingered the blessing of Caesar. The second part the features are encountered in threequarters view and from the peon’s position beneath the head they resolve themselves somewhere to the left and behind. Who hasn’t in their childhood looked up to their father as he placed a hand on the sink gazing out the window or turned away to the faraway distance of Judgment and Consequences as he focuses his attention on the negative space of thought. But the third part the eyes betray the inhumanity of this thing which appears a man but is actually an idea calcified into stone—pupilless cut from slab and undiscerning grey. They understand nothing. They occupy a solid skull focused someplace in the negative space of thoughtlessness (as is ascertained now in our humanity) and at any moment it might snap its supports and roll down on the frail bodies that love it, crushing us. Objective and possessing a thirst for violence that can be slaked no better than a rock that says I’m thirsty.

Josh Boardman is from Michigan. He is the author of the Colossal chapbook series (2024-5), Plantain (West Vine Press, 2018), and the Latin translation project We, Romans (2015). His work was shortlisted in the 2025 Leopold Bloom Prize for Innovative Narration, selected as a finalist in the 2024 Fugue Prose Prize, and his stories have appeared in journals such as New York Tyrant, Juked, and Dandruff Magazine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he is working on his second novel and a collection of stories about his hometown.

He is the founder, owner, and operator of Hewes House, an organization with the aim of elevating aspiring writers.

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Across The Wire Vol. 6

Sunday Morning Driving 

By David Luntz

Route 1’s a twisting labyrinth of fast-food franchises, tattoo parlors, strip clubs, and fortune teller booths. It’s got no exit or entrance, beginning or end. I tossed my bread crumbs away. Deadweight. I pray I’ll run into the Minotaur. 

Traffic lights bristle all around, a canopy of thorns. Sharkskin sky looms overhead, sharp enough to cut. Below the traffic light, a homeless man’s drowning in an invisible sea, clutching a sign that says, ‘He Has Risen.’ Out front, a rainbow blossoms in an oil slick. Weeds poke through the cracks in the asphalt. Faded like an old dog’s coat, they tremble in the breeze. I admire their resilience.

Across from the man, on an abandoned lot, several teenagers shoot hoops. They waver on the abyss of adulthood. I can tell from the way they move their dreams are still intact. Their hands don’t know what it’s like to struggle in open water. It would be easy enough to walk over and join them. But the gulf of compromises makes this impossible. Besides, their innocence would bore me.

David Luntz – Work is forthcoming in or has appeared in Post Road, Hobart Pulp, Farewell Transmission, Bruiser, ergot., X-R-A-Y Lit, Maudlin House, HAD and other print and online journals. More at davidluntz.com Twitter: @luntz_david

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Across The Wire Vol. 6

A NOTE FROM STEVE, AUTHOR OF THE BOOK OF STEVE

Ask yourself if it really was Adam and Steve.

And naked.

And a big snake.

And 86 the apple, sub a long ripe banana.

Low-hanging fruit.

And God gettin’ all judgy and shit just because Steve got hungry after all that big snake wranglin’.

And where all them kids come from?

Much more interesting story.

Plumbing v. storage.

If God’s a dude like people always say, then he’s wondered at least once in his life about butts and penises, innies and outies, and how not to make a baby.

If God’s a dude then he’s watched porn at least once in his life and wondered if it’s the p or v that’s more important in baby making.

Steve’s a dude.

Steve’s had plenty of thoughts only God knows.

If God’s a dude and Eve was a chick and we’re all God’s children then it’s pretty gross that he wanted to watch his adult daughter running around naked with his adult son in the first place. 

Just Steve’s two cents.

Signed 

–Steve

Drevlow is EIC & poet laureate of all things BULL/bull. You can check out more of his bull shit at thedrevlow-olsonshow.com or on twitter, insta, face, bsky, & threads @thedrevlow.

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Across The Wire Vol. 6

2 Poems

By Ben Pease

The Steeple Bell

My father said it was nice, nice, 
that we had a chance to ask 

my mother what she wanted
a week before she died: 

service at the church, no funeral 
home, ask Gail about the song 

about the eagles (we never did), 
a simple meal, “Bury me next 

to my first husband—but not until 
you’re dead too, Rod—to mix

our ashes,” and then she pointed at me 
from the bed in the living room, 

(ghost bed I’d see long after 
it was removed) from that quiet mouth 

of hell, she said to me
“You’re in charge.” 

I tried to stop him 
but my father 

insisted on asking, 
“What do you want to be cremated in
  
the dress from Ben’s wedding, 
or the one from our renewal of vows?” 

The closet full of seasonal clothes
and the duck print sleeping bag 

where we placed my mother’s ashes
on the high shelf.

What Comes First

There’s no space for warmth here
between the double-paned hospital

window and the drive to the gold coast
where I lay out a sheet of plastic

and cut out rotted windowsills
as the snow hastens and stops

once I’ve made it halfway home
from work early. More hawks

than there used to be however
harried on their watch, the camel 

keeping the sheep, the draft horse 
eating its grass among the mules.

My wife lets out extended notes
of labor and a handful of my shirt

and after twelve hours of it
the hospital becomes familiar:

a loved one immobilized  
in an adjustable bed. Unsure

of the question, I watch
my wife riddle a physical

sphinx and come out of it
with not just her own life. 

Once I get to hold my child, 
her eyes grey blue, I observe 

my mother rising out 
of the unconscious, bewildered 

by her son become a father.

Ben Pease is the author of the full-length poetry collection Chateau Wichman: A Blockbuster in Verse (Big Lucks Books), a poetry-infused Dungeons & Dragons adventure module called The Light of Mount Horrid (Ghost in the Forest Games), the hybrid illustrated edition Furniture in Space (factory hollow press), and a few chapbooks. He is a co-founder of the Ruth Stone House and Sistrum Books. 

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Across The Wire Vol. 6

Locating

By Tyler Dempsey

I remember almost nothing of the 2007 Werner Herzog documentary, Encounters at the End of the World. But I remember this. 

“Is there such a thing as insanity amongst penguins?” 

Whether Herzog’s hyperbolic nature made him ask, or he was simply bored to tears talking to a penguin scientist, the scene that follows haunted me. The scientist, after a long pause, where he deftly skirts revealing he thinks Herzog is a whacko, answers, “Well, they do get disoriented.”

With morose Catholic hymns as soundtrack, the camera focuses on a penguin turning away from everything it’s ever known, becoming horrifyingly small as it moves farther and farther into the vast inland of Antarctica.

 Disoriented, I thought. Better not contract that.

Herzog’s voiceover continues, “Dr. Ainley explained that even if he caught him and brought him back to the colony, he would immediately head right back for the mountains…But, why?”

As a kid—now, too—when I was in a car I played a game. As scenery whirred past, I slung an imaginary ball out into it. My mind was magnetically wed to the ball. And the whole game was having it sail, avoiding objects speeding past, then return like a boomerang, again avoiding what I was unable to see or predict when I “threw it.” 

Equally spaced objects, like electric poles, or fence posts, made the game impulsive. And deeply rewarding. I played for hours. On road trips. Going back and forth to the store. It’s what I did. 

But why?

Growing up, I often heard about a camping trip when I was two. How, in the shortest time possible, with the adults’ attention elsewhere, I wandered off and fell in a river. 

My grandmother dove in the three-foot water and saved me. She’d bring it up sometimes at family events. Turning the room silent. Everyone focused inward as they replayed that terrible memory. But the thing is, I didn’t remember it. Aside from what felt like an irrational fear of water I eventually got over, it wasn’t a part of my identity the way it was for my family.

Instead, my trauma blossomed at Walmart. 

I must have been about five. After getting distracted while deciding which VHS to convince my mom to buy, I finally held out a movie in front of me and ran where I thought she was. But she wasn’t there. So, I cried. And eventually a worker called her name on the speaker while I choked on air and salty boogers. 

I recalled this often, feeling the emotions as if they were fresh, until college, where, in an Intro to Psych course, I learned tons of people experienced the same thing. Except, it never happened. The professor said researchers convinced gaggles of people into believing a false memory. Google “Lost in the Mall Technique.” It’s fucked up. 

I called mom. Did she remember? The movie? The crying? Her name announced throughout the store? The embarrassment? The fear?

No, she didn’t. But we kept talking, and just as the researchers would have predicted, she started to doubt herself. The handrails of her memory turned soft and gooey.

“It could’ve happened,” she said.

I felt unmoored, the bedrock of my identity drifted. If anyone had recorded my face at that moment, I would’ve looked exactly like that penguin the moment before it set off. 

One of my favorite pastimes is wishing I’d become something I’m currently not while I was still young. 

I should’ve been a mechanic, I think. A police officer. Lawyer.  

Now that I’m almost forty, it’s easy to know my tics and proclivities. I can feel the happiness these jobs would have brought seeping through the sheen of disappointment I wear like skin. 

“Whatcha doing?” My wife asks, finding me eyes closed and cross legged on the couch.

“Shh, shh,” I raise a palm, imagining myself covered in grease, wrenching under a hood that isn’t mine, dollar signs floating in and out of frame.

I was fundamentally broken as a kid. What made other kids see someone doing a job and think, I could do that, wasn’t installed in me. Skills were what other people had, while I looked at them, mouth open, like an idiot.  

  I’d love to think it was for the same reason we tell certain people not to rush to college. That I was figuring it out. Playing the long game. 

But it wasn’t. 

I was scared. Of what every man is scared of. 

Do you know what it is? 

Lean closer, I’ll tell you:

I was scared I wouldn’t be any good.

I’m in Search & Rescue. I spend inordinate amounts of time looking at maps. The word for this affliction is “cartophile.” 

By age three, humans can correctly identify a map. There’s an argument that using images to locate oneself in space is innate to our species. When someone can’t, we say they’re lost. And, there are downright bizarre behaviors and symptoms associated. 

First, they panic, experiencing an overwhelming urgency to find something familiar, but failing to utilize available resources, such as maps and compasses, to do so. Instead, they wander in circles. If it’s cold, they don’t build a fire, even if equipped with the tools and know-how. Memory loss is next, events that just occurred being the first to go. And when a rescuer calls out, they rarely answer. 

Finding them is a disturbing experience. Based on looks, you’d think they’ve been lost for months, when, in reality, it’s been less than twenty-four hours.

A man I helped rescue once looked me in the eyes and asked, “Who am I?” And when I asked, what, he said, “Where am I?”  

There’s a term for these symptoms.

The term is, “disoriented.”

I lied. There was one occupation I saw as a kid and thought, I could do that. 

Three Indiana Jones movies dropped in the ‘80’s. In every one, there was an object—an amulet, a skull, an ark—and some idiot who couldn’t wait to touch it and unleash its curses.

I could be that guy, I thought.

“Indiana Jones Idiot” wasn’t in the help wanted ads, though.

So, I continued. With no identity. No future to strive for. 

It was a geographical problem, I think. 

There’s a line from Kurt Vonnegut about growing up in Indiana. How, having nothing but horizon in all directions was enough to make a person religious. No wonder all my neighbors in Oklahoma eventually run to God. Try living an entire life with no goal post to orient yourself to.  

Firmly grasping where you are, where you’re going, it’s the most important, but least recognized need of the human spirit. It’s what is meant whenever we say, “rooted.”

By age twenty-three, I had only ever lived in Oklahoma. I was Godless. Broke. And the only person to make me feel grounded was my older brother. Who’d just been arrested. Facing trial for something he didn’t do.

He’d be convicted of this thing he didn’t do. 

And all would go to shit.

I’d leave the State two days afterward. And when I reached another State, I’d leave that one, too.

I was blind. Running without a fear of death. But, despite my efforts, something was imprinted in my soul. Telling me, if I moved in this specific, calculated way, even though odds were low, maybe I could make it. 

I would have looked hopeless had you queued Catholic hymns and zoomed in from above. A twenty-three-year-old baby. In a junker car. Hood held down by a leather belt. $240 in the bank. Heading for Alaska.

But even if you caught me and brought me back to everything I’d ever known, I would have immediately headed right back for the mountains.

“The rules for the humans are: do not disturb or hold up the penguin. Stand still, and let him go on his way. And here, he’s heading off into the interior…with five thousand kilometers ahead of him, he’s headed toward certain death.”

This week I read an article about the frillfin goby. It’s not a J.R.R. Tolkien character, if that’s what you were thinking. It’s a fish.

It lives in the intertidal zone. A zone that sometimes looks like ocean. Other times, like land. When it looks like land, the goby lives in one of many saltwater pools that end up in a cup in the rocks when the tide moves out. 

Sometimes, a predator comes along. Or, pool levels suggest time might be running out. So, the goby launches itself like a fighter pilot from an ejector seat. It flies through the air. Lands in another pool. And, when it gets to the next pool, it jumps again.

It can make up to six consecutive jumps before landing in open water. All from a mental map it made of the area when it looked like an ocean, before the tide went out. 

“Stimming” is a word used to describe certain autistic behaviors. Things like rocking back and forth, repeating words or phrases, or spinning objects. They help stimulate a person. Or control their emotions whenever the world is shitting on them.

I have a word for my ball game. 

I’m “locating.”

I don’t believe that penguin was doomed. I also don’t think when I left for Alaska I was gunning toward certain death.

I was breaking a circle. The opposite of what most people do when they’re lost.  

Habits bring us closer to who we are. Or shove us further away from ourselves. 

Before we turn off the lights at night, my wife always asks, “Besito?”

It means, “little kiss.”

And, every time, I think, here I am.

Tyler Dempsey is the author of four books and the host of Another Fucking Writing Podcast. He lives in Utah with his wife and dogs.

Categories
Across The Wire Vol. 6

3 Poems

By Julián Martinez

Jesus

The Vatican’s senior accountant started locking her office door, ignoring emails. Calls. Knocks. From out in the hall, her colleagues of the Holy See heard sobs. Invoices needed to be processed. No one had any idea how much they’d gone over budget, if they’d gone over or if not, how close they’d gotten. When greeted on the stairs, she’d walk faster, graying head down. She’d jet out at odd times, once immediately after coming in and shutting her door behind her. “Boss Macabre,” The Pope dubbed her over coffee with a cardinal, according to a rumor. Dozens of theories proliferated. The HR director prayed for her before every meal. What no one guessed was that the sixty-five year old was months pregnant and suffering a nightly nightmare: Jesus enraged in Herod’s Temple, flipping the tables of the money lenders. Her child was obvious— his Second Coming had been prophesied. She’d never taken those stories seriously, but for the first time in her life, she surrendered to His power. She confided all this over the phone one night with her ex-husband, the con artist, the last person she’d been intimate with over a decade ago. He told her she should be institutionalized. That’s exactly it, she thought. I’ve become institutionalized. Her stomach sank. Then a kick.

Pussy

Wire taped to my chest, I stared at my crotch to avoid looking at the open shirt in the dresser
mirror’s reflection. Green boxer briefs with tropical flowers and flamingos on the waistband. The phrase ‘big pussy’ flashed in my mind. Imagining Big Pussy from Sopranos in the mirror instead of myself made it bearable to button my shirt— it wouldn’t be me kissing the neck of my crime boss wife, asking questions about slush funds pumped with funny money over slow jams at
Easter Sunday brunch. It’d be some other rat in my place. It’d be Big Pussy. I saw Big Pussy,
sauced on a boat, riddled with bullets that never paused for a reload by my towering wife. My dick stood up at the thought. “Wait, what the fuck? Why?” I asked my crotch. My FBI handler,
coming in from the bathroom, cleared his throat and tapped his watch.

Cleo

Her jeweled hands passed over the crystal ball like ocean waves. She told me exactly how I’m supposed to die— an infection in my skull after a fall from a stranger’s window. At one point, I asked her how she could be Miss Cleo when the Miss Cleo from TV had passed away. She froze, index finger tickling my palm’s heart line, candlelight painting the maroon of her nails a deep shade, and took a breath of the Nag Champa basement air. She exhaled with a chuckle and, dropping her Caribbean accent, she said, “it’s a persona owned by the company I work for, my dear.” I thought then that I’d fallen for a scam, but she proceeded to lay my life open like the tarot cards she had me shuffle. She knew me better than anyone ever had— every embarrassing habit, every good thing about me. She said I would soon go through tough financial times— this was a couple weeks ago— then yesterday my boss called me into the conference room and told me I was being laid off. Miss Cleo said I’d be falling in love sooner rather than later, which I found hard to believe, until the memory of her dark brown eyes and silky fingertips kept me up all last night. I came back for another reading this morning but the neon sign in the house’s window is gone. I called her company’s 24-hour hotline a dozen times but it was never her, the ladies’ Caribbean accents sounding forced and offensive coming out of them. They all said they were Miss Cleo, but the real Miss Cleo is out there. Not the real real Miss Cleo, but my Miss Cleo. I love her. I need her. I don’t care how I die anymore. I need her to tell me how I’m supposed to live.

Julián Martinez loves Chicago so much, he’s marrying her. Find him @martinezfjulian or martinezfjulian.com.

Categories
Across The Wire Vol. 6

Berries Poem

By Alex Rost

I put a quart of blackberries in the work fridge to snack on over the next couple days,
go back an hour later and toss one in my mouth.
Don't even have to bite
the fruit is so tender,
just squeeze it between my tongue and the roof of my mouth,
feel it pop, sweet juice squirting out in every direction, 
coating the inside of my cheek. 
Flip it to my teeth to finish the job,
chomp once, twice,
then get that perfect berry down my throat and grab for another 
except the second berry is sour,
a slightly too firm dud,
the third even worse.
Fourth, fifth, sixth - 
sour, sour, sour.
The seventh tastes a little metallic but isn't so bad,
the texture is right
and I have hope when I eat the eighth—
sour.
Sour, sour, 
fucking sour.
Firm, gritty.
By the thirteenth my palette has no memory 
of that first, perfect berry
but I can't stop,
the tingle in my tongue demands retribution,
solace from bitterness, 
yearns for satisfaction.
The container is low, 
the plastic of the bottom showing.
One sweet berry and I'm done.
It doesn't even have to be as good as the first,
only needs to provide a glimmer 
that I can take into the future,
a belief that what I'm left with is better
than this.
Sour.
Sour.
Sour.
I'm not hungry.
Wasn’t hungry to begin with.
Two left.
Please, I think.
Sour.
FUCK.
One left.
I pick it up, hold it between thumb and forefinger,
bring it to my eye.
Solid, deep coloration.
A little squeeze— 
just enough give.
I allow my hopes to rise.
I have confidence.
I run my tongue through my mouth,
searching for the taste of that first berry under layers and layers of sour.
I place the final berry on my tongue,
shift it between my teeth,
and bite.

Alex Rost runs a commercial printing press outside of Buffalo, NY

Categories
Across The Wire Vol. 6

2 Poems

By Damon Hubbs

Brink


Gossiping with Alyson and Alys. 
Fika, visiting cake. 
Nobody is Swedish although Nadia is the type of blonde 
you’d kill a prime minister for. 
I read the papers and gamble on papal elections. 
To think of all the beauty and bloodshed, 
fuck it. I’m lying to myself and others. 
Artifice in loud terms. 

Nadia gives me a jagged hump
and I’m on the oozy brink 
when she starts talking about Irish writers 
and some esthetician 
in Palm Springs 
nicknamed Jack the Ripper. 
It’s strange how people cling together. 
Darling, don’t shoot until the subject hits you.

I’m barely awake when you call me Finnegan
stately, plump (picnic, lightning). 
I mock the myths I help create
make faces in the surveillance camera. 
Where we’re headed, where we are 
halfway down the coast I lost the comic timing,
pick up the phone like a cold kiss— 
yes, Nadia, the fire escape is burning

and I’m watching the deaf republic 
under a wild pack of stars. 
I’m thinking about the poet 
who dropped an electric toothbrush into her cunt
and fried my cock.  
Love after love after love 
I’m pissing like the Colosseum in full view
listening to the pretty tyranny of the wind.

Patagonia Picnic Table Effect

Somewhere between night and the morning after
queer shades of future dusk 
Berluti knot, orange wine, lips like an extra maraschino

we talk about art and Genet and the birdshit on the bench. 
“You should write a poem about birds,” 
she says, not knowing I’d sworn off bird poetry 

preferring to write poems about petite mort and 21st century malaise
clubby androgynous youth, gobs of spit, vape girls, egirls
empty theaters and red latrines, Aslan’s pin-ups, lui magazine

desire that isn’t explained, desire with a mouth like a dirty rest stop, 
Vogue Italia, dressing for the rapture, what it means to be exiled, 
what it means to be stripped of happiness, what it means to be stripped 

like a saint, murder holes, arrow loops, Divine’s funeral, my complete 
fear of list poems, biographies, throat cancer, my complete fear of Kathy 
Acker, Trazodone, nightstands, spotlights, Piss Flowers, the exquisiteness 

of tiramisu, the slippage between desire and disgust, the foil to her 
flamboyance, Stabat Mater, my complete fear of Connecticut, the 
insurance man, the cricket-impresario, tennis elbow, preferring to 

write poems about coupling, decoupling, parallelism, lines of influence 
and what it means to find a rare species, and another, and another —
Yellow Grosbeak, Thick-billed Kingbird, a nesting pair of Rose-throated 
Becards.

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 Apocalypse Confidential, The Crank, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Spectra, the engine(idling, Horror Sleaze Trash, & others. His poems have been nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net.