Category: Across The Wire Vol. 8

Categories
Across The Wire Vol. 8

two poems

  • Post author By
  • Post date

by Sean G. Meggeson

spaceship earth

a rag 

or another

cleaning thing 

under the sink 

a contextual truth 

nah

giving up is 

giving up 

no one asked 

which way is up 

no one sussed out 

a bodega

and look 

sis puts out 

her smoke on 

her tongue and 

the whole block 

losses it’s axis 

for a minute 

that’s a lot 

that’s all we got

The Theory of the Richer Fool

The bad name of the rat is a synthesis 

of one retrograde fantasy after another. 

Today’s post-hallucinogenic time zones, 

tomorrow’s flash-backs of a buggy cottage. 

We drink all day on the patio. Stubbies 

of Dragon, a dialogue of dressing down   

repressed as muted rage: Harold Searles 

wrote through pyromania and ballroom 78s. 

And the paper he wrote: 

“The Effort to Drive the Other Person Crazy—An Element 

in the Aetiology and Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia.”  

So let’s get to work. The word purposive forms

in the lower intestines. Could be popcorn. Could 

be cobalt. Regardless, I demand that you to consume me 

at the cherry blossom festival. A would-be act of repair.  

Sean G. Meggeson is a poet and audio/spoken word artist, living in Toronto. He has been published in a range of journals and magazines, including 100subtexts, Bruiser, and the Journal of Experimental Practice . Forthcoming album, Liminal Animal. His audio work can be found on Bandcamp and Spotify. Sean’s blog: https://seangmeggesonpoetry.blogspot.com/

Categories
Across The Wire Vol. 8

UNITED CRUSHERS

  • Post author By
  • Post date

by P.G. McNabb

I.

           Tufts of prairie 

Surround a driftless industrial

Cathedral, with elephant skin

And stained glass pox of spray paint.

The volume of grain demanded

Enormous gear to grind the silage

Which one time made the air breathe thick 

As batter; it’s heavy, still, but with different

Refinement: dust, asbestos, the grist of time

Inhaled by young persons in search

Of palliatives for boredom. “Abandoned”

Could not describe those buildings: they capture

Attention. Everything is interesting

When it’s out of order, out of the order

Obscuring a dream – a petty misdemeanor

Graffiti can’t wake from. It’s hard to imagine

The last days the mill was operational,

That there ever was any purpose beside 

The curiosity served as a ruin of our own.

Barbarous children must also have trashed

The Acropolis before the couple

Hundred necessary years had passed

To make it a monument of something

We will always be too young to remember.

Flour built a temple, too, for people need

To eat some bread and earn some dough and 

Spray some paint, so there might be an ornament.

Different people come for different things

But all enthralled by the broken casements 

On bygone work of hidden generations 

Who built our world and left 

Some wasted castles behind haphazard.

II.

Efforts were made by sealing entrances

To reduce the risks for personal injury.

Getting inside was never the same way 

Twice. Once, an open window granted

Passage to the ground-floor level. 

Generators rusted in the damp – depressed

And inutile – like a third-rate

Duchamp gathering vacant fuel

In an ancient lot. A sepia shroud dressed

The dead room, stagnant water glittered. 

By keeping tight to the wall, you could creep

Around, reach the stairs, and make your way

To successive galleries of babbling graffiti. 

Across that concrete canvas, talent 

Was interrupted and often crowded 

By amateurism – as in any museum. 

III.

But vandals only deface what’s valueless

To them; so when style was in the room,

Rules were observed: like no one fucked with

The really good graffiti, and if they did,

Their tag would suffer a thousand imprecations

From connoisseurs who saw it the same way 

Modernists see the activists 

Throwing motor oil on Vincent Van Gogh. 

There are many among us who hear 

Only half the music. 

          But one sterling

Mural in black & white remained

Unchallenged by the recursive tags of

Disparate crews that dripped from the wall 

Like bukkake. Depicted was a cartoon city

Alight with black flame: humanoid wolves

Bore cyclops eyes, stalked the streets,

And cracked civilians with ebony clubs. 

A simple lyric, maybe title, hung at

The left in capital letters: RATIONAL

ANIMAL. But there wasn’t a tag

To take the credit. 

       Danger increased

With every elevation. Aluminum stairs

Moved from story to story. Machinery,

Shoots, and gothic levers stood patiently

Waiting to resume the work that kept on

Somewhere else – a protestant sense 

Of wakefulness. But there were signs

Of someone resting – mattress, empties,

Orange caps, panties, jackknife, bloody.

Darker forms of life had filled the vacuum:

A process paralleled in shipwreck.

The diver must fear what he finds

Plucked from land and plunged through fathoms

Of time tearing apart the matter, returning

Each object to prima materia. 

            A sense of being

Underwater was also felt at three hundred

Feet in the air – the top of the mill

Awarded surveillance over the city

To the morbidly curious who cleared 

The top unseen. Unknown is how the

Eponymous tag was rolled on fourteen

Consecutive grain elevators – a silo

For every letter in UNITED CRUSHERS.

Everyone authors the story: anecdotes

Circulate – a friend of a friend

Of a friend will know a guy in the

Crew, but still they can’t clarify

The obvious technical challenges

That marvel the metro audience. 

IV.

It happened at night. 

Were grappling hooks used? Or

Did they paint it upside-down? 

How many hours – start to finish?

Mu-dog said they were drunk and dangled

Each other by ankles to roll on the piece.

The work’s placement upset a losing

Proposition, challenging gallery standards. 

V.

Breadth of triumph widens in relation

To its means and their concealment from 

Our understanding. Nobody understands

Exactly how the painting was completed,

And even if they could, they couldn’t comprehend

The risk involved in pulling it off and why

Anyone would want to take it. 

 Enigma

Enfolded on enigma bind to suggest an 

Achievement. Life was staked against

The mark and cultic fame flourished.

It’s for these reasons, UNITED CRUSHERS

Must be considered a MAJOR WORK. The 

City claims it for its landmark, another

Aesthetic insurrection absorbed by 

An institution – vandalism canonized

As infrastructure. And shadows 

Cast round its stature: chronicles of

Death, assault, and drug manufacture

Inspired the total foreclosure of egress:

Immovable mass of concrete placed

In front of doors and ground-level windows.

The palimpsestic gallery of graffiti is

Entombed and inaccessible for further

Consideration – murals borne on fugitive

Minds cast back to their hollows and pulled 

From the audience, practically nonexistent.

But nothing forgotten ever is lost,

And minor work gets cut off the line.

The highest point was reached by spry drunks

With white paint – and there they left 

Their mark on the wintering imagination 

Of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

P.G. McNabb lives and writes in Minneapolis. His work also appears in The Metropolitan Review, Reap Thrill, and SPECTRA.

Categories
Across The Wire Vol. 8

Ingestion II

  • Post author By
  • Post date

by Steve Gergley

Ronald was the first human to eat a ripe plum. Sixteen of his nineteen living siblings have no visible eyebrows. He lived in Weehawken, New Jersey for 337 and 8/9ths years. At 5:13 a.m. every morning, he does 445 pushups amid the sharp and chilly dust of the attic. On March 19th, 1983, Ronald told his great-great-great-great-granddaughter that the key to immortal life is lying awake in bed from four to one each day, and reciting from memory the totality of the New York City Subway System.

Steve Gergley is the author of a bunch of books and a lot of weird writings of an indeterminate nature. His new novel, Stone Cells, will be published by Translucent Eyes Press on August 28th, 2026. He tweets @GergleySteve. His fiction can be found at: https://stevegergleyauthor.wordpress.com/. He’s also the editor of scaffold literary magazine.

Categories
Across The Wire Vol. 8

Being a Cock at Odd’s Cafe

  • Post author By
  • Post date

by Spencer Eckart

I got into an argument with an erudite priest over whether Socrates was Christian. I told him nah man Socrates was effing BC! And he was like anyone who communes w/ spirit at the level he did is in the Holy Spirit and is Christian by proxy. I told him that’s cool but also fuck you. He said so you agree? I said no that Christ is a sex symbol. He said fuck you sir. I said Walt Whitman said argue not concerning God. He said I’m not arguing I’m just spreading the gospel which is ultimately true so there really is no debate. I said OK that’s fine I love you bro. He said I love you bro. But also fuck you I said. He said fuck you as well. Neither of us said anything for a while. Then he and I and everything else began to dissolve into infinite mind. And I started vocalizing involuntary. He said I’m dead over and over again. He and I are one guy. All my shit ends like this because I don’t know how to write an ending. Really that was just an explanation of smoking 5-MeO-DMT. I make fun of writing MFAs but if any of yous want to teach me how to write a proper ending please click the little envelope button on my website. And we can belong to each other forever.

Spencer Eckart lives in the Great Smoky Mountains. His debut collection, Blue Heron Inn, is forthcoming.

Categories
Across The Wire Vol. 8

O  U  T    OF THE   W  O  O  D  W  O  R  K 

  • Post author By
  • Post date

By Bill Whitten

Scene I: Duluth

Entomologist Vann Maguire, age forty-eight, powerfully built with salt and pepper beard and hair paces behind a lectern in front of an auditorium half-filled with undergraduates. He writes two words on the blackboard: Cimex lectularius.

“Of all the biting, blood sucking bugs of the world, this little fellow – the common bedbug – has made an incredible, headline grabbing comeback. A persistent problem since antiquity – can you imagine historical figures from Plato to Winston Churchill were covered at some point in their lives in bedbug bites? Until well into the twentieth century most people were on familiar terms with Cimex lectularius.”

He removes a remote control from his jacket pocket and presses a button.  A photograph of Cimex lectularius flashes on a screen behind him. 

“For all his evolutionary brilliance he remains an exceedingly ugly little devil. Note his stylet fascile – the two fang-like mandibular protuberances which he uses to chew through the flesh of his victim.” 

He points the remote. On the screen appears an image of a naked torso covered in red bite-marks the size of quarters. 

A collective ewwww from the students.

“And we all know what they do…” 

Again he waves the remote and this time a stock photo of a generic baseboard and wall fills the screen. ”…and we know where they like to make their homes. Not in tiny coffins which would seem appropriate but in our walls, woodwork and baseboards.”

He throws the remote control on the lectern. Hands in his pockets, he faces the students.

“So for millennia we are at the mercy of this relentless creature until”, his voice booms, “science to the rescue! With the discovery of powerful insecticides we put Cimex lectularius on the ropes. DDT and other, similar chemical treatments more or less wiped him out. But thanks to supposedly well-meaning environmentalists – cue the eerie horror movie music – the twenty-first century rolls around, DDT is banned and suddenly we look in the New York Times and find intractable infestations reported in Amsterdam, Paris, London, Madrid and finally – this is when it begins to penetrate the consciousness of the average American – New York City.  And these babies are a new breed. Tough does not begin to describe the contemporary Cimex lectularius”.  

Maguire lets his body fall against the podium. He rests his head on his hand, as his dark eyes search the auditorium. When he speaks it’s in a voice that rises and falls dramatically, theatrically. He seems on the verge of tears or roaring rage.

“A colleague and I discovered – well let’s just say my protégé stole most of my research and published it as his own – we discovered, I discovered that if one introduces the AIDS virus, the Hepatitis viruses A, B or C into the body of Cimex lectularius, why our little friend kills these otherwise indestructible pathogens almost immediately. Truly remarkable. What accounts for this eleventh hour comeback and this new, almost immortal durability?”

He begins pacing again.

“Corporate lobbyists in the pay of Dow Chemicals will tell you it was caused by the needless ban on Zyklon-B and DDT. While conspiracy theorists maintain the vampiric superbug crept out of biowarfare labs in Russia or Red China or perhaps our very own Plum Island. The fact is an arcology made in heaven for Cimex lectularius has been created. i.e. a highly mobile managerial class deprived of job security and any sense of permanence now flits from city to city and thanks to inexpensive transcontinental air travel has the option of going to sleep in San Francisco and waking up in Vladivostok. A truly footloose international bourgeoisie. Once upon a time it invented high culture”, he lowers his voice to a whisper, “now it spreads contagion.”

He stops pacing and pulls an old-fashioned pocket watch from the vest of his three-piece black suit. “I’ll have to leave it there. Time is short and I know you’re all eager to begin studying for your midterms. Heaven forbid I keep you.”

As he gathers his papers and throws a blue, cape-like loden coat over his shoulders, a pair of female students approach the podium. A brunette in black turtleneck, jean-jacket with a backpack slung over a shoulder smiles at him. “Will you be going to Cicero’s Tavern after class, professor? This might be our last chance to pick your brain before midterms.”

The professor grins, white teeth flashing through his beard. As he addresses the two young women his eyes fix on a third, a redhead, who remains seated in the front row and observes him with a wry smile.

“As much as I’d like to, Sarah,” he nods at the blonde “and Chelsea. A mole that I have managed to place deep within the Administration – come to think of it not unlike Cimex lectularius – has warned me that certain powerful members of the board of trustees have been keeping a close watch on my activities. We all know about my troubles at Columbia. I have no inclination to tempt fate, repeat history and jeopardize in any way my position here. If you had the sizable alimony payments that I have, perhaps you girls might understand. Why don’t you come see me during office hours.”

Scene II: Lower Stratosphere

Geneticist Ludlow Swift – British, navy suit, open collared white shirt – runs a hand through his blonde hair and pushes on the bridge of his horn-rimmed glasses. Pursing his lips he looks out the window from his first class seat aboard China Airlines. The sun is like an interrogating eye above a sea of clouds. He turns away from the window, brow furrowed by an expression of worry. 

“Would you like another Glenfiddich sir?” A stewardess hovers over him.

He looks up at the smiling young woman. “I couldn’t possibly…”

She moves her cart down the aisle.

He turns his attention to his laptop. His fingers fly over the keys. The words Message Encrypted flash across the screen. He begins to type.

Ian

Before I boarded my flight I was given confirmation that Dr. Tsien received the ‘package’. It certainly pays to have friends in the diplomatic corp. Who would have imagined delivering the potential AIDS cure to our putative enemies in Beijing would be so easy? Trials of Red Factor IV will be underway within a fortnight. It goes without saying I couldn’t have done it without you, Ian. I have to admit however that my excitement is tinged with a bit of anxiety – Dr. Tsien’s methods are extremely unorthodox to say the least. Bioethics is not a concept the good doctor seems to be familiar with. He almost seemed to imply that the prisoners – the Red Factor IV test subjects – were deliberately infected with HIV in order to provide suitable candidates for the trials. If this is true, well…My god, I’ve never heard anything so monstrous…

Hopefully I’m just being my usual paranoid self. But this will be one of the first things I bring up when I meet with Tsien.

Talk soon,

Ludlow

Scene II: New York

In a dark office, Ian Martinez’ gaunt yet strikingly handsome face is lit by the screen of his desktop computer. Behind him windows look out onto a dark city street. In front of him, on the other side of a clear Plexiglas wall is a lab filled with medical equipment and closed circuit TVs. 

Images of a dozen caged rhesus macaques are visible on the screens of the TVs. On most of the screens the monkeys appear to shriek and violently leap about.

Ian’s eyes skim Dr. Swift’s email.

“A fortnight?” Under his breath he mutters, “I can’t wait fourteen fucking days for the trials to begin. At this rate it will take months before we have any results…”

His colleague Maurelle sticks her head in the door of his office. He looks up. “Yes?“

“That’s it for me, Martinez. I’ve had enough. I don’t know how you do it. I need sleep. See you tomorrow.”

Distractedly “Yes, tomorrow, Maurelle, always tomorrow…” 

She closes the door behind her. 

“For some of us that is…”

He pulls open a drawer, removes a syringe, an ampule labeled with the word Morphine Sulfate and a length of yellow rubber tubing. He fastens a tourniquet above his elbow, draws a portion of the drug into the syringe and injects himself. For a moment an expression of pure, almost religious ecstasy lights his face. He unrolls his sleeve then like a roulette dealer raking chips from a table, brushes the drug and his paraphernalia into a drawer. He locks his desk, stands up and walks out of the office.

Sliding a keycard through a lock he passes into a section of the lab filled with caged animals. After traversing row after row he stops in front of a tiered set of cages. A piece of masking tape imprinted with the word Willie is affixed to the door of the top cage. Ian reaches a hand out and shakes the cage door.

“You’re doing great, aren’t you Willie? Your T-cell count is back to normal, your weight has stabilized and the PCP pneumonia that had you on death’s door is completely gone. The only thing is…you sleep all day, you react negatively to light and only become active some time after midnight…”

Ian rests his head against the cage. “Except for our T-cell counts, you and I have a lot in common, buddy.”

From somewhere in the back of the cage, the unseen macaque coos in response. 

“I wish I could share this with you, Willie. It might perk you up.”

He reaches into the pocket of his lab-coat and removes a clear vial of white powder. He shakes a pile onto his fist and snorts it. He throws his head back and begins grunting madly like a chimpanzee.

“What is something all primates have in common Willie? We’re all risk-takers. We like to live on the edge. You and me buddy. Risk takers par excellence.  And what does one do when protease inhibitors no longer do a damn thing? Where do I turn Willie? I’m so tired. It’s like I’m carrying a great weight on my shoulders. I guess dying makes you tired.”

He dumps more of the drug onto his fist. He snorts it.

“I think we both know the answer don’t we Willie? We know what must be done…”

Ian turns and walks away. Over his shoulder, “See you soon buddy.”

As Ian leaves the animal lab, Willie appears from the dark recesses of the cage and grips the bars. He returns to his dark corner and begins shrieking as if in incredible pain.

On the closed circuit TVs Ian can be seen sliding his key card through an electric lock and then entering a lab door marked Bioreactors – Authorized Personnel Only. On another CCTV he can be seen exiting with an IV bag filled with a ruby liquid.  Back in his office he pulls on a black leather jacket and places the IV bag in a Styrofoam cooler.

As he enters an elevator he lights a cigarette. The doors close.

Scene IV: Shanghai

Pale, stocky,  middle-aged, clad in a white lab-coat, hands clasped behind his back, Dr. Dingxiang Tsien whistles as he walks down a long hallway of a dungeon-like prison. Outside a cell-door medical staff wait next to a cart filled with surgical instruments and transparent IV bags filled with a red liquid hang from portable IV stands.

Dr. Tsien sidesteps the staff and walks into the cell. A woman, in her early thirties, lies in a hospital bed. Her body is confined by restraints. Dr. Tsien picks up the chart at the foot of the bed. He turns pages.

“Chenguang, how are we today? Are you in the mood to make history?”

Her half-shut eyes attempt to focus on Dr. Tsien. It’s clear she has been drugged.

He shakes his head sadly. “Would you believe that I managed to find one of your loathsome books of poetry?”  

In a singsong voice he recites:

Just as the newspaper yellows

and the white spider’s filaments catches no flies

And the riverman’s boat lies still in pathless waters

It is my destiny to lift Oblivion’s veil.

“When I first read these lines I thought to myself; what rubbish! Were my parents needlessly slaughtered in the Cultural Revolution so subversive bourgeois scum like you could write such filth? But then, Chenguang, I began to see the genius of your verse. It fits the task we will undertake today. The lifting of oblivion’s veil at last. This is our work. Yours and mine.”

He turns and motions to the medical staff in the hallway. In moments a red IV bag drips into the young woman’s veins. She remains motionless, inert. And then a tremor passes through her body. A red flash tints the retina of each eye. The doctor and the staff are unaware as they move on down the hall to the next cell. 

Tsien unlocks the door and speaks softly: 

“Mr. Huang do we feel like making history this morning? Be honest with me. You would like that wouldn’t you? To be a part of something special?” 

Scene V: Duluth

Sheet pulled to his waist Vann leans against the headboard of a king-size bed, hair mussed, breathing hard. A tumbler half-filled with an amber liquid rests on his stomach. The redhead from the classroom lies next to him.

Sweat dampens her hair. A look of astonishment on both of their faces. Vann lifts a bottle from the floor next to the bed and freshens his drink. The redhead stirs.

“What was that business about your protégé stealing your work? You’ve never mentioned that before…”

Vann sips his drink and sighs. 

“I don’t know why I brought it up, Tanya. It’s something I usually can’t even bear to think about…” He finishes his drink in one gulp. Voice rising “It fills me with…” He hurls his empty glass across the room into the fireplace. The fire burns on undisturbed. “It fills me with…incalculable rage, baby.” Whipping the sheet off he rises and begins pacing around the room. 

“Ian Martinez. My sycophantic protégé. A whizz kid, an interdisciplinary genius. An entomologist, a geneticist, a medical doctor…I’ve never met anyone like him…thankfully. When I discovered the surprising immunological responses of the common bedbug, why we were both starry-eyed with the possibilities. Cures for AIDS, Hepatitis C, Leukemia all within sight…Blinded by my own optimism – I’ll never make that mistake again – I failed to miss all the little warning signs that would have tipped me off to the fact that my bright young assistant had developed a serious drug problem. When he wasn’t in the lab with me he was on the nod in some god-awful shooting gallery in Harlem, the proverbial needle sticking out of his arm.”

Vann sits down on the edge of the bed and drinks straight from the bottle.

“Then what happened?”

“What do you think happened? I get an email from a colleague. ‘Hey Vann have you seen the latest issue of The Lancet? Your boy Ian just published a rather shocking paper.’”

He begins pacing again. “Of course I did what anyone would do. I found him and beat him nearly to death. Little shit that he was, he managed to video the beating with his iPhone – it may well have been his plan all along. And before you can say Fuck Me, I was locked up in the Tombs awaiting arraignment on felonious assault charges…The DA cut me a break and knocked it down from attempted murder. This, Tanya, was just the beginning of my troubles. How else could I have ended up in this backwater? The so-called University of Duluth?”

Tanya pulls him back into bed. “Well if you hadn’t left New York, Professor, we would have never met.” 

“I suppose there are consolations to be had in even the bleakest of circumstances…”

Scene VI: Hell, Precisely

“Please follow me Professor Swift.”

Ludlow Swift is led by Samantha Xiuying along a glass enclosed walkway through the Omaha wing of TLS Biologics brand new Beijing Campus.

“Omaha Wing?”

“Yes, we’ve named each of the twenty segments of the campus after great international cities.”

“I see.”

Professor Swift stops at a window and looks out onto the sprawling grounds TLS Biologics. 

“I thought time was of the essence Professor Swift?”

“Yes, yes of course…” He pulls himself away from the window and follows her. 

After what seems like a disorienting twenty minute walk through gleaming maze-like hallways, past dozens of workers clad either in ‘clean suits’ or Western business-wear they arrive at a bank of elevators.

They step in together. Samantha removes a key, unlocks a panel and presses the glowing button for Sub-Basement level −4.

“Dr. Tsien has been relegated to the basement?”

“The Experimental Sector is a state of the art laboratory and is located for security purposes one hundred and fifty feet below ground”. 

“Security purposes?”

“The Biotech field is highly competitive. Industrial espionage is far more common than the layman imagines.”

The elevator jerks to a halt.

“We take every precaution imaginable.”

The doors open.

From behind a glass enclosure an armed security guard smiles at Samantha and presses a button. Electronic doors swing open. 

They walk down another hallway and Samantha stands before a wall mounted security cam and announces herself:
“It’s Sam and Professor Swift.”

There is a buzz as the door unlocks. The pair enters into darkness. They stop almost immediately, each raising a hand to their face.

“My god, what is that smell….It’s like rotting fruit or…”

A voice calls out from the shadows. “There seems to be a ventilation issue in my office.”
A desk light snaps on and Dr. Tsien is visible behind a large glass desk. He leans back in his leather chair, eyes covered by sunglasses, a white bandage beneath his right cheekbone.

As Professor Swift crosses the room to shake hands with Dr. Tsien he realizes he recognizes the smell. It is the pheromone of Cimex lectularius. He’s never encountered it in such overwhelming concentration. Tsien’s office must be completely infested. 

“Dr. Tsien I believe I have an idea about what it is that’s responsible for the smell…You may not want to hear this.”

“The smell is the least of my worries, Professor Swift. As you may have ascertained I’ve been injured…by one of the test subjects no less. I’ve tested myself for HIV, Hepatitis A, B and C and my results have come back negative. Yet I feel very…unwell…”

“Test subjects? It was my understanding that the trials weren’t scheduled to take place until…”

Dr. Tsien places his elbows on his desk. With his eyes covered by his dark glasses he appears as something of a cipher. “I have the most remarkable toothache, Professor Swift, I’ve never been in such pain. As to why to the trials began so soon…well let’s just say that I’ve been feeling a bit of pressure from those”, he points at the ceiling, “above me. They are very eager to see if your gene therapy is successful…Ms. Xiuying why don’t you escort the doctor to his accommodations. Hopefully the guest house will be to your liking…”

“Tsien, I want to see the test subjects. Immediately.”

“Well in that case Dr. Swift might I suggest”, he points at a cart filled with liquor bottles beneath a large flat screen TV, “you fix yourself a drink before we pay a visit to those unfortunate creatures.”

“Creatures?”

“I suggest a water-glass full of Reyka vodka and then perhaps a bar of Xanax while you’re at it. Let me see if I have any in my drawer.” He violently rummages through the contents of his desk drawer. 

Dr. Swift is outraged. He steps to Tsien’s desk and leans across it, index finger pointing at the preoccupied Doctor. “What in God’s name are you talking about, Tsien?”

Tsien looks past Dr. Swift. “Sam would you be so kind as to leave us alone?

“Yes Dr. Tsien.”

“In the parlance of our American colleagues; shit is so fucked up with the test-subjects, that your mind is about to be permanently blown. Trust me, Swift. Have a drink.”

“Take me to them at once, Tsien. If things are as ‘fucked up’ as you say, it will be the last time you see them. I’ll have you relieved of your duties at once.”

Tsien lights a cigarette and walks to the liquor cart. Swift can’t help but notice Tsien’s strange gait; his shoulders are hunched, arms almost touching the floor – and strangest of all – he moves in rapid bursts. First from the desk then to a six-foot tall Ficus tree then to the liquor cabinet. He pulls a bottle of Reyka from the cart and takes a long drink. “Let’s go, old chap.” 

He raises a hand to his jaw. Swift noticed his nails are incredibly long and yellowish.

“My jaw. My jaw. So much pain. It’s unbearable.” He let out a strange cry.

“Enough Tsien. Take me to the subjects.”

There is a door to the left of Tsien’s desk. The doctor removes a card from his pocket and runs it through the lock. A light above the doorknob flashes green. He holds the door for Swift. 

They walk through a lengthy white hallway, their heels clicking on the spotless tile floor.  At intervals of roughly one city block, security doors block their path. After they’ve passed through the third such checkpoint. They are confronted by a guard sitting behind a Plexiglas window. Like Tsien he wears sunglasses and both of his hands, along with the left side of his neck, are bandaged. The stench of Cimex lectularius pheromone is overwhelming. 

The doctor presses an intercom button and addressed the guard.

“Any new incidents Haolin? 

The man turns his head in the doctor’s direction looking as if he is about to speak into the intercom microphone but remains silent. His arm moves and the security door buzzes open.

“An interesting side note, Ludlow – may I call you Ludlow? I feel familiar terms are called for considering what you are about to witness. All the test subjects exist in a kind of erotic frenzy. Their only interests seem to be feeding, sleeping and….”, he grunted in what Swift assumed was laughter, “and fucking.”

They passed through another door and the modern, hi-tech atmosphere of TLS Biologics vanishes and they are in the bowels of a prison or medieval dungeon. It is dank and cold. A guard is visible across from an iron-barred cell. Purple light emanating from the interior of the cell bathes the guard. 

“Chenguang meet Dr. Ludlow Swift.”

A woman, or what once was a woman, lifts her head and a long – there can be no other word to describe it – fang protrudes from the center of her mouth. It’s a stylet, Swift realizes. She has taken on an ovular shape and fine dark hair covers her entire body. He notices with disgust she’s thrusting her hips – apparently in his direction.  

“She seems to fancy you Swift.” 

“She must be taken from here at once, Tsien. She needs treatment. Her suffering must be inconceivable…”

“Oh yes treatment. Definitely treatment.” He laughs – it is hopeless laughter. “We all need treatment…Perhaps a shotgun blast to the face. Something along those lines. But actually the guards and I – my brothers – we are going to take…” He was interrupted by the screams of a male voice coming from somewhere further down the hall. “We are going to do what’s necessary. Torch the entire underground wing of TLS Biologics…and martyr ourselves before our little friends escape and wreak the sort of havoc that the world has never seen. You will be the last non-infected scientist to witness the abomination that we – you and I – have created.” 

There is a popping noise, like the crack of a whip. Then another.

“Oh, dear. Xiang instruct Haolin to implement emergency lock down procedure. I think, alas, it’s time we initiate Operation Inferno.” 

Tsien walks down the hall toward the screams.

The woman, Chenguang, has torn off her restraints and is sitting up in her cell. As if by magic the restraints that hold her podomeres in place pop in unison. Then she stands or more likely crouches next to the bed. Swift, repulsed as he is, can’t help but feel a strong attraction to the woman; the fine hairs cover the still supple flesh of her body. Her breasts are large and the nipples erect. The stylet, dripping with saliva, holds a strange fascination. He could never have imagined in his wildest dreams such a thing… 

And then with amazing speed she is at the bars facing him and the stench of pheromones is so pronounced he places a handkerchief over his nose and mouth. Inexplicably, as if a voice has instructed him to do so, he takes it away. He inhales and feels strangely calm.

Tsien is once again at his side.

“The thing about our new hybrid creatures is that they retain Cimex lectularius’ ability to flatten themselves. They can fit through almost any opening…combine that with their almost eternal lifespans, their adaptability to any habitat, their ability to fight off every pathogen, their single-minded desire to feed and of course their surprising strength… Well, let’s just say that if they were unleashed upon the planet, such a creature would be impossible to stop.”

A vision, for which he’d waited his whole life, forms in Swift’s head: And wreak the sort of havoc that the world has never seen.

He would have to find a way to free Chenguang from the Experimental Sector. The first thing he must do, he understands, is kill Tsien…

Scene VII

Ian Martinez begins sleeping all day beneath his bed and then rising at midnight to wander the streets in search of something other than dope…

Scene VIII

As exsanguinated corpses appear on the streets of the Lower East Side, reports of strange, malformed men wearing dark glasses accosting young women on the streets in the early hours of the morning become a daily occurrence…

Scene IX

After his girlfriend disappears, Vann Maguire undertakes what can only be described as a war…

Bill Whitten is a rock musician, a writer and a reader. His latest album is Dédoublement. His first book BRUTES came out in 2022.

His second collection: I NEVER STOP ARRIVING is in need of a publisher. He is currently reading with great pleasure The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Alvaro Mutis.

Categories
Across The Wire Vol. 8

Pocomoke Billy

  • Post author By
  • Post date

by Richard Pounder 

It’s summer break from college. I’m living with my girlfriend, Anne, at her farm in Pocomoke City, Maryland instead of visiting my home in Pittsburgh because guys at her job kept trying to fuck her last summer.

She works as a waitress at a beach restaurant called Mr. Bello’s. That’s where it happened. Anne says it wasn’t her fault, and I mostly believe her.

I’m going to try to get a job there as a busboy. Until then, I will be helping out around here.

Anne’s dad, Ed, is a chicken farmer. We can’t stay at her real house while we’re here. We could, but I’d rather not stay in a house with Ed because he gets drunk a lot and starts swinging at people.

The only other option is staying with Ed’s cousin, Billy.

Billy lives in an old camper in the woods between Aunt Linda’s backyard and the township dumpsite.

No electricity. I don’t know how I’m going to charge my phone. What if Anne needs to text me while she’s at work?  

Billy has three teeth. His voice is gravelly. 

Me and Anne stand there. Billy has a twin bed, a hotplate, a pair of tall rubber boots, a coat hanging from a lamp. A few dishes. A toilet. A sink. 

Kitchenette grease sits in the humidity. Billy’s BO.

“Gon’ need yer help in the chicken house tomorrow,” he says in front of my girlfriend. I say okay.

At 5:00 AM I meet Ed and Billy in front of the two long chicken houses. It’s dark, but you can see all the stars in Pocomoke. Anne’s still asleep. 

“Too early for ya?” Billy says, steaming Styrofoam cup in hand.

I have to wear rubber boots that go all the way up to my knees. 

Ed is hunched over, vomiting pink. He drank eighteen shots of Jose Cuerva last night. His pancreas pokes out like he’s pregnant.

Air blasts out vents of the sides of the building, spraying ammonia in my eyes. 

When I squint, Billy laughs. He says his son, Little Billy, is my age, works at a Wal-Mart. Hasn’t seen him in years. Doesn’t care to, neither. He doesn’t like how Little Billy failed out of Air Force Basic Training and wears skinny jeans.

He smacks my shoulder. “Ya ready?”

“Yep!” I try my best.

He laughs again.

Ed opens the chicken house. He flips some switches on a control panel mounted to the wall. “Fuckin’ piece-a-shit.” 

“Come here,” Billy says to me. 

I follow him through another door. 

They aren’t baby chicks. Definitely not full-grown either. Tens of thousands, clucking. 

Billy hands me a bucket, raises his voice over the clucks. “Gotta walk through, pick up the dead. I’ll go do one house; you guys do this one.”

“Pick up the dead?”

“Yep.”

“Whattaya mean?”

“You just fuckin’ walk through, aisle-by-aisle. You see a fuckin’ dead chicken, pick it up, throw it in the bucket.”

I nod. “Alright.”

“You want gloves?”

Billy’s not wearing gloves.

“I’m good.”

Billy just stands there and watches. 

I walk slowly, lifting my feet high, looking carefully before landing each step. The chickens scatter every time I step forward. 

“Watcha don’t step on ’em,” Billy says, arms folded, leaning against a wall.

“Uh-huh.” 

I make it all the way down the first aisle without a dead chicken. Maybe there are days with no dead chickens. 

“What are you doin’ up this early?” I hear Billy yell as I turn down the next aisle.

I look up. Anne stands in the doorway. Short Soffe shorts and tank top. 

“Morning, babe!” she says. 

“Hey.” 

Billy chuckles under his breath. 

I see it. A dead one. I glance to see if Billy’s watching. Finally, he’s not. He’s lighting a cigarette. 

I rush past the dead chicken. A few moments pass. I keep walking.

“Hold up! Wait a minute!”

“Huh?” I turn around. 

“Missed one.”

“I did?”

“Yup.”

Fake chuckle. “Oh.” I stand there. 

“You gone get it?”

“Where is it?” 

Ed comes in. “Annie!”

“Boy missed a dead one, Ed,” says Billy as he walks toward the dead chicken. I finally catch a deep breath. He’s going to get it himself.

“Oh yeah? That’s alright. Just go back, pick it up, that’s all.” He looks at me seriously for several moments then laughs. “I’m just kidding. You don’t have to.” 

I grin, but I can tell the rest of my face doesn’t match. 

“I got it,” I say. 

I get there before Billy, pick it up, toss it in the bucket. THUD. 

I look at Anne. She’s watching. Everything in me tingles.

I keep walking. 

There’s a chicken limping. 

I walk past it. 

“Gotta get ridda him, too!” Billy shouts over the roaring fans. Feathers swirl through the burning air.

“How?” 

“Gotta kill it. Waste of feed.”

I laugh and keep walking. 

“I’m serious.”

“Oh. What do I do?”

“Lemme show you.” 

Billy drops his cigarette in the middle of the chicken house floor, stomps it out, walks over. He picks the limping chicken up by the neck, winds up, and slams the chicken against the nearest wall. He tosses it in my bucket. “That’s all. Just do that.”

“Okay.” I try to keep my voice steady.

I rush through the rest of the house, praying really hard that there are no more injured birds.

But there is. I figure it’s not worth hesitating. They’re all watching. 

I pick it up by the neck, just like Billy showed me. Its neck squirms in my hand like a snake, and it squawks a lot. That’s how I know I’ll able to do it. To make the awful squawking stop. 

Plus, they’re all just going to stare at me until I do it anyway.  I slam it against the wall. The squawking doesn’t stop. I didn’t do it hard enough. I do it harder. The squawking stops. 

I want to throw up, and I feel a tingling buzz at the same time. I look at Anne. Her smile makes the throw up part go away. 

Ed looks at Billy. “See that?”

“Took a while,” Billy says. 

“Now, he did good.”

I kill two more chickens by the time I’m done with that house. 

Billy asks if I want to help him in the other house since Ed needs to lie down.

I say sure.

We walk through the second house, looking left and right, scanning for any limps or crooked wings.

Each time I have to do it, it gets easier. Still, I hate doing it. It makes me feel like I’m hurting God. It would be one thing if we were going to eat them. But they were never going to make it to the processing plants anyway. They would just get fat off feed and end up in the flesh glacier behind the two houses anyway, turkey buzzards picking at them. 

“I’ve never killed one before,” Anne says, walking next to me and Billy. 

“He’s never made you help?”

“Oh I help every year. I just can’t do that.”

“So, what do you do?”

“Just toss it in the bucket.”

“Isn’t that worse?”

“I figure they’re suffering on the dirt floor here, or they’re suffering in the bucket. What’s the difference? All I’m doing is moving them.”

“Who gives a shit?” chimes Billy, cackling, cigarette dangling.

We dump the buckets of dead or dying chickens into the back of an old pickup. Billy backs up to the compost pile. 

It’s 93 degrees now. Humid. Chicken shit-ammonia air in every breath. It burns my lungs. 

Me and Billy stand on each side of the bed and toss handfuls of chickens into the massive compost pile. The buzzards wait in the surrounding trees. 

Anne stays in the AC. I don’t blame her. 

Billy grabs three chickens at a time in each hand, by the talons. I try to keep up. I can manage one in each hand. 

I look back at Anne. She’s texting. Probably her mom or her boss or something. I look at Billy. He never thinks about stuff like that. He’s probably thinking about taking a nap and sipping coffee and smoking by the fire later. 

Watching her causes me to slow down. 

“You alright?” growls Billy.

I pick up the pace. “Yep.” I toss a few more handfuls, look back at Anne. She’s still texting. 

The buzzards lean forward. 

Richard Pounder is a writer based in Philly. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Bending Genres, Maudlin House, Expat Press, BULL, Some Words, and elsewhere. You can follow him on X: RichPounder150

Categories
Across The Wire Vol. 8

Three shorts 

  • Post author By
  • Post date

by James Keith Smith
 

Game Night

My father, the murderer, wants to play Settlers of Catan. He assembles the board, takes the dice from the plastic bag, passes out resources—brick, sheep, ore. “It’s all about the ports,” he tells us, divulging his strategy. His old army rucksack is by the door. He spent the entirety of his incarceration playing board games. 

“How about a beer?” my wife asks.

“Or a glass of milk,” I say.

“Do you have soy?” my father asks.

My father can shoot a man between the eyes for $87 in small bills but he’s developed a slight dairy allergy. 

The man he murdered was only nineteen. His name was Ronald Fisher. He had a daughter, five months old. 

He calls my wife Little Lady, looks around the living room appraisingly, as though he’s casing the joint. He says the halfway house is always cold. The television is broken and the toaster doesn’t work. I wonder what my mother saw in him. I wonder what they talked about in those late-night phone calls and the monthly visits. 

Soon I lose interest in the game, make bad trades, stop going for Victory Points. 

“Will you be staying for dinner?” my wife asks when the game is over.

“Chow?” my father says.

I elbow her under the table. 

My father eats his polenta in three bites, then asks what it was. After dinner it’s time for him to go back to the halfway house, except he can’t find his key. 

My father can elude law enforcement for 37 days, but he can’t keep track of a door key. When we find it, my wife puts the key on a pink wrist coil, like the ones worn by teenage girls.  

“But wait,” my father says. “One more game.” 

Hearts—his favorite. The only time I visited him in prison, it wasn’t cigarettes, erotica, or fresh fruit he asked me to bring, but a new deck of Bicycle playing cards. My father deals. “Now remember, you have to follow suit.”

I have my father’s hands, the same jawline, the same blue eyes. Yesterday, on the way to work, a guy cut me off and I followed him for three blocks, got out, and pounded on the hood of his car. Quick to anger, my wife calls it. 

The games are over. It’s almost midnight. I want to give him something, a gift to ensure he’ll never come back. I look around the room. A chair, a lamp—anything. “Know what, Dad? Why don’t you take that TV home with you.”

“You mean it?”  

“Sure. I know what it’s like starting over.” 

For me, starting over was moving to a new city for college, leaving the dorms when I was 19. It was learning to live without a father, breaking up with a first girlfriend. It wasn’t being released from prison after twenty-five years, into a world that doesn’t want you. 

He hoists the rucksack over his shoulder, lifts the television. I watch him disappear, close the door, and lock the deadbolt. 

The Closers

One night, Bruce Springsteen played at my band’s house party. We were about to be evicted. There were dirty dishes in the bathtub, the toilet handle was missing. Bruce Springsteen’s red bandana fell off in the foyer. It was a great party until someone left a hash knife in the daiquiri mix and turned on the blender. The girl lost her eye but she wouldn’t press charges.

When the party was over, Bruce Springsteen was able to reboard his tour bus only after being hermetically sealed in a germ-free plastic pouch. We all waved goodbye from the porch as his forty-five-foot tour bus pulled away. 

The next day, our band hit the studio. Speck, the recording engineer, kept a bottle of bourbon under the console. Liquid courage, he said. 

Speck was originally from Placerville, California. I’d never been to Placerville, but I imagined it was one of those sun-scorched towns where everyone worked at the Petco and lived next to a water treatment plant. 

Speck said lots of bands are great live, but when you get them in the studio, they can’t produce. They weren’t closers. We wanted to be closers. 

Back then, we all had day jobs. Our singer worked as a dog walker. Our drummer was in telephone marketing. I was a migrant farm worker. We were young and unambitious. We took all the latest drugs. But I was unhappy. 

Ever since I was a boy back in Little Walnut, Iowa, I wanted to be famous. At family gatherings, I stood on an ottoman and sang hymns for my seven sisters. One year, I won the Little Walnut talent competition for my impersonation of Mrs. Teller, our school secretary. 

Bruce Springsteen called, he was looking for his bandana. Were we hungry? He was meeting with Interscope Records CEO Jimmy Iovine to ink a thirty-two million dollar deal, but he could stop by a BBQ joint on the way back. He took our lunch orders. We were all vegan, but we couldn’t tell Bruce Springsteen that, so pork it was. 

Bruce came with the sandwiches wrapped in waxy paper. We wanted to show off. Before noon, we recorded thirty-seven versions of House of the Rising Sun, which our guitar player thought he had written. Our singer was learning the saxophone. We discouraged it heartily.

I played hammered dulcimer. We were a punk band. It was a transitional period. 

By 2pm, we were starving. Someone brought in a carrot cake from Safeway. I found a dirty fork next to a hotplate and washed it with powdered soap in the bathroom sink. Bruce slipped out the back door.

In the control room, there was a green chaise lounge. I laid down and stared at the posters on the ceiling. My favorite was the Whitesnake poster promoting their controversial sixth album, Slide It In. I hadn’t slid it in anyone in a long time.

Her name was Coco, like the Puffs. Coco was a dance major at a small liberal arts college. She was a very passionate woman, until a hash knife got stuck in her eye.

That night, at the studio, we took all of the drugs and drank all the whiskey. Our drummer drank a pint of kerosene and smashed a beer can against his forehead at 120 BPMs. I set fire to the control panel, and we made off with thousands in high-end microphones, vintage amps, and monitors.

Later, after the band split up, it was back to migrant farm work for me: blueberries in late summer, apples in fall, oranges in winter. I got my knuckles tattooed and lived in a yurt. I discovered Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. 

One morning, years later, back in Little Walnut, I saw Bruce Springsteen again. I followed him through a cornfield at dawn. The leaves of corn were decorated with beads of dew, my cotton pants heavy from the wet stalks rubbing against my thighs. Finally, I caught up to him. He was wearing his ‘Born to Run’ era outfit: black leather jacket, white T-shirt, and torn jeans. I tapped on his shoulder, and he turned to me, but by then I wasn’t a punk anymore, just a regular guy with a receding mohawk and nothing to prove.

Round and Round

Beef is forty-eight. Works in the record store and sings in a black metal band. Lives on Pop-Tarts. Is locally famous. Every Saturday night, a dozen hoarse, middle-aged women scream his name, fists raised in the sign of the devil horns. 

Beef has a son. The son lives in Phoenix. Caitlyn, the boy’s mother, seethes with hatred. Beef wants to talk to the son. It’s his birthday. The boy is eight. They haven’t spoken in—how long has it been? Never. They have never spoken. 

Beef’s long hair is always wet. He stands behind the counter, unknowable. An early Japanese import of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid in one hand, Samsung in the other. He dials. The boy’s mother answers.

His mouth is dry. How can he explain? 

“Is that you, Fuck-wad?” 

He hangs up.

Beef rings up customers. Record Store Day—the biggest event of the year. There are boxes to unload, exclusive ten-inch records, split singles, box sets. Beef holds a life-sized cardboard cutout of James Hetfield under his arm. The ceiling fan goes round and round. 

*

His ex, Caitlyn, was always on the move. Huntington Beach, San Francisco, Buenos Aires. By the time Beef got an address or phone number, she and the boy had already moved on. When he knew her back in the day, they painted each other’s nails black and snorted heroin. But then she joined a religious cult. There is a BBC documentary about the cult. 

“Tell me about him,” Beef says when he gets the nerve to call back. He’s in the storage room of the record store. “It’s his birthday, right? What does he like?” He still hasn’t chosen a record for his son. Something rare. Miles Davis or Sonny Rollins, the Blue Note years. Even in her wild days, Caitlyn carried a faint whiff of praise music about her. Now that she’s gone full-tilt nut-job, he can’t imagine what kind of music the child is exposed to. 

“Tell me about 80k in unpaid child support,” Caitlyn says.

“I tried to find you. You kept moving.” 

“Bullshit.” She hangs up. 

Beef puts on a record. Ambient music. Droning guitars, undulating distortion, a tone poem. He breathes. Eats a Pop-Tart. Doesn’t taste it. Back behind the register, there’s a line out the door. Customers complain. 

*

After work, exhausted, Beef goes to the Alley Cat, a poorly lit dive three doors down. Cracked vinyl bar stools. A warped pool table. Dollar bills stapled to the ceiling. He has a polaroid of his son in the pocket of his leather jacket. A woman approaches, mid-forties. She looks familiar. She climbs up on the pool table, takes a dollar from the ceiling, hands it to Beef. 

“Put on something romantic,” she says.

At the jukebox, Beef selects a Townes Van Zandt record. His eyes begin to swell: that first ambling section, the interplay between the two acoustic guitars. When Caitlyn became pregnant, he tried to be a good guy. Offered to pay for the procedure. When she refused, he told her he’d man up. Do all the things. Beef stands at the jukebox, breathes, steadies himself. 

When he returns to his barstool the woman is gone and so is his leather jacket.

“Why do they call you Beef?” the bartender asks.

“I’m from Iowa,” Beef says, looking out the door. 

Later, Beef stumbles towards home. Sees a shooting star. Lies on a picnic table in the park, looks at the Milky Way. Caitlyn never gave him a chance. He might have been a wonderful father. 

*

At home the porch light is on. 

“How was work, honey?” his girlfriend asks.

“Good,” Beef says.

“Were you a good boy today?” She wears leather. Her whip is long. She takes the last bite of an apple, leaves the core on the counter. “Do you want to play?” she asks.

“Very much so.”  

The sheets are clean. It’s the duvet cover he likes—low thread count, scratchy. She binds his hands. Brings out the strap-on. Stuffs the ball gag in his mouth. Lights a candle. But there is a hole in the bedroom ceiling. He’s just seeing it now. A crack along the crown molding, three or four inches, and then a hole, like in the center of a record. Up through the roof, it goes on and on. 

James Keith Smith’s work has appeared in Split Lip Magazine, Moon City Review, Sierra Nevada Review, Pithead Chapel, and others. He grew up in Michigan and lives in Tacoma, WA. You can read more of his work at jameskeithsmith.com.

Categories
Across The Wire Vol. 8

An Ordinary Day

  • Post author By
  • Post date

by Sarp Sozdinler

I went to the grocery store because I wanted cereal, and also because I wanted to leave my apartment for a reason that sounded more respectable than I needed to leave my apartment. I bought cereal, dish soap, frozen peas, a loaf of bread, and one lemon. I don’t know why I bought one lemon. It felt like the right thing to do at the time. The cashier asked if I wanted my receipt. I said no. Then I said yes. Then I said actually no, you know what, forget it. She looked at me for a moment and printed the receipt anyway and put it in the bag without saying anything. I drove home and carried the bags inside. The plastic handles cut into my fingers. The loaf of bread fell out onto the sidewalk, but it was still in the plastic so I decided that was fine. I put everything away except the lemon, which I left on the counter because I kept forgetting I have lemons.

Later that night I wanted to know how much the cereal had cost. I looked through the bag for the receipt but the receipt wasn’t there. I looked on the counter. I looked in the bread bag, for some reason. I checked my bank app but it only showed the total, which I already knew, because the total had been bad. I went out to the car with my phone flashlight and looked between the seats. I found two pens, a hard french fry, a guitar pick, and the title to the car in an envelope I had been meaning to deal with for maybe two years. I couldn’t find the receipt. I sat in the driver’s seat in the dark and thought about how the cashier had definitely put the receipt in the bag. I tried to remember watching her do it. I thought maybe I had thrown it away involuntarily, out of habit. I thought maybe my body made decisions my mind wasn’t included in every now and again. I went back upstairs and checked the kitchen trash. There was coffee sludge, peas I’d spilled and then swept off the counter with my hand, and the cardboard sleeve from the frozen pizza I ate for lunch. Still no receipt.

The next morning the lemon was gone. I stood in the kitchen and looked at the place where it had been. I looked around like maybe it had rolled somewhere while I was asleep. I checked the floor. I checked the fruit bowl, which strangely had one garlic in it. I checked the refrigerator, even though I knew I didn’t put the lemon in there. I started to think maybe I was mixing up days and had never bought a lemon in the first place. I remembered placing it on the conveyor belt after the dish soap because I didn’t want lemon chemicals from the lemon getting on the bread. I still don’t know if lemon chemicals are real. They seem real. I found the grocery bag in the trash and looked into the emptiness of it. I became convinced that the receipt incident and the lemon incident were somehow related.

I drove back to the grocery store. I didn’t really have a plan. I went to customer service and said I had a weird question. The woman at customer service said okay in a way that suggested she had already heard what I would say many times before. I told her I’d shopped there the night before and lost my receipt and also a lemon had gone missing from my kitchen. She asked if I wanted a duplicate receipt. I said probably, yeah. She asked if I knew the time of the transaction. I said approximately. She asked if I had the card I used. I handed it to her. She typed something in her computer for a while and then printed something out. She handed me the duplicate receipt. I looked at it. There was no lemon on it.

I said that’s strange because I remember that I’d definitely bought a lemon. She said then you probably didn’t. I said no, I definitely did. She said then it would be on the receipt. I said unless the receipt was incomplete somehow. She said receipts are usually pretty committed to their thing. I looked at the receipt again. Cereal, dish soap, peas, bread. No lemon. The total was lower than I remembered, which I didn’t like, because it suggested the receipt might be right. And that I might be wrong. I asked if anyone had found a stray lemon. She said where. I said I don’t know, maybe near the registers. She looked at me for a while, then looked past me and said, next guest please, even though I was still there and no one was behind me.

I drove home feeling like I had been slightly inconvenienced. What’s worse was when I went back in the apartment the lemon was on the counter exactly where I’d left it. Beside it was the receipt. Not the duplicate receipt from customer service. The original receipt, folded once. I unfolded it. The lemon was on there. One lemon. 0.89. I looked at the counter, the lemon, the receipt, my own hand holding the receipt. I thought about calling someone (Mom, a therapist, the grocery store representative), though I didn’t know what I would say. I thought about taking a picture, but I couldn’t decide if a picture of the lemon or a picture of the receipt would make more sense. They both could look pretty normal in a picture. I picked the lemon up. It felt cold in my hand. Not refrigerator cold. More like outside at night cold. I put it back down on the counter. 

I ate a bowl of cereal. I kept looking at the lemon while I ate. The cereal tasted a little like dish soap. When I finished, I went to pick up the receipt. I folded it into a ball in my palm and uncrumpled it to put it in my wallet. I put the lemon in the freezer. It just seemed safer somehow.

Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Wigleaf, HAD, Hobart, X-R-A-Y, Maudlin House, and Pithead Chapel, among other journals. He edits the literary journal The Bulb Region.

Categories
Across The Wire Vol. 8

The Other Garden

  • Post author By
  • Post date

by Craig Rodgers

Billy swings the hammer. A big crusher of a thing. Feet of wood stem with a fat hunk of iron wedged on the end. 

Remodeling, he calls it. It’s cheaper this way, he says. Opening up the room between kitchen and den. Some jargon name for this he saw on a show. Shared space. Dual use. Something. He swings the hammer again. 

Things are moved out of the way. Household staples dragged. An end table, framed photos. Buckets of English ivy that once hung are set in a corner. Things waiting for a new equilibrium. 

Plaster falls with each boom. He hits the same spot over and over. A hole appears and spreads. The structure underneath. He goes on swinging, pounding. Cursing and grunting and on.

There is a crack, a noise more fragile now. A thing shuttering all through. Billy lets down the sledge, where it wobbles and settles and sits. He leans down to look in the hole. 

There is a darkness. He leans more still and a hint of light shows. But the smell. He presses close.

“Hon?”

Soft footfalls come. Amber. She says hey, she says what. He talks.

“Can you smell this?”

“Bill, hon, what?”

“Just come look.”

“Are you doing something gross?”

“I’m not joking. There’s a smell.”

She steps over the mess and leans down and breathes. She looks at him and breathes again. 

“What the hell?”

“That’s weird, right?”

“Is it poison? I read poisons smell sweet.”

“I don’t think it’s poison. I think it smells like grass.”

Her eyes fall closed as she breathes. One hand picks at loose plaster.

“That’s so weird,” she says.

_____

It’s like a chainsaw. Some kind of jagged machine. He cuts at ragged edges and wall falls away and beyond this another layer waits. He steps back and then around to the side of the existing partition and he frowns. The fractured barrier shows an inner depth. He knocks away loose parts. He tries to enter the space. Crawling.

The first thing he feels is a heat. This little cubby. He wipes his face with a hand and he scoots. An inner wall shows cracks from his knocking. He turns and braces and he gives one hard kick. Plaster goes flying and then light comes. 

“Oh. Shit.”

_____

The hole doesn’t show onto the den. The space beyond the shattered wall is open grassland. A soft breeze shuffles limbs. Animal noise hums. Bugs, other things. Wafting green leans under foreign sun. Billy shifts and turns and puts his face near the hole. 

The air is jungle hot. The land ahead shows swaying fields of some alien grain. Maybe it has a name known but Billy doesn’t know. He looks around with a face stupid and shaken. He touches wood to make sure. The house is still here, he is still in the house. In the house’s middle, looking onto a grassland beyond. A little at a time he backs away.

_____

He pretends it’s fine for a day and another day. He doesn’t quite look that way going by. When she asks he says I’m going to get to it, I’m going to get back to it. The wood needs a different kind of support is all. I’m gonna get to it, I promise.

On the third day he finds her looking. He can’t find her and then he does. Sitting down in the hole. Staring.

“Billy? What is this?”

He crawls in behind. The smell is the first thing he notices. The change. Old mud now. Like a slap. He leans and he looks and the land has become something else. A pall has replaced the waving grasses, the green and reaching life now fallen over and gray. Here and there a patch of some familiar clover shows, and in the distance some bizarre pink thing rises in sprouts. The ground below is a wet black thing.

“I don’t understand.”

He pulls her back from the hole.

“It’s nothing.”

She turns wide eyes his way. Horror.

“Nothing?”

“Come on out of here. I just need to patch up the wall.”

“You’re going to patch it up?”

“That’s all I need to do.”

“Bill?”

“It’s fine.”

“Bill, what is this?”

He touches her arm until she turns and then he leads her back into the house proper.

“It’s just a hole in the wall. That’s all it is.”

_____

He wakes with red eyes. Touching, pressing. He clears his throat in hard chugs. Early morning light shows through blinds. He touches her hip and she moans and rolls away.

He pads to the bathroom and pisses and coughs and he spits into the toilet waiting. Snot and blood there. He stares. He hears her moaning again. Words. Babe. Babe?

Machine noise begins somewhere. A buzzing. Leaf blower, chainsaw, something. Babe? He’s moving through rooms in a haze. Is this a fever? Illness? He turns a corner and moves down a hall and he passes by the hole in the wall and tries not to look but he does look and a growth black and wet creeps in all directions from that cave. 

Onward. The front door waits ahead. That machine noise still. And back the way he came, Babe? Stumbling steps. His breath labored, squeezed. 

He turns the knob and pushes out and he braces for a breath fresh and deep he expects but it doesn’t come, and now he is gagging, and he is bending.

Landscapers move along the street in pairs. Industrial grade masks obscure the faces they turn to look. They move one with a weed eater and another with a pumped spray, marching up one side of the street and down the other, together attacking with a focused vigor the many patches of some pink and rising thing showing in sprouts all along the way for blocks ahead.

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