Category: Issue 5 Non-Fiction

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Issue 5 Issue 5 Non-Fiction

BATTLEGROUNDS

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By Jessica Aurell

It’s July.

In keeping with the old custom, my birth is one of my very first deaths. Like my mom, like her mom, umbilical cord wrapped taut around my neck like every first born baby girl in our lineage. Dad breaks the news to a waiting room full of strangers. How my entire little body was gray-blue as the scales of a bruise. Right hand in a fist, clenching at my destiny. It’s a moment of worldwide paralysis. 

The doctor slinks on his gloves 

Lifts a mask to his guard 

Throws me in the ring and beats me up good, 

so surgically nonchalant 

until I let out the chicken cry of a loser, 

who gets to keep the prize. 

Papa bragadocious, my Messenger on the Hill, paid the local movie theater fifty bucks to have lit up that night on the marquee: 

“WELCOME TO THE WORLD: 

JESSICA DAWN AURELL” 

But the seventeen year old in charge of swapping out the lettering, left out the L in WORLD. So there I was–welcomed to the WORD, instead. 

I am made of such obscure mistakes as these 

A clash of mythology and predestination 

Of faith and no reason. 

It is July. 

In toddlerdome, I demand darkness. I often trespass the coat closet, stashed with a mesh bag full of the beach toys we only ever use on New Year’s in Half Moon Bay. My summer-swollen head gets stuck in a bucket I frequent. Sight, sound, smell, taste all go blank as a black hole. Like the dungeon of a womb. My mom is a first and only time mom and takes me to the hospital at the slightest hiccup. There we discover that the pressure is so tight around my cranium, the doctors cannot just pull the bucket off, but must saw the bucket off with what appears to me to be a turbo speed pizza slicer. I only begin to cry once my skull is free. 

This is around the same time that I start blacking out 

the whites of my baby doll’s eyes with sharpie, wanting to shield them from the knife of the light which carved me.

My dad has me baptized and writes a sermon on the book of John, Chapter Nine, where Jesus spits in some mud and rubs it in a blind man’s eyes and then he can see. “His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ 

I learn early on the importance of the guardian angel, waiting to be beheld ten times a day, who doesn’t fear breakfast like I do, or love the sound of breaking glass like I do. I am relying on something I cannot see because I love when I cannot see. I never feel more safe than I do when I’m stuck in that bucket. 

It is July. 

In the summertime, before my freshman year of high school. There’s a group of popular junior girls who take interest in my “potential”, because I’m long-legged and eastern european-esque, and they advise me to purchase a bra. 

I follow their instructions, do a hack job of shaving my legs, spritz on some Pure Seduction body mist and stuff my Old Navy training bra with wads of toilet paper. They text me and say “Meet at the baseball fields” across from Flynn Wethers house. Flynn Wethers looks like a pencil but is the most popular boy at the high school. Flynn Wethers drives a vintage green convertible and I fantasize about road head in the wind. I build a body beneath my sheets out of dirty laundry and beanie babies and sneak out through my window like they do in the movies. 

When I arrive there on the dirt, there are the popular girls and there are the popular boys and it feels as if I’m the last one chosen for a team sport. I am filled with eyes, then quickly taught about a beer bong, getting deep throated by alcohol before being whisked away on the shoulders of some guy who plays a sport. With the guy who plays a sport I have my first peck, my first tongue, and my first endoscopy. We are in the backseat of his father’s SUV. There is no wind but there are screens behind every head rest and I catch the reflection of myself in the blank. He feels up my newly fabricated breasts and I forget for a moment they aren’t real. I move his hands to my neck like I remember seeing a girl do on pornhub. 

My throat is a football in his fist and I blackout and the next thing I know is I’m hiding in a pantry from the cops with my shirt on inside out. 

I am informed of my sins the next morning, when I read on my formspring submissions that I am the blowjob queen of San Francisco. That I am a thirteen year old skank who buys her lunch with dirty money. That I suck dick like a girl does on pornhub. 

I call a friend who wasn’t cool enough to stuff her bra and go to a junior party and she tells me she’s already heard all about my escapades. That her mom advised her to pray for me. That I should probably drop out of school and consider the monastery. 

If I was a nun I would black out the whites of my habit as I did of my baby dolls eyes. 

Of the purity of a night 

Of the insecurity of “no”. 

Of making it out alive with a cherry in the harvest. 

It is July

In another five years. I’ve placed my hands in a black velvet box and taken the box to a psychic who meticulously reads the palms. 

She says to me, “You will save many souls.” 

And I say to her, “You don’t say.” And proceed to let this go to my head. 

I become the Vigilante, with nipples fleshed against my blouse like baby bullets. But I’ve never shot a gun. 

This proves to be a problem, when on some South Central street corner I get rammed by a big bully on a bicycle; who grabs me by the nape of the neck, puts a box cutter to my abdomen and says, “Hey I’ll kill you! I’ll really fucking kill you!” 

In the shallows of my girl-jean pockets there is pepper spray disguised as lipstick. I feel it cylindrical between the crease of my thigh and my crotch. I feel the skin puckered beneath the pressure of the blade. An incorrect intuition takes over, blurting out in my own voice, “Well, I have pepper spray”, scolding like a teacher as I simultaneously snatch the weapon from my holster, as the bully simultaneously snatches the weapon from my hand and skips it across the street like a riverside child. 

We lock eyes in the flashbang, before I projectile vomit directly on his face. I was vegan as an eating disorder at the time, so missiles of raw, barely digested carrot, cabbage, and corn pummel his head as his stare of intimidation morphs to sheepish terror. In shock and disgust, he drops his own bike before me and runs off scattering flecks of barf like a windshield wiper, without securing a single spoil of mine. 

I love the mistakes of my body, which without fail serve the purpose of some divine plan. When I get home and undress to wash myself off, I discover in the other pocket a miniature and hand-blown glass turtle. A parting gift from mom as I flew the nest, a token of resilience and protection. 

Of perfect timing 

Of who the hell do you think you are 

alone in LA without a shield or an army 

Of getting lucky this time, one more time. 

It is July 

In many more years. And I am folding my armor at the laundromat. I try to listen to a podcast and be educated, but I’m paying more attention to the doodles on the sky blue walls that outline Coldplay lyrics in clouds. Look at the stars, look how they shine for you. When I am tapped on the shoulder by a squat man with braids and stubble and stench and asked about my sneakered feet, I feel as if I am in a bubble, abruptly burst. This man, at the laundromat mind you, tells me, “I want to take care of you, I want to pay your bills, I want to see your toes” 

So of course I give him my phone number. Mostly because he won’t move it along. With my granny cart loaded with my wares he’s pursuing me out the door. He says he gets paid on Fridays, nipping at my ankles like a puppy. I say okay. Tiny Tim tells me he’s a security guard at the TD Bank on Fulton. I say okay. He tells me he wants to take me shopping, wants to buy me a summer wardrobe, wants to pay for me to get my nails done. I say okay, okay, okay. He tells me that he’s honest, that he’s noble, that he loves me. That’s when I notice the corpse of a bird.

It is a bad sign. 

Of a perfect specimen 

Of the frog pinned down for the science class dissection 

Of a slimy prince who cannot uphold his end of the bargain. 

It is still July 

The same July and I watch the bird decompose a little more every day. Before I leave my apartment, I look out the window to check for the man from the laundromat. Somedays he is standing across the street, waiting for my first steps out the door, to saunter over and say, “But baby, I’ll give you whatever you want, just give me a pair of your dirty underwear.” 

One time he does zelle me thirty dollars and another time fifty dollars, but I mean honestly, do you think a girl like me’s soiled g-string is worth a measly eighty bucks? The blow job queen of San Francisco? 

So I’m on my way to my job because a man thinks I’m cheaper than a rental car and I pass the dumb dead bird who I’m getting sick of. I cross the street at the Dunkin Donuts and again at the funeral home where my morbid fascination always keeps an eye out for unloading hearses. And there between the bones of the crosswalk is a detached femur of a dog. Or I can only guess it belongs to a dog. It’s surely bigger than the leg of a cat, but the paw is smushed in such a way that makes it appear almost as a goat’s hoof. 

With the curiosity of a car crash, I slow my gait to inspect. It is the cleanest cut I ever saw, a perfect ball from a perfect socket. The sun refracts twinkles off dry brown blood. We’re near the hospital. I pray the dog died swiftly, sacrificed to the fender of an ambulance charging on to save a life. But this is a one way street, with the hospital at the other end. You can’t possibly save a life rushing away from. 

For the next month I pass the limb where it’s become my monument, patches of dirty white fur sewed into pavement. I am the pall bearer, the funeral procession, the mourner. I will save many souls. Sometimes I lay on the ground next to it at night, stitch my spine into the ground until each vertebrae is flattened and forgets itself. The longer I spend with the leg the more lockstep I am with paranoia. There is no other way around it. If I want to go anywhere I must pass death.

Jessica Aurell is a Brooklyn based writer, triple cancer, and jaded waitress. She is rewriting the Bible. She is waging war. She is counting her blessings. You can read more of her ramblings at trophyseance.substack.com

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Issue 5 Issue 5 Non-Fiction

INTEREST

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By E.N. Couturier

At the online newspaper where I work, I am instructed to get better at making people interested in me. (Well, not “me,” just my ideas, what I say, what I think, what I mean, what I notice, what I believe, who I am.) 

Historically my writing and my life have only interested specific people with the same questions I have. I am in the habit of thinking this is an advantage, that it’s better to have a real connection with a few than something fleeting with many. Sometimes I wonder if I am a coward to not sell myself harder. 

I find my stories interesting, the people in them surprise me with their thoughtful depth, but the public won’t click unless the headline promises something shocking and impossible. They seem to want it to hurt. 

I say to my editor, I’m almost done writing this lede but I want it to suggest more narrative. We don’t need narrative, she says. We need intrigue.

She has worked here for 50 years but admits nobody knows what that really means. Maybe one of us will crack the code today. But then we’d develop into some new problem; such is progress. If we aren’t struggling towards something, we aren’t living for anything. 

Our office takes up the first floor of a big brown building in the center of the city. Seagulls hit the windows like cannonballs. Pigeons shit and die on the wide front steps. This morning I almost slipped on the stucco, which someone had flooded with bleach to neutralize the stains. Another tiny egg had already fallen from a nest in the overhang and shattered into the sanitation. The bird was fully formed but had not yet fought its way out of its shell.

In our air-conditioned open newsroom with tinted windows, I sit at a long, shared desk and deconstruct what would interest me about off-season maintenance activities on a lowbush blueberry farm. I write about how the land is lit on fire to make the plants produce more fruit; four hundred people read it. This number is far too low. We are losing money. I am costing money. I don’t earn it. Steve the sports guy brought in off-brand Twinkies called Hoo-Dees, and all of us are smiling. Steve cares about our lives. Last week was butterscotch candies. You’ve got the touch, the CEO said to me before they started tracking my numbers. You’ve got your finger on the pulse. 

Sometimes when I get anxious about my failure to restart humanity’s heart, I think reflexively about biting into somebody’s neck like an apple where it meets their shoulder. I’m just convinced I would find some relief in an undeniably real intersection with the world of other people. I’ve had it before, but whenever it goes, I think I’ll never know it again. 

This image of sinking my teeth in doesn’t help me relax, but I invite it without wanting to, gnashing my jaws like plastic wind-ups alone in my car at the thought of how my work could have been better, could have meant more to more people if I only knew what interest was, how to draw it and how to bear it.

One of the only poems that ever did anything to me ends on the lines: For here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life. Whatever I do, I want it to change something, make someone understand that they are changeable. 

My poet friend had a God complex in middle school. He describes lying in bed believing he was the Messiah, that he had to be careful what he dreamed at night because it would all come true. We joke that maybe it takes this kind of narcissism (his word) to become a writer. But I don’t disbelieve him, really, 11-year-old Sammy in the puka shell necklace. Why would God give you the chance to act if He couldn’t use your movements?

For this reason, I wonder if I should find it selfish that I am so comfortable receding into the background. Other women with jobs like mine make their companies money by filming themselves trying things for the first time, playing up a wide-eyed stupidity about reality that I am unwilling to replicate. Maybe they help more people than I ever will. I don’t want anyone to look at me, even though I need them to. 

Before this, I reported on local government for a small paper focused on print where nobody talked about interest. It was already on the page, so everyone saw; they didn’t have to choose it. People said we were a relic of a workplace, the kind of world that didn’t exist anywhere else. Somehow that didn’t make things any easier.

I broke my own heart in spite of myself there over a video game player, the first person I could have had a future with. We were both old-fashioned and slow and new together, set aside from whatever it is that most other people seem to share. He studied sewer lines carefully at work and told me he meant what he said and took long walks around town after midnight in a leather jacket he’d worn for 10 winters. Lying in bed, I thought about him passing by my apartment, knowing he could be close to me at any moment without my realizing. 

But we didn’t want any of the same things; after work he looked past the world, liked to watch television and go to the movies. Forgetting helped him stay nice, he said, kept reality from warping him. Underneath his affection ran a current of bitterness for everything before. I wanted to fix it but also feared it would surface once who I really was became undeniable, moved beyond the walls of the office where I came to see him after hours. This is sparing us both, I said when we called things off, without feeling any better. Later, I kept remembering how his hair touched his shirt collar.

To forget, I started seeing a guy who worked on the printing floor baling paper with a foot-pedal machine that whipped plastic cord around the stacks and melted the ends together on top of his dry pink fingers. He smelled sharp like ink all the time, even in his weekend clothes. Privately I referred to him as Friggen’ William, because he kept designing notes in Photoshop to tape on my car and texting me seven times in a row. I let him into my life because he was so relentless about wanting it. 

It was easy to slip away from this attention because it was just my face, really, that he thought all the other things were attached to. He would pause to ask accusingly, You aren’t catching feelings, are you? like they were terminal, and I’d say no, William, I’m not. When I asked him why he wouldn’t buy curtains for his bedroom, he said no one ever looked in. 

Sometimes now, when I’m not happy with an article, I’m almost relieved nobody is reading it. The television monitor mounted to the wall above my desk displays our top stories today: A man crashed a plane and broke both big toes, a swimming pool is closed for high levels of human fecal bacteria, the university hockey team’s prospects are grim, and an aquarium downstate is now home to a rare albino lobster. 

I really hoped the last story I wrote would be up there. In it, I interview a man who has spent decades taking photos of wishing wells. Most of these wells drew water a century ago. Later, homeowners capped the tops to keep their children from falling in and built decorative fences around them, attached little blue buckets to the handles. He knew of an old book I mentioned and told me it was a wonderful resource for people who are interested in things other than Instagram and artificial intelligence. 

Like me, perhaps, he wants to grab everyone in the world by the hair and make life matter to them, to fight through reality. The book moved backwards from buildings and went on to say that trees are magical creatures, fantastically intelligent beings millions of years old who can figure out survival better than any of us ever will. Sometimes, when apple trees fall down in old age, their branches stab the ground and grow up into new plants rolling across the landscape.

People like to say that you can only help somebody who really wants to be helped, reach somebody who is already searching. Plenty aren’t. Most aren’t, supposedly. I still find that hard to believe. Why does one sheep run from you?

I drive home by myself, perfectly untouched. No single men work at the online newspaper. Sometimes I don’t know if anyone sees me, so I stop at a gas station for a slice of slick pizza just to remember what it feels like. All week, I observe people carefully, photograph their faces and their hands, take pages of notes, listen to their recorded voices again so I can replicate them for the public and love them in this way. Still, we don’t get close to each other. 

Even the most sensational headlines sometimes don’t bring in more than a few hundred clicks. Intrigue alone isn’t enough; the audience waits for a factor nobody can isolate. 

Once in a rare while I deliver it to them without realizing I have until thousands of people are sending the story to each other, until all of them are talking and understanding what they want to. Sometimes I think nothing we do could ever be explained, any impetus captured, beyond the shape of the action. You don’t have to talk to your hands to make them move; they just do it. I’m depending on you to see what I tell you is there. 

E.N. Couturier is the author of Organic Matter (Autofocus Books, 2025). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Offrange, The New Territory, jmww and elsewhere and has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. Find her online @witnessborne.

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Issue 5 Issue 5 Non-Fiction

STAIRCASE & DAD, SMOKING IN 1995

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By Terrance Wedin

STAIRCASE

Someone in the shop said it was the radio. The song on the radio. That he was distracted by a Pink Floyd song playing on 105.3 The Bear. Wish you were here. 

He cut through pine first, then bone. Treads for a staircase that didn’t go anywhere but backstage. The teeth were moving so fast the blood dried almost immediately.

Someone in the shop tied his finger with twine. Someone else hit the button that turned off the table saw.

All Dad said was, “Someone go find my car keys.”

He played pool that night. Wrapped finger tapping the felt between shots. 

Maybe this is where we got it from. Brothers able to endure. Sons told not to look away. Let it wash over you until you no longer feel it.

Was it hanging off? Was it dismembered?

Dad’s pool shark buddies asked these questions. They wanted to know how he planned to play league with a Frankenstein finger. They wanted to know how to line up a shot with a finger with no nerves.

Once, Dad told me a story about his father covering their trailer in kerosene and lighting it on fire. They spent a few weeks of hurricane season in wet clothes because the windows of the car they slept in leaked. His father’s knee ballooned to the size of a softball. Infection from his wet jeans. He pulled his leg behind him, making it a part of his grift as he pointed at Dad back in the car and pocketed cash in a parking lot.

Karl didn’t believe it could all be true.

I reminded him of the staircase Dad finished. Reminded him of a Beckett play we saw once. Reminded him of a radio station that still exists.

DAD, SMOKING IN 1995

Sometimes after dark, Dad didn’t smoke on the balcony. Sometimes he’d walk down the flight of stairs, through the laundry room where the dryers and electrical meters hummed, and stand in the field outside our building. Six other buildings in Foxridge looked back at him. 

From my top bunk, I pushed the blinds on our bedroom window down and watched the ember of his cigarette move. Smoke looped from his hip to his face, back and forth. Most nights I counted the seconds he took between each drag. I looked past him, adjusted my face against the cold window so I could line my eyes up with his, to see whatever he was fixed on out there. 

All the buildings looked the same as ours. Same balconies. Same shade of brown paint. Same parking lot. Same yellow lights behind curtains in other people’s windows where I sometimes caught shadows watching him like I was. He’d stretch his arms up, adjust the fanny pack the doctor made him wear because of his bad back. Sometimes he would take a few steps in his white Reeboks, like he was going to sprint toward one of the other buildings, toward anywhere else. But he would stop, like someone had grabbed him by the arm, retrace his steps carefully back to his spot. 

Dad smoked everywhere. He smoked on the couch. At the dinner table. In the car. On the balcony. All those places made sense to me. He was doing something while he smoked. Outside, he was just standing and looking and smoking. The streetlight near the dumpster cast a perfect square of light across his shoulder, some nights through spring showers, some nights splitting the mosquitos clouding around him, just above where he kept the green pack of Benson Hedges rolled into his shirt sleeve. He blew smoke straight up or tilted his head to the side, sending it away from his face. Sometimes he coughed into his fist. Sometimes he spit mucus into the grass.

There was one time Mom walked out there after him, her house slippers leaving dragging marks in the snow. His footprints made circles around him. I watched her talking to him in her winter coat, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying. She stood five feet away, talking at his back, jabbing her finger at the space between his shoulders. He never looked back at her. Never said a word. Just kept smoking as the snow fell between them. 

Mom bent down and packed a snowball in her bare hands and tossed it at his back. Just kept smoking until she walked away.

Some nights I’d close my eyes while he was out there. I’d tell myself when I opened them, he’d be gone. But then I’d listen for him. I’d count the seconds between each sound bringing him back inside. His footsteps up the stairs, the clang of the metal front door, the television volume coming back to life, his lighter sparking up one more cigarette.

Terrance Wedin lives in Austin, Texas. His work has appeared in Esquire, Fourth Genre, Ninth Letter, Washington Square Review, and other literary journals. His first novel, ANCHOR, will be published by Haskell Industries in 2026.

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Issue 5 Issue 5 Non-Fiction

BAD LUCK LULLABY

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By Cody Cook; Art by Will Schaff

It was 2005, and What Comes After the Blues had just been released. Magnolia Electric Co was announced on the lineup of the Intonation Festival in Chicago. I had a couple of friends who wanted to go, and I agreed. I didn’t have a car, so I took a Greyhound bus from St. Louis. It took twice as long to get there, stopping in every town on the way. I passed the time by listening to that album on my mp3 player. Nobody else on that bus was going to the festival; it was full of the kind of working-class people in the songs I was listening to. I must have looked out of place with my tattoos and rock band shirt. 

I had been a big fan of frontman Jason Molina and was excited to have a chance to see him play live finally. He felt mythic to me. Some people had The Beatles or some other important favorite artist, I had Songs: Ohia. The festival was painfully hot, almost unbearable. My friends and I sought shelter from the heat in some shade, and Jason strolled past us in black jeans and a long-sleeved black metal band t-shirt, effortlessly cool, like he wore what he wanted, and the weather had it wrong. I worked my way up to the front during their set. They played most of the new record but slipped in some old favorites and a Warren Zevon cover. I hadn’t liked the new album as much, but hearing the songs live gave me a new appreciation for them. I reflected on the long bus ride home, listening to the album with new context. I had found a new love for those songs, and as I stared out the window, I started jotting down some notes. Those notes turned into a review of the album and ended up being my first piece of published writing.

Around that time, I started a job working in a music venue. Minimum wage plus unlimited draft beer and rail liquor. I didn’t care about the money, I was in love with live music and determined to surround myself with it. Drinking on the job wasn’t just tolerated, it was encouraged, it was good customer service. I got caught up in the social side of it, going out with coworkers every night, having fun. It became a nightly ritual. I had to play the role of being social and charming, and alcohol made it easier. The character I was playing led to making a lot of friends who drank, and led to finding love.

I got promotion after promotion at the venue. I was charming and funny, and people enjoyed being around me, but it was largely a drunken role. When I was training to become a manager I was overwhelmed with how much math and paperwork I’d have to do. I told the guy training me that I didn’t think I’d be able to do it and drink as much as I had been. He laughed and said, “Don’t worry, you’ll figure it out.” I got good at working drunk. Sometimes there would be mistakes in the paperwork and I’d brush it off, apologizing for “rushing.” It seemed like it would catch up to me one day and it never really did. One night, I had to take a break from doing my closing duties to go throw up, but I sat right back down and finished up like it was the most natural thing to do. For a while, it worked. 

I married a woman who had found this version of me to be very charming and attractive. She offered me her number across the bar and before you knew it, we were inseparable. In those early days she drank just as much as I did. Everyone in our social circle did.

Over time, it became a necessary social crutch. I hated that I couldn’t be this person without drinking. If I tried to socialize without it, I would be uncomfortable and withdrawn. It became less and less about drinking to be comfortable in public and more about just wanting to be drunk. I started hiding it from my wife. For her it was still a social thing. I kept empty Old Crow bottles stashed in cabinets and buried them deep in the trash when she wasn’t home. Figuring out how to get drunk was my daily challenge, and I couldn’t stock enough alcohol in the house to keep up with my thirst. I’d walk to the local drug store and go through about ¾ of a handle a day. On nights that we would go out, my wife would keep pace with me, but at home she didn’t drink. She never confronted me with it either. I assumed she knew more than she said. We went camping and I waited for her to go to sleep, saying that I just wanted to sit by the fire for a bit. I pulled out the bottle and the next thing I remember is waking up on the ground next to the fire, with scrapes on my face. I got into the tent, and she woke up, took one look at me and said, “Oh good, you’re alive” with disgust. She’d known what I’d been doing, there was a coldness setting in.

Months later, my brother and I went home to Ohio for a memorial service for our uncle. He’d struggled with alcoholism, and I suspected it had a role in his death. We were staying in a hotel and, again, I had snuck a bottle in my bag. After he was asleep I drank the entire thing, knowing I’d need it to be able to go to sleep. I woke up in the bathroom on the toilet in total darkness, with no idea where I was or how to get out. I searched for the door or a light switch but was so drunk I could barely stand at all. My brother woke up to my struggle and came and rescued me. He made one passing joke about it the next day, and we never spoke of it again, my uncle’s fate hanging over us. 

I was no longer the charming drunk I had once been. I had to get drunk every single day, and nobody could know how drunk I needed to be. I had to be so drunk I could barely walk. Once I vomited in our bed, I started sleeping in the guest room. I claimed that my wife and I had different sleep schedules and it was easier that way, but I’m sure she was glad to have me out of her bed. I knew it was wrong and I hated myself for it but didn’t want to change anything.

 I studied Molina through all of it. When stories started coming out about his health issues from drinking, I felt an eerie kinship. I understood how he felt, why he couldn’t quit doing something he knew was killing him. He had so many people who loved him, so much success, and yet he still wrestled this demon. We both had a public persona that alcohol was the fuel to maintain, and a private persona that was using it to drown ourselves. I imagined that, like me, the fact that it was killing him was the point. 

Hearing about Jason’s passing stirred up a lot of revelations for me. It should have been the wake-up call that I needed to beat this thing. This was not a game. This was not romantic. Jason was not some tortured mirror image of myself, he was just a man. A man who had just lost his life by doing the same thing I was doing every night. I’d be right behind him. My life was the only thing I had that was worth having, and I could not share the same fate as Jason and my uncle. I had no clue what demons he might have been wrestling with, only that he no longer got to fight them. I still had time.

But I didn’t fight, I kept drinking. I was terrified. I didn’t know who or what I would be without alcohol. I considered it a necessary elixir to bring out my true self.  The haze underneath the drunkenness wasn’t a complete person, it was a blank slate that I did not want to face.

 I thought of Jason often. I’d sit alone in my living room while my wife slept, drinking Old Crow shots chased with cheap beer until I couldn’t feel anything. Once I was good and trashed, I would crawl into bed and put on my noise-cancelling headphones and blast his music. “Old Black Hen” always got me. Lawrence Peters belting out Jason’s words would pierce through the fog and manage to make me feel something. The lyrics referenced the “bad luck lullaby” as a recurring force that can’t be overcome by the narrator, and it came to symbolize my need to be totally and completely drunk by the end of every night. I felt powerless. I’d play the song repeatedly and just sob at my inability to break this nightly ritual. I don’t tell people these parts of the story often, but in those moments, I found myself resolved to the fact that this would be my end, content with it. This person sleeping next to me deserved better, and I knew that I’d be alone if I kept going. Death was less intimidating than being alone. I felt death was what I deserved.

Jason had been gone for two and a half years before something got through. I found myself in the hospital with pancreatitis.  A doctor told me that my liver was failing and if I continued the way I had been, I’d be dead in about a year, maybe less. Lying there, I realized I’d been waiting for someone to care enough to say something. I did not want to die. I was miserable and depressed, but I was still alive. I could still pursue happiness, I could become a person, a partner, worth saving, but the only person who could save me was myself.

I like to say quitting was easy once I finally made the decision. That’s mostly true, but committing to that decision was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. In those first months, I found myself listening to Jason’s music constantly. William Schaff, an artist who’d collaborated with him, had made a drawing he’d meant to help navigate Jason’s path to recovery, a literal map with song references and affirmations that sadly did not make it to Jason before his passing. Schaff had released it as a print in hopes that it could help someone else who was lost. I read the story of the map and felt that I was the perfect audience, someone who could still be helped. I hung it in front of my desk and would study it, recognizing scattered lyrics and motivational phrases throughout. Even though it had been drawn for someone else, it still led to the goal I sought. Like a whisper that the road was still there for me, even if I had to crawl. I made it my lock screen so that it could be a constant reminder that there was still time. It was my north star. There was still a kinship with Jason, but now, instead of understanding his pain, I was trying to honor him by not squandering my opportunity.

Courtesy of Will Schaff and Fort Foreclosure

I remembered a young man sitting on a Greyhound, looking out the window, listening to Jason Molina sing, “Ever since I turned my life around, it still happens from time to time, don’t know what pain was yours, or what pain was mine.” I thought about how I might have interpreted those words on that bus, having no idea how prophetic they would be. Now the lyrics made me think of my uncle, my failing marriage. That blank canvas of a person was no longer something to fear but an opportunity to finally live. First, I tried to be what my wife needed me to be, but I realized that was just as wrong as letting alcohol decide that for me, and we went our separate ways. It couldn’t be for her, or Jason, or my family, I had to learn to identify my own pain, and that was the real map. 

This year marks ten years of not a drop. That William Schaff print still hangs at my desk, and not a day goes by that I don’t look at it and feel grateful that I chose to stay alive. I still work in a music venue, I run the place now. Sometimes, I even put on my noise-cancelling headphones and listen to “Old Black Hen,” with a smile, grateful that it can still make me feel something.

Cody Cook has spent the last twenty years working in a music venue in St. Louis, where live performance continues to shape his writing. He is currently at work on his first poetry chapbook. You can find his work in Blood + Honey Lit, and say hello on social media @codycookstl

William Schaff has been a working artist for over two decades. Known primarily for his mastery at album artwork, (Okkervil River, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Songs: Ohia, etc.) Schaff is also the founder of Warren Rhode Island’s “Fort Foreclosure”. The building, lovingly named without the least bit of irony, serves as Schaff’s home and studio as well as  home and meeting place for  other artists (most notably former resident musicians Morgan Eve Swain, and the Late David Lamb, both of Brown Bird).  William also performed for a decade with the What Cheer? Brigade, as one of 20 musicians in a brass band that travelled the U.S. and Europe. An experience that shaped so much of his life. In 2015, recognizing the importance of art in this world, he expanded his community to the West Coast, where he started “The Outpost”, in Oakland, California. There––   financial earnings be damned!–– William filled his days creating works of art for private commissions, bands, exhibitions  and his own examinations of human interaction. He has since returned to Rhode Island and can be found, daily, doing the same at the Fort. He has a Patreon page if you’d like gifts in the mail and to help keep the lights on.

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Issue 5 Issue 5 Non-Fiction

WOO WOO

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By Mike Nagel

My sister-in-law Molly grew up as a pastor’s daughter but at some point in her mid-thirties she became more of a witch. I thought that being a witch meant you invited the devil into your heart and learned how to cast fertility spells, but it turns out it mostly means you just get really into backyard gardening and start saying things like, “Happy winter solstice!” instead of “Merry Christmas!”

Early on, I let her do a few tarot readings on me, as practice. I’d never had a tarot reading done before, and I figured it was going to be complicated. So I was surprised when she just fanned the cards out like a magician and asked me to pick one.

“Whichever one feels like it wants to be picked,” she said.

Molly was still pretty new to all this witchy stuff back then — “woo woo shit,” she called it — and wasn’t always familiar with what some of the more obscure cards meant.

“Six of wands…” she’d say, tapping her upper lip. “Hmmmmmmm.”

“Sounds bad?” I’d say, trying to be helpful.

“It does sound kind of bad, doesn’t it?”

“Like maybe I should be extra careful or something?”

“You know what?” she’d say. “It wouldn’t hurt to proceed with caution.”

Around the time Molly became a witch, my friend Amy got really into something she called “Water Theory.” She’d watched a documentary about it on YouTube. “They put all these water molecules under a microscope,” she explained to me over lunch one day without me having asked any follow-up questions. “Then they said some very nice things to half the water molecules and some very mean things to the other half.”

I nodded and stirred my soup, which was a creamy tomato with a glop of sour cream slung into the middle.

“And the water molecules they were nice to, they turned into these crystal-looking structures that looked like I don’t know what. Cathedrals or something. And the water molecules they were mean to…they just turned into these cancer-looking blobs.”

“Yikes,” I said. 

“And the human body is what? 90% water, right?” she said.

I blinked a few times.

“Right?!” she said.

More recently, my other sister-in-law, Marsha, became a devout believer in natural fabrics. She read an article about it online. It said that all our synthetic clothing is killing us. All those fake chemicals leeching into our skin. It’s causing all kinds of problems. Cancer. Heart disease. You name it. Now Marsha is on what basically amounts to a fashion diet. A wardrobe cleanse.

“I’m doing natural fabrics only,” she explained at a recent family get-together. “Wools. Linens. Silk if I want to get fancy. Hemp.”

“And that…does something?” I said.

She shrugged.

“Apparently.”

I like to think of myself as an open-minded person. Just not when it comes to things that will require me to change the way I live or shop or that otherwise strike me as being inconvenient. When it comes to those things, I can be pretty closed off, actually.

Which is why I was surprised to find myself spending a recent Sunday afternoon attending the type of group meditation session that involves yoga mats, essential oils, and a playlist featuring more than one contribution by Imogen Heap. I wondered if I was having some sort of crisis. It would make sense. For the past 18 months, my wife, J, and I had been living with my in-laws, helping out after her dad’s stroke. He was seventy-four years old and could no longer walk, talk, shower, or go to the bathroom without our help. After such a harsh reality check, it was only reasonable that I would go looking for consolation in other realms. If there was ever a time to be open to this woo woo shit, it was now.

“Sure,” I’d said when my sister-in-law Molly texted me the invitation. “Why not.”

Molly was running the session and was convinced that I, in particular, might get something out of it. I tend to trust her judgement about these sorts of things. In addition to dabbling with the occult, Molly also recently became a certified life coach. She took a class online.

“I want you to imagine a bright, beautiful star living between your eyes,” she instructed us as our guided meditation began, melting each word into the next like they were made of wax. “Now follow your bright, beautiful star…inward…into your inner space.”

There were six of us here today. Seven if you counted Molly. We were laying on yoga mats that had been arranged in a large rectangle in the middle of the room, on the second floor of an arts collective in Downtown Garland called Into the Well. The place had the worn-out wooden floors and large, dusty windows that I associate with old-timey New York factories. It looked like the kind of place where a couple hundred toddlers could have made an honest living a hundred years ago, hammering together lunch boxes and rubbing shoe polish onto their faces. It was me and six women, all of whom were wearing hot-colored yoga pants. I didn’t mind. I like being around women. I’ve been told I have a feminine energy myself.

“You remind me of my friend,” a woman had told me recently at a literary conference in Boise.

“Oh yeah?” I’d said. “What’s his name?”

“Her name is Sarah,” she’d said.

“I remind you of your friend Sarah?” I’d said.

She nodded.

“Same energy.”

I wasn’t offended to hear that I have the same energy as a woman named Sarah. It was better than the other energies I’ve been accused of having throughout my life. Nervous energy. Anxious energy. Weird energy. 

“What’s with all the weird energy, Mister,” J had said a few days earlier. This after I’d just been sitting there on the couch, minding my own business, reading a Jonathan Franzen novel, the one where everybody is having a hard time.

“Don’t act like you know about energy,” I’d snapped. “You don’t know anything about energy. And you don’t know anything about me!” 

She was right, of course. I was in a bad mood. I can’t remember why. Later, I apologized and asked how she could tell I was feeling off. “Are you kidding?” she said. “When you’re in a bad mood, I can feel it across the room. The whole house changes.”

So, I don’t know. Maybe there’s something to this energy stuff after all. Laying there on my yoga mat in the loft, I let Molly take me on a guided tour of all the energies hidden within my body, starting from the bottom and working our way up.

“I want you to notice the energy in your toes,” Molly droned in that same voice poets use at open mic nights, where every sentence curls up at the end like a water ski. “And now in your ankles… And now in your calves…”

She must have read an anatomy textbook or something because her instructions started getting pretty specific.

“And now in the medial meniscus of your right knee… And now in the articular cartilage of your left hip…”

I didn’t know what these parts of me were, what they did, or what they looked like, but I started to imagine myself as one of those skeletons that doctors always have hanging in their offices in movies and TV shows. Just a collection of parts and pieces. Proximal filanges. Mandibular notches. It was relaxing to see myself that way — as a hanging doctor’s office skeleton — and pretty soon, I started drifting off to sleep.

“And now the transverse cervical nerves in your neck… And now the sphenoid bone in your skull… And now your skull…”

I figured Molly would stop when she got to the tops of our heads, but then she kept going, out of our bodies and off into outer space.

“And now up past the clouds… And now up past the moon…”

One reason I think Molly makes a good witch — and now a good life coach — is that she has a great voice for this type of thing. It’s soothing and firm at the same time, like a waitress at a fancy restaurant telling you your credit card has been declined. She could tell me anything and I’d go along with it, if only because it sounds so pleasant coming from her.

“Your anal chakras are completely out of whack,” she could say, and I’d say, “You’re making a lot of sense to me right now.” She could read me the Ikea instruction booklet for a bedside table, and I would have an out of body experience. 

Some people are just made for this type of thing, I think. You spend five seconds with them, and you can tell they have access to other realms. I’m thinking of this guy I saw the other day who was sitting in the middle of my favorite coffee shop, 1418 Coffee in Downtown Plano, eyes closed, transcendentally meditating. He was wearing the type of free-flowing outfit that cult members put on before walking into a live volcano. His necklace looked like it was made of billiard balls and horse tails. I was so distracted by his level of concentration that I couldn’t get anything done. I just stared at him for an hour. Then I got up and went home. Later, I described him to J as an asshole.

“So this asshole is sitting there meditating in the middle of the coffee shop,” I said, as if he’d been sipping a chai tea latte naked. “Full lotus pose. Eyes closed and everything.”

“What a showoff,” J said.

“Exactly,” I said. “Thank you. He was showing off. Shoving his mindfulness in all of our faces.”

“What was he trying to prove anyway?”

“Just what an asshole he is, I guess,” I said. “And boy did he succeed.”

One of the many things I love about J is that I can always count on her to back me up when it comes to thinking people are assholes. Especially people who believe in things. A few years ago, on a train to Downtown Dallas, J got in a fight with a woman wearing a t-shirt that said, “ASK ME ABOUT WATER BAPTISM.” The fight started innocently enough — just a friendly conversation between strangers, really — but ended with the woman informing J that she was going to hell and J yelling, “Great! I’ll save you a seat, bitch!”

I don’t know why we’re not more open to these spiritual sorts of things. I don’t know why we resist them so strongly. Wouldn’t it be nicer to see the world the way Molly does? As a series of energy fields we can hop between like lily pads? Wouldn’t it be more pleasant to see people the way Amy does? As human-sized water bottles just waiting to be transformed into Disney-style cathedrals by a kind word or gesture? Wouldn’t it be more comfortable to dress like Marsha? In natural fabrics that are not only breathable and self-cleaning but may prevent cancer?

Realists, J and I call ourselves. But what’s so great about reality, anyway? What’s so appealing about it? In reality, people have strokes and never bounce back from them. In reality, people die for no reason and nothing interesting happens next. In reality, we’re all nothing but doctor’s office skeletons, just hanging there in the corner, hoping someone will come along and give us a poke every now and then. 

It’s enough to keep you up at night, if you think about it too much. Which is maybe why, laying there on my yoga mat up there in the artists’ loft, I never did fully drift off to sleep. I just laid there, hovering somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness, right there on the edge of reality, as Molly led us out past the moon, and then out past the planets, and then out among the stars where she made a U-turn somewhere out there in the cosmic black and led us all slowly and gently back into our bodies — and then even more slowly and more gently back into the room — where she dusted us off, spun us around a few times, and kissed us all on the cheeks before sending us, blinking and stumbling, back into the real world.

Mike Nagel is the author of Duplex and Culdesac, both from Autofocus Books. Find selected nonsense at www.beefham.com.