Tag: across the wire

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Across the Wire Vol. 4

Johnny Lifeline

By Calvin Cummings

I get together with this guy now that I don’t drink. He’s my not-drinking buddy. I thought our get-togethers would involve more, but our time together has become more about what we don’t do. 

His name’s Johnny, but in my phone, I’ve got him saved as “Lifeline.”

Last time I was over there, we were sitting on his back porch, not talking, passing a pack of cigarettes back and forth and freezing our balls off. I asked if he wanted to get something to eat. He shook his head.

“You mind if I go get something?”      

He did this backwards nod. Like lifted his chin up. In the drive-thru, I thought about whether this actually meant yes or if it was just an acknowledgement that something was said. Or was it nothing? Are there even words for what it was, or does defining it completely miss the point? 

Back on his porch, unwrapping my burgers, I decided it’s just one of those things that words don’t work for. Like how I feel about him and what we do for each other.

We continued not-talking as I ate, the burgers cold and the fries flabby because I drove the fifteen minutes back up the state highway to his house to eat it with him. With every bite the burgers revealed themselves to be what they really were, not food, because once stuff like that gets cold it stops being food, which it never was, you know what I mean? Like as long as it’s hot, you can trick yourself into believing it isn’t what it is, which is what it’s not, but once it’s cold…

Back and forth between the burger and the boagie, putting it down on the plastic chair’s corner with the ember just hanging off. Shivering, chewing. Missing out on the mirage. But even so, I could never bring myself to pull over into a spot in the parking lot and eat everything hot and crisp and alive because then I wouldn’t be with him. So I went back and ate while he didn’t and we continued doing nothing because that’s our way.

Back when I used to drink, I’d do nothing too. One of the nothing-things I’d do was watch nature documentaries, usually with other people, the roommates I used to have before everything spiraled and I landed at my mom’s. Those guys weren’t like me and Johnny. They could watch a peregrine falcon dive for doves, or a baby elephant get separated from the herd in the desert, or learn about the mushrooms under the ground, how they communicate electronically across thousands of miles of rot-eating foam without needing to drink ten, sometimes fifteen beers. 

“There’s this jaguar,” I told him after I finished the not-burgers, “that lives in Asia, like around Russia, or maybe even in it. And there are only forty of them, the jaguars, or tigers, this specific one. Can you believe that? And they’d never been captured on camera before these guys did it, the documentary people.”

I knew this because I watched the documentary about the documentary, too. The footage of the footage. The men wrapped in white camo, their telephoto lens peeking through the layers and the snow on top of the layers. That’s how I knew that this mythic creature had never been photographed before. That, before this, it wasn’t totally real, just a legend, a story told over and over.

My man hit me with the inverted nod.

“You should watch it,” I told him. “I can’t describe it. There aren’t words. The way it jumped from rock to rock and crawled out of its hole. This perfect thing. So cool.”

I crinkled up my silvery wrapping papers and shoved them into the bag, tossed it under my chair. An HVAC rattled to life and its hum whited out the evening’s other murmurs.

“Just unbelievable. That these things are out there happening and we don’t even know about it—I don’t know, like it’s so cool that it’s out there. I still can’t believe it.”

Another not-nod.

I’m not explaining this right, how me and him are together. Listen: he means more to me than any other person I’ve ever known and is second only to my higher power. I’m serious. If you gave me a button and told me, “Press this button and someone will die. Someone who is loved by someone else as much as you love this man. But, if you press the button, this man who you love will also feel how much you love him for the rest of his life, at all times forever, and the feeling won’t dissipate or grow stale the way all feelings normally do, it will be constant and buoyant and good forever.” If you gave me a button like that, I would press that button in an instant, because not-doing things with him is the only way I’ve found to prevent myself from doing all the other things I don’t want to do, the things I don’t want to do because I want to do them so badly, the things that every part of me, down to my atoms and the humming space within my atoms, sings for. It’s like no matter what, whether I drink or don’t, a chorus of me-particles belts the hymn of beer inside me, in faith and hope and love, convinced of what great things beer can do for me and us and the world, if only we believed. 

But sitting with Johnny makes me think I can learn another tune.

“Yeah, the jaguar looked like how Hot Dog looks when he jumps down from the couch to the floor and then up to the kitchen counter.” 

My childhood cat, Hot Dog. Fourteen years old this Christmas, in just a few weeks. He’s third after my H.P. and this guy. But there’s a gap between my number two and my number three, and it’s a lot wider than the gap between one and two.

Chins up from Johnny.

He feels the same way about me that I do about him, I’m sure, because why else would he let me come over? I come over after work, don’t even need to call him, and he’s always back there, dragging off a 27, offering me a light when I ask. I pull a chair up and we can just be. He doesn’t need to talk when we’re back there. He talks plenty in the meetings, where we met. There he tells us about his daughter and his ex-wife. He talks with his hands, shaking his fingers and stretching his arms out wide, telling us, “If I knew where they were I’d go to them, I’d nail myself to a cross in front of them—no, I’d let them nail me to the cross. But she’s changed her number and my mother-in-law won’t give me an inch.” 

Sure, we could talk about that stuff. But I think he likes that I can take his mind off all that. I like that I can take our mind off it. And so I tell him other stuff.

“These documentary guys, they did one about the ocean too. Apparently we used to be little tiny one-cell guys,” I said, pinching my fingers, “that didn’t even need air to breathe, and we lived off the methane farted up by the volcano pits down at the bottom of the ocean. Did you know that? That that’s what methane is? Farts? And that the whole world used to be an ocean?”

He readjusted how he was sitting, pulling at the crotch of his pants and crossing his arms, an unbroken stare into the fading-to-black backyard.

“We could just split in two,” I said, “and make more of ourselves. No sex. And now we’re made of trillions of these things.”

There were good times, too, he’d told us, when the kid and her mother and him would be at the zoo, usually after only one or two sips from the flask, before he’d completely emptied it and moved on to whatever wine coolers and domestic cans they served from the popcorn stalls. Everything would be coming into focus, the sunshine making its noontime transition from blue to straw-gold, the weather perfect, sometime between Summer and Fall or Winter and Spring, and he’d see a stuffed penguin or snake or something and pull it off the rack and hold it in front of his daughter’s face and say, “You like that? You want it?” and that’s when he’d notice his daughter’s twisted face, these uncertain curves of mouth and eye that she’d turn to her mother, whose face would also scrunch up, like they both had some pain somewhere deep inside themselves that was flaring up, and he’d go and buy the penguin anyway and hand it to his daughter and she’d shyly walk behind her mother’s legs, who might even have been pulling her.

He said he knew it was all his fault, but that knowing this didn’t stop him blaming them for working against him, for trying to ruin his life by always bringing it all up, by feeling things that made him feel guilty. Because it’s one thing to have a problem and another to have someone have a problem with your problem. 

There was some other stuff too. He put his hands on them. He says he’s only been told about it, doesn’t himself remember. And I’m always thinking, like, damn man. Damn. But these are the people who become your brothers when you’ve been where we’ve been.

We don’t talk about any of that now though, not on the porch, leaning back in the plastic chairs, hearing ‘em creak. Pulling our arms into our shirts and rubbing our palms against our ribs. That’s not what the porch is for. 

While I talked about poison dart frogs and bonobos, he stood up and limped to the deck edge and peed through the railing onto the grass. Like our doing nothing, this struck as something I’d do while drunk. But that’s the thing: we weren’t drunk. So it was different. 

I watched his back, his thinness rippling under the plaid. Steam slipped off his arced stream. I worked my hands under my armpits, trying to get back the feeling. My Johnny.

The HVAC shut off and the splat of his piss on the mud became clear. Enough time passed that I started counting the seconds.

“Phew-wee! You been holding it in?”     

He remained concentrated. I fiddled with the name tag on my polo. I work at the TJ Maxx by the quarry. Two months in and I’ve been promoted to customer service specialist. I handle most of the returns. People bring me their used things, stuff they no longer want—things they really should keep given how they’ve been used—or bought by mistake, or bought out of some hope for what the item could do for them, turn them into—expensive blenders, skinny jeans, Star Wars Legos (all on sale)—and I place the things that used to be theirs beneath the counter and run their cards and say, “Thank you for coming in! God bless!” and I mean it, I really mean it.

“The job’s good,” I said to Johnny’s back. “Yeah, the job’s real good. Real good. They think I could move up to management in a year, if I can stay in line.”

He grunted as the stream pittered out to a trickle, zipped himself up, and limped back to me. 

“I know I’ve told you already, but you ever need anything,” I said, “you can use my discount.”

He lowered himself into his seat and lit another cigarette. I had to snap to get his attention for the lighter, but then I did the same. We sighed the smoke out. The HVAC chunked back on.

I don’t know what Johnny does other than haunt this house where he used to keep his family. And now I haunt it too. But I guess it’s better to be a living ghost than just plain dead.

“Yeah, real good over there,” I said. “Real good.”

You might think, How could you possibly sit with a man like that? Did you also hit a woman? I’ve already explained it. You either get it or you don’t. And no, by the way, I haven’t but what does that matter? Would you even believe me? Would you even care?

I’m sorry I’m so defensive. Add that to the list of things you either get or you don’t. Now that I think of it, maybe the difference between you and me is that I know what the Apostle Paul’s talking about in Romans, with the whole “I do not do what I want to do, but what I hate.” I don’t need to hit a woman to know that I’m like Johnny, that we’re all Johnny. Maybe you do. Maybe that’s why you hate Johnny. Because he’s who you’d be if life ever forced you to really face yourself.

“So how are you doing anyway? Me talking your ear off as usual,” I asked.

He adjusted himself again, sniffed, rubbed a finger under his nose at some nonexistent snot, then flung his arm outward, turning and looking at me now for the first time all night, those flood-light lit eyes and expressionless smile, and gestured towards the world, like, “This is how I’m doing, my beautiful, dear friend. This. Here.”

I followed the trajectory of his arm, its cast across the backyard and up to the treeline, where bat silhouettes flickered against the blue-steel of night. A mourning dove called. Wind shushed through the deck railing slats. This could be any time. We could be anywhere.

I flung my arm out too, both of us now holding invisible glasses, raised in an unspoken cheers to another God-glorious day plucked from the jaws of our devourer.

Calvin Cummings writes and lives in Baltimore. His work is featured in or forthcoming from Blue Arrangements, Soft Union, Spectra, Scaffold, SWAMP, and others. calvinthomascummings.com

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Across the Wire Vol. 4

2 Prose Poems

By Julián Martinez

WD-40

The key was having a harder and harder time with the lock. The lock was having a harder and harder time with the door. The door was having a harder and harder time with the frame. The frame was having a harder and harder time with the wall. The wall was having a harder and harder time with the house. The house was having a harder and harder time with the block. The block was having a harder and harder time with the tenant. The tenant was having a harder and harder time with herself. Her self was having a harder and harder time with her country. Her country was having a harder and harder time with its laborers. Its laborers were having a harder and harder time with their bosses. Their bosses were having a harder and harder time with their bosses. Their bosses were having a harder and harder time with their bosses. Their bosses were having a harder and harder time with their bosses. Their bosses were having a harder and harder time with their spouses changing the locks.

IKEA Bear

My girlfriend didn’t care that the stuffed brown bear in a lawn chair in IKEA was carrying a gun. Our cart is packed, she said, staring forward. Look at that bear, I said. No one in the store besides me was watching it load its pistol, the sneaky freak. We had been arguing over money and each other’s lack of listening skills all evening, so she kept walking when I made eye contact with the bear and broke into a sprint. I’d wrested the gun off of it, both of us snarling, when a salesperson asked if she could be of assistance. The bear plopped to the floor. The gun went behind my back. She was confused. She had no clue how the bear had gotten into the store. Was I sure it wasn’t mine? I blurted, yes, uh, actually it’s an engagement gift. As I kneeled down to pick up the bear with one hand and squeeze it tight, it bit me, pulled the gun free and shot me in the face. It fled on all fours, everything going black. While I was in a coma, my girlfriend built the furniture then took it all with her when she left. I’ve been practicing my revenge on the bear at the local gun range every day. The bear’s probably by the side of the highway in the forest now, making fun of itself for being so fragile and soft.

Julián Martinez (he/him) is the son of Mexican and Cuban immigrants and is from Waukegan, IL. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in HAD, Hooligan Mag, Little Engines, The Sonora Review and elsewhere. His debut chapbook, This Place Is Covered Head to Toe in Shit (Ghost City Press, 2024) is available now. Find him online @martinezfjulian or martinezfjulian.com, or IRL in Chicago.

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Across the Wire Vol. 4

DOORS

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By Craig Rodgers

The phone is already ringing. David wakes at the sound. He turns in bed and looks about in a fog and he reaches for the phone, he presses the screen.

“Mark?”

Banging on the line, some kind of commotion and then quiet. David asks again.

“Mark? Hello?”

Another quiet moment. He starts to hang up when Mark’s voice comes through. 

“I found the door again.”

He says more but the commotion returns, louder now, then click, he is gone.

_____

Mark is nodding off. He sits at his desk with notebooks open showing figures he follows in only the barest of ways. He reads and reads until numbers blur and the lamplight falling across the page takes on a false tone, the light of a stage play, dreamlike and unreal. He stumbles his way down the hall. Shoes clack on tile. He touches his face, he yawns. The bathroom door is open. He pulls it shut at his back.

The tap is modern. He waves a hand at the sensor. Water gurgles and spurts out into a chrome sink. He fills a mug and drinks. Awake now. He shakes his face and blinks. He turns and opens the door.

At first he cannot accept it. The mind reels. A hallway lays out the way but the details are changed and wrong. Green carpeting lines a floor that goes on far longer than it should. He takes a step. Hands hold the wall for safety. The warm paneling is unfamiliar to the touch. He wipes the hand on his pants.

Passages exist where none should. A doorway opens onto a bedroom. Another shows an office of sorts. A library, a den. At the end of the hall there stands a door closed to him. He approaches in slow walk. He leans, wary. Hand reaching out. He turns the knob and pushes. 

The next room is cast in the pale light of buzzing overheads. Long tables divide the space. Racks of cabinets labeled in some other language take up all of one wall. All is quiet here.

He turns. The carpeted hallway at his back is as it was. The familiar bathroom of his home is there beyond the hall. He takes a breath and closes the door.

He opens the door, the same door, onto a bedroom. Sheets are mussed where someone has lain. A television plays but the sound is turned low, figures whispering between bouts of familiar canned laughter like the sound of falling snow.

A voice comes from somewhere near. Growing. He crosses the room to a closet, stumbling, catching himself. The voice is coming near. He crawls into the closet and pulls the door closed. The voice is at once gone. All sound is changed, even the unheard white noise breath of the walls is wholly altered. He opens the closet door.

Ahead is a garden enclosure. Glass walls look out on the world beyond. Houses, a street. A neighborhood entirely foreign. He moves along an aisle of quaffed greenery, ducking or peering over the rows of lush flora. Looking for a door.

At the room’s end is a small shed. Tools inside. Hoes and sheers and rakes. Gloves, seeds. Bottles for spritzing. He stoops to fit inside, pulling the door shut against him in the tiny space. 

He feels the change at once. The humid greenhouse air is replaced with a dry coolness. He opens the door onto a dining room set for a meal. Sweating now. Frustrated more than scared. He checks the phone in his pocket but there is no signal here in this place. He crosses the room to a door.

They go by faster now, searching for anything familiar. Yanking open doors and running to the next. A hallway, an attic, an office, a ballroom. More of the same, with occasional deviations. One door opens onto a stadium vacant of living things. One opens onto a room in pitch dark. He does not test the walls for a switch, instead pulling the door again closed and moving on. Doors and doors. Then.

He doesn’t recognize it right away. The green carpet. The hallway. He stops when he does. Standing, breathing. His body shakes. He resists the urge to run. The phone shows a signal. He moves with a measured pace. Forward. He scrolls and dials. It crackles but it does ring. He presses it hard to his ear. The voice is there, far away. He is in the bathroom now, and there comes a pop like a room pressurized. David’s voice is there, clear.

“Mark? Hello?”

Mark closes his eyes with relief and more. 

“I found the door again,” he says.

But the hair on his arms is standing, his fillings ache in his jaw. When he opens his eyes the door is closed.

David parks in a skid. He is out and crossing the lawn at a run. The lights all show in the house’s every window. Not just the windows, the open front door too. David steps inside. He goes room to room looking. Every door in the house stands open and Mark is not here. He checks again just in case. He calls friends, he asks questions. What could this be, where would he go. Each agrees to come help, even if they know not with what. With nothing left to do but wait for their arrival, David closes the front door.

Craig Rodgers is the name on several books ghostwritten by a gaggle of long dead Victorian spirits.

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Across the Wire Vol. 4

The Ever-Present Mr. Small

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By Alicia Ameur

Three-to-close is my least favorite shift. The streets are too dark and empty to walk home alone. I look at the clock and see it is almost closing time. Mr. Small was in the store for my entire six-hour shift. I caught glimpses of him, wandering from aisle to aisle, carrying a shopping basket filled hours earlier with a few loaves of white bread and jars of peanut butter and jelly. He never checks out at my register and, thankfully, tonight was no different. I watched as he timidly stepped into Tracy’s line to pay for his groceries. 

After punching out I search the window along the front of the store and don’t see him standing in his normal spot between the shopping carts and glass. Usually I can keep tabs on him while he watches me work at the register but lose him while I’m in the office closing out my drawer at the end of my shift. 

I edge close to the storefront window, trying to see further out into the parking lot. It is too dark beyond the row of cars parked directly along the entry walk to the store. I press my forehead against the cool window, cup both hands above my eyes to block the reflection of light for a better look, expecting to see Mr. Small on the other side of the glass, watching. 

He is not. 

I scan the parking lot, carefully considering whether a shadow is behind a tree or if it’s just my heightened fear causing an illusion. 

The hair on the back of my neck stands up as the automatic door swings open to the chilly night. I glance around as I walk out the door and still don’t see him. I scurry across the lot to the sidewalk, keeping a careful eye on the tree and its shadow. 

Once I reach the crosswalk I consider which route to take. The quickest is straight up Winthrop, a well-lit, frequently trafficked street. I would have good visibility of the sidewalk ahead, but there are many nooks for Mr. Small to hide. There are also homes on either side and I could knock on a door to get help, or even flag down a passing car.

The longer route would involve a half mile walk on Revere Beach Parkway, and another half mile to Short Beach. Not only is that an inefficient way to get home, there is a section where I would walk alone between the seawall and street with only a flood barrier on the opposite side. But there would be nowhere for Mr. Small to hide other than on the rock armour beyond the seawall. There aren’t any houses for me to run to for help and the cars drive too fast for me to flag down. 

I chose the faster, better-lit route. Only now I must decide whether to walk through the front or back parking lot of Dimino’s Subs. I am grateful to see that it is still open and the lights pool on the front lot, showing no Mr. Small in sight. There is only a sliver of streetlight shining into the back parking lot and I decide to stay at the front. My only concern is that I might be blindsided if he is waiting in the back lot on the other side of the building. 

I walk as quietly as possible, peering beyond the wall, hoping I don’t see him. Once I pass the sandwich shop, I have a clear line of vision all the way to the train station. I stay close to the chain link fence between the sidewalk and train station parking lot. There are a few cars still in the lot, but not a person in sight. 

My eyes dart in all directions. Ears conscious of every sound, listening for the rhythm of steady footsteps. All I hear is the rustling of dead leaves and litter in the light breeze. These sounds startle me into thinking he is nearby, then give me a fleeting, false sense of safety when I realize it is not Mr. Small. 

I think empty ‘positive’ thoughts to keep my panic at bay. There’s nothing to be nervous about, Alicia. He’s never hurt you before, he’s harmless. . . It’s not even a mile, you’ll be fine.

I reach Beachmont Station, and  see him standing behind the bank of pay phones. My heart races and my throat constricts. I come to a full stop, frozen in fear.

I take deep breaths and calm down enough to continue walking. I cross the street and walk past the bakery, hear the crinkle of his shopping bag and the thud of his boots on the pavement. He is walking about twenty steps behind me, his usual stalking distance.

I’m not sure if he understands what he’s doing, following me, a fourteen-year-old girl to work, dance class, and almost everywhere else I walk. Maybe he’s trying to protect me, I think, telling myself lies to tamp my fear.

I think back to ‘the incident’ almost two years ago. On that night, the neighborhood boys thought it would be funny to pull a prank on Mr. Small and tell him I was in love with him. I was home alone with my younger sister. We were watching a rented VHS from June’s Video Hut when we heard loud banging on the front door. As I approached the front hall, I heard Jay, Scott, Anthony, Brian, and T.J. laughing hysterically across the street.

The pounding reverberated louder and louder with each step I took. I yelled out, “Guys, it’s not funny!” The culprit furiously jiggled the doorknob while pushing and pulling the door in its frame, and I heard my sister whimper behind me.

I saw movement outside in the dark. Then Mr. Small’s face peering through the porch window, his hand cupped over his brow to get a better look inside. I stood frozen as his head turned in my direction and we locked eyes. He smiled.

I ran to the kitchen, feeling him watch me as I searched through the junk drawer for the list of emergency phone numbers. I remembered my parents added Natalie’s Restaurant.

I steadied my hands enough to dial the number. The hostess answered after several rings, and the sound of an adult’s voice suppressed my fear. I gave a hurried description of my parents.

Since they were regulars, the hostess knew who I was looking for. When she put the phone down to get them, full terror returned; I was alone in the kitchen with Mr. Small watching my every move. I could no longer stay strong and contain my tears. My shoulders shuddered as I quietly sobbed with my back to the window.

I waited for one of my parents to come to the phone. I focused on the background noise of the busy restaurant coming through the line: plates and silverware clinking, people talking and laughing, live music from the dance floor. People who were comfortable and safe, and at that very moment, I couldn’t remember how that felt. 

After what seemed like an impossibly long time, I heard my mother’s irritated, slightly slurred voice on the other end. Through jagged breaths and sobs, I explained what was happening and begged her and dad to come home. With the same casual tone she used to deny me a ride to a friend’s house, she said that their dinner had just been served. 

Dinner had just been served? There was a man trying to get in the house and she was more concerned with food. I composed myself enough to convince her that this was an actual emergency. She reluctantly told me she would request doggie bags for their dinner and head straight home.

After I hung up the phone, a rush of relief flooded my body, interrupted by a worry: assuming this Saturday night was no different from all the other Saturday nights, it was very likely that my parents had been drinking heavily. If my dad was too drunk to drive, they might die in a tragic car accident, all because I called them to come home early over a situation my twelve-year-old self couldn’t manage.

Even though I feared my parents would get in trouble for driving while intoxicated, I decided to call the police in hopes that they would arrive sooner than my parents. I explained the situation to the dispatch officer and she advised me to take my sister to a spot where Mr. Small wouldn’t be able to see us. She assured me a patrol car would arrive as soon as possible. I hung up before she could say anything else and slowly turned to see if Mr. Small was still watching through the window. 

He was.

I could still hear the boys laughing across the street. I focused long enough to decide that the safest place to hide would be in the living room, which spanned the back of the house. If we crouched behind the sofa, we would be close enough to the front door to hear if he got in, but far enough away to be safely hidden. We held each other tight, crying quietly while we waited for the police or our parents to help us.

The police arrived about an hour later, shortly before our parents. I saw the flash of blue and white lights illuminating the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. I told my sister to stay hidden and went to the dining room window. A couple of police officers stood below the streetlight in the grass triangle across the street. Mr. Small was hiding behind a bush with no leaves. After a minute or so the police got him to stand and walked him to the police cruiser. He wobbled back and forth trying to balance, clearly drunk.

My parents pulled up as Mr. Small was being placed into the backseat of the cruiser. They approached the police officers, walking deliberately enough to mask their unsteady gait. After a quick discussion, the officers drove away. I heard my parents’ laughter as they came up the front walk. I unlocked the deadbolt, my hands still shaking.

I asked my dad what the officers said, and he calmly told me they were going to keep Mr. Small in jail overnight to sober up and let him go home in the morning. They couldn’t keep him because he technically didn’t commit a crime. I wanted to scream at them.  They were so unconcerned about what transpired; didn’t even ask me if I was okay. I was too exhausted to talk about it further. My body felt numb and I could barely stand. I knew any protest would be futile until they sobered up. So I walked upstairs, brushed my teeth and got into bed. As upset as I felt, I was grateful there were adults in the house.

The memory of that night causes tears to well up. I remind myself that thinking about the past won’t help and shift my focus to my surroundings and the whereabouts of Mr. Small. 

I realize I have reached the shortcut next to St. Paul’s Church – stairs leading to a path that crosses over from Winthrop to Bradstreet. If I take the shortcut, I will be home in less than a minute. As desperate as I am to get home, I’m afraid to take the shortcut because the passageway is very narrow with fences on either side.   

I walk the full block around, knowing we will soon pass the house where Mr. Small lives with his mother. I wonder if he will continue following me home or stop at his front door. The closer I get to home, the faster I walk. As I pass his house, I pray he will stop there. My house finally comes into view and I increase my speed to pass the ten or so houses that stand between me and safety. 

I risk a quick glance behind me and see Mr. Small outside his front door, watching me walk away. I break into a sprint, fumbling my keys as I rush to get inside, panicking until I finally deadbolt the door behind me. 

I walk into the cold, dark, empty house, sit on the stairs and cry.

ALICIA C. AMEUR is an aspiring writer, knitter, avid reader and baker, as well as a mother to two adult children, Josef and Amina.  Born in Boston, MA, raised in the Beachmont section of Revere, MA, a suburb of Boston, she currently resides in Worcester, MA with her three black cats, Edgar, Allan and Poe.  She is currently writing a creative non-fiction book to share her and her family’s story with the world.

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Across the Wire Vol. 4

You Hate Me Correctly: A review of Cletus Crow’s Phallic Symbols

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By Conor Hultman

Cletus Crow has published a grand slam sophomore book of poems. Phallic Symbols (Pig Roast Publishing, 2024) has absorbed the disciplined formalism of the debut, like sunshine into a stone. Out of that formalism Crow has kept the bare beauty of the senryu, but allowed the verse to unselfconsciously expand into a free verse, occasionally prose poetry, that retains structural integrity and power. Rarely is a word out of place or tossed off. Very often does a poem glow with an unassailable wholeness, made up of atomically graceful single lines. “this is how / vampires / kill themselves”

        These poems don’t disappoint on the title’s come-on, but most often they’re about erotic disappointment. Festooned with phalluses and dotted with anuses, the poet accomplishes that Freudian alchemy of symbolism that draws a pornographic flag of genitalia intersecting, drains all the prurience out of it, transforming sex and its paraphernalia into potent totems of impotence and disappointment. “My penis is a sewage pipe.”

The suffering displayed here is almost always racked across a relational valence. Failed romance, unrequited love, flirting with friends, family history; the self being created across the collection is a group collaboration, a tapestry of every way people can make pain together out of wanting and not getting. “My therapist says / I should clone myself / so I can kill myself / without dying.”

Crow is funny without trying, which is the best way anyone can be funny. Almost every page in Phallic Symbols could make you laugh or cry, could be used as a Rorschach-blot-test-cum-poem. A short one to prove it to you:

     Outrageous Nowadays

     Man offered to buy my old gym socks for $30

     Can you imagine?

     $20 more and we can go see a movie

A whole world created at one glance, like a gay American Hanshan carving poems into a mountain with his penis. There’s a raucous, generous humor there, but it’s living uneasily with a great and knowing sadness. Part of the secret at work is religion, which flits among the poems about pop culture and fantasy. Christianity, a rich tradition of desire and loss and promise, is referenced with a reverence special to good art. “I make meth / with some man named Jesus / who is not God.”

The sequencing of the poems in Phallic Symbols is part of what makes the whole work. It starts with “Hike with Erectile Dysfunction,” where the exterior natural world and the interior world of sexual imagination fuse into a stark naked, frozen noninteractive image. It ends with “Hope,” a beautiful ode as tautology, including desperation and transference in ten simple lines, that function as a reinforcement of all the preceding emotive confusion and as a suggestive imperative line away, an exhortation to the reader to hope, even if the hope is futile and hurts. Between these two bookends are poems about whale penises, the penises of statues, God’s penis, girl penises, Godzilla’s penis, insect penises, penises after vasectomy, mannequin penises, cyborg penises, penis pictures, penis drawings, porn penises, grandfather’s penis, and the Washington Monument (which is, of course, a penis). Rather than brute obsession, Crow takes this material an expands it, goes off on variations of content and concept as frequently as technique. Phallic Symbols is like Apollinaire’s Alcools, or Mahler’s Third Symphony, in that it takes a theme and recreates it at every stroke, fully maps out its potentialities and drops the pen immediately when the next line would be repetition. Love is the most fertile battlefield for such artistic wars, as the above mentioned. “Then comes a night with your penis in / the love of your life.”

Cletus Crow nods subtly to influence when it’s due, Graham Irvin and B. R. Yeager notably. But these poems are all the author’s own. Crow is aware of being a singular voice, alludes to outsider status with grace, as with the poem “Literary Society”: “There are too many words I don’t know. / The poets are coming to kill me.” Phallic Symbols could very well be next season’s fashion, and after that a perennial classic. If you are trying to copy a more intelligent and hilarious style than your own, look no further. But don’t tell them I sent you.

Also, my copy came with a condom with a poem on the wrapper, but it would have to be some seriously fucked up sex for me to use it:

     BDSM

     a whip hands above

     handcuffs on the doorknob

     you hate me correctly

     at specific times

Conor Hultman lives in New York, New York.

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Across the Wire Vol. 4

The Dunes

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By Jon Doughboy

The Oregon Coast in the year 2000. The dunes of a new millennium. In the backseat a younger he, high-school dropout, hitchhiking in search of adventure, seeking a sense of purpose, a coherent self, a fine young woman to write poems to and ogle with soulful, sensitive anguish. To worship. The northwest coast of conifer-studded sand, an alien land to the eyes of an east coast teen, child of highways and denuded hills, medians hosting deciduous trees in their death throes, blighted chestnuts and scraggly sumacs adorned with assorted trash. Sprawling condo developments sliding into polluted rivers. George Washington crossed here, no, there, well, also, probably here and don’t forget there. 

NIN is playing. NIN was playing, then. Is playing, now, again, a twenty-three-year-old memory. The girl behind the wheel is singing along and staring in the rearview mirror, locking eyes with him, with the he of then, and singing “I want to fuck you like an animal.” It’s intoxicating, was intoxicating. He was scared. Horny. Aglow in the eyes of someone’s desire. Here is the hangover, still, residual radiation at age forty. But he didn’t like NIN because his friend’s older brother and schizoid drug dealer used to blast them out of waist-high speakers and they had to creep past his room as kids, tiptoeing cartoon spies hung on tenterhooks by his random acts of terror, until they were old enough to creep into the brother’s room to buy an overpriced eighth or take a hit from the gravity bong in a gray mop bucket in the corner, the plastic jug bobbing in it like a maimed apple. 

“I wanna feel you from the inside,” she’s singing, his ride, the owner of the Astrovan, vehicle of choice for rubber tramps and kidnappers alike, trailing rust and coolant and cigarette butts along the Oregon Coast. How did he end up here? Bus from Connecticut to Chicago. Rideshare from Chicago to Billings. Hitching onward from there to Idaho. Three more rides, more drugs, more propositions, to Seattle, then south, some college kids, an old trucker who was obsessed with the lizardmen lying in conspiratorial caves across the southwest on the brink of a mass invasion. Where are these dunes, he’s wondering, was wondering, and the dunes were more than dunes, they were freedom, proof, despite his doubtful parents and even more doubtful teachers, that he could manage himself, handle the world, grab it by the balls and not get shaken loose like stray and feeble lint clinging to its sex-slicked pubic hairs. 

“I want to fuck you like an animal” and he wondered and wonders what it would have felt like, fucking her, being fucked by her. She was thick and young but older than him, nearing twenty so to a sixteen-year-old, mature, experienced. Worldwise, sexwise. Where are these dunes? But her friend in the passenger seat is the one he was attracted to, desirous of. Eighteen, maybe. A fellow dropout, beautiful brown filthy hair, that hippie bounce, crown of leaves and grit and glitter. 

Beyond the dunes, the sea. The Pacific Ocean. He’s never seen it before. Where do the currents lead? How far Hawaii, Japan? What’s beyond beyond? Is Bobby Darin alive and kicking, crooning there?

He’s looking—was looking, the younger him—out the windows, searching for the dunes, avoiding the confident and penetrating glare of the driver. Too much energy, too many hormones, the rush of uncertainty, youth, hope, angsty wonder. He wants to fuck! He wants to feel! Inside, outside. Like a man, an animal, like the ocean eroding the shore. He’s floating above the van—him, the one he’s become, middle-aged, sluggishly juggling debts and regrets—breathing in its fumes, white coolant and burned oil smog billowing out of a pitted muffler, the smoke of a thousand spit-soaked roaches, patchouli, peanut butter, Old English-soaked upholstery. The other, younger him, is restless in the backseat, nervous, looking for the dunes he cannot see, though from these heights, from the bird’s eye of time, they’re clear as day to the older one, undulating beige waves breaking on pine and spruce reefs. His younger self can’t hear the elder version’s urgent croaking. It’s muffled by the passing years. No matter how loud his older self yells. No matter how important or timely his advice. Time is a vacuum. Time is a room, a cell silent save for the click of the door as it locks behind you. Time is and was and will be. 

NIN is blasting. The dunes are coming up. The dunes are here and gone. The lizardmen — who knows? — are thriving in their caves. The sixteen-year-old he is driven on, fueled by lust and pride and fear. The forty-year-old version drifts after him, an irrelevant flutter, weightless as a dream, howling mute warnings from a possible future. Somewhere, somewhen, beyond.

Jon Doughboy is a janitor at the Hrabal School of Embodied Poetics in Prague. Watch him pull some palavers out of the trash @doughboywrites

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Across the Wire Vol. 4

FUTURES IN WHICH YOU’RE NOT WELCOME

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By Sam Pink

A huge dog charged me in the street snapping

and I just yelled Hey and

it stopped, growled a little then retreated.

My battles settle themselves anymore.

At least, that’s what I want.

Burning in reverse. Problem solved.

We should all be kind to each other.

Isn’t that cool of me to think. I’m so great

and I know you can see it.

Which is what’s important anymore.

The universe meets you right

at the point of existence. Unfolding through you.

Machined finely against your every move.

It takes no pleasure or pain

in your defeat or victories.

Teaching lessons through jokes

you couldn’t dream of, not caring

to be heard. With a morality way beyond

any idea you could ever have.

The universe puts you through cycles

you have to see to defeat, or ignore

and continue to be defeated by.

But the cycle will be presented

as many times as necessary.

And that’s that. I won a long time ago

when I decided to just keep going.

The difference now is, I love it.

I see behind the curtain on mental processes

I’ve developed (and clung to)

and entire architectures disappear

like completed lines in Tetris.

And some will ask, what happens

when they’re all gone, when you’ve cleared them all.

To which I say, Who gives a shit.

I’ve relied on a future version of myself I know is real

but isn’t yet and has shown no signs of coming

and it pulls me up every time.

By muscles earned. Frontiering forward.

I forget myself. All my best decisions

happen without me. Being authentic

is a stupid goal. It’s a pretense

that immediately reverses itself.

A dog doesn’t say

I’m gonna be extra like a dog today.

You should be living it.

It should be obvious. I keep reminding myself

this. It’s at the point now where

everything is absurd

but it’s not depressing, it’s funny and awesome.

It’s like how people morph into chickens

in the eyes of a hungry person in a cartoon

except to me everything morphs into

a golden retriever wearing glasses in front of a computer.

And the difference now is, I love it.

Dropped out of the pageant, king of my own sideshow.

So get with it, stupid.

American Reloading is selling

500 (blemished) 124gr hst’s for like 60 dollars, shipped.

Which is pretty dang neat.

When people say they want to see you change

they mean die.

I freeze stars with how much I hate.

And begin Spring with my warmth.

It’s called being a human.

And the difference now is, I love it.

This is not an audition.

It’s the universe unfolding,

a small part of the big idea.

Everything that happens is my fault

for listening or not.

It’s all my fault and that’s fine.

It only gets bad when I try and

blame anything else.

Because the future is ruthless and right.

I salute you on your path, from mine

where you’re not allowed.

Roses are red

violets are blue.

God loves me more

Than He loves you

Sam Pink – twitter: sampinkisalive
Instagram: sam_piink_art

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Across the Wire Vol. 4

SNIP

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By Anthony Neil Smith

The doc called Logan and me back to the ER after midnight on a middle-aged husband shouting about his wife having a heart attack and no one helping her. 

We’d already dealt with a drunk who’d taken a swing at a nurse a couple of hours before. Logan had enjoyed cuffing the guy and manhandling him out to the curb to wait for the cops. Logan was the type who dreamed of being a cop but couldn’t pass the physical. The man had a gut and I’d never seen a vegetable anywhere near his mouth. But when the cops showed, he was all, “Got your perp here, attempted assault on an employee. Intoxicated.” Like it was an audition. “Keep up the good work,” they said. “We need guys like you fighting crime.” He couldn’t tell these dicks were fucking with him.

I’d known them both, worked with them on the force. I hung behind. I didn’t want to hear Horace’s ribbing. He knew it, and didn’t care. “You stay safe, Beau. Don’t let anyone cough on you.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

The other, Jimbo, asked, “You ever get your license again?”

He knew I hadn’t. My bike was chained up outside in plain sight. Assholes.

Anyway, this husband trying to help his wife. I got it. This hospital is in a small Minnesota town, a make-do sort of hospital. Always short-handed, they hired the best of the rest. 

Like me. A half-assed security guard.

I scoped the scene at the patient’s room. Mid-forties hockey mom, D-cups, gripping both rails and panting. “It doesn’t feel right. Something’s wrong.” The husband stood at her side, leaning over, brushing hair from her face, while one of the younger nurses held an oxygen mask in one hand. “You’re okay. I promise, you’re okay. I’m telling you, you’re not having a heart attack. I swear.”

Another woman, thin, flat-chested, white streak running through straight dark hair parted in the middle, saw us first. “Seriously? Are you fucking serious?”

The husband looked up. Thick professor glasses topped by thick eyebrows. A little fat, double-chinned, in sweatpants and a t-shirt that swamped him. A souvenir from Ireland, green with their flag on it.  

I waved him towards the door. “Sir, can we talk –”

“Are you insane?” The hippie woman came for us. 

Last thing we needed.

Logan puffed up. “Ma’am, calm down.”

“All he did was get her some help! They called security on a man trying to get help for his wife?”

Logan reached for his Taser but I grabbed his wrist. “Dude, please.”

Oblivious. He kept at this granola-looking woman. “You need to stand down.”

“You want to tase me? You want to tase my brother-in-law?” The sister stepped into the hall and swung the door closed behind her. Or tried to. 

Logan reached over her shoulder and slammed his palm flat against it. “That’s not how it’s going down.”

“I can’t believe this!”

Logan wouldn’t be happy until he had a chance to tase the fuck out of somebody while I only wanted to get through each shift invisible. An afterthought. 

I talked the sister down. Took all the shit she flung at us in stride. You had to let people vent. They weren’t all threats. Logan was still posing, though. “We can’t have that type of behavior. Your brother-in-law is disturbing the peace.”

I interrupted them both and said, “Please. All I’m going to tell him is play nice from now on. Can you ask him to speak with us?”

Which seemed to do the trick.

Maybe on the surface I was a placid security guard, trying to deescalate the situation. 

Scratch me though, and right under the skin I’m boiling. Wishing I’d never rolled my squad car drunk and gotten fired from the only job I’d ever wanted. 

Two years ago? It’s always yesterday to me. On a good day it feels like last week, never far from my mind. 

Out at three in the morning after a fight with Vicki, who’d finally found out I’d got a vasectomy because I didn’t want another kid. I mean, we already had four, all two years apart, bottomless pits for food and attention and toys. Of course I’d wanted kids. Of course when I, a lapsed Lutheran, sort of, and only child, met Vicki, from a Mormon family of nine, I’d known the deal. She wanted to be a Pioneer Woman mom. Trad mom. Hand-me-downs, bulk shopping, family game nights instead of TV. I went for it anyway. I’d always thought Vicki had my heart in her hand. Now I think she’d memorized a how-to book. How to Mold the Man of Your Dreams, or some such like A Godly Man Needs a Godlier Wife. 

Then we had the kids. After my second daughter – two boys, two girls – I was done. Scared to touch Vicki, more fertile than MiracleGro. Like her eggs were out on patrol, searching for sperm, one measly sperm that might’ve dribbled in when I pulled out and let go on her stomach. Every other woman, better odds you can shoot a million up in there and they all miss, but not Vicki. Something about the women in her family. I’ve got five sisters-in-law and twelve nieces and nephews whose names I can’t remember, even sitting in a pew behind them week after week.

I’d come home aching, only to be leapt on by toddlers. Shin splints, nut punches, sprained muscles. I’d say “Not now,” but Vicki would say, “I’ve had them all day, so it’s your turn.” And I’d say, “You don’t get it. I chased some guys. I tackled one. We had some domestics resist. Please, honey. Can’t they watch cartoons?” But she’d give me a look, the one reminding me I’d told her a long time ago I was on board. Sickness, health, wealth, debt, an arkload of children, I was on board. 

So I got snipped. Never told her. 

Thing was, our little Minnesota town, they’re all in each other’s business, so if a fellow Saint worked at the clinic, and found out from another Saint that Vicki’s husband Beau had been to Dr. You Know Who in order to you know what, well…you know. 

To be honest, I’m surprised I got away with it for as long as I did. Six months of some great God-inspired fake procreational lovemaking. No more pull outs, no more cold shoulders, no more looks. Wham-bam-I-love-you-ma’am! 

My wife’s not stupid. She had an inkling. I think it was more she threw out some bait before reeling in the tea, or whatever they call it, the gossip, the down-low. Our Sainted friends at the clinic almost burst their lungs holding onto those delicious tidbits as long as they did. 

Getting back to the squad car, though. 

I had come home from work. Funny looks from the kids among their hundreds of thousands of Lego pieces. No noise from the kitchen, Vicki not cooking that night for our battalion. 

“We ate pizza,” my oldest son said. “Mom’s upstairs.”

I knew I was in for it. 

She’d planned to turn it into pure drama. Waiting for me in the bedroom, skimpy panties and thick lipstick – on a school night? Posing like a centerfold. Laying a trap.

“I know you know.” I sat at the foot of the bed. “I get it.”

By the time we were done – I never even had time to change out of my uniform – I stormed downstairs to the basement and turned the hockey game up loud while she put the kids to bed, something we usually partnered on. 

Once I knew everyone was down for the night, and Vicki retreated to our room to pray for my lyin’ ass soul, I headed to a fellow cop’s house. Horace. We played Call of Duty and NCAA Basketball and drank a kiddie pool’s worth of Golden Light before he brought out the Evan Williams, as if we weren’t already dizzy enough, while he virtually dunked on me as I spilled the story. 

“Fucking Mormons,” he’d said. “No offense.”

We laughed and made fun of a Mormon wife’s cavernous vagina after popping out eight or nine or eleven soccer-ball-headed kids. I didn’t tell him it was a myth and Vicki could still squeeze my Mister Mister tightly after four, because I was drunk and thought he was funny. “Hot dog down a hallway!” What a joker. 

As I left, he clapped me on the shoulder and slurred, “You…right…thing.” You did the right thing. Guessing he meant the snip. At no point did he say “Stay here, you can’t drive” or “Let me call you an Uber.” Just waved me on my way.

The first few well-lit blocks were fine. I had a curb to follow. But I took a right and there were three roads where there had been only one, overlapping, so I tried to punch through the foggy ones and race right down the middle. A cul-de-sac. I kept on bowling down the center. Dreaming I was an F-1 driver. Blink Blink. 

A yard! A house!

Yanked my wheel to the right, going faster than I realized, and went zero-g before doing an impression of a brick in a clothes dryer. 

I avoided the house, thankfully, and any people due to the late hour, but ripped up this poor guy’s yard. Took the bumper off his GMC pick-up. Felt like I took it off with my teeth. And still – and still – I walked away with only bruises and one broken finger. 

My true blue bros covered for me, of course. If I’d killed someone, it might have been a different story. The higher-ups hid the part about me being drunk – no one tested me, field, breath, or blood. I lost control because I was sleepy. An unfortunate accident was all it was.

Behind the scenes, though, boy howdy. 

I was screamed at. Throttled. Humiliated. Stripped of my badge. 

Then there was Vicki. 

As mad as she was at me getting snipped, it wasn’t like we were done. For a good Mormon woman, “divorce” was a word for soap operas. No, no. Only whispered, never a serious consideration. Around others, she was thankful and blessed I survived intact. Alone, she told me I would have to complete a very long list of making-up over a very long time in order for us to be okay again. 

As in okay okay. As in “letting you anywhere near our bed, let alone my vagina.”

First on the list: church counseling. 

Even in a severely traditional, male-powered system like the LDS, fuck’s sake, the counselor raked me over the coals and then some.

Thankfully, friends of friends of friends helped put me back on my feet with this security gig, even though Vicki had to take a part-time gig at the craft and hobby shop to help with the bills. All in all, we were doing okay, considering. 

Considering losing one’s badge and gun feels a lot like losing one’s dick and balls, even if it only shot blanks. 

So that’s where we were. A perfectly acceptable stalemate. 

When the husband came out of the room, easing the door closed behind him, I knew he was angry. The heat sloughed off in waves. But this was a professor, not a bar brawler. He was angry, embarrassed, and afraid of us all at once. But not afraid enough, not now. Not anymore.

“You understand why we’re here,” I started. Might as well try to get this back on track. I held out my hand. “I’m Beau. This is Logan.”

“Terry,” he said. “My wife is having a heart attack.”

Logan, Mr. Congeniality, said, “I don’t care about the why, okay?” 

I wanted to slap him upside his head. 

“You weren’t here. My wife was telling us good-bye. She thought she was going to die right then. And no one could be bothered?” 

“You have to treat the staff cordially.”

“That’s on them. I don’t think it’s cordial to let my wife suffer.”

I nodded. “Absolutely. You’re right. I understand.”

I did, I really did. I can’t imagine what I’d have wanted to do to these assholes if they’d pulled some of this shit on Vicki, or one of my kids.

But Logan? He couldn’t help himself. “You will follow the rules, or you will not like what’s next. You know what’s next?”

A sneer. He held his wrists together and out. “You want to cuff me now? Solve all your problems.”

I saw Logan, like a gunfighter at high noon, his fingers flicking, wanting to go for those cuffs.

“We don’t have to at all, sir.” 

“Good to know. Can I go in with my wife now?”

If Logan wanted to force the guy to comply, I couldn’t stop him. But I hoped not. I said, “Yessir. Have a good night, sir.”

“My wife’s having a heart attack, you tell me to have a good night.” He shook his head and stepped into the room. Closed the door without another look at us guards. 

Logan let out a breath. “Dude. He is pissed.”

Idiot. 

“I’m going on break. Please, don’t pepper spray anyone until I’m back.”

I found some coffee. I went outside. 

On the curb was the woman’s sister, the granola with the long straight hair and Birks. Sitting, smoking, staring. Getting close to two in the morning. Since I didn’t want to spook her, I made some noises, jiggled the arsenal on my utility belt, and took a wide berth coming around so she’d see me. 

I waved. Like a child. I waved at her. “Hey, remember me? In there? You alright?”

She glared at me, her head nodding in a sort of I can’t even believe you’re talking to me right now. Held the cigarette in an elegant manner, like a book jacket photo. No make-up, not much affect. I don’t know, something about me was drawn to her. But I waited as she sharpened her tongue.

Once she had, “My younger sister is having a heart attack. The doctors and nurses are ignoring her. And they send the goon squad when Terry tries to get her help. I’m not alright, you asshole. Not at all.”

“Can’t say I disagree.”

“Only doing your job?”

Shrug. “That’s why I get the big bucks. Nothing was going to happen. I told him to be a little more careful.”

She took a long drag, then tilted her chin up and blew a stream into the cool air. Even though she was a bit older than me and what I’d call a hard-scrabble Midwestern woman, no great beauty, something about the way she blew smoke and looked me in the eye got blood running to places it shouldn’t have. Or was it that my wife had frozen me out for far too long now and any sort of vibe got my juices going?

“Mind if I sit?” I pointed to the curb beside her. Feeling silly.

“Don’t you have sick people to arrest?”

“Come on.”

She wrapped her arms around her knees and squeezed. “Free country.”

I took off my belt, took a seat, grunting halfway down. I might’ve thought Logan was too much of a balloon to be a cop but I’d gained a beer belly myself. Since I’ve been off beer this past year – not my choice – I guess it was now a custard-filled Bismarck belly. “Name’s Beau, by the way.”

She held out her free hand. “Godiva.”

“Seriously?”

“Well, I wouldn’t want you to run my real name and check me out.”

“Fair.”

“Married, I see?”

I looked at my wedding ring, had forgotten about it to tell you true. “Mm. Four kids.”

“Happily?”

“When I’m not fucking up I’m pretty happy.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Hey, you just got interesting. Give me an example of how you fucked up.”

Sure. Why not? “I got a vasectomy without telling her because she wanted more kids, and I did not.”

Godiva laughed. A hearty, roiling laugh. A little phlegmy. “I’m guessing she caught you?”

“Too small a town to keep a secret. I should’ve known.”

She rocked into me. “My, my. Still together?”

“Oh, she won’t leave me. I won’t leave her, either. We’re both stubborn enough. Oh, and she’s – we’re – Mormon.”

Another laugh, softer. Another pull from the cigarette. “Too bad.”

I thought about asking her if she’d take me to whichever vehicle they’d arrived in and let me slip it to her. Just sex. A physical relief. Not love. Not at all. Bend her over the seat and go, man, go. I imagined a woman like her had secrets. Secrets only revealed when she was naked. How I’d like to know, yeah, how I’d really like to know.

But I was a coward and wouldn’t dare. Instead, I’d head inside to the men’s room and rub one out thinking about how raw and slippery and filthy it could be. Imagine myself as a stronger man than I am, someone who can make a woman like Godiva beg for it, instead of having to beg my wife to even let me hold her hand in church, sleep in my own bed, kiss her on the lips anymore. But that’s who I was. If my wife had ended up in the ER like this, she would’ve ordered me to hunt down these bastard doctors and give them a piece or our…her…mind. Never on my own. Not sure I could work myself up to it.

The brother-in-law, Terry, stumbled out of the sliding doors. Startled us. He saw us sitting together but nothing registered on his face. He wilted to the concrete beside Godiva. Face flushed purple, eyes red and wet. “She’s…um…they took her to surgery.”

“What?”

“The surgeon told me. He told me.”

“Told you? Told you she’s in surgery?”

“Told me…Jesus. She died, Gin. She died. She’s gone. She’s really gone.”

They broke down together, ugly, insistent, painful. And me. A third wheel. Sitting there beside them, wondering how much I’d miss Vicki if she were to suddenly not be there anymore. And…I don’t know, not half as much as Terry would miss…never got her name. 

They embraced and wept and said things neither could understand.

I stood, grabbed my belt, and slipped inside the sliding doors. Carried the belt to the bathroom with me. They weren’t the first people I’d seen lose loved ones on this job. It got easier, though. I locked myself in a stall and dropped my pants. Tried to remember all of the details of Godiva’s grin before Terry cockblocked, at least in my version, what I needed to feel better right then.

Is that cruel? Someone’s wife and sister dead, and me wanting to get off? I mean, people die every other week at this hospital. They just do. We all do. I formed a callous over my heart months ago. What about me? What about my life being worth dying over?

I worked my hand down there. Thought of Godiva’s feet, her hair, her scent. 

Nothing. Whatever I felt outside had faded. 

That was okay.

It would all be okay. 

I sat on the toilet and wondered how Vicki would humiliate me tomorrow.  

Anthony Neil Smith is a novelist (Slow Bear, The Drummer, Yellow Medicine, many more), short story writer (HAD, Bull, Cowboy Jamboree, Maudlin House, Reckon Review, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, BRUISER, many more), and professor (Southwest Minnesota State University). One of his pieces was chosen for Best American Mystery and Suspense 2023. He was previously an associate editor with Mississippi Review Web, and is now editor of Revolution John. His short story collection The Ticks Will Eat You Whole is forthcoming in 2025 from Cowboy Jamboree Press

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Across the Wire Vol. 4

Grief Therapy

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By Carla Sarett

Carla Sarett writes poetry, fiction and, occasionally, essays; and has been nominated for the Pushcart, Best Microfictions, Best American Essays, and Best of Net.  She has published one full-length collection,She Has Visions (Main Street Rag) and two chapbooks, including My Family Was Like a Russian Novel (Plan B) Carla has a PhD from University of Pennsylvania and is based in San Francisco. x/twitter: @cjsarett

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Across the Wire Vol. 4

Two Poems

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By Jeffrey Hermann

You Couldn’t Pay Me

They say to be good at one thing but I can’t decide. I make some phone calls and I send some texts but it’s Friday. People are heading out to Long Island. “Don’t fuck it up” is the best job advice I ever got. The world only needs so many healers. Someone has to drive the truck. Someone has to think about scrap metal. I’m thinking about scrap metal when I discover a thirteenth month. It’s sunny but breezy and it loves people, unlike the others. Offers worth millions come pouring in. Instead I name it after my dog and give it away, no charge. According to the calendar it’s still July. In the Atlantic, sharks are doing what they do. Only the beach people are worried. If there’s blood in the water, they can’t smell a thing. Seen from below, their legs look like flippers. 

Hold On, Is this Thing in Reverse? 

We saw a shadow on an x-ray in the shape of New Jersey. It was nothing, some normal muck inside the body. The doctor rubbed his eyes and left the room. When he got home to his place in Secaucus his kids were watching pilot episodes of shows that never made it. The nurse stayed with us and spoke with her hands; two birds finishing each other’s sentences. I saw them later in the next room delivering difficult news, then they went home to the Palisades. Sometimes I look at the sky and forget which season comes next. Will tomorrow be a little colder or a little warmer? Sometimes I don’t fully trust my car’s instrument panel. People who aren’t afraid of being alone probably get too many phone calls. I silence mine and sometimes miss my wife asking for help. My two greatest fears are letting go of her hand in the hospital hallway and rolling backward over an embankment.

Jeffrey Hermann‘s work has appeared in Okay Donkey, Electric Lit, Heavy Feather, Trampset, and other publications. His first full-length collection of prose poetry and flash fiction will be published by ELJ Editions in 2026. Though less publicized, he finds his work as a father and husband to be rewarding beyond measure.