Tag: across the wire

Three shorts

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by James Keith Smith

Game Night

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

“How about a beer?” my wife asks.

“Or a glass of milk,” I say.

“Do you have soy?” my father asks.

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

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

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

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

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

“Chow?” my father says.

I elbow her under the table.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You mean it?”

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

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

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

The Closers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Round and Round

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

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

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

His mouth is dry. How can he explain?

“Is that you, Fuck-wad?”

He hangs up.

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

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

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

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

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

“Bullshit.” She hangs up.

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

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

“Put on something romantic,” she says.

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

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

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

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

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

At home the porch light is on.

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

“Good,” Beef says.

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

“Very much so.”

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

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

Tags across the wire, farewell transmission, fiction, Game Night, indie lit, James Keith Smith, round and round, short fiction, The Closers

An Ordinary Day

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by Sarp Sozdinler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags across the wire, an ordinary day, farewell transmission, fiction, indie lit, sarp sozdinler

Across The Wire Vol. 8

The Other Garden

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by Craig Rodgers

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hon?”

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

“Can you smell this?”

“Bill, hon, what?”

“Just come look.”

“Are you doing something gross?”

“I’m not joking. There’s a smell.”

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

“What the hell?”

“That’s weird, right?”

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

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

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

“That’s so weird,” she says.

_____

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

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

“Oh. Shit.”

_____

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

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

_____

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

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

“Billy? What is this?”

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

“I don’t understand.”

He pulls her back from the hole.

“It’s nothing.”

She turns wide eyes his way. Horror.

“Nothing?”

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

“You’re going to patch it up?”

“That’s all I need to do.”

“Bill?”

“It’s fine.”

“Bill, what is this?”

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

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

_____

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags across the wire, craig rodgers, farewell transmission, fiction, indie lit, the other garden

Across the Wire Vol. 7

Third Saturday in May

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by Jameson Draper

Roman immediately regretted his outfit choices as soon as he stepped out of the Uber and onto Pimlico grounds. The whole thing was a glorified patch of dirt transformed into gray mud by the formless rain, and he was wearing the white loafers he bought from the thrift specifically for the occasion. The thrift was in the Hispanic part of town. It’s also where he got his white Stetson, which, along with the loafers, he figured came from the body of some older Mexican man, who once deemed these garments his Sunday best. Roman paired the hat and loafers with a loose off-white Oxford shirt tucked into cream linen pants, all sure to be destroyed by the mud. He erroneously thought an all-white fit would be proper and haute, his own personal nod to the commencement of summer and the ceremony of tradition. It was supposed to be the first warm weekend of the year—and it was, nearly touching eighty degrees—but the rain had not been in the forecast. He originally wanted to wear an all-black outfit, since this was a pseudo-funeral for Pimlico, its last year hosting the Preakness Stakes before they moved the Triple Crown race out of Baltimore to the state track down in Laurel to allow for repairs that, Roman was convinced, would never actually happen. He didn’t see the need for repairs to a century-old track; he’d been alive long enough to see the aesthetic charm of old venues turned into something grotesque and efficient for the sake of capital. He lamented the loss of old baseball parks, which, like Pimlico, he’d never been to. This was why he made the hour-long trek down to Baltimore for what he was sure would be the old venue’s swan song.

What Roman found, though, in his porcelain splendor, was not a Kentucky Derby-esque display of snobbish American decadence he yearned to cosplay for one fateful late spring day, but a Petri dish of no-frills debauchery and hedonism, the smell of flowers and cigars replaced by shit and cigarettes. He thought he’d find himself surrounded by southern belle debutantes donning garish hats in their closest sojourn to a Union state; instead he found half-naked women with smeared makeup in crop tops and ripped jean shorts, racing each other along the tops of port-a-potties and double-fisting Black-Eyed Susans, the official beverage of the Preakness Stakes, a peach schnapps and bourbon concoction with a touch of orange juice whose sweetness makes a mint julep taste like bitters. Roman apparently failed to realize this was Baltimore, Charm City, a place with rustic industrial allure built upon the backs of blue-collar workers and dreamers, whose idea of luxury was a cold beer and a fistful of crab guts. He realized, albeit too late, that he thought this would be like Louisville. He accidentally imagined Churchill Downs without realizing it, full of pageantry and performative etiquette, where expensive drugs were done by the American elite behind the closed doors of suites and limousines, where you could see the best wide receiver in the NFL and the richest man in the South standing shoulder-to-shoulder, placing bets on horses you’ve never heard of in amounts you could never fathom. Instead, he found himself in this mud they called the “infield,” a place that somehow escaped the watchful eyes of God, where men in faux leather boots and Make America Great Again t-shirts did key bumps of coke out in the open and fondled unsuspecting girls behind Zyn pop-up tents. If Churchill Downs was a society ball, then Pimlico was a state school frat party. The rain kept coming harder and from the infield the horses could only be seen for a fleeting moment, rounding the second-to-last turn of the races, kicking up mud and disappearing as fast as they came. Roman was disgusted and, moreover, heartbroken.

He stood under a sprawling tent in the beer line, jaded and ready to leave, smoking a cigarette he bummed from an overweight man with a soul patch and a straw cowboy hat adorned with the Coors Light logo, who complimented Roman’s Stetson, by now soaked through. The beer line in the tent was packed to the brim because Ray Lewis would be there signing autographs. Roman looked at the line of unmoving drunkards thoughtlessly waiting like the line was the event itself. When he got to the front—which seemed like it took hours—he convinced the bartender to sell him six beers and three shots, planning not to go through that ordeal again. He poured the shots into a plastic flask he brought and harnessed the beers between his forearm and chest. He walked back outside. The rain had subsided into a sort of steady mist, subdued enough for Roman to stand alone in the mud, drink, and plot his next move. He had none. His loafers were covered in mud, with no more white visible, and the cuffs of his linen pants were spattered. He looked around and saw he was the only person standing alone, everyone else in a group of friends, laughing or crying or puking or sleeping on the lawn. It was clear to him this venue was only used once a year, left to rot for the other fifty-one weekends in this otherwise quiet residential neighborhood. Everything looked sad to him. Even the grandstand, the dilapidated concrete sloping and cracking at its seams, extemporaneously covered by a glass press box that made it look not so much nice again, but like the racetrack was trying to hide its true state of desolation and disrepair. The image of a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound came to Roman. He wandered toward the bathroom. The cement concourse was streaked with unidentified liquid stains and smelled like stale beer, musty laundry and hot dogs. Once he was inside, the scene seemed, at first glance, more congruent with Roman’s expectations. It was full of ambling attendees who paid for seats. They were dressed a bit nicer than the clientele outside, but upon a second glance even they exuded some sort of brokenness in fashion; the men’s black and gray suits poorly tailored, some of them wearing sneakers instead of dress shoes; the women wearing ill-fitting dresses with unbecoming silhouettes, cosplaying themselves a subculture they evidently knew nothing about. In the bathroom, Roman’s loafers were further defiled by the standing water on the floor, most of which, he assumed, was actually stale piss.

Roman lost track of time back at his lonely spot in the infield, drinking away the hours, thinking that maybe they should tear this shit hole down. He downed his beverages quicker than he planned and laid back into the wet earth in an act of surrender, accepting that once he woke up, he may never be able to wash off the mud. But he did wake up, an unknown number of hours later, to a foreign touch and the unmistakable and inscrutable scent of a woman. A woman? He opened his eyes and saw a beauty with golden locks, hazel eyes, small mouth, fair skin, and an inexplicably pristine white dress, leaning over him with a look of concern, rubbing his right arm. She looked like an angel to him, juxtaposed with the roaming miscreants all around her. The deep focus of the scene before him struck Roman like something from a movie. He thought she smelled floral and earthy, but it could’ve just been the still-wet mud beneath him, though he noticed it had stopped raining and, while still cloudy, the sun was attempting to peek through the dense rain clouds. It was like the heavens had opened up to him. He was still very drunk. He thought maybe he was dreaming. He felt himself and felt her arm. All he could muster was a short, confused, “Huh?”

She put her finger on his lips to indicate silence and Roman acquiesced, still mostly unsure of…everything. Then she laid beside him. He wondered why, and worried that her beautiful long hair was going to get dirty from the mud. He looked around and saw no one nearby. It seemed this woman was alone. He turned and looked at her with one squinting eye, his vision going in and out of focus. Closer to him, she smelled like pure ethanol, cheap vodka. He looked at her and she looked at him for almost an entire minute. Neither spoke. Then she took her hand and ran it across his sideburns and through his hair and smiled. At that moment, Roman realized his Stetson had fallen off in his sleep. It sat in a puddle of mud above his head. She moved her hand down to his collar and pulled him close. She closed her eyes and started to make out with him. She unbuttoned the top button of his Oxford shirt and ran her hands through his chest hair. He felt himself growing at her touch. She smiled as she kissed him and exhaled. Roman could smell cigarettes on her breath in addition to the alcohol. All signs, aside from her seraphic beauty, pointed to the fact that she was another pleasure-seeking youth at the overindulgent booze-soaked white kid saturnalia, but for the first time, Roman didn’t care. For a few moments he opened his heart and his body, taking in everything from her scent, her touch, her gaze.

He pulled back from her kiss and said, “What’s your name?”

The woman smiled and pulled away from his grasp; he had wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her in without realizing it. For the first time he wondered if others were looking, but then thought again, and decided he did not care one way or the other. The woman did not respond. She sat up from the ground and grabbed his muddy Stetson. She put it on. Her head was small and the hat was huge, but her smile, glowing out from under its brim, further illuminated her beauty, its very spirit drowning out the mere size of the ruined hat. She pinched his exposed chest, stood up and turned around to walk away. As she strode toward the crowd in the distance, Roman noticed with a mixture of pleasure and astonishment that, somehow, her little white dress was completely clean. There was no mud anywhere. Roman could not fathom how that was possible. He noticed from the taut feeling in his cheeks that he, too, was smiling wide.

He shook off the final remnants of his sleepiness and noticed that in the distance a stage had been set up some time during his rest and Bruno Mars was performing. Bruno Mars was listed on Roman’s Preakness ticket as the “afterparty” performer, meaning he had missed the main race. Normally this would have angered Roman, but he noted with some surprise that he was totally unbothered. He looked around and didn’t see where the woman had gone. He stood up and stumbled half-drunk around the smattering of people that remained for the show—most had gone home, it seemed, after the races, probably because of the rain—and could not find her anywhere. He knew that if she was in his sightline, she couldn’t be missed. She was too bright, a moving orb of light among the drab grayness of the track, to blend in with the crowd. He decided he needed another beer, so he went back to the tent, where the beer line was thankfully much shorter.

Roman got his beer quickly. He walked back outside and stood alone again and scanned the scene before him as he sipped his tepid brew. His clothes were almost completely coated in mud and he was cold to the bone, but he felt a pulsating warmth inside. He looked around and for the first time noticed the hitherto hidden beauty of this American tableau. Patches of grass, glowing verdant and full of life from the downpour, were sprouting up out of the suffocating infield mud. The porta-potties sat in incredibly straight rows on either side of the field in perfect symmetry. The torn-up mud on the only turn on the track he could see was glistening in the afterglow of the rain. The sky in its yellowgray timidity took on a friendly softness. Even the tumbledown grandstand in the distance shone in a new light; its charm was in its disarray and decay, not despite it. Each crack and slope and spore of mold were another story, another layer, in this grand house’s long history. Roman realized—or maybe just remembered—that every scar is a story. A wave of melancholy overtook him; he wished people could just get in touch with the sensuality of downtrodden imperfection. For the same reason he liked the musty old halls of baseball stadiums he’d never been to, he began to develop an acute and dear love for the ramshackle Pimlico. And now it was going to be torn down, mere months away from the cold and unforgiving face of the wrecking ball. And so it would cease to exist, whatever bound to replace it sure to be more soulless, sterile, and empty than what now stood on these mythic grounds.

Something inside Roman changed for good. He was just happy to have been able to see Pimlico as it was always meant to be before it was too late.

He walked off the grounds at dusk and didn’t bother to try and wipe off his shoes.

He had already forgotten that the unnamed woman stole his hat, though he remembered her.

He sat on a curb as the stragglers left the Bruno Mars show.

He watched a group of angry PETA representatives on the opposite corner protesting the inhumane practices of racehorse owners and smiled.

He found a vendor down the block selling leftover Miller Lites for one dollar a pop.

He bought three.

Jameson Draper is a writer from Detroit. He currently lives in Baltimore. His work has appeared in Burial Magazine, Hobart and Michigan City Review of Books, among others. He loves his gray cat, a crisp negroni and a baseball game on a summer night. He is endlessly frightened and is wondering if he could maybe have a bite of your shawarma. Follow him on Twitter @jamdraper.

Tags 3rd Saturday in may, across the wire, farewell transmission, fiction, indie lit, Jameson Draper

Across the Wire Vol. 7

Here We Are

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By Conrad Joseph Walsh

Vegas heat is oppressive. It makes shoe rubber melt into asphalt. The kind of heat that requires dog owners to put literal shoes on their canine’s paws in the summertime.

I drive to Smith’s Food King to buy some Monster Energy drinks. The white ones. I get the drinks and put them in my cart.

I slouch down a few more aisles with no real goal. The cereal aisle screams with loud colors and cartoonish fonts. I add a box of Trix to my cart. A man starts talking to me, and I wish I had my AirPods in.

“None of this stuff is good for us, but here we are, right?”

“Right.”

“Health is the most valuable thing there is. It’s not money. If we’re rich but sick, then what do we really have.”

“That’s a good point.”

“Have a good one, brother.”

“You too.”

I escape the aisle and head for checkout. Gotta get out before another impromptu conversation. Without AirPods, it’s too risky to be in here like this.

The Dalai Lama once said that the ultimate source of happiness is not money and power, but warm-heartedness. But the Dalai Lama is rich. His net worth is 150 mil––so much for that vow of poverty. And before you tell me about how it’s held in a foundation and that he doesn’t have access to it, et cetera, et cetera, what I know is this: his rent is always covered, he has book deals, and that pad in Dharamshala isn’t exactly a dump.

I feel myself atrophy in the parking lot. The palm trees look like candles on a birthday cake, waiting to be lit by the waves of heat radiating off parked cars and abandoned shopping carts on Tropicana.

Conrad Joseph Walsh writes fiction and essays exploring disillusionment, absurdity, and the quiet pressures of modern life. His work has appeared in Expat and elsewhere online. He lives in the American Southwest.

Tags across the wire, Conrad Joseph Walsh, farewell transmission, here we are, indie lit

Across the Wire Vol. 7

short prose

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by Naa Asheley Ashitey

I’m not giving up, but I won’t lie to you: I’m starting to get really tired

It feels like we’re going backwards. No, I know we’re going backwards. Everyone believes we’re the generation that’s going to fix this, but I don’t think we will. I don’t think we ever will.

My dad might still have his November 2008 copy of the Chicago Defender, and I am still able to walk freely in the halls of these ivory towers because Brown V Board passed barely a decade after my father was born, and yet every single day I wonder if all my fuck ups are going to be the reason why the next incoming class in my med school might have no Black students.

The bold, defiant tone I speak with is somehow more hated by third-term Obama liberals I know as my fellow peers than the white man that called me a nigger when I went to pick up my chipotle order the other day. How broken must we be that when I scroll my social media I see more people crying over the fact that we will likely never live under an institution ruled by another Black war criminal. How broken must I be that I, who openly calls that man a war criminal, am still willing to waste 270 characters defending said war criminal in a tweet, because that term has been reduced to another dog-whistle; another word and phrase that I’ve come to hate, alongside “well-spoken,” “educated,” “polished.”

“Akata.”

How broken must we be that we’re going backwards because my people have always moved forward; that we are capable of occupying the spaces built by our own blood, at the cost of the morals and sufferings of our past ancestors being used in speeches about inclusion and progress, as we are now able to participate in imperialistic bombing campaigns and rewriting laws that if we had not undone, we would not be able to be the ones undoing them because we’d still be blocked.

I still hold sympathy for my people who once believed we could change the evil of this world, only to find themselves complicit. Even as I watch families torn apart and children born beneath rubble, I’m still getting text messages from my classmates who are more concerned with the language I use to fight oppression than recognizing the privilege of never having to have fight for the basic civil liberty of sitting down and studying for fifteen hours straight to take a poorly written med school midterm.

Hush little baby please don’t cry, I want you to dream of lights and stars tonight.

When I was a child, I used to have this nightmare about a dinosaur chasing me. If my mother wasn’t shaking me awake, it would often be my sudden jolt and eruption of sobs that would cause her to wake up. My dad would rush in from the living room to help my mom calm down my non-stop babbling about how I don’t want the dinosaur to kill me. Eventually, I would fall back asleep, clutching my favorite brown teddy bear, hoping she would absorb the nightmares.

When I’d wake up the next morning, I could feel how puffy my eyes were. Sometimes as an extra present, I’d have more snot than usual falling down my nose. Though most notably, once I truly was awake and aware of my surroundings, I could recognize physically and mentally that something had shifted; I felt this notable disorientated feeling. At age four I did not know nor use that word, so in four-year-old terms, I felt “crummy” and “bleh.”

Sometimes, my mom was still asleep in her bed or the couch (depending on where I was sleeping that night), or she was already in the kitchen cooking breakfast (or lunch if it was a really bad cry that tired me out). I slowly walked to the bathroom, aware that my vision was slightly worse than normal, especially when I’d bump into the corner of the brown dresser in the room. When I looked at myself in the mirror, it was more terrifying to see how a silly dream that I made up in my head could put me in such a state in which I looked so awful. I felt like I was looking at a shell of myself. I was one year shy of seeing Evanescence’s “Everybody’s Fool” music video but it’s almost uncanny how I created the mirror scene on my own—minus smashing my hand and cutting myself. I’d touch the bags under my eyes, thinking if I pushed down hard enough, the bags would deflate. I’d try to smile and bring back the image of myself that I was used to seeing; one that wasn’t this disheveled. It was futile. The smile would dissipate, and it felt like I was looking at a horror scene. I knew if my mom saw how I looked, she’d worry. So I’d splash cold water on my face (I didn’t know about the ice-cube/spoon-in-freezer trick yet) to reduce the puffiness. Once my mom was awake or done in the kitchen, I’d call her to help me brush my teeth and get ready for the day. She never really asked me more about the nightmares. In retrospect, I’m glad she never did; it almost felt quite nice to leave the nightmare behind and simply move on. She’d walk away to get an extra towel for my bath, but in the seven seconds she was gone, I’d look back in the mirror, touch those eyebags once more and turn away.

I couldn’t swear away nightmares, but I certainly wanted to do whatever I could to avoid them. So, my bright idea: constantly do things that made me happy in the day. I would beg my mom to let us go on a walk in the park across the street or head to the playground two blocks away from the Jewel-Osco we bought groceries at. It was the distraction I needed. If we couldn’t get time to go out, I’d reread some of my favorite books (while complaining to my mom we needed another dollar tree or library run) to my teddy bears and barbies till it was TV time and I could watch Cyberchase. Ultimately, I was distracted, and it felt freeing. I felt so sure that as long I kept this routine up, the nightmares would cease.

And then I joined the gifted program in kindergarten and learned that nightmares could happen in the day and come in the form of other kids. In 1st grade, the arguments turned into yelling, and I started to fall in love with silence. In 2nd grade, I looked for new coping mechanisms and found sharpening a pencil and digging it into my right arm gave me the relief I needed. In 5th grade, I started hoping and begging my mind to give me the dinosaur nightmares in place of watching my home fall apart, and the fast-growing apathy and hate I felt towards myself.

I don’t remember when I stopped being afraid to see what I looked like in the mirror. All I know is that I started to become grateful to wake up and see my disheveled state.

It meant that I was still alive.

I want to be a mother

I want to be a mother. I want to be a good mother. I want to be a better mother than my mother was, not that she wasn’t good or that she didn’t love me, but that I don’t want my daughter to end up like me. I want my daughter to never think about the number of calories in a frappe. I want her to never fear telling me how she feels. She should be able to complete her sentences and not just fall into silence, keeping her true feelings to herself. I want her to always believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, maybe not forever, but longer than age 6. Maybe till she’s 10. That might be too old. I don’t know what age you’re supposed to stop believing in those things, but I know I didn’t believe long enough. I want her to walk in sneakers and heels, or whichever one she likes more, I’ll get her as many as possible in all her favorite colors. I want her to never wake up with the walls of her bedroom rumbling from audio vibrations, if so, it must only come from the TV, never from my voice or her dad’s. I want to nurse all her tummy aches, sing her songs even after she’s fallen into REM, and dance with her even when I don’t want to get up from the ground. I hope she never finds my pill bottles. I hope she never asks about the girls in old photos of mine that I don’t know anymore, and I can spare her from learning the complicated dynamics of friendships and the heartbreak that it can come with. Maybe she’ll know how to make friends better than me, so she’ll never have to learn how to heal from losing what you thought would be life long-friendships. Maybe she won’t have to learn that it will take about a year before you can talk about those people and recall memories without feeling that ache in your stomach and tears welling up in your eyes. Frankly, I hope she wakes up from nightmares about dinosaurs and unintelligible objects, and never from the things I said to her, or the things she says to herself in her head. I want to be a mother. I want to be a good mother. I want to be a better mother than my mother was, not that she wasn’t good or that she didn’t love me. I just don’t want my daughter to wish that her mother would’ve taken SSRIs and believed in therapists as much as she believed in the Lord. I don’t want my daughter to end up writing stupid prose poems at 11:28pm on a Saturday about how she hopes she doesn’t fuck up as a mother, not because I think my mother fucked up. But because I am fucked up, for a lot of reasons. Some of those reasons just happen to include my mother.

Dread without the Jenga Pieces

1:23am:

I can sometimes be a scaredy-cat. Isn’t everyone? No, well, okay then. No, it’s fine, I might as well just be honest here. Yes, I am a scaredy-cat. Anytime I play Mario Kart with my cousins, I request levels that don’t have any of the chain-champers or whatever those fucking creepy blocks are called that fall on your head. Thwomps? Thwamps? Whatever. It is not even fear in a jumpscare manner. It’s just, like, seeing a face turn angry and move quickly to attack that freaks me out. I’m not explaining this right but whatever. Overall, I’m not into scary games or scary movies, though I know a lot about the Five Nights at Freddy’s games from watching all my favorite YouTubers play it. Their reactions to the jump scares are funny so it seems weird that I can handle that type of content, but I can never play any of the complicated Mario Kart levels with the things that scare me or I’ll cry.This is a really stupid confession. I don’t know, I have so many other things that I’m scared of, but I feel like they are things I bring up that inevitably separates myself from people. I’d rather confess about Mario Kart than all the intrusive thoughts I’m fighting back acting on every single moment. But it’s so hard, you know?

You’re supposed to be able to talk to your friends about how you’re doing. I want to tell people that I’m not doing okay. I want to tell people that I’m not really suicidal. I’m not suicidal, like, I’m not. I guess there are times that I just want everything to stop and be silent, but not in a dead kind of way. Or sort of in a dead kind of way. I know they say to reach out to your friends and be honest, but I think I share too much that it scares people or stresses them out. I become the stressful friend, instead of the strong friend confessing I’m having a rough time and I just want someone to know I’m working on it but I’m struggling. I don’t want to push people away, but I also don’t want to keep being open and honest with people about how I’m doing, just to wake up the next morning to discover I’m blocked. It’s a double-edged sword. When I keep everything in, I get hurt. When I decide that I need to free up some gigabytes of storage, I let the choir sing, echoing in a long, empty hall. I share, I laugh, I sob, and end up alone. I get even more hurt waking up to find out that the people I thought I could trust decided I was too much and completely deleted a relationship like it was nothing. Like those years of laughs and hugs was all for nothing. Like my honesty was some kind of contagious disease people needed to protect themselves from.

I just want to be like everyone else who has these struggles but can maintain friendships. What is wrong with me? Was there just some unspoken guideline everyone else got at the beginning of adulthood that never got updated for me? I really want to tell others how I’m doing but it’s nice having people to text and I don’t want my phone to go dry again. Please, I just need someone to tell me what the fuck I should do so this doesn’t dissolve once more.

“…… [chat gpt generating a response].”

Naa Asheley Ashitey is a Chicago-born writer and MD–PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. A first-generation, low-income Ghanaian-American and University of Chicago alumna, she writes at the intersection of race, medicine, and belonging.

Her creative and editorial writing examines how policy, media, and academia reproduce structural violence—and what it means to resist with truth.

Her creative work appears or is forthcoming in Eunoia Review, BULL, Hobart, Michigan City Review of Books, and editorials for The Xylom, MedPage Today and KevinMD. She has been nominated for multiple awards, including Best Small Fiction. More at NaaAshitey.com.

Twitter/Instagram: @foreverasheley
Bluesky: @foreverasheley.bsky.social

Tags across the wire, farewell transmission, Naa Asheley Ashitey, prose

Across the Wire Vol. 7

Alternatives

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By Jenn Salcido

The DJ has just started a new job on a new radio station that plays Tori Amos and makes people in the small town very angry.

The reporter lives in the small town and has noticed that the radio is playing Tori Amos instead of oldies.

One of the things the DJ likes about the radio station is how he simply projects into cars and rooms he will never see if he doesn’t want to, which mostly he does not.

The reporter clandestinely listens to him in one of these rooms. It is the Computer Room. The reporter is 14.

The DJ lives in one of those townhome developments off the highway. He doesn’t yet know anybody in town, and his life is a vector between his townhome and the station. He is a little lonely but mostly fine.

The reporter lives in a different development on the other side of town, one that is lush with sodded bluegrass carpets and Bartlett pear trees that shower rubbery leaves all over the damp sidewalk on days like today.

The reporter’s parents have taken the modem from the Computer Room. I hate them, she thinks.

Across town the DJ is cozy at work in the studio, sipping herbal tea between the different little on-air bits he does. “Hey, I’m The Oracle and that was Tori Amos, of course, with ‘Crucify.’”

The DJ likes that record but honestly he’s a little pissed off about the new mandate he’s gotten from the media conglomerate who bought the station. He looks with disdain at the printout that lists the mandatory top 25 rotation, all of which he must fit in “organically” during his slot. “And next up? We’ve got Suzanne Vega with ‘Tom’s Diner.’”

The reporter comes home and stomps up to her room and turns on her radio and she is SO HAPPY when she hears “Tom’s Diner.”

The DJ looks at his watch and is worried that if he doesn’t have enough time left to get through the mandatory top 25 rotation, he’ll get put on DJ probation. This would not be good; it has happened to him once before. In that case he was simply reading a public service announcement and made some unfortunate flourishes with language that were not appropriate for the time of day.

The reporter is pacing around her room, thinking about all the instant messaging she could be doing were the modem not in modem jail. Recently, she has obtained an internet boyfriend and is now more eager even than usual to hear that clickity clack static and the “YOU’VE GOT MAIL!”

Sometimes when her father wants to make her angry he teases her by announcing “YOU’VE GOT MAIL!” whenever he enters a room.

After school the next day the reporter comes home to find that her parents have relented and the modem is plugged back in. No one is home to tell her otherwise so she logs in, finds no mail, clicks around a bit.

Inspired by her growing stack of SPIN magazines, she has started to make her own website, accessible via the World Wide Web. She has figured out that she can make Word documents and save them as .html files. She likes trying out different backgrounds. She has learned how to loop an image over and over and over. She can, for example, make a page with a background that looks like stars in an infinitely scrolling sky. It’s hard to read the writing on that particular background, though.

Once she has her home page arranged enough, she opens her email and writes the DJ. He is going to be the first interview for her new online magazine on the World Wide Web.

The DJ wakes up to start his Saturday, and feels the paunch of middle age sliding down his hips when he gets up from the couch. He thinks he should start exercising soon, probably. He lights a cigarette and gets coffee going.

He goes over to the computer and logs in. “WELCOME! YOU’VE GOT MAIL!”

TheOracle107@aol.com clicks on his inbox. He skims the subject lines, deletes some scams. There is a note from an address he hasn’t seen before. He opens the email.

Dear Mr. The Oracle, I am looking to interview respected figures in music culture for my magazine. I really enjoy listening to your show and have found a lot of my favorite artists because of you. Do you think I can interview you? We can do this over IM. Respectfully, Laurel M.”

He cackles. Dear Mr. The Oracle!

“Sure,” he writes the reporter. “Call me Dave, though. IM is fine. I’m around today.”

Sent. Whoosh.

“YOU’VE GOT MAIL!” comes the call to the reporter’s post in the computer room. After she opens her mailbox and reads the note, she checks and sees that TheOracle107 is online!

“Hey,” she types into the void.

“Hi,” the DJ answers back.

They get to talking. The morning zips by. The reporter’s questions are a bit timid. The DJ imagines she’s maybe just out of college, doing her first internship at a radio station somewhere.

The reporter cannot believe her luck. What a coup for the first issue.

They chat for a while, mostly about the music itself but a little about themselves, what they like, what movies they’re watching lately. The flow of their rapport makes the DJ relax a little bit too much and he catches himself complaining about work, about how that’s changed. He realizes he’s holding his breath when he thinks about that.

After the conversation winds down, the reporter copies and pastes the chat transcript into a Word doc, which she plans to edit later.

The reporter asks the DJ if he has a bio.

“Sure,” he types. “All celebrity DJs do.”

Later that night, the reporter is still situated in the Computer Room when she hears the shrill demand for her to appear at the dinner table “right this minute.” She complies.

“I will take this to go,” she says, grabbing the Schwann’s breaded chicken patty with rice pilaf accoutrement. “I am working.”

Back in the Computer Room, enraptured by the sallow light of the cathode ray tube, the reporter can feel a piece of herself float up from the top of her head and dissipate into a realm that knows neither time nor space. This piece bears little relation to the crepuscular creature in the chair.

She opens the 30 second sample clip of “I’ll Be There For You” by the Rembrandts that she downloaded and plays it a few times in a row.

The DJ is alone again in his apartment. I should try harder to make friends, he thinks. Instead, he makes his way to his desktop and clicks the icon.

“WELCOME!”

There is always a little pause between the welcome and the announcement of mail. In this pause, hopes and dreams are made and crushed; the reporter knows this as well, if not better, than the DJ. The reporter is in the throes of a full-blown internet addiction, whereas the DJ is just a bit bored.

The DJ has no mail, but sees the reporter’s handle in the chat box.

The reporter is busily typing a very long-winded fiction to her internet boyfriend about her daily activities. In the fiction, she has been invited to a party, and she’s going to the mall with some friends to pick out an outfit. It’s hard sometimes to keep the reality from straining into the fiction, especially when she’s nearing the time of day when she has to shut everything down and prepare for the next morning. The mornings are firmly grounded in a horrible reality, with no room for the fiction.

Because she is no dummy, she also includes a critique of a long, old book she has not read.

Satisfied and clicking “send,” she is surprised when she sees a new window, an invitation to converse with Mr. The Oracle.

“Hey!” she writes.

“Sorry to bug.”

“Not bugging.”

“Wondering if you needed anything else. For the magazine.”

“Hmmm I haven’t really finished the article just yet. Been really busy at work.”

The reporter re-enters her body. Her eyes flash around the room, as if some source of information could possibly leak details of her appearance or her life through IM.

“Oh yeah cool cool,” he says.

The DJ thinks he sounds dull. Why does he care?

“I’m really close though, like going to finish it soon. It’ll be great.”

“Yeah.”

“How are you? Are you doing well, or are you also staring directly into the meaningless nothing?”

He laughs, out loud, at that, and starts typing again.

For a few days in a row now, the reporter has been corresponding with the DJ in short bursts on instant message. They haven’t gone too deep on any one thing; mostly she talks to him about music she likes. She gets some recommendations from him and tells him a few lies to make her reading life sound smart.

She tells him about how, at Circuit City, she sometimes hides CDs in the wrong alphabetical order so that they will be there the next time she comes, and that is when he asks her: “Do you want to grab a drink?”

She blinks.

Her cheeks redden. Even though she knows the doors are closed, she looks over her shoulder. She is smart! She is desirable! She is, as her internet boyfriend told her while they were having “cyber” yesterday, “so sexy.” The DJ wants to go get a drink with her.

Don’t worry. This is not that kind of story.

Her mind doesn’t go to the after school special place where older men take advantage of girls, kidnapping them from sleepy midwestern towns and making them their slaves in some creepy cabin in the woods. She’s not even thinking about age at all, or questioning the DJ’s motives, or remembering that she’s been frequently told she comes off as older and more mature in her writing.

Instead, her thoughts go to a different place, a softer place. There is heat there, and she feels some possibilities opening up to her that she’d never before considered. In her life, there is an unbreakable wall that separates her from the notions of desire, and from being desired. In her internet life, she is the recipient of genuine feelings from her internet boyfriend, and also she begins to inhabit the life that she projects to him. When she wakes up in the morning, there is a small, clouded window of time when she is no longer inhabiting her life, but her other life, and her other life is exactly how she wants it.

When her internet boyfriend ::leans in and plays gently with hair::, she feels the flutters in her heart that all the adult contemporary radio programming has promised there would be.

She feels that finally, here in the other space, she has become desired, desirable.

“Soooo ummmm” she types, and adds a smiley face with a nose, which seems less flirtatious than the smiley face without the nose. “I have a boyfriend actually, sorry.”

Across town, the DJ is listening to the new Soundgarden record and flipping between windows of his web browser when he registers the sound of her response. He had gotten deep into a Usenet forum rabbit hole and had totally forgotten he had offered the reporter a date.

It bloops again. “Sorry, r u mad?”

“Oh no haha all good,” he assures her, then closes the window.

Jenn Salcido is a writer from Los Angeles. Her short fiction has appeared in Vlad Mag, Zac Smith’s Chrismzine, X-R-A-Y, JAKE, and Back Patio Press. You can read her work at www.jennsalcido.com.

X: @jenneralist

Tags across the wire, alternatives, AOL, dj radio, farewell transmission, indie lit, Jenn Salcido, short story

Across the Wire Vol. 7

The Fifth Hit

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by Tyler Plofker

September 2, 2026

Robert D. Manfred Jr., Commissioner

The Office of the Commissioner of Baseball

1271 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY, 10020

Dear Mr. Robert Manfred,

I hope you and your family are well and looking forward to the Labor Day weekend. The sun is so warm this time of year. This is Jimmy Granes of the Baltimore Orioles. The reason for this letter is to apprise you of my efforts in identifying the Fifth Hit. I hope you will be patient with me; I do not want to leave anything out or anything unclear.

Being a student of the game yourself, you will recall that during Game 1 of the 1886 World’s Championship Series, Chicago White Stockings’ cleanup hitter Fred “Dandelion” Pfeffer was thrown out at second base trying to stretch his RBI single into a double. It is my contention that Pfeffer’s mistake was not an unintentional baserunning blunder, but rather, the first public attempt at finding the Fifth Hit. Before Game 7 of the 1925 World Series between the Washington Senators and the Pittsburgh Pirates, the infield dirt was doused in gasoline and set on fire; ostensibly to dry the rain-soaked diamond, however, contemporaneous records paint a different picture. The diary entry of William McKeen (second-in-command groundskeeper) for October 15th, 1925, reads simply, “It did not work.” Again and again, these trials show up. Aparicio’s fall at third. Germany Schaefer and his steals of first. Manny being Manny? More accurately, in my view: Manny being an astute and diligent investigator of the Fifth Hit.

Single, Double, Triple, Homerun. Single, Double, Triple, Homerun. When did the thought of a fifth emerge? Infielder Mike McGeary and Third Baseman Warren White’s letter correspondence from the years 1885–1891 provides the earliest written evidence. McGeary writes of his ideas (“[A] plump Belgian Draught, salivating on an autumn day”) and White gives his own. McGeary rails against the fools who accuse him of “game-fixing.” White writes, “Time is no longer of a benefit to us.” I have seen these letters, have been allowed to study them through the goodwill of their descendants. White’s great-great-great-grandson, Paul, is a fabulous baker, a wonderful baker; the man can really bake.

In the 1930s, there were a number of ballplayers—dimwits, morons—who argued that the Fifth Hit was merely an inside-the-park homerun; i.e., that the homerun can and must be separated into inside-the-park and outside-the-park and, therefore, five hits. But this was rightfully and forcefully mocked by their successors, and is clearly absurd—inside-the-park and outside-the-park are two different manifestations of one kind of hit, in the same way as one can have a ground-rule double and a traditional double, or a single and a bunt single. These are different flavors of the hit they correspond to, not entirely new ones. Dobermanns and Shih Tzu are both types of dogs. I am sure you agree, Mr. Manfred.

I learned of all of this—though unconsciously, I feel it must have been with me from the start, from the very beginning—only this past off-season. Reading Christy Mathewson’s 1912 baseball history/instruction manual/collection of anecdotes, “Pitching in a Pinch; Or, Baseball from the Inside,” I was struck by this passage:

Then Lobert, the tantalizing Teuton with the bow-legs, whacked out a home run into the left-field bleachers and slowed at third with a mocking smile on his face which would have gotten the late Job’s goat. You would have thought he’d done something more than knock a four-bagger.

“[S]omething more than knock a four-bagger.”

From there, I simply followed the thread. Clear on the history, from the first day of this year’s spring training, I began.

I have attempted more than could possibly be listed here. I have concluded a triple by springing up on my left foot and then striking the base with the intermediate phalanx of my right pinky. I have—and I’m sure you’ve seen the footage—I have hit a bouncing single up the middle and marched, half-step, straight from the bag to the bleachers in center, pulling up my uniform, revealing my pale belly, slapping it as if a dholak drum. I have hit a smoking line drive while visualizing the preposterous mustache of Dr. Thomas Wang (more on the languid doctor later). I have smashed (absolutely barreled) balls with all manner of things in my mouth. A grape. A roofing nail. A hornet. One night, with no one else in the ballpark, I sliced a ball down the line, slid prone into second base, and slowly and meticulously gyrated my groin against it until fruition; but, while a pleasurable double, the hit remained, no less and no more, a double.

Once, on an off day, I thought I found it in the maneuvers of a gas station attendant. I had hit what appeared to be an infield single the day before—could every moment since then, every step and every breath, the shoveled putout in the bottom of the inning, the bumper-to-bumper drive home, the morning coffee with too much Sweet’n Low, could it all have been part of it, part of the Fifth Hit which had now just ended with my gas station attendant, a Mr. Francisco Marcello Capionne—whose hair leaves a lot to be desired—a Mr. Francisco Marcello Capionne, jiggling the aluminum nozzle free, letting the gasoline drip and drip and drip onto the back wheel of my 2024 Lincoln Navigator? But the thought left me as quickly as it came. No, not this time. I paid the man in banknotes.

You know, of course, that I am slashing .314/.427/.658, good for a 193 wRC+, Mr. Robert Manfred? I am leading the league in fWAR by a two-win margin. Over the last three seasons combined, I have accrued almost 28% more value than the man behind me. This is to say: the manager lets me do what I want. Old Tony Mansolino does not believe, but he does not stop me. “Keep it mostly in blowouts,” he says. “I’ll try, skip,” I say, winking. Yesterday I licked home plate clean.

Sometimes I have doubts. Sometimes I wallow. Sometimes the thought pops into my head that this life is nothing but an inexhaustible maze of horrors. But then I remember Mike McGeary’s 28th letter to Warren White, McGeary’s 28th letter to White in which he states, “I know it in its absence.”

In the 17th chapter of the first Book of Samuel it is written, “And he took his staff in his hand, and chose him five smooth stones out of the brook, and put them in a shepherd’s bag which he had, even in a scrip; and his sling was in his hand: and he drew near to the Philistine.” Plato claims the five regular polyhedra—tetrahedron, hexahedron, octahedron, icosahedron, dodecahedron—to be the fundamental building blocks of the physical world. The Hadith enumerate five distinct pillars of Islam. The Pandava brothers (Yudhishthira, Bhima, Arjuna, Nakula, Sahadeva) of the Mahabharata number five. The Fir Bolg chieftains of the Lebor Gabála Érenn number five. Celestial mechanics describes five points, referred to as Lagrange points, where the gravitational pull and centripetal force between any celestial masses are necessarily and always in perfect equilibrium. There are five basic human senses. Five fingers to a hand, five toes to a foot. The Five Holy Wounds of Christ.

Let us not beat around the bush any longer, my esteemed, handsome, well-groomed friend. Let us put all the marbles from the bag onto the end table. The fact is this: My languid, hilariously-mustachioed Dr. Thomas Wang, he of the curled, trembling upper lip and eyes like golden rubies, told me a week ago what I already knew: I am dying. My pancreas is not cooperating with the rest of my body. My remaining time is best denominated in months. You, as such an intelligent baseball man, Mr. Manfred, may have noticed the 193 wRC+ mentioned above, while exceptional, is a whopping 34 points lesser than what I was running as of the end of July. My production will continue to dip and soon I will no longer be able to play; soon I will be counting scuffs on the ceiling and my only hits will be into the bedpan.

Really, this letter is not a briefing; it is a request. If I do not find the Fifth Hit in my dwindling inhales—and I may not, I have no doubt I may not—this letter is a request. Open the fields, Mr. Robert Manfred. Open the fields. That is my request. Fields across this great, lush, green country; men and women and children swinging, experimenting. Making the rules up as they go. New rules no one has ever thought of and old ones no one is left to remember. Thousands and thousands of baseball diamonds, at every school, at every campground, at every workplace. At every prison and every hospital courtyard. In the abandoned alley behind P.S. 112 and in the middle of the White House South Lawn. Long-tressed women snorkeling in Chesapeake Bay. Maybe there is a horseshoe crab. Men of all sizes giving yellow-throated birds something nice. Perhaps a small bear filled with sand. Young girls eating cotton candy through their nose and wiggling out their last baby tooth, tossing it, hitting it real good alright with a metal bat. Little boys hopped up on Shirley Temples, so many Shirley Temples, outrageously above any reasonable serving size recommendation of Shirley Temples, jitterbugging wild to Songs of the North American Bullfrog. A film projector that doesn’t work well. Big-time scrapes, thorn bites left unbandaged. Pencils. Become the commissioner of the Fifth Hit, Mr. Robert Manfred, help us find it. It will require a great deal of funding, I understand. I understand that. Start at the top. Reach out to the President. If the fool can get but one thing right, let it be this. And if he refuses, turn to local government, private money. Problems there, then turn to the charity and the goodwill of the people. The people, Mr. Manfred. Get the funds however you must and build. If you don’t want to admit what the push is for, that is okay. If you don’t think the public is ready for that, that is alright. Just say the initiative is to “grow the game” or to “positively impact health.” The people will understand, intuitively, what needs to be done. You, Mr. Robert Manfred, born into a family of five—mother, father, brother, sister, and you, born a boy and now the commissioner of the Major Leagues—you, Mr. Robert Manfred, know that better than anybody.

Grass is something to smell. The sun is so warm this time of year.

With love and sincerely yours,

Jimmy Granes

Tyler Plofker is a writer in NYC.

Tags across the wire, baseball, farewell transmission, fiction, mlb, opening day, Robert Manfred Jr, the fifth hit, tyler plofker

Across the Wire Vol. 7

Two Stories

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by Kent Kosack

Zuidema

When I was a kid, David Zuidema would pump our septic tank. Each lawn in our neighborhood had a container full of sewage buried in it. He told my mother to get my sisters to stop taking such long showers. Said they were making him rich. But they never stopped. Teenage girls have needs that younger brothers and the septic tank man can’t fathom. I took normal-length showers. I liked to stand under the red heat bulb recessed into the ceiling. It felt like a second sun up there. Maybe that’s how God feels to His faithful. I don’t know. I’m not religious. But it’s cold where I’m standing now, and I want to believe in something.

Quantum Leap

My sister is visiting for Thanksgiving. My girlfriend C. is drunk but managing. I put in the Quantum Leap DVD I borrowed from the library. Sam leaps through time, righting historical wrongs. My sister and I watched it as kids. The house has all the right smells. Turkey. Stuffing. Various casseroles. C. is drunker. Rambling and scattered. She thinks she’s charming. My sister eyes C., me, asking a question too complicated to answer. We watch one episode, another. We think about leaping through time. Think about fixing our lives. We’re on the edge of our seats. A crashing sound from the kitchen. C. swears. Fumbles with something. We miss the parade. The dog show. The football games. Miss all that might have been. I put in the next DVD.

Kent Kosack is a writer with work forthcoming in Subtle Body Press, the Heavy Feather Review, Magazine1, L’Esprit Literary Review, and 3:AM Magazine. You can find some of his essays, reviews, and short fiction at kentkosack.net

Tags across the wire, farewell transmission, Kent Kosack, Quantum Leap, short story, Thanksgiving, Zuidema

Across the Wire Vol. 7

Archie Cruz and the Bridge to the End of the World

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By Albert Rodríguez

Archie Cruz moved from Greenwich Village to Williamsburg, then from Williamsburg to Bushwick, and eventually to Fort Lee. Each relocation felt less like a move than a gradual subsiding, a slow fizzing-out, like champagne left open overnight.

The retreat hadn’t been entirely voluntary. Archie had worked in finance, living by the old grammar of ratios and balance sheets, the faith that hid in the small, haunted pauses between trend lines. He’d built his career the traditional way—patiently, with a restraint that now seemed almost anachronistic. In the altered order of things, this steadiness passed for a defect.

Artificial intelligence arrived with a different tempo. It came into the world like a polished guest at an overcrowded party, fluent and ingratiating. It charmed executives, soothed analysts, and slipped into Archie’s chair without ever needing to announce itself. What others welcomed as innovation looked like a form of extinction—a quiet undoing of human sovereignty.

Archie was replaced suddenly and with a kind of surgical neatness, the way a tiger removes the throat from its prey. The machines hadn’t seized the world; they’d been invited in, settled at our desks as if we’d always suspected we were an interim species and deserved to be replaced.

For a time, Archie’s unimpeachable reputation kept him afloat. The company offered a new title, a new set of responsibilities—a gesture of continuity more than anything else. He was to “oversee” the machines, a phrase that carried its own quiet joke. Human oversight, they called it, though the term made him wince. What he actually did was stand guard over the forces responsible for his disappearance. The euphemism of the day was that he provided a human touch, though everyone knew that the only thing a person could reliably add was delay and the occasional mistake.

His presence functioned less as labor than as sentiment, a ceremonial remnant of the old order.

The demotions came for others with the steady rhythm of tides. Titles dissolved, duties floated away, offices migrated without explanation. The structure of his career thinned out, until finally he resembled a forgotten filing cabinet someone had neglected to push to the curb.

Then came the call. A short meeting. Polite regret. No hard feelings. And with that, he was dismissed—sent out to pasture with the gentleness reserved for things no longer needed.

After that, Archie drifted—lightly, almost politely—toward the edge of his own life. Later he would say it was the closest he’d ever come to despair. For most of his adulthood he had moved through the world in a confident stupor, buoyed by the unexamined belief that things, in the broad run of time, would work out. He had been, in the plainest sense, a cheerful man.

The collapse of his career stripped his defenses. He lost his footing in stages. The absence of steady income, the fading prospect of marriage, the quiet death of the family he once imagined—all of it pressed on him in ways he couldn’t articulate, a set of blurred weights that made each day feel slightly narrower. The future no longer seemed indifferent; it felt adversarial.

His finances were pitiful. He had six, maybe eight months of rent in a savings account. After that, New York—his city, his arena—would cast him out. The odd jobs kept him afloat only in the way aspirin steadies a fever: briefly, symbolically. A delivery route for a week. A stint as a nightclub bouncer. Painting work in Kips Bay. None of it added up.

If he couldn’t find something that restored both solvency and a sense of self, he would be pushed to the perimeter of the map: Newark, Trenton, Bridgeport—places that felt less like destinations than sentences.

Now and then Archie caught himself making peace with his status as an exile—not only geographic, but existential. He wandered through ideological cul-de-sacs, dipped into digital subcultures devoted to grievance and squandered promise. At one point he even considered whether “incel” might be his new station in life, though the forums rejected him outright.

He was, they insisted, too fit, too credentialed, too conventionally presentable. Someone accused him of “aesthetic fraudulence.” He decided to take it as a compliment.

It was in this suspension between former usefulness and looming irrelevance that Archie met a new kind of sadness. And with that sadness came the bridge.

Late spring. The sunlight felt provisional, the air unsure of its own warmth. Archie left his apartment in Fort Lee and went for a run. It wasn’t fitness he was chasing but escape, the hope that motion might quiet the mind.

He usually avoided the George Washington Bridge. The vast steel colossus had a way of amplifying his darker thoughts. But on this afternoon he made an exception. The views, he told himself, were worth the risk.

Halfway across the bridge, shirt damp, breath thinning, he saw her—a woman gripping the rail, disheveled and trembling. For a moment he couldn’t tell whether she was resisting the drop or reaching for it.

His body acted before thought arrived. He pulled her back. They went down hard on the walkway.

The wind tangled her hair like ivy across her cheeks. She was beautiful. Her name was Mendi, an Ivy League graduate.

Later, over dinner, she tried to explain.

“I wasn’t trying to die. Not exactly. It felt like… something inside me stepped forward, and I couldn’t step with it.”

“Like you wanted to be near the edge, not past it.”

“Yes. Yes. God. Exactly. I wasn’t jumping—I was leaning. I just didn’t know how to step down.”

“Most people don’t.”

She watched him then, her eyes glassy yet alert.

“So what are you? A guardian angel in gym shorts?”

“No. Just unemployed.”

Her laugh burst out of her, small and sudden, like a hiccup of joy after a long illness.

In the weeks that followed she brought him fruit baskets, as though the debt of being pulled from the brink could be settled in kiwis and candied pecans. The deliveries grew increasingly ornate.

One came with a note: Thank you for standing between me and the wind.

Archie Cruz began returning to the bridge. Not every day, not even with intention, but often enough that a ritual took shape. He stood there in the evenings, collar raised, keeping watch.

It surprised him how many others came. People approached the bridge the way some approach confession: not always to jump, but to take stock. Many resembled him—tired, decent-looking, strangely invisible. Former executives, displaced engineers, solitary figures with shoes too polished for the lives they were living. They weren’t there to die, not exactly. They were there to test the drop. To confirm its existence.

Archie spoke with them, first with clumsy concern, then with something steadier. He grew familiar with the signals: the twitching hands, the gaze slipping past the skyline, the unnerving quiet that seemed to detach from the person producing it. Listening became its own discipline.

In time he constructed an education for himself. He read late into the night, studied case files, took online courses in crisis intervention. Slowly, almost accidentally, he became a presence on the bridge—a secular priest tending to the threshold. He talked to people on the verge of their own disappearance, coaxing them back toward the ordinary daylight of their lives.

He never accepted a payment. The work was compensated in another currency, one that renewed something in him that the world had written down to zero.

Inadvertently, Archie Cruz had stumbled into a vocation. He grew so skilled at talking people back from the edge that a magazine sent a reporter to profile him. Soon he was a local hero. A television crew followed, filming him in winter light as he walked the length of the bridge.

The story kept expanding. The mayor presented him with a ceremonial key. A billionaire, stirred by his improbable compassion, offered several million dollars to help Archie establish an institute to study and counter the social fallout of the AI revolution.

The institute evolved into a foundation. Then came a Time Magazine profile. After that, the opportunities multiplied. Through it all, Archie carried himself as though he were only incidentally involved in his own success, standing a little offstage, bemused by the spectacle. He considered himself fortunate, knowing that others had not been so lucky.

Archie and Mendi married in a small ceremony overlooking the Hudson, their vows composed not of promises but of recognition. In the farmhouse they bought upriver, they grew tomatoes and raised daughters. This, he felt, was the one certainty he could hold without reservation: his loyalty to his family. Everything beyond that—the weather of the future—remained unstable, a rumor of a world still waiting for its proper name.

He never entered politics, though overtures came. The notion of campaigning struck him as faintly indecent. Instead, he finished his PhD and began teaching at NYU, offering courses on social entrepreneurship and the ethics of intervention. For him these subjects were not abstractions but continuations of the work that had reshaped his life.

Students adored him. In their online reviews they mentioned his quiet voice, his understated humor, and the sense that he was a modern prophet pointing the way forward.

Once, a perceptive student asked him what had saved him at the bridge. Archie paused, as if testing the question for sincerity.

“Nothing saved me,” he said. “I just kept showing up.”

Albert Rodríguez is a Brooklyn-based emerging writer whose fiction has appeared in Litro Magazine USA, Five on the Fifth, White Wall Review, Platform Review, Across the Margin, Mr. BULL BULL, Modern Literature, INK Pantry, Literally Stories, and other outlets. A graduate of Borough of Manhattan Community College, he draws on his years working as a handyman in Manhattan’s historic buildings, a vantage that continues to shape the texture and temperament of his work.

Tags across the wire, Albert Rodriguez, Archie Cruz and the Bridge to the End of the World, Brooklyn writer, farewell transmission, NYC story, short story, working class

Across the Wire Vol. 7

Significance

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by Frank Carellini

He was sure the banging outside his door was one of those dreams within a dream. He had planned too diligently to get a full night’s sleep: the last coffee of the day before two PM, a six PM dinner with low acids, an eight PM wine, a double dose of the sleeping medication at ten and, an hour before swallowing little pill after little pill, abstaining from any screens, even for telling time, which he substituted by getting up from bed to squint at the little green numbers ticking away on the microwave until it was ten-thirty, by which time the medication would move everything into a slow motion frame and put him to rest.

He resisted the urge to lay down at eight-thirty after the tipsiness of the large glass of barolo began to lull the room around him into one giant warm velvet curtain by reading a light novel that required little work and was in the category he regarded as entertaining but not informative. His eyes burned when they closed and opened in slower and slower intervals, but he resisted until he urinated at least twice more, not wanting to be woken up by the urge to pee until at least five AM, from which he could slowly start the day in the bronze, purple dawn of the morning and set the coffee maker to brew a bold, rich, perfectly opaque cup.

He settled under the covers, with the automatic temperature controls set to a perfect sixty-eight degrees of a hotel room. The coolness of the linen envelope him. He put on the satin eye mask from the luxury airline he used to fly back and forth to Paris, where in his second home, he drew the curtains at six AM with a strong dark tea, and would run along the Seine until the museums opened and he could be first in line to say hello to Monet in the l’Orangerie, accompanied, of course, with the complete Das wohltemperierte Klavier through his noise canceling headphones. Would listen to completion day after day, until his stomach called for a meal, until autumn called him back to New York, where by five PM or so the sun already set.

It would’ve hardly been possible that anything outside of an earthquake, which didn’t occur here, would wake him up. The noise continued for a few moments. Was that the trash compactor? What, he thought, could possibly be the significance of the trash compactor activating in his dream. A trash-like smell of leftover meals floated into his room. Dr. Stevenson had warned that vivid lucid dreams could be a side effect of the medication, which he welcomed as they occasionally inspired a small painting he could make while sitting on his window ledge, using the period of uninterrupted natural light between one and three PM in the afternoon, and kept him busy even if they would never be seen in a gallery, but could be given as unsolicited gifts to the doormen or the women he encountered in cafes who had not heard of his writing. The trash compactor continued to chew, now accompanied by the opening and closing of an apartment door, letting out a whirl of clanking champagne glasses and boisterous, inaudible bursts of conversations. A party? Which hardly would occur without him having known about it or at least being alerted to it on courtesy. Usually, he’d find a cream-colored envelope regrettably, but kindly, informing him of a soiree with a live musician from the Juilliard school hosted to play Chopin’s Nocturnes, all of them, on the baby grand piano that occupied its very own room in the four-bedroom penthouse that sat across from his studio. He was welcomed if he wanted, but they knew he preferred Schubert to Chopin when it came to nocturnes, an irreconcilable difference that had caused him to clamor with zest at the first party such that he spilled red wine onto the white coat of the mr. host, and since had received the cream-colored envelopes informing him of the parties, rather than the ultramarine ones inviting him. It continued to clap, the trash compactor, for what must have been half an hour, which of course in the dream could have been only a few minutes or several hours, he forgets which way it goes, and of course may not have been the trash compactor at all, but some nightmare of Chopin being chopped into clunks by a Juilliard student, which was a possible side effect of the double dose of medication.

In this part of the dream, he rose from the bed naked and watched his shadow splay on the ochre floor, fast like a demon, as he drifted across the room to get his computer, which according to Dr. Stevenson should sit on the opposite end of the room when it was time to sleep as the new studies showed that a ten foot radius from anything electronic was best for full REM recovery, a discovery by one of the billionaires investing in living forever. The night mode of his screen shed a mild yellow light around him in an abbreviated aura that lit the upper half of his body. He searched for a while about the significance of trash in dreams, coming to some conclusion or the other that it had to do with cleaning up, cleansing, resetting, a perfect premise for a perfect night’ sleep. Reassured, he went back to sleep in his dream, watching the shadows of fanciful animals cast by the WiFi router sprint across the ceiling, counting them one by one.

In the next dream, he woke around midnight.This time it was his door. What is the significance of that, he wondered. Squinting through the eyehole, a man in a short beanie cap and round glasses peered inward. He had seen this man before, a patient of Dr. Stevenson’s, buzzing into the apartment directly next to his. The man must have been having another late-night episode. Wrong door, he whispered from inside, as the door began to visibly shake with each knock, as if it was going to shatter. Hadn’t the resident manager received his note about Dr. Stevenson’s patients visiting outside business hours? It hardly felt appropriate. This was a home, after all. Perhaps in the dream, he hadn’t yet written the request to the resident manager. He found his phone, buried in the drawer and unlocked it through one squinting eye and a hand partially shading himself from the brightly lit background of his self-portrait on top of the white snowy mountain, a photo chock-full of symbolism. He drafted the email, sent around one AM, and received an immediate automatic reply that the request would be addressed within business hours starting Monday at nine AM, and if it was an emergency to please dial 9-1-1.

He laid back in bed, squarely into the four plump pillows, which again surrounded him in coolness. This was refreshing. Hadn’t Dr. Stevenson told him no scrolling? Oops, didn’t even realize he took his phone to bed. The medication had worn off, and a warm sweat began to displace the coolness around his body, which we refreshed in intervals by rolling side to side. Scrolled through the new videos that had been posted since yesterday evening. Oh wow, hadn’t seen that comedian in a long time, thought he was a goner. He propped the computer up on his knees and watched the old comedian’s new routine, letting out little laughs in bubble-like exhales. Through one of the three tall windows, a bright white light blared. That goddamn neighbor again, doing whatever he does on that big computer all hours of the night. Doesn’t this guy ever stop? Hardly a neighbor, as he didn’t live in this building, but the newer apartment one building over. It was one of those modern ones like a sideways shipping container. He stepped onto the window ledge, like a model in some sort of display window and banged against the glass naked, his body swinging in motion to get the attention of the neighbor who sat in a headset back in a chair with a video game controller. A woman in a bra and underwear came and went in the background, making eye contact with his fully naked body, dodging away and yelling to the man from behind the wall, directing his eye contact upward towards the window. Dr. Stevenson knocked at the door. He just got a call from the resident manager. You promised me no more nude flashes if I prescribed the sleeping meds, he called from right outside the room. His shadow dissipated as he walked away. He let out a little laugh. Dr. Stevenson said sometimes he would make an appearance in these dreams, but not to take it at face-value. Don’t forget to have some fun, it’s just a dream, right? A thump thundered from under him. What, had the floor below him been turned into a nightclub? It blurted out in bursts of bass-heavy thumping. He hadn’t danced in a while. Have some fun, he thought, feeling the house music thud on his spine. Dr. Stevenson had reminded him to now and again throw in a boogie or twist. Ah, that’s right, he mouthed, wiggling his body in bed to the ambiguous thump that seemed to shake the walls into a rhythm. This vibrated his body and its associated shadows against the wall cast by the WiFi router, and then subsided. The sheets became cool again. That was refreshing. A cream-colored envelope slid beneath the door. Tonight, he was informed, regrettably but kindly, of a reading by Flaubert. Well, that didn’t make any sense, he thought. He wasn’t in Paris until spring.

Frank Carellini was born in Connecticut in 1993.

Tags across the wire, Connecticut writer, farewell transmission, frank carellini, indie lit, short story, significance

Across the Wire Vol. 7

Holy Oral History

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By Brooks Egerton

Last time I heard from God, he started reminiscing about the kinks of the early Franciscans. Hang tight, buddy, I said, hang tight, let me grab my recorder. By the time I got back to the phone with it, he was chuckling about a couple of characters named Hansel and Gertrud. Here’s the transcript of his monologue:

This was in January of 1299, or maybe 1300, in Vienna. A medieval backwater then. He was a monk — cute boy, wise beyond his years, but hormonally still very much a teenager. She lived near his church with other beguines — a supposedly celibate community of women, bundled up in ridiculous habits like nuns, but with no permanent vows, no obedience to anyone up the Catholic food chain. A pope soon tried to squash them, of course. She was in her mid-fifties. Gaunt and feisty. Old enough to be his grandmother.

Hansel wasn’t a priest yet, so he couldn’t hear confessions. Not that Gertrud was seeking to confess. What burdened her mind were visions, not sins. The older monks had grown awfully weary of her. Some questioned her sanity, especially when she reported seeing licentious clerics shrieking in a pit of brimstone. That sort of thing. Hansel, however, was intrigued. And an excellent listener. We should all be so fortunate as to know a Hansel.

Now, Gertrud didn’t just want a sympathetic ear. She wanted to leave a record of her sojourn upon the earth. But she couldn’t write. Most people couldn’t, women especially. So he became her scribe. They’d made significant progress toward completing a manuscript when her nerve seemed to fail. Then she sent word that she was ready to try again, which led to this scene:

Hansel is reaching into the embers of a fireplace, clutching a thick beeswax candle like his most beloved body part. He lights the wick, impales that meager cure for darkness on a pricket, puts it on the dank room’s one table. Now he adjusts his mud-brown robe and sinks to his knees. Dear Lord, he tells me, gazing at the crucifix on the wall as if it were more than an object, I know I am unworthy even to speak your name, but nonetheless I beg you, please, extend your mercy to the virgin Gertrud, give her strength to endure her weakness, weakness to temper her strength. And dear Lord, guide my hand today so that what I set down will be pleasing to you, and true to what the sister at last may tell me of your son. Amen.

He’s crossing himself when there comes a rapping on the door. Who is it? he asks, although he knows. Without answering she glides in. And they carry on like this:

O Sister.

O Brother.

Thank you for returning.

Thank the Lord for giving me another hour of life.

My God and my all, Hansel says. He lays a log on the fire, motions to a chair, takes the one opposite. Their dark eyes meet. He opens an enormous book with his left hand, and with his right dips a goose feather into an inkwell. Silently she begins to weep. He offers no consolation, as he did at their last meeting. That had driven her away. Now he just starts writing about the tears.

Fear not! Gertrud almost shouts, raising her bony hands from beneath the table, squeezing them together and then wiping her cheeks. Fear not! That is what the Lord our God told me.

He spoke to you? the monk asks, looking up wide-eyed, even as his right hand races on across the page.

Yesterday, as I prayed. But he did not speak in words.

Is there some other way?

In love, she says, flashing a smile of pity that the kid doesn’t see. She waits for more questions, feeling freer to answer than to offer. He also waits, quill still moving. He already understands the power of silence, of discomfort.

A great rushing love, Gertrud says, the words fast and fierce and whispery. Rushing through every part of my body. Flooding me with heat and light, making me shudder.

[Not transcribed here are a tasteless crack I made about the Big O, and God’s rather stern request not to be interrupted again.]

It is this love that frees me to speak to you, the sister says.

Again she halts, again he waits.

No, it doesn’t free me, she says. It compels me.

And Hansel asks, Have you experienced this rushing before?

No, she says, then takes a vast breath before continuing. But ever since I was a young girl, a lowly peasant’s daughter in a world of reeking muck, I have cried joyously and inconsolably as the feast of the circumcision approaches. I cannot eat, I cannot sleep. All these years. It never changes.

Another burst of weeping and wiping ensues.

I’ve always pictured the blood, she says upon resuming, the blood our blessed savior spilled for us not during the Passion but on his eighth day outside the blessed womb. The blood, the blade, the screaming baby. A scarlet prophecy. Last week, though, when I went to mass on the feast day — here she closes her eyes and opens her mouth wide, as if to reenact the ritual. Then her hands cover her face.

Hansel catches up on his writing, taking his time. Finishes, fidgets, eventually feels unable to outwait her again. What happened, Sister?

Gertrud drops her hands back to her lap and says, As I knelt before the priest and he brought the host toward my face, my mind’s eye beheld nothing but Christ’s severed flesh. Washed clean now. Anointed with oil. I closed my mouth and walked away, without receiving the bread. Questions fell upon me like hailstones. What did Mary do with that tiny hood? Did it ascend alone to wait for her son, or did it go with him thirty-three years later? Could it properly join with the fully grown member? Will our Jesus be whole when he returns?

Did any answers come to you?

Not in words. Nor in thoughts.

In love, then?

This is what I was most afraid to tell you.

Fear not, Sister!

Fear not, Brother! The answer that came to me, as soon as I reached my room, was the holy foreskin itself.

You think you saw the true relic? Not just the image?

I felt it. Here, she says, touching her pale lips.

Oh my.

[another tasteless crack from me, another stern request from God]

And I knew I had to taste it. So sweet! Sweetness that could turn honey bitter with envy. Sweetness that could tame a forest full of wolves.

Now she leans her head back and howls. Isn’t the human imagination glorious? One of my greatest creations? Ah, but I digress. Hansel steals a glance at Gertrud, goes right on writing. His hand begins to tremble a touch.

Then I swallowed it, she says.

O my my my.

But soon it came back into my mouth, as sweet as before.

[another tasteless crack, another stern request]

O heavenly angels, he says, and right then a big log collapses in the fireplace. Sparks shower the hearth. Both of them look over, diverted only briefly.

So I swallowed again, she says.

He stifles another exclamation, struggles just to keep his shaky right hand moving. His left hand, which has been on the table, slips below. For hopeless suppression purposes of its own. Poor boy.

It went on and on like that, she says, growing moist herself — but accepting it, even enjoying it. On and on and on, she says.

How many times, do you think?

A hundred? she replies. A thousand? A hundred thousand?

Holy Virgin. Holy Virgin.

And gradually it grew. So it could join properly, I feel sure.

[tasteless crack, stern request]

Yet you still could swallow?

With no trouble. When I tried to touch it, alas, I could not. It always moved down my throat, out of reach.

O Sister, where is it now?

O Brother, I do not know. But by the following morning, it had left me. I fell into the deepest emptiness I’ve ever known. I lay on the floor for days, denied myself the bed. Finally I rose and reached for my cherished tool.

Here she does exactly that: pulls a leather sheath from a hidden pocket, slides out a knife. Caresses the edge. Slides it across the palm of her other hand, drawing several drops of blood. The monk stops writing, transfixed. If I were anyone other than God, I might well have held my breath.

I began to clean my teeth with this, Gertrud says, beholding the implement. I scraped out all manner of dead insects — flies, locusts, moths — and an angel’s voice said, Just as they sicken you, so your sadness sickens the savior.

Yes! Hansel cries, grateful for the erection-melting effect of her story’s twist. Yes!

That revelation is what inspired my last visit to you, she says, when I couldn’t quite find my voice. So yesterday I prayed some more, prayed for the foreskin’s return, and lo, there it was, for one perfect moment, on my tongue. And with it came a message, Brother: that the Lord will grant you special blessings for your service to me, as well as the power to vanquish the darkest temptations.

Amen, they say in unison. He puts down the quill. She puts down the knife. They join hands, her blood smearing his skin.

Jesus H. Christ, I said. And right then my recorder ran out of juice. Gotta go buy some batteries now, I told the big guy. Call me back whenever. He let out another of his divine chuckles and said something like, Let’s talk about the Jesuits next time, OK?

Brooks Egerton is the organizer of Sewanee Spoken Word.

Tags across the wire, brooks egerton, farewell transmission, holy oral history, indie lit, sewanee spoken word, short story

Across the Wire Vol. 7

three work poems

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by DS Maolalai

A Trip

I’m somewhere in Meath or Kildare with a man to assess an insurance claim.

we’re discussing the injury – somebody walking apparently tripped.

the drain has been patched over since.

with cement to stop anyone tripping.

he wants to know why, because that’s evidence.

I have nothing to say except “somebody tripped” so we look at the path and repairs. around us.

it’s a housing estate out in Newbridge and never not raining.

there’s guys up on ladders, clearing the gutters of caked-earth.

Joe says hello and curses the damp in his gloves.

the insurance man doesn’t comment.

he is no mystic – no mind toward the future.

he jigsaws together what has already happened.

and who should have known it might.

Solstice

standing in sunset

behind the brick back wall of maintenance dispatch

on saturday.

the motorbikes are stacked in the bay

like teeth on an old five-comb.

we take a minute

while the phones at our desks ring other emergencies,

and talk about what we would rather

be doing.

matt offers cigarettes to each of the boys

and to ciara.

I hurry one down.

you can almost tell time by the shadows of buildings.

light between stones at a neolithic solstice

the staggered approach of shift-change.

An unpolished shoe

they work together

carefully, cutting up weeds between cobble

like surgeons attacking a tumour.

fresh, healthy sunburn has thickened their cheeks

to something approaching the toe on an unpolished shoe.

I meet them onsite – ask what they’ve done

and where they still have to get to.

I don’t like to criticise their work.

they do it better than I ever could,

these healthy young immigrant men.

felipe’s getting married this summer.

we have to find someone

to take over his round for the week.

DS Maolalai has been described by one editor as “a cosmopolitan poet” and another as “prolific, bordering on incontinent”. His work has been nominated fourteen times for BOTN, ten for the Pushcart and once for the Forward Prize, and released in three collections; “Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden” (Encircle Press, 2016), “Sad Havoc Among the Birds” (Turas Press, 2019) and “Noble Rot” (Turas Press, 2022)

Tags across the wire, an unpolished shoe, dispatcher, ds maolalai, farewell transmission, kildare, maintenance tech, meath, poetry, solstice, three work poems, work

Across the Wire Vol. 7

Blue Shines Through

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By Sophia Krich-Brinton

I noticed it the night my first child was born. I was nursing her, in awe of her tiny hands, my stomach rumbling but no food in reach, when I realized I could see the blue hospital blanket right through my fingers.

Turning my hand forward and back I could see bones, muscles, tendons, and beyond, the blue patterned blanket.

It wasn’t clear like glass. More like an early morning mist, so thick you can only see rooftops, the hint of a window, but you know there’s a building there.

It got worse as my child grew. By the time she was six months old, both my hands were transparent. On her first birthday, my arms were completely see-through. I could still hold her, which was the oddest thing. I kept expecting her to fall through my embrace, but she didn’t. She gripped my arms with her tiny hands, chewing and sucking on my invisible fingers as if nothing was wrong.

And maybe nothing was. Nobody else seemed to notice. When I held up my arms for my partner, he shrugged and said, “Everyone gets that way with the first kid.” No panic. Just a smile as he turned back to his computer. “Give it a few more months and you’ll feel better. Everyone says this part’s the hardest.”

Maybe they did. I didn’t know a lot of people with kids.

We had another soon after that. We’d always wanted two, as close in age as possible, and though I had second thoughts when the time came to push, it was too late to back out. Soon we had a son, a tiny, mewling creature as different from our first as he could be. She’d been quiet, an easy sleeper, but he came into this world screaming as if he knew his mother’s see-through arms weren’t right and he wanted everyone else to know it too.

Within a day, it spread to my waist, then into my chest. I felt constantly chilled, as if the foggy autumn air had pierced my skin and settled in my bones.

When my jaw went clear, I woke my partner up. He was asleep in the living room now, otherwise the kids kept him up. We’d agreed that since I was staying home and didn’t need to be alert, I could deal with them at night.

And during the day, too, apparently, since he left before breakfast and came home after they were asleep.

He woke when I shook him, sitting up with a frown. “Who’s there?”

“It’s me. I’m really worried.” I held my arms out. “It’s way worse. All the way to my chin.”

“Hello?” He looked around, his eyes moving through me. Then he lay back down and rolled over, pulling the blankets up.

I glanced at the mirror over the couch. Fear shivered through me.

I was completely gone.

I rushed back into the bedroom and over to my son’s crib. He looked up at me with those huge eyes, not blinking.

“Can you hear me?” I whispered.

He cheeped.

Relief barreled through me so hard I had to sit down on my bed to catch my breath. “I don’t know what’s happening to me. I don’t know how to make it stop.”

My daughter sat up in her crib. “Mama sad?”

“Love, can you hear me too?”

“Hear Mama,” she said, nodding.

My son cheeped again. He raised a tiny arm, reaching for me. I bent down to kiss him and he grabbed my invisible chin and squeezed.

In the morning, my partner woke up, made coffee, and packed his bag for work. He kissed each kid and left the apartment without a word. He didn’t feed them, or call a sitter.

I chased him down the stairs, shouting his name. He brushed his hand across his face as if he’d walked into a spider web, but didn’t seem to feel me grabbing his arm or beating on his back.

Life wasn’t much different after he stopped seeing me.

He left for work early, came back late. I spent my days with the kids, as always. We couldn’t go out in public, but I took them into the small green space out back and we sat in the sun together. The heat felt amazing on my invisible body. I took my shirt off and lay back. Why not?

I watched the kids enjoy the bright, quiet day, and smiled. “I love you both so much.”

They looked up at me with their large eyes, so like my own, almost as if they could see me.

Sophia Krich-Brinton (she/they) lives in Colorado with her partner, kids, and cats. They write weird stories at dawn when the world sleeps and the cats try to sit on their keyboard. Her work has appeared or is upcoming in HAD, The Argyle, Moss Puppy Mag, and more. When not writing, she boxes, plays the banjo, and goes backpacking. Find them at sophiakbrinton.com or on Twitter/Instagram at @sophiakb_writes

Tags across the wire, blue shines through, Colorado writer, farewell transmission, indie lit, kids, short story, Sophia Krich-Brinton

Across the Wire Vol. 7

The Islands

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by Walker Rutter-Bowman

At parties we stood around the newest statue. The host described intent, the extraction of stone, the weather of genesis. This time it was Charles. His pants were new and stiff. When he lost his train of thought, he defaulted to saying, “Galala marble.” Those were important words, and he clung to them. The statue was almost beautiful. We tried not to look at its bent genital, its implausible balls. Or we tried to look closer. When Charles lost the train again, he spoke, with feeling, of his adopted son’s agoraphobia. It had been diagnosed by a real doctor via a videoconferencing portal. The fear came to light as a nightmare: the boy pinned against a wall as people backed up, the backs of their heads growing as large as balloons, black hairs coming into focus. The reason the boy gave for not coming downstairs was the poor health of his lizard. The vet sipped champagne and said, “The lizard is fine.” He shook his head sadly. “The lizard has never been finer.”

These people wore watches and rings. Their shirts looked like normal shirts but more assured. To them and their methods, wealth meant island. My money was new, and so were these friends. I had never been an island man. I was from an interior state shaped like a muffin. Islands have sun and sand. They crawl with things that kill. They have grooves and protrusions, inlets and sides. They sneer.

One night, while everyone was discussing island life, some people pulled out their new passports to the islands they owned. These were official-looking documents with pictures and dates. While others looked and laughed at the photos, I shook my glass with a landlocked vigor, making the ice bang together.

Why no island? they asked me. They knew my net worth. They had read the profile of me in the lifestyle magazine. You can still find the profile online. The writer called me a transit magnate, and it’s true I’m in bridges. That’s how I made my money. Why no island? they asked. They doubted my holdings. They lacked a fiscal literacy when it came to the great bridge. But I had funds. I’d adopted a daughter despite the towering cost. I could afford an estranged wife who sometimes sent me cards, and from the handwriting, by the angle of the stamp, I could tell she came by her loathing honestly, like a farmer. Adopting a daughter had to do with a single office where you went to fill out forms. And then the fenced-in area where you met your daughter. But having a daughter won’t protect you from island pressure. She’ll love it, they said. In good weather your adopted daughter will sail around the coast, they said. As the sun sets, you’ll sit on the terrace and watch her boat go by, and she’ll look up at you and wave, and the wave will mean something to both of you. She’ll sail all around and make you a worthless map, and you’ll attach it to the refrigerator with a magnet, and every time you go in for ice cubes, you’ll tap the map with your finger, and you’ll think, Here I am.

Sometimes this is your house, your new statue, your adopted daughter. Sometimes, despite what you’ve been told, Shauna is not agoraphobic, she just likes to read. Sometimes a lizard is not the perfect pet, and it ends up being you who feeds it and rubs its crested head. I liked the lizard but not my new statue, which had a small and sneaky face. He looks like you, the people said, and they mimed kissing it. That was their notion of a joke. I described to the guests how the artist was eager to disprove traditional metrics of abundance. The statue was small and ugly because the artist aimed to desexualize, or was it sexualize?, the height of men. Smoochie smoochie, the guests responded. I left doors open so they could poke around, find proof of my money, like pictures of Shauna in various stages of the latest orthodonture. They studied the photos to see if we had skipped steps. We had. But we had also doctored photos to hide the fact that we’d prioritized certain teeth over others. Half-satisfied, they put down the pictures and studied my clocks. I turned away to signal I didn’t care if they pocketed some of my clocks.

It’s not nothing, they said, roughly handling my timepieces, tossing them back and forth like baseballs. Meaning: a clock is not an island. Two clocks is not an island. Three?

I knew it wasn’t. A clock is much more than nothing, but even the rarest clock in the world is no island. And if, one day, there’s an island that’s also a great big clock, it won’t come cheap. I was rich but I wasn’t clock-island rich.

But I could buy the average island if I wanted one, I said. But do I want one?

Their embarrassment rose up.

They looked deep into the faces of my very own clocks to hide how stupid they thought it was, a man holding himself apart from island desire. Money can buy a lot, but it can’t buy you the sense to keep things to yourself. It can buy you a clock that looks like a coconut with a hinge hidden by soft, brown fibers. It can even buy you the service of a man who stands in front of you to block your words with his broad body, a man named Jim who was a respected member of the team. For years my words struck him and fell to the ground, and for this he was, in my view, well compensated. But he couldn’t always be there. Jim needed a day off from time to time. Jim had a family.

So I bought the island. I had another party. I bought another sculpture. I was in the red. The bridge business was sputtering. Shauna wouldn’t come down because her book was getting good. The vet came in the door and said he heard the lizard was ill. I said the lizard was fine, and he said, That’s a relief, and helped himself to a flute of champagne and some canapes. He shook hands with the members of the group. His daughter’s teeth were straight but not as white as Shauna’s. His daughter had a lizard, but she would never have a lizard and an island, a lizard on an island. I helped him help himself to another flute or two.

I walked the guests around the statue and pointed to the contours. You see them there, the contours? They looked, but they took them for granted.

But of course, this location is temporary, I yawned. I could see Jim scrambling towards me. Soon we’ll move the statue to the island.

You bought an island?

I didn’t mention it?

Which one? they asked. Their maps were open.

That one.

That’s the one Kurt wanted.

They were impressed. I knew because they went quiet and still, like certain birds in the presence of larger birds. While Jim was in the cellar getting more champagne, I took advantage of his absence to quote a poet who loved to fish.

But now they wondered what was left of my holdings. Any liquid? Was I hurting? Island-rich is one thing. Island-poor is another. They said I had the stink of it on me, the smell of a man over-leveraged by his land. So I bought one more. Jim said I was only doing it to shut them up. He was grilling for us because I’d never mastered the art. From time to time he’d complain that grilling was not really his job. I said maybe he should shut up and focus on the burgers. But he burned them anyway. His mind was elsewhere. He had been playing piano at Petit Chapeau Rouge for ten nights in a row, and it was starting to take its toll. The subject was sensitive. I’d told him he could do both until one of the jobs suffered, and now they both suffered. He wasn’t blocking comments at a satisfying rate, or grilling with the precision of former days, and word from Petit Chapeau Rouge was his playing was plodding and lacked dynamism. He was overworked. Jazz piano was teaching him vindictiveness, and he was leaving me unprotected. This burger is burned, I said. It’s flame-broiled, he said, hanging his head.

If I bought the second island close to the first one, they would criticize me for making decisions based on convenience. Accuse me of intending to build bridges between the two islands. Say, Oh, he made his fortune from building little bridges, now watch him try to connect his islands with two or three little bridges. I fooled them all by buying a second island quite far from the first. No bridge in the world could connect them, and I should know. Part of working in bridges is knowing when you’re ahead and when you’re not, and another part of working in bridges is proving your point.

Jim, who was helping me with motive, said it’s all right to prove your point. He was proving one himself with his sad piano playing and his burned burgers. Now I’m in a position where I can comfortably say upon reflection that the second island didn’t measure up to the first. It was covered in ants—one kind of ant, special for its aggression and orange thorax. A man lived on the island, a scientist, who had stretched his research grant longer than anyone thought possible. He called them Hofmann ants. His name was Hofmann. Either it was a tremendous coincidence, or he had named them after himself. He was covered in bites, and when you thought of all the pieces of Hofmann the ants had bitten off, the name began to make sense. He lived in a brown, single-flap tent. His papers declared he was allowed to study the ants for two more years, but I think he had changed the dates. He held his papers up as if someone might read them. He clutched the documentation like someone might take it away. When he talked about the ants, Hofmann could really get going. His face would grow red, his newer bites would begin to glow. The bites looked like little islands themselves, volcanic chains of red craters surrounded by ashen crusts. He was very skinny. Jim and I wondered what he ate. There were no fruit trees. Very few fish in the surrounding waters. But there were ants. And his tongue, when it showed itself, was short, thick, and coated in an orange gel. Maybe it was love, maybe it was revenge, maybe it was as simple as a dependable source of protein.

Two islands impressed my new friends. They had to rethink the sources of my wealth. Little bridges, sure, but maybe little tolls, too? That’s right, that’s right, many streams. Bridges was big. The people who had once asked, Is bridges really a living, is bridges really wealth?—they were now rethinking what they knew about the revenue of the load-bearing causeway. Plus I had invented a dongle that changed people’s lives, turning one port into another. Because a dongle is a bridge, too. A dongle is a bridge, too.

I hated playing favorites, but one island had ants and the other didn’t. One island had an unwashed and righteous scientist and the other didn’t. I built an airfield and a road going all the way around the antless island. Jim said we could call it Island I—that’s the kind of creative thinker he was. I built a house on the cliff overlooking the bay where the sun set, splashing down into the ocean in a fine display of leaking reds and oranges, like it was the first or last day on earth. I pointed to the bay to show Shauna where she could sail her boat, but she wasn’t there, she was upstairs, reading her book and picking her blisters. But nothing could kill the mood. Jim popped a bottle, and our thoughts turned to God, the color and loneliness at the start of all things.

We must have brought an ant or two over on the plane. Shauna showed up at breakfast covered in bites. Jim set out traps that might’ve worked on your ordinary ant. Instead, they began to chew on some foundational elements of the new house.

I was hurting a bit financially. People knew I was island-rich, and, like the Hofmann ant, sensed opportunity. The vet began to call and ask when was the best time to visit. He asked, How’s the lizard? and, Are you liquid? Then Jim realized he might be undervalued. He must have got to talking to the other men and women who stood in front of their employers, operating their grills, blocking their words. I think there’s a group. Maybe his long nights of stale smoke at Petit Chapeau Rouge gave him a taste of independence. He brought me some charts showing how much money he had saved me by blocking certain words. He handed me a pamphlet about the dangers of eating uncooked meats. It was hard to believe they were accurate, but they were compelling and certainly colorful. Under each bright bar was one of the stupid things I had tried to say, or a type of raw meat, and then the bar extended upward to a point of potential fiscal damage. And then the last bar, the total, extended off the page and he had to fold out some sections of the graph to show how far it went, and like a tongue of orange flame the bar unrolled and kept going: that bar was the financial damage I would’ve incurred from eating uncooked meat and then speaking about it in an honest but fiscally ruinous manner. Jim knows better than the average man that the meat lobby is a powerful force, and bridges must work with meat to reach the state of synergy we all crave in business and the American meal.

The bars had words on them. These words had hit Jim’s chest and fallen to the ground. We were safe, thanks to Jim. But now the words had returned, printed on a color-coded graph Jim used to shake me down. The words had come back, after all. I signed some papers, and Jim was rich. He had always been good to me, but now? With his bad attitude? What if all those stupid things I said didn’t actually hit Jim and clatter to the ground, but became embedded in his skull, his soul? I’m not saying he became dumber, in body, mind, or spirit. But uglier? I’m saying he remembered the words I thought we’d agreed to forget.

“Let’s say, for the sake of conversation, some of the ants made it off Island II and onto Island I. What would you do?” I cut Hofmann’s steak for him but encouraged him to hold the fork. We were broadening and deepening his diet via imported goods.

“I would worry about the survival of the habitat, as the Hofmann ant is one of the most destructive organisms in the world.”

I knew my builders would agree. My new house was sliding down the cliff before it could even be finished. I watched the workers move about, welts covering their bodies, and I thought, Is it too late to be someone else?

When asked about indigenous self-determination, I said I was all for it, on paper. A truly rich man? the advocates said, with two islands such as yours? One of which has had people living on it for centuries? Wouldn’t the truly rich man concede that the land was more theirs than his? and that they should be allowed to govern it as they see fit? Not only do you not have the right to own the island? but you don’t really have the right to be there at all? The fake passport you wave about raises a notion of nationhood? that is not yours to raise or really even listen in on? Before responding I locked eyes with Jim, who was not going to stop me, though it would pain him to see me step forward and shoot off my mouth, which is what I did, and I quoted a poet with a passion for fishing but also for fascism, and I regretted saying those words then and then regretted them even more once I saw them punctuated in the last surviving publications of print.

Sometimes, island-rich means being able to give up Island I. Sometimes, island-rich is a feeling you once had, not a life you get to live. At least that’s how Jim put it. I saw the logic, but I didn’t like it. I agreed to meet with the indigenous, and I can’t say I liked them either. I didn’t dislike them because they were indigenous. I disliked them because they disliked me. And because they killed Jim. There was a misunderstanding with Jim and the manner in which he opened his arms in a gesture of welcome. I thought it was a nice gesture, but they shot him with a very long arrow. Jim’s wife and son said after all the shielding Jim had done for me through the years, that perhaps I, for once, could have shielded, etc. They said Jim’s threats of further litigation led to my hesitance to step in front of that arrow, but it had very little to do with that. It had much more to do with the arrow, and the fear that filled my heart when I saw it flying through the sky. Even if Jim had survived the puncture, the arrow was poisoned, and the fever brought out a burst of language I had never heard from the man who took great care with his words. With some gasping and an agitated frothing at the lips, Jim died. The last thing he said was, “Is it blue? Is the body really blue?” No one knows what he meant. But from time to time, I find it useful to ask myself the same thing.

After Jim, I stopped responding to others. I went a bit mute. If I had to say anything, I wrote it on a scrap of paper and kept it in my pocket until I could gather more information on what kind of thing it was. It slowed me down. Sometimes I dropped a scrap of paper, a thought, and it blew away, and after a few moments I didn’t miss it.

Shauna says it’s interesting that islands are places of exile and objects of desire. Shauna says it’s interesting what wealth does to men of a certain susceptibility. Shauna says it’s interesting how expensive her school is, though not even she knows the real figure. She wants to want to help others, but she wants other things too.

We listen to old recordings of Jim from Petit Chapeau Rouge. I can detect things I said to him that influenced his playing, as though the words found their way into his fingers. The playing is plodding, it lacks dynamism—and that’s exactly how I want it. Sometimes the last thing you want is dynamism. His grave is on the island. The island has a bird with a very recognizable call. Somehow Hofmann never noticed it. The bird drowns out what I’m about to say. I want Jim to be that bird. Jim didn’t believe in bridges, and neither do birds. Shauna puts flowers on his grave, and I sprinkle it with scraps of paper. She questions if the scraps of paper are a good way to honor Jim. I believe he would’ve valued it for its human comedy: the scraps of paper carried away by the wind, the way I chase after them and trip over my own two feet, the way Shauna sighs, the way they blow into the water and drift into the distance, the way I wade into the shallows without even rolling my pantlegs. The papers soak up the sea, the ink bleeds into the water. Hofmann makes an orange stew. I open my mouth to speak, but the Jim of a bird screams again. A bird is a bridge, but to what? To more birds?

Walker Rutter-Bowman is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn.

Tags across the wire, Brooklyn writer, farewell transmission, indie lit, short story, The Islands, walker rutter-bowman

Across the Wire Vol. 7

two poems

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by Conor Hultman

#000000

logical heart

precious hoped gentle wind

me finger I my

#029CBC

parallel so not

return grace silly trunk

livid sang ran

Conor Hultman lives in New York, New York.

Tags across the wire, Conor Hultman, farewell transmission, indie lit, poetry

Across the Wire Vol. 7

Nights That Don’t End

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by Huina Zheng

At eleven p.m., the baby is still awake, squirming in her mother’s arms. The mother rocks her, pats her back, hums lullabies, but she refuses to sleep. Her eyelids droop, yet she keeps fussing. The father has long since gone to bed, his snores rising and falling. At one-thirty a.m., the baby cries again. She wants her mother, not her father. The mother reaches for the bedside lamp. The father rolls over, muttering in his sleep. The mother carries the baby to the living room. Mixes formula, tests the temperature, feeds her. Still she won’t sleep. She wants to play. She wants books. The mother leans back on the sofa, the baby curled against her chest. Page by page, line by line, she reads. The little bear wet the bed. The little bear is hungry. The little bear has a fever. Two a.m., still reading. Two-thirty, they play peekaboo. The mother hides her face behind the book, then reveals it. The baby giggles. By three-thirty, the baby finally yawns. The mother paces, murmuring Tang poems, singing nursery rhymes, patting her back. Four a.m., at last she sleeps. The mother lays her in the crib. The father has sprawled into the middle of the bed; she nudges him back to his side. The mother lies down. Exhausted, she cannot fall asleep. Seven a.m., the alarm goes off. The mother wakes groggy. The father gets up, too. At seven-thirty, the mother kisses the baby’s forehead and closes the door. Grandma is already awake. The mother leaves, squeezing onto the subway before eight. The car is packed, shoulder to shoulder. She could fall asleep standing, but her heart stays home, with the baby still sleeping. The father, refreshed, boards another train.

Huina Zheng either writes as an admission coach at work or writes for fun after work.

Tags across the wire, farewell transmission, Huina Zheng, indie lit, Nights that don't end, short story

Across the Wire Vol. 7

Frying Pan

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By Erin Jamieson

Without asking, you dump confetti sprinkles in the pancake batter while I’m stirring. You smell like jasmine tea and anger, and we reach for the spatula at the same time.

Your hand is smooth; mine is calloused.

I just thought you could use some help, you say.

I pull away, as I have been for over a year. Since the day you came home with a receipt for Starbucks: two vanilla chai lattes. The cheating bothered me less than you becoming the type of person who drank vanilla chai lattes, when, on our first date, you took me out to McDonald’s because you said all coffee tastes like dirt anyway.

But today my stomach bubbles with the bubbles of the batter on the frying pan. The sprinkles fuse, as I knew they would. A rainbow pancake, a dream for our child. He’d be 5 years old today.

Why don’t you get out some fruit, you say. Only I feel your words more than I hear them. I scrub the counters clean while you keep making more and more pancakes. Soon, your scent is overpowered by the saccharine batter. Soon, my scent is gone too, and it might be anyone’s home, a happy home, if one exists.

I set the table for one. I start back for my plate and fork and knife, but then I spot an open cabinet, just slightly ajar. The one where we keep the cookbooks we received as wedding gifts. The last time we used any, our son was still alive.

What are you doing? you ask.

But before you can stop me, I swing open the cabinet, cookbooks, crammed haphazardly, spill out. I see the 100 Quick Meals cookbook my mother bought us, kick it aside. I reach for a slim paperback in the very back. Pale blue.

Don’t, you say, and try to pull me away.

The pancakes are going to burn.

Why are you looking at that?

But you know. We both know why. The reason this cabinet has been locked for a year is because I can’t look at the cookbook without seeing our son, milky blue skin and long eyelashes. Baby’s First Moments, crammed alongside recipes for gyros and baklava.

Steam, then smoke. Our fire alarm sounds.

Neither of us move.

You stand beside me, and for the first time in a year, I see it: the haunted, fearful look in your eyes.

I don’t want to pretend like he didn’t exist. Like we didn’t exist.

I turn off the stove top. The pancakes are charred black. I pull up a seat- your seat- and eat one, chewing through the thickest parts, dousing it with syrup.

At least I can no longer see those damn sprinkles.

You’re still standing by the cookbooks. I’m sorry.

It’s what I’ve been waiting for, since that day. Maybe for five years.

I stack the dishes in the sink, and walk out the front door, leaving you and the pancakes.

Erin Jamieson’s writing has been published in over 100 literary magazines and nominated twice for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of Net. She is the author of four poetry chapbooks, including Fairytales (Bottle Cap Press, 2023) and a forthcoming collection, and a historical novel, Sky of Ashes, Land of Dreams (Type Eighteen Books, 2023).

Tags across the wire, Erin Jamieson, farewell transmission, Frying Pan, loss, short story

Across the Wire Vol. 7

DEAF

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by John Grey

staggering down

the middle of Main Street

red-eyed

dress torn

one arm tattooed

the other bleeding

not holy

not clean

just another ghost

from the dead side of town

in the courthouse square

screaming out a name

and what he did to her

no stars out

moon hiding

behind a cloud

and the whole damn town

pretending not to hear

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Shift, River And South and Flights. Latest books, “Bittersweet”, “Subject Matters” and “Between Two Fires” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Rush, Writer’s Block and Trampoline.

Tags across the wire, deaf, farewell transmission, indie lit, John Grey, poetry, selective hearing

Across the Wire Vol. 7

This Is Not The Story Of The Hurricane

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by Casey Jo Graham Welmers

I think it starts with Dylan, and it will probably end with Dylan. I have to turn back the clock a bit here, go back to when God and me were born. I have to let the song titles do most of the talking, because copyright laws around lyrics get murky. I can’t repeat quotations so you’ll just have to draw conclusions on the page. The words are still Dylan. Mine are still me. There’ve been other musicians along the way: a Rhodes scholar and a mailman and a kid from Asbury park. A Jamaican messiah, some shoegaze Stars and a Canadian brunette that once moonlit as God. A few kids from Seattle that reinvented the wheel and a skeleton crew from Haight-Asbury that claim this is all a dream we dreamed, but I’m in this dream, and Dylan is central to it, so here we are. This is my life according to Bob.

I have it on good cosmic authority that when my mom’s ’75 AMC Gremlin is smashed from behind “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue” is on the radio. She careens across the slick of Michigan’s winter roads like a hockey puck, her water breaking across the chilly driver’s seat. It is all over for me in that moment— my life in utero, anyways. I’m born blue, umbilical cord around my neck, face up. A stargazer. Yonder stands your infant with her strangled tongue. The doctor frees the umbilical cord without difficulty and I pull air, fill my tiny lungs, shriek to confirm my existence. I’m tiny and pink and premature, jolted into the world courtesy of ice and snow and the poor maintenance of rural roads.

I have a habit of playing with the carpet in our living room. I run my hands one way and then the other, against the grain, with the grain. This is my usual TV watching ritual, but one day in 1992 my hands sit frozen in my lap, the rug fibers momentarily undisturbed. I’m having a music related awakening. Richie Havens is covering “Just Like A Woman” for Bob Dylan’s 30^th Anniversary special, performed at Madison Square Garden and aired on local PBS affiliate WCMU. My dad, seated nearby, just keeps saying oh my God, and in my mind Richie Havens is God—his voice is reaching inside me and his guitar is my heart, his fingers conjuring magic on the strings. I watch the entire concert, each and every performer. I don’t break like a little girl, but I do break—a visceral, ecstatic sort of cracking. The next day I ask my dad if we can watch it again. We watch so many times over the years that the VHS tape wears out and unravels from the cassette.

My mom has a vascular connective tissue disorder. We don’t know about the disorder until her carotid artery dissects, blood pools into her brain and she suffers a massive hemorrhagic stroke. I’m barely 20 and she’s 42. She tried to raise us Catholic, and because I feel like it’s what she would want, I pray nightly for her soul. I’m out of practice and winging the words, playing it fast and loose with ‘Hail Mary’s’ and ‘Our Fathers.’ I stuff her rosary under my pillow, squeeze my eyes shut, listen to “Knockin’ on Heavens Door” and “Tryin’ To Get To Heaven” back to back. Mama take this tragedy off of me. I have recurring dreams where she is trapped, some kind of ghost; dreams where we buried her alive in the backyard next to the family dog and she unearths herself, walks around the house covered in earthworms and dirt. I’m not clear on the specifics of purgatory, the status of Heaven’s doors. My mom once told me she wasn’t afraid to die, but I’m stuck on the terror of her in some kind of limbo. I don’t imagine she’d be okay having to knock or wait, caught between this life and the next.

I’m half asleep when my dad peeks his head into my bedroom, says an airplane just crashed into the World Trade Center. In my groggy state I assume it’s a tiny prop plane, spiraling, the pilot drunk. I picture it like a toy, something with a shiny red propeller. When the second plane hits he starts yelling in the living room. We spend the rest of the day lifeless, glued to Dan Rather. A month later my English professor assigns an essay on a song of our choice. I stay up all night listening to “Masters of War” and “License to Kill” worrying sour Skittles until my tongue is a shredded rainbow horror show. I write about death planes decapitating the Twin Towers and cowards hiding behind desks but mostly I write about this woman on my block who is homeless and mute; who I’m convinced is some kind of incarnation of the woman in the refrain to “License To Kill.” She just sits there, and if she had a voice I imagine her fixing her cataract eyes on my own, asking me, who will take away their license to kill? She is so clearly collateral damage to man’s destruction that I can’t help but project this ‘blind seer’ trope on her. My classmates stick to our era: “Heart Shaped Box”, “Fade Into You,” “Last Goodbye,” all artists I admire but trace back though some convoluted family tree to Dylan. Kurt to Neil to Bob. Hope to the Paisley Underground to The Byrds to Bob. When I try to connect Jeff Buckley there are no meandering arrows, just a solid line that runs through his father, through Dylan, straight to the edge of God.

I’m sliding off the tattoo table, covered in sweat. My ribcage buzzes under the needle and I verge on the point of passing out. I’d heard this about rib tattoos, thought stupidly that my high pain tolerance would protect me. Fool me once. My husband is getting tattooed on the ribcage as well, a chunk of lyrics in old English from “Shelter From The Storm.” We’re 6 days into married life, still riding the high of our wedding. We referenced it in our vows and played it at our reception and now we’re cementing the song on our skin in blue-black ink. I’ve never worn flowers in my hair, but I have worn silver bracelets, paraded around like some kind of bohemian deity. My husband has likely sheltered me from more storms than I’ve sheltered him, it’s honestly hard to say. We promise always to do our best by each other. We give our word. We slather A+D ointment to our sides and steal constant peaks at our oozing, sacred pact.

I cover my palms in chalk and my arms in tacky goo, haul atlas stones onto platforms and carry heavy awkward objects specific distances. I ask the promoter of one particular Strongman contest if they can order a t-shirt for me in XS. They laugh and tell me that’s a first, but are happy to oblige. I deadlift a car but skip the squat event, knowing I can’t hit the weight. The following summer I honor my Scottish heritage, don a kilt with the family tartan and walk-on to compete in a farmer’s carry event at the local Highland Games. The audience titters, they think it’s a joke, like get a load of this chick, no way she can lift 100 pounds in each hand, let alone walk anywhere with it. In my head I hear “The Mighty Quinn.”

Yeah you ain’t seen nothing.

I haul up the handles and gain distance and the laughter turns to screams. They’re on their feet, going wild for the scrawny underdog. This is, by far, my favorite party trick.

I don’t want to work on the farm no more. I don’t really work on a farm, I work in a hospital. Patients throw prosthetic limbs at me and reach out to pet my hair after their hands have explored the warmth of their bare and unwashed nether regions. So I hum it, “Maggie’s Farm.” I don’t want to work for the physicians no more, the managers, the administrators in the C-suite that come to the floors in designer suits, looking starchy and crooked next to the staff in their scrubs. One executive wears heels that we can hear clicking down the hall well before she manifests at the nurses station, a spiky haired haint. She brings us pizza, would probably prefer that we sing while we slave. I don’t eat any but I stay at the farm. I transfer to the operating room. No one can hurl fake feet while propofol runs through their veins.

I pull over my car because the sobs racking through my chest are uncontrollable, tears choking my vision. I’m a hazard to myself and others, collapsed on the steering wheel, “Forever Young” blaring through the speakers. My 40 year old sister is dying from cancer and I want her to stay forever growing older, with me, but she won’t be. Everything about her will remain arrested and unchanged, and I’m not sure how I’ll navigate my years ahead without her. I would build a ladder to the stars to reach her. I’d climb the rungs ‘til my hands failed, my fingers bled, a million splinters embedded in my desperate, tortured palms.

Is this Dylan? There’s no way, there’s no way this is Dylan! I’m sputtering in the passenger seat next to my dad, dialing up the knob on his car stereo to better hear the song coming through the public radio station. It is Dylan, singing “Death Is Not The End.” My sister has just died, not even a full day earlier. This is a Dylan song we have never heard. This is a Dylan song we will never hear again, at least not at random like this. I am shook at how literal this sign is, how crazy. My sister is spelling it out for us as easily as she can, knowing my dad, in his full blown atheism, will be the hardest to convince. She hits him over the head with the message. She hits hard. I’m agnostic, but there’s no way this isn’t her. I believe in synchronicity. I believe in this.

One day I will die, too. I don’t know where or when or how, but it’s inevitable. In between will be all the crushing and brilliant intricacies of life, hundreds of Dylan songs sung by Dylan and hundreds of other performers one hundred different ways. But when I am gone, and the people I leave behind are forced to pull themselves together and throw a banger of a death party, they will play “I Shall Be Released.” I want the Chrissie Hynde cover, the one she played in Madison Square garden at the concert with Richie Havens that pulled me into this whole world.

I’ll see my light come shining.

It’s hard to say what direction it will come from—could be the east onto the west. I have no way of divining the particulars. I like to think that I’ll know who the light will be, who’s blinding spirit will be arcing toward my own.

Casey Jo Graham Welmers was named after a Grateful Dead song, so maybe this IS all a dream we dreamed. Find her most recent words in Stanchion, BULL and Pool Party, and more at https://caseyjo.carrd.co

X: @ca5eyj0

Tags across the wire, bob dylan, Casey jo Graham welmers, Chrissie Hynde, cnf, farewell transmission, forever young, I shall be released, indie art, indie lit, its all over now baby blue, life in songs, Maggie's farm, Masters Of War, Mighty Quinn, Richie Havens, rob kaniuk art, Shelter from the storm