Tag: across the wire

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Across The Wire Vol. 6

Three Stories

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by Joel Tomfohr

On the Eve of My Hospitalization

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

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

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

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

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

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The Veld

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

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

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

Shh.

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

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

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Gun Collecting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Across The Wire Vol. 6

The 9/11 Roadshow

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by Jon Doughboy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Across The Wire Vol. 6

Single Speed Summer

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By Jon Berger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No, Bobby! Get out!”

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

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

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

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

“I shouldn’t let you buy that.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The bike was still riding wonky but creaked less.

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

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

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

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

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

I nodded at him as he approached.

He avoided eye contact with me.

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

That is okay. 

I took another sip from my beer.

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

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

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

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

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

“Where did you buy it from?”

“Oh… Walmart.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You can try, friendo.”

I helped him load the bike into his shitty minivan.

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah.”

“Why are you doing another lap?”

“Because I hate the world.”

“Oh… well… be careful.”

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

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

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

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Across The Wire Vol. 6

These Days

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By D.T. Robbins



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

Let me start over…

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

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

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

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

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

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

These days, it's hard.

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

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Across The Wire Vol. 6

Before the Sunrise

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By Wilson Koewing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, of course, dear, he croaked out.

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

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

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Across The Wire Vol. 6

Colossal pt 1

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By Josh Boardman

colossal pt 1 by josh boardman

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

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

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

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Across The Wire Vol. 6

Sunday Morning Driving 

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By David Luntz

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

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

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

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

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Across The Wire Vol. 6

A NOTE FROM STEVE, AUTHOR OF THE BOOK OF STEVE

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Ask yourself if it really was Adam and Steve.

And naked.

And a big snake.

And 86 the apple, sub a long ripe banana.

Low-hanging fruit.

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

And where all them kids come from?

Much more interesting story.

Plumbing v. storage.

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

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

Steve’s a dude.

Steve’s had plenty of thoughts only God knows.

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

Just Steve’s two cents.

Signed 

–Steve

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

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Across The Wire Vol. 6

2 Poems

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By Ben Pease

The Steeple Bell

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

my mother what she wanted
a week before she died: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

I tried to stop him 
but my father 

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

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

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

What Comes First

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

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

and cut out rotted windowsills
as the snow hastens and stops

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

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

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

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

and after twelve hours of it
the hospital becomes familiar:

a loved one immobilized  
in an adjustable bed. Unsure

of the question, I watch
my wife riddle a physical

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

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

my mother rising out 
of the unconscious, bewildered 

by her son become a father.

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

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Across The Wire Vol. 6

Locating

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By Tyler Dempsey

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

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

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

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

 Disoriented, I thought. Better not contract that.

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

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

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

But why?

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

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

Instead, my trauma blossomed at Walmart. 

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

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

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

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

“It could’ve happened,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it wasn’t. 

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

Do you know what it is? 

Lean closer, I’ll tell you:

I was scared I wouldn’t be any good.

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

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

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

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

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

There’s a term for these symptoms.

The term is, “disoriented.”

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

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

I could be that guy, I thought.

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

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

It was a geographical problem, I think. 

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

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

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

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

And all would go to shit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have a word for my ball game. 

I’m “locating.”

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

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

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

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

It means, “little kiss.”

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

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