Tag: farewell transmission

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Saturday Morning II

BEACH SPECIMENS, PROVINCETOWN

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by Beina Xu

with a note from Liza St. James

Shortly after the Fourth of July, I received a message via WhatsApp from my friend Beina Xu, a Berlin-based writer and filmmaker. She was sharing photos with me from her trip to P-town earlier that week. I replied with an update-photo of my own, as well as some questions. “Speculations re the tooth-comb specimen?” I asked. “Some kind of ray-like thing??” Beina texted back. “Or massive fish? The rest of the carcass was nearby but so pulverized I couldn’t tell even a shape.” 

The photos had an uncanny quality, especially in light of the much-advertized U.S. semiquincentennial. Curious, I looked up the tee shirt pictured in front of the Pilgrim Monument in the last image—merch for Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness, proceeds from which go toward preventing gun violence. Mysterious and more compelling the more I considered the suite as a whole, I asked Beina’s permission to share her triptych with Farewell Transmission so that this image-story might reach screens beyond my own. 

—Liza St. James

Beina Xu is a writer, editor and filmmaker based in Berlin.

Liza St. James is a writer, editor, and translator from San Francisco. 

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PETS ISSUE

The Bouncing Donut

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by Christopher Wral

My dog likes to curl up into a donut shape on the softest surface nearest me. His preferred surface is a human bed but a couch or rug will do. My at-home workspace has a guest bed next to my desk and this is often where the dog’s naps will take place. This guest bed is where he spends the most time as a donut.

My dog will occasionally kick his leg in a thumping motion while he sleeps. This causes his whole body to bounce up and down and up to a higher plane. For brief periods of time on this earth, my dog transforms into the bouncing donut.

I recently became immobile. Bad health and surgical wounds that won’t resolve. I’m a long distance runner, but now I’m not that. So I sit and watch my increasingly energetic dog hoping he can tire himself out. Knowing he can’t. 

In the past, I tried taking my dog on runs with me but he gets bored too easily. He’ll seemingly enjoy the run for about 5 minutes and then want to do something else. He’s had a similar issue on walks as he doesn’t want to repeat any route in exactly the same way. In a city using a grid system, I can weave him through different blocks to explore more of the local neighborhood.

A run along a trail offers little variation. I relate to the boredom and desire for novelty. Unfortunately, his version of novelty sometimes means pulling down an alley with a strong trash bin scent.

In many ways, I respect his refusal to accept anything less. I often wonder where he’d go without me if I didn’t keep him on a leash. How far he would go. And if he’d return.

Pompeii has a famous mosaic of a dog in a building called the House of the Tragic Poet. The mosaic says, “CAVE CANEM,” or, essentially, “Beware of the Dog.”

As much as my dog would like to think differently, generations from now won’t beware of him. Not because he won’t live forever, but because he isn’t that ferocious.

He looks to me for protection from other dogs and takes quite a while to warm up in a new dog park. Half an hour can pass with him standing at my feet before he finally finds the courage to run around. With this found courage, he’ll quietly orbit the other dogs with as little interaction as possible.

Dog parks are fine, but my dog never looks happier than when he’s sprinting at top speed.

If he reaches top speed I’m a bit more confident he’s had a good day. My apartment is too small for top speed. He tries carpet to couch to carpet to couch. But we both know it’s not top speed.

I dream of making it up to him. I want to take him to a dog store in the city.

George, a local chain, stands out with its designer choices, setting out to bring artisanal aesthetics to the realm of dog toys, and Le Marcel Bakery has a giant windowed-counter of baked goods for dogs while the owners make the treats behind the display.

If we’re ever close to one of these locations, my dog will pull inside no matter how tired he is from his running.

In my bad health I’ve felt like a monster. In this shrinking I’ve overcompensated with adorning myself with new clothes. Perhaps with enough clothes people won’t tell I’m repulsive. I bought a new striped shirt, American-made chinos, a vintage herringbone sport jacket, a raglan overcoat, and a cashmere scarf in just the right blue.

With all of my layers I essentially became a better bed for my dog. He can now donut even closer.

I recently came across a hand-painted ceramic from the Isle of Man that features an aging shepherd in a tweed green outfit sitting with a walking stick resting against his shoulder and his black-and-white dog sitting in between his legs.

As my black-and-white dog is going to live forever, he will be there to sit with me in old age. As he does now.

Regardless of the years that pass, there’s something about taking a rest from all the running around out in the world, and just sitting together. We can guard each other… one sleeps while the other keeps an eye on things.

I know there may come a time when this dynamic will run its course. When he has to look out for himself. When he’ll be forced to go into the world and befriend other dogs to survive. Perhaps the dog stores he used to go to will take pity on him and slip him a bone but I know he won’t have the cash to make that an everyday thing. He’ll have to find himself in this new freedom. And this will be a new version of himself that doesn’t involve separation anxiety from me.

I imagine he’d remain a city dog instead of heading for the woods. He can only change so much.

There’s an interpretation of the CAVE CANEM mosaic that it was meant as a joke… the dog in the mosaic is featured in a play bow and doesn’t look all that ferocious itself. I’d like to commission a mosaic called Beware of the Bouncing Donut.

The runs may have been the happiest, but resting near each other brings us both to a higher plane.

Christopher Wral is a writer in San Francisco. His website is christopherwral.com.

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PETS ISSUE

After Lindsey

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by Katie Haley

The therapist I saw after the breakup with Lindsey fixated on my teen years, talking to me about them in present tense instead of past. I couldn’t tell if this was because she’s a shit therapist or if my development was so obviously arrested the therapist couldn’t imagine there was anything more to talk about then the things that happened to me before I was twenty years old. 

Those years don’t do me any favors though. There’s a lot to talk about. Enough to fill a quarter of the pages in her yellow legal pad. There was the bulimia, which she seemed determined to blame on my mother’s habit of reading the nutrition labels on things like gum packets and toothpaste. The abortion I let Matty Parks pay for with money swiped from his dad’s nightstand that I haven’t thought about since it happened. And plenty of benzos in exchange for quickies behind the high school’s baseball dugout. 

I think the therapist latched on to the worst stuff, the most obvious struggles, not understanding what I needed help with most was the mildly unpleasant. An empty pill bottle in the back of the bathroom drawer with Moonie, the name of Lindsey’s cat, written in faded black ink on the label. The street I have to pass on my way to work that she lived on when we first met. My roommate’s dirty dishes in the sink. Lately, anything small consumes me. 

“How does it feel when your dad calls you a whore?” 

We stared at each other in silence while she waited for my answer, which I knew was expected to be insightful. I shook my head, reminding her I needed to talk about Lindsey and my dad hasn’t called me a whore in years. 

“Don’t you think your dad’s treatment of you will impact your relationships going forward?” 

Greta asks why I’m still making appointments with the therapist. I think I’m too ashamed to admit it’s because the appointments are something to do. Somewhere to go. An air-conditioned room to sit in. Greta says she has something she’s been told not to tell me yet but that she can’t help but tell me anyway. I get my hopes up thinking it will be about Lindsey. That she’s dating someone we both know, whose social media presence I can hunt for glimpses of her. That she isn’t dating anyone because our relationship was so significant she needs to be single for a while to rid her system of me. That I can shop at Saltzman’s again because she’s moved to a different neighborhood. But no. None of that was said. Nothing was said. Greta touched her palms to her stomach and smiled wide enough I could see most of her teeth. 

The baby shower was after a session where the bullshit therapist suggested I never got over the wound of my older sister leaving for college. I told the therapist my sister went to Sarah Lawerence so she didn’t exactly abandon me. At the shower, Greta assured me Lindsey wouldn’t be there. That the two of us were closer than the two of them. If only one of us could be invited, it was me. I did my best to hide my disappointment that the run-in I’d staged in my head was not happening. Her husband’s mother said the baby would be born with a full head of hair like her son, whose hairline hadn’t receded an inch all his life. She held up the sonogram and said a skull shaped like that is meant for thick hair. We ate cold cucumber sandwiches and were barred from wearing pink or blue or any kind of color that suggests gender. I went with a light green dress. Greta cried at her sister’s gift of a rattle engraved with their late brother’s initials under a small pair of angel wings. As much as I wanted the attention to be on Greta and the baby, all of mine was on Lindsey. I hadn’t found a way to casually bring her up in small talk I’d been making with the guests who knew her. It was my goal, to ask about her in a way that denoted I’d forgotten to until that moment. The hard part was picking the right friend to ask, someone close enough to have information but maybe not close enough to immediately message Lindsey to tell her I’d asked about her. Jess was out of the question as she and Lindsey saw each other almost every weekend and texted throughout the week. RJ couldn’t be trusted either as they did Lindsey’s hair, and from what I remember, she was due for a cut and color any day now. Liza would have to do. She liked to gossip but really only saw Lindsey a couple times a month. Although if one of those times should be the next day or sometime soon, if it was too close to the baby shower, one of the first things Lindsey would be told is that I wanted to know how she was doing. I took the risk. 

“Lindsey’s alright, she’s getting another cat I think.” It was all I could manage to get. 

It made me sad enough to spend the train ride back to the city crying. I’d begged Lindsey to add another cat to our mix, to give Moonie and I a friend, but she wouldn’t on account of our work schedules. What change had been made to her schedule that couldn’t have happened when we were together? 

The second therapy session following the shower was spent assessing if the pass my science teacher made at me in the eleventh grade was the catalyst for my sorry attempt at college. At least we’d moved up in the timeline of my life. 

At a dive bar I saw someone who looked like Lindsey walk out to the smoking patio with someone who didn’t look anything like me. When I had finally pushed my way through enough people to end up outside I didn’t see them but saw a girl who did look like me standing by herself, smoking the kind of cigarettes I’d just run out of. She let me bum one then took a book out of her purse to ask if I’d read it. It was her new thing, recommending it to strangers. 

“It’s just that good,” she said. 

A copy of a self-help book about dreams was in her right hand, the sticker promising a price that ended in ninety-nine cents was half picked off the front cover. She let me read the blurb before reading me a passage. 

“Your past flies overhead in the shape of a vulture and your future is at the end of the pavement before you. Don’t get distracted by the sounds of the vulture’s wings that you fail to look at what’s waiting for you.” 

She looked into my eyes like she was impressed to not see tears. I asked her what if the past isn’t a vulture flying above with the intent to maul you but a park pigeon whose begging for bread crumbs stresses you out so much you want to run as if it were a vulture? 

“It hasn’t said anything like that yet. But I bet it will. At least something similar,” she said. 

I put the cigarette out under the toe of my boot and thanked her. She said, “No need,” then went back to who I assumed, by the barely there brown eyeliner and the soft wave of her hair, was a date. I made a mental note that a book about dreams is a good thing to have on hand for a date in case the conversation dulls. Though I don’t know when I’ll be on a date next. After Lindsey, how little I am attracted to anyone else just makes me cry. 

Staying up late, thinking of the cat I wanted that Lindsey probably now has, I decided to adopt my own. A cat I could name anything I wanted. Anything but the name I wanted to call the cat I wanted with Lindsey because she’s probably using it now. Before falling asleep I decided to come up with a new name once I had the thing in my hands and could see it. There wasn’t any particular breed on my mind, just that it had to be a girl because boy pets came with a dick and a pair of balls. She’d get arm & hammer litter and eat out of a ceramic bowl. If she could tolerate it she’d wear a purple collar. 

The next morning I went to the shelter up the block and picked the only cat that didn’t come with a ‘but’ from the kid working. 

“She’s really smart but… she sent two previous owners to the hospital with bites.” 

“She’s sweet sometimes but… she swats at blondes.” 

“She’s great but… she has chronic worms.” 

We got to the cat I finally picked and I waited for the “but” for a long time. There wasn’t one. There wasn’t anything to say about her other than she’s smart, sweet, and great. Her gray fur had a patch missing on her leg from something that happened during her birth. It was the one part of her body she didn’t like touched. While wiping up her first shit I wondered if Lindsey was doing the same with her new cat that could’ve been ours and then wondered if, on the off chance that she was doing that, if she was thinking of me. Thinking about the little I asked for and when it became too much. 

At the next therapy appointment I mentioned the new cat, who I thought made a good Margie, and how Lindsey’s cat was my idea. The therapist asked if Margie reminded me of Cookie, the cat I had in my teen years. I said no because Cookie was a slow stray I lurred into the house with cookie dough and kissing sounds. 

“Cookie was with you after the abortion right? You said she laid on your stomach. Have you always felt connected to cats?” 

I didn’t want to talk about the abortion again so I ignored that part. 

“Always. Moonie, Lindsey’s first cat, was slow to warm up but she’d sleep on my chest sometimes.” 

“Did Lindsey like that?” 

It was the first time she’d asked me anything about Lindsey. Or spoke about the present. 

“I think so.” 

“Did she like you?” 

“I hope.” 

Katie Haley is a writer and gossip from California with honest work in/on Hobart, Vlad Mag, Somewords, and elsewhere. 

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PETS ISSUE

LOST AND FOUND

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by Suzy Eynon

My cat escaped in Colorado. We lived in three different states together, Kyle the cat and I. Colorado was the pit-stop between two other places that felt more like home. We stayed with my friend Larry, Kyle’s former owner. We had worked together at a grocery store back in Arizona. Larry and I, not the cat. Kyle was his cat in Arizona, but when he moved to Colorado six months ahead of me, Larry gave Kyle to me. He was going to stay with his mother, and she had a cat already. I was always falling in love with a friend’s cat, accepting other people’s strays.

I stayed Friday nights on Larry’s couch after my shift at the grocery store in Arizona because my roommate had a new girlfriend who had walked into my bedroom completely naked to ask to “borrow” lotion, then lubed up with her leg hiked on the side of my bed. Larry and I would get nachos from Aliberto’s drive-thru and watch movies with Kyle circling the periphery until I passed out. Kyle would wake me the next morning as desert sunshine seared my eyes through the miniblinds. He would jump off the window ledge above the couch and onto my head, and I would say good morning. It was the best sleep I got at the time even with Kyle’s greeting. I watched as the cat knocked Larry’s mugs off the kitchen counter to the linoleum floor.

“Since you like him so much,” Larry said, “do you want him?” 

I moved into my own small apartment. This was still in Arizona. I did want the cat. He was a beautiful Siamese tabby mix with startling blue eyes the color of shallow tropical waters. Pizza delivery drivers commented on his attractiveness. Larry didn’t have a cat carrier, so I bought one at the pet store on my way to retrieve him, then drove across town to my new apartment while the cat screamed at a high pitch. I took backroads because I was afraid of driving on the highway, and of making left turns. I was living alone for the first time in my life. Kyle and I became roommates. I had no couch or cable to receive any TV channels as reception was blocked by proximity to a mountain, but we had a tidy quiet place, just a couple of single youths.

When Larry left Arizona, I felt adrift. I was from the place everyone else left, permanent when everyone else was passing through. Then I left too. I picked Colorado since Larry was already there and it wasn’t too many states away. That, and I was probably in love with him. I told myself that I would visit my family every month on the Greyhound, since my fear of driving had expanded into a fear of flying. Larry wanted to move out of his mother’s place, so we could be roommates and he’d be reunited with Kyle.

The morning in Colorado when Kyle escaped, I’d woken up early to go to a breast cancer walk. Did you know you have to pay to participate in those? I didn’t. In those days, Kyle didn’t always want to sleep with me because he wanted to hang out with Larry, his former owner, who always had a clique over, carrying on in a raucous manner late into the night. Kyle would cry to be let out of my room where I hid and watched The Office DVDs and ate curry takeout, which I’d picked up on my walk home from the college where I was a thirty-year-old undergrad. My closest friends during this time, my first time moving away from home, were the cat and Pam Beesly. That morning I opened my bedroom door and the quality of light in the hallway was wrong, too bright for the early hour. It felt surreal, like entering a portal. 

I sleep-shuffled to the kitchen and poured cat kibble into a dish. It was drafty inside. I’d had trouble adjusting to the cold in Colorado, wearing the wrong type of coat and boots, soaked and slipping through that winter. As I went to grab a sweater, I saw that the front door was wide open to the landing outside our second-floor apartment. 

Larry was asleep in his room with the door closed. Our front door had an unfortunate quirk where if you didn’t slam and lock it, it wouldn’t always latch. It slowly swung back open over time. I glanced in the bathroom to make sure there wasn’t anyone hiding in there. Since this was Boulder in 2008, no one was in the apartment while we slept with the door wide open, keys left on the kitchen counter for the taking. Kyle didn’t come running from his spot in the living room. The dish was untouched.

I started out the door without the sweater, without shoes, calling for Kyle. He’d never been outside before. He was an inside cat. I wasn’t even sure he’d encountered stairs before. I stood on the landing, frozen for a moment against my rising panic. I turned to run down the stairs and there was Kyle, light on his feet, jogging up and then past me right into the apartment, as if we were pals passing in the hallway. He let out a chirp as I hurried in behind him and slammed the door before he could change his mind. He purred loudly as he ate.

“Sorry I almost lost the cat,” Larry said when he came out of his room.

 I felt lucky that Kyle was smart enough to return for food after a brief adventure. It horrified me that I came so close to losing him that day, that I had been asleep while he was running down the landing outside to frolic in the night or galloping down Arapahoe alongside cars in the dark. He’d been lost and found without my knowledge while I slept dumbly. I was young then and carried less anticipation of loss. I wouldn’t lose him for another 13 years, after we’d moved together one more time, to another state and finally to a house where he had more space to play, and he was my cat again. I let Larry know when the cat wasn’t doing well, gave him health updates along the way, until the final day.

After Kyle died, I wanted to find a piece of him previously unknown to me, a secret final message from the other realm he’d moved to. I’m not a religious person but I still looked to him for guidance as I did for years. We’d traveled through phases of life together. I picked up an old digital camera in hopes of finding forgotten photos of him but there were none I hadn’t seen before. I scoured the house for hidden memories and was frustrated to realize I couldn’t find the stuffed red monkey he’d once loved, the one that made a too-long shriek when its tummy was poked. I feared I’d given it away years earlier, before I fathomed losing him, when it was just an annoying monkey doll. 

Now that grief has dulled, my aging mind and the passing of time occasionally provide memories new to me, a photo I’d forgotten or a memory like the time he got out. I hope he had fun that night. Now I tell the story to friends like one might share the tale of a lost night in youth, reminiscing about a cool friend who disappeared for hours only to return wearing nothing but a cape, embellishing the story with each telling. It’s part of his lore. Maybe there was snow on the ground into which he sunk his striped legs. Maybe he met the raccoon that lingered in the strip mall behind the apartment complex and they ran free together through the field. Like a close friend, some parts of him remained unknowable, unreachable, even after spending 15 years together. I’ll never know what he saw or did that night. Kyle, my old friend.

Suzy Eynon is the author of Terrestrial and the chapbook Being Seen. She lives near Seattle with 3 cats.

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PETS ISSUE

Speaking Terms

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by Alexei Raymond

We’re no longer on speaking terms. 

We’re still close, but she’s stopped talking, or responding at all. A whisper-quiet treatment. I look at her in the mornings, how she serenely sleeps, sometimes twitches in dreams. I get the urge to kiss, caress, hold her to my chest. On weekends I watch her walk beside me, or run ahead. I, of course, cannot help myself and call out her name, trying to say whatever remains. She acts as if she doesn’t hear and refuses to stay near. Maybe she really doesn’t hear, or my voice is no longer dear. I cannot know for sure, but perhaps it’s depression that mars us so. I see the way she lounges on the couch before the TV, her gaze downturned to some sad corner of the room, away from me. I’m sure anyone else, had they seen her, would tell me I’m simply overthinking, projecting, she just looks tired, looks peaceful to me, but trust me, I know what I see. And this depression—no mere seasonal thing or vague distaste. She feels abandoned by me, hurt immeasurably. Sometimes it’s as if she’s finally looking at me, but I know that cannot be, for her mind is elsewhere, far from me. It’s why even on sunny days when the weather is godly and the wind flutters against her face, her sweetly shut eyes—a sight the very picture of animal contentment—my heart remains pinched. I know those moments, to her, are alternative grace. There are, also, nights when I am struck by fear, that by now we are simply strangers to one another, in this new configuration, no longer near. How they wound me, these moments in which she seems wholly new, materially immaterial, as if never before have I laid eyes nor planted kisses nor palmed caresses unto her. Never before held close. Are we through? No recourse? I do still believe in her soft spot for me, somewhere in her distant heart—should luck do its part. And yes, memories of better days do keep me afloat, but as we drift further away, as on separate boats, what good are they? Yesterday I felt as if our eyes finally locked; she could see me; I her. I wished she’d see into my very core and I’d peer into her, praying we’d overcome whatever drives her secretly sorrowing, avoidant heart. But the moment was a far cry from cinema and its minute facial nuances, last-minute reconciliations.
My face was frozen, matching hers, across all these photos and videos.

Alexei Raymond offers his heart, shaped by life and love in the Middle East. He chases visions of unspeakable loveliness. Find pieces of him in a variety of publications. https://x.com/enemyofcruelty

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PETS ISSUE

The two pets that I want most

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by Mariya Kurbatova

The two pets I want most are a fish or a rat but I live with two roommates and one has a cat and if I understand right, fish and rats are a cat’s favorite meals (though this particular cat is too old and fat to hunt but maybe orange enough to try) and our landlord used chatgpt to write the lease and she’d asked chatgpt to specify that the lease allows only one (1) cat, and though my hypothetical fish and my hypothetical rat would be contained (aquarium or cage respectively), I don’t know if she’d consider additional pets to be a violation of our chatgpt lease, and by the way our landlord apologized for using chatgpt to write our lease (she knows we’re all writers and it’s probably destroying our jobs but she still used it to write to the lease) and anyway, I don’t think I’m in a good place right now to be taking care of something living, something that needs my money for pellets and gravel and little calcium-fortified blueberry rat treats because I don’t have a lot of spare money right now and I don’t have a lot of spare space right now in this house I share with two roommates and a cat, and I don’t have a lot of spare space right now in this heart, because I’m used to hoarding all my love inside myself like a hamster bubbling its cheeks with grain because even though it (the hypothetical hamster) lives inside a cage inside a house with a human who has a paycheck to spend on grain for a hamster, the hamster doesn’t understand that it’s safe from starvation forever and so its survival instincts make it still hoard, but I’m slowly becoming less hamster and more human because you are so kind to me and my heart and maybe one day we’ll have enough money for our own house and we can fill our house with all the pets we want, and did I ever tell you that when I was little, I had a pet betta fish in a one gallon fish tank that I put on top of my bookshelf one day and just kinda forgot about until the fish slowly starved in its own slime, and also when I was little I begged my parents for a pink hairless rat, a rat hot dog creature that we took home in a petsmart cardboard box, and it died weeks later under my care because our house was kept so air-conditioned that my hairless rat got hypothermia, but you make me want to try again in the future to take care of something small and precious.

Mariya Kurbatova (she/her) is a fiction MFA candidate at the University of Arkansas. She’s the Book Reviews Editor for The Arkansas International literary magazine. Her work has previously appeared in HAD and the Tightwires Anthology. Please send her pictures of your dog via Instagram @dogenthusiast.

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PETS ISSUE Uncategorized

Animal Control Blotter, Northwest, CT

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A.T. and Adam Soldofsky

Torrington | 290 block of Church St | Report of a dead muskrat on the sidewalk, unknown if Muskrat Suzie or Muskrat Sam | 2:31PM – 03/29/2026

Torrington | 970 Torringford St (Walmart) | Report of a dog that jumped out of a vehicle and engaged in the art of fisticuffs with another dog and the dog’s owner | 20:32 – 04/18

Torrington | Highland Ave @ Ford Ln | Report of a pig crossing the road, unknown if it made it to the other side but the caller is wrestling the pig in an attempt to keep it safe | 18:20 –

UPDATE 18:24: The owner of the pig is on scene with cage

Adam Soldofsky is the author of the poetry collection Memory Foam, recipient of an American Book Award and Telepaphone, a novella. His latest collection, Three Short Novellas, is available here.

A.T. writes captions, among other things

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PETS ISSUE

Billy with a Y 

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by A.T.

Driving Route 5 West Side I overheard a regular rider named Elena talking to another passenger about her cat. “Oh, Luna does this . . . Oh, Luna does that . . . It’s the cutest thing . . . Luna is thee best cat.”

Bus drivers are not supposed to talk to passengers. There’s a DOT safety poster in the break room stating “unnecessary conversation is not only distracting, it’s PROHIBITED.” But Elena had crossed a line. 

“I  think you’re exaggerating.”

Elena glared at me in the overhead mirror. “Excuse me?”

”There’s no way Luna can be thee best cat. Maybe a distant second. I know this because I have the best cat. Her name is Billy, Billy with a Y.”

We adopted Billy ten years ago. I’d been the one hold out in the family when it came to having a pet. The kids wanted a cat. My wife wanted a cat. “But cats puke everywhere, and I’d be the one cleaning the litter box,” I’d say.

When I finally did go to the shelter it was under duress. The wife drove. I had agreed to go only if it was while the kids were in school so they didn’t beg for every cat they saw and whine when we left empty-handed. I got out of the car with my mind made up but prepared to pretend. The miasma punched me as I walked through the door. A thick, dank, disrespectful concentration of both pre and post-processed animal chow, wet dog, cat piss, and disinfectant. Dozens of dogs incessantly barked in some back area I would not venture. 

A lady with bloody scratches on her arms told us to look around. I followed my wife into an enclosure with scattered condos and scratching posts where cats could mingle and lounge, and hope to con their way out of an overcrowded nightmare of shared litter boxes and donated food and into a new home. Use their big eyes, head tilts, and rollover playfulness to prey on lonely, affection-starved saps looking to buy a friend because they didn’t have any.

I watched them all with a cold heart, arms close to my sides. I couldn’t be fooled. I didn’t need friends. And they all seemed to know it. 

All except one. 

A solid female Tabby came out of nowhere and jumped atop a cat condo I was standing next to. She stared into my eyes, ready and willing to be petted. When I didn’t give in, she leaned forward and rubbed against my sternum with her full body weight, as if we were old buds. Nice try. 

But something was different about this one. She didn’t vibe like the other idiot cats shucking and jiving for an easier life. Maybe she was just a better con. Or maybe she felt the same way I did about this whole ridiculous process and saw that in me. They say animals can tell what’s inside a person. I reached up, paused, then scratched her head, stroked her back. Her spine arched and she purred, headbutting me. I hung out with her for a few more minutes. Just to make it look like I’d made an effort. She seemed nice and I wished her well. On the way out I found her picture and information on the wall. A four-year-old stray someone at the shelter had named Millie.

My wife was wearing a big ass grin as we turned out of the lot. “So? Did you see any cats you liked?”

I almost mentioned Millie. Instead I folded my arms, looked out the passenger window like a petulant child. “No.”

Within a week I was back at the shelter. Alone. I hadn’t told my wife I was going. Just in case I came to my senses and turned around before getting there. A different lady with deep scratches on her arms had me fill out a questionnaire, so they could determine if our home was safe for Millie.

“Will the cat have an emergency savings fund of at least $2,000?”

“What specific brand of organic, free-range, grain-free holistic food do you plan to feed?”

“If you move, break up with a partner, or have a baby, how will you prove the cat is still your primary priority?”

“Are you willing to surrender your entire couch set to structural compromise?”

“What is your philosophy on feline behavioral discipline?”

I didn’t have two-grand for myself, let alone for a cat, hadn’t considered pet food yet, and I was for sure, without a doubt, never getting a divorce. I adjusted the truth and was handed a clipboard with adoption paperwork. 

As a staff member slipped away to do whatever they do with paperwork I called my wife, who was surprised to hear where I was. “The kids are gonna be so happy!” She didn’t like the name Millie because she’d had a dog named Millie and was against the idea of using it again. But I was reluctant to change an animal’s given name. She might hate it and decide to ignore us whenever we called her. When people claim their pet doesn’t know their own name I want to say maybe they just don’t like it. As a compromise, the wife suggested Billy, because it sounded similar. I looked into the enclosure and saw Millie, now Billy, sitting atop the same cat condo as when we first met, looking at me through the glass. I waved like an idiot. The staff member went in, grabbed her by the scruff, and stuffed her in a cardboard carrier with “I’M GOING HOME” printed on the side in big, red bubble letters. Billy yowled and yawped the whole ride. 

When I got back to the house I brought the carrier down into the basement and opened the top, expecting Billy to leap out. But she just stayed there, looking up at me like What the fuck is happening? I tried to coax her out by going psss, psss, psss, and then with treats, but nothing worked. I considered turning the carrier over and shaking her out like pruned limbs from a trash can but decided that might be taken as a poor welcome by an already scared cat. I thought about how friendly she was during my first visit to the shelter and briefly wondered if I’d been given the wrong cat. I checked the time, saw I had to pick Holly up from preschool and bolted out the door. Holly burst with excitement when I told her about our new cat. 

I figured Billy would have taken advantage of her alone time to explore. But she was still in the box. Staring up at us with that same look on her face. I told the kid we would just have to be patient. We set up a litter box, put out a bowl of water and a bowl of food, but several hours later Billy was still in the box. So I poured her out. She scrambled across the fake wood flooring, and found a place to hide. And that was the last any of us saw of her that day. My wife and Sam came home, looked everywhere and couldn’t find the cat. The following day, Sam caught a glimpse of green-yellow eyes reflecting light from under a piece of furniture. By the time anyone else got there they were gone. This is how it went for a couple months. It was almost like we didn’t have a cat. The only reason we knew she was there, somewhere, was because food and water would disappear, and there’d be something for me to scoop from the litter box.

I felt like a moron. Billy had conned me afterall, which I kind of respected. But my kids had wanted a cat and I managed to adopt one that didn’t want anything to do with us. 

One night, Holly said, “What ever happened to the cat we had that day?”

I hate to admit it, but I considered seeing if I could take Billy back to the shelter and exchange her for a different cat. My wife had enough. She enacted a strict daily program of exposure therapy that became known as “Billy Time.” After dinner was cleaned up she’d drag the cat out by the scruff from whatever piece of furniture she was hiding under and bring her to the couch where we could all pet her. At first the forced integration sessions only lasted a minute or so before Billy dug her claws into someone’s lap and escaped to one of her hiding places. But the time she tolerated this gradually increased. A couple minutes became ten, ten became twenty. She stopped digging her claws into our laps. Her body relaxed. She began to purr with the attention we gave her. By six months Billy was voluntarily coming out to hang with us, appearing in the living room at “Billy Time” all on her own, pausing to look at us like, You forgot to drag me out from under the dresser. She even began begging for food. Loudly and insistently. She was still skittish with Holly because little kids are full of energy and like to dress cats up and carry them around like a baby, which Billy usually tolerated with nothing more than an indignant expression. And when she simply had enough of being forced to wear a tutu, Billy would lightly scratch H, who would then cry and claim to have done nothing to deserve it.

Over a short period of time even that changed. Holly and Billy were becoming best friends. Billy even seemed to enjoy being dressed up and smothered with hugs and carried like a baby. As Holly grew and calmed down they spent more and more time together. Holly became her favorite person in the house. Billy didn’t sleep in anyone else’s bed. She would perk up when Holly got home from school, lay across her math homework, and no longer bothered shaking off the hair ties Holly draped over her ears, wearing them with purring, slit-eyed regal satisfaction and pride. As if she’d been crowned.

Billy also became my writing companion. There was never a time she wouldn’t curl up next to me as I typed or scribbled in my notebooks. 

The kids discovered the box containing Billy’s adoption papers and saw her name had been changed from Millie. It was a major scandal. 

“Changing someone’s name is mean!”

“You should have asked us first!”

My wife explained the decision behind the name change. The kids weren’t swayed. They were angry we would do such a thing, angry we hadn’t consulted them. There was a revolt. In protest, they started calling her Millie. If I called her Billy, Sam would say, “You mean Millie.” But their attention spans were short. Millie became Billy once again. Peace returned to the valley. But only for a time.

In the divorce my ex-wife got the house. I got the cat. Billy didn’t appreciate being stuffed into a carrier and emerging into a strange new place with strange new sounds and smells. She expressed her displeasure the only way cats seem able to: puking. But, like she did with the family all those years ago, Billy warmed up to the new situation and even seemed to enjoy having a new home. My ex-wife had added a puppy to the mix, a development Billy and I did not care for. In no time she was strutting around as if my new apartment had been her territory forever. At this time, so early in the breakup of the family, there was no love lost between me and the ex, but I remained grateful to her for three things. Two of those things being our kids. The third was forcing me to go to the animal shelter the day I first met Billy.

Sharing custody of my kids, who I’d seen every day of their lives up until then, was the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through. Having Billy snuggled next to me as I read or watched tv in my sad, depressive state helped a lot. I suppose I did need a friend.

Time went on. Scar tissue covered old wounds. People adjusted. Billy got old. She was nearing eighty in cat years. Meds for a thyroid condition made her weight go up and down. Then only down. She went from twelve pounds to six, then four. She started to look like skin and bones. One weekend she began to have trouble breathing, then lost the ability to meow. Her not being able to meow was possibly the most heartbreaking part to me. She could no longer perform a cat’s sworn duty to annoy their owner with incessant cries for food. She didn’t ask for food at all. 

The vet said it was heart failure. After having fluid drained from her lungs, Billy started eating and meowing again, but I was warned that is temporary. That she will get worse again. It lasted fifteen days.

Billy rode in the back of my car. I’d placed the towel containing her body inside a cardboard box. I thought about the cardboard cat carrier from the shelter with “I’M GOING HOME” printed on the side in big, red bubble letters. Billy was leaving us the way she had arrived. 

The pet crematory was in a dark building atop a hill. In a reverse procession, I carried Billy to the door behind my ex-wife and kids. A man with a big mustache let us in. The main room had shelves and shelves of urns and keepsakes, such as necklaces and bracelets one could put their pet’s ashes in. The mustache directed us to a small room to lay Billy out on a cushioned counter. The little room had dark walls and was dimly lit. There was a bench to sit on while we said our goodbyes. On one side of Billy’s cushion there was a statue of a frog sitting in the lotus position. On the other side were a couple of children’s books about death. On the wall above, a framed image of Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet holding hands and walking away below the phrase “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.” And goddammit I cried even more. Sam wanted a hug, then didn’t want a hug. I don’t know how long we were there. We said a difficult final goodbye to our Billy, walked out of the room and then the building. It was the first time we had left her with someone who was not one of us. 

At home, afterimages of Billy haunted my peripheral vision in the form of a couch cushion, a shadow, a hoodie left crumpled in a corner. I was careful to watch my step in places she had always been underfoot. Drying tears left a salty film on my glasses.

That day when I told Elena that her cat couldn’t possibly be the best cat in the world, that Luna could only be a distant second best cat at best, she took playful exception to this hard truth. From then on, whenever she got on my bus, Elena would greet me with, “How’s the second best cat doing?” And I would dutifully reply, “I don’t know, you tell me.”

The first time I saw Elena after Billy’s passing she was waiting at her usual stop in a downpour. I knew telling her what happened was going to require everything I had not to cry. And it still wouldn’t be enough. I briefly considered sailing past, pretending I didn’t see her.

But I hit the four-ways, eased to the curb, pulled the E-brake, and the bus kneeled down before her. I opened the door. Elen boarded, closing her umbrella, and looked at me with a mischievous smile. “How’s the second best cat in the world?”

“I don’t know, you tell me.”

A.T.

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Saturday Morning II Uncategorized

Duck Pond #11

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by Adam Soldofsky

Adam Soldofsky is the author of the poetry collection Memory Foam, recipient of an American Book Award and Telepaphone, a novella. His latest collection, Three Short Novellas, is available here.

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Across The Wire Vol. 8

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

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By Bill Whitten

Scene I: Duluth

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

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

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

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

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

A collective ewwww from the students.

“And we all know what they do…” 

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

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

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

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

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

He begins pacing again.

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

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

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

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

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

Scene II: Lower Stratosphere

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

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

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

She moves her cart down the aisle.

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

Ian

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

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

Talk soon,

Ludlow

Scene II: New York

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

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

Ian’s eyes skim Dr. Swift’s email.

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

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

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

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

She closes the door behind her. 

“For some of us that is…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scene IV: Shanghai

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

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

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

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

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

In a singsong voice he recites:

Just as the newspaper yellows

and the white spider’s filaments catches no flies

And the riverman’s boat lies still in pathless waters

It is my destiny to lift Oblivion’s veil.

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

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

Tsien unlocks the door and speaks softly: 

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

Scene V: Duluth

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

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

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

Vann sips his drink and sighs. 

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

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

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

“Then what happened?”

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

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

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

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

Scene VI: Hell, Precisely

“Please follow me Professor Swift.”

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

“Omaha Wing?”

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

“I see.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Security purposes?”

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

The elevator jerks to a halt.

“We take every precaution imaginable.”

The doors open.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Creatures?”

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

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

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

“Yes Dr. Tsien.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Enough Tsien. Take me to the subjects.”

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

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

The doctor presses an intercom button and addressed the guard.

“Any new incidents Haolin? 

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

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

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

“Chenguang meet Dr. Ludlow Swift.”

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

“She seems to fancy you Swift.” 

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

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

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

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

Tsien walks down the hall toward the screams.

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

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

Tsien is once again at his side.

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

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

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

Scene VII

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

Scene VIII

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

Scene IX

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

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

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

Categories
Saturday Morning II

Jobless

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by Nate Perkins

Nathaniel Kennon Perkins is the author of the books Cactus (Trident Press, 2018), The Way Cities Feel to Us Now (Maudlin House, 2019), and Wallop (House of Vlad, 2020). His work has appeared in Spike Art Magazine, Upstreet, Triquarterly, Rejection Letters, and Intrepid Times, among many other online and print publications. He runs Trident Press and lives in Mexico City. www.nathanielkennonperkins.com


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Across The Wire Vol. 8

Pocomoke Billy

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by Richard Pounder 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Billy has three teeth. His voice is gravelly. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He smacks my shoulder. “Ya ready?”

“Yep!” I try my best.

He laughs again.

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

“Come here,” Billy says to me. 

I follow him through another door. 

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

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

“Pick up the dead?”

“Yep.”

“Whattaya mean?”

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

I nod. “Alright.”

“You want gloves?”

Billy’s not wearing gloves.

“I’m good.”

Billy just stands there and watches. 

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

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

“Uh-huh.” 

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

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

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

“Morning, babe!” she says. 

“Hey.” 

Billy chuckles under his breath. 

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

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

“Hold up! Wait a minute!”

“Huh?” I turn around. 

“Missed one.”

“I did?”

“Yup.”

Fake chuckle. “Oh.” I stand there. 

“You gone get it?”

“Where is it?” 

Ed comes in. “Annie!”

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

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

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

“I got it,” I say. 

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

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

I keep walking. 

There’s a chicken limping. 

I walk past it. 

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

“How?” 

“Gotta kill it. Waste of feed.”

I laugh and keep walking. 

“I’m serious.”

“Oh. What do I do?”

“Lemme show you.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ed looks at Billy. “See that?”

“Took a while,” Billy says. 

“Now, he did good.”

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

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

I say sure.

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

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

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

“He’s never made you help?”

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

“So, what do you do?”

“Just toss it in the bucket.”

“Isn’t that worse?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watching her causes me to slow down. 

“You alright?” growls Billy.

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

The buzzards lean forward. 

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

Categories
Dispatches from the King's Motel

America’s Big, Beautiful Birthday, A Heat Dome, & The Wartime World Cup

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Derek Maine

June, still somehow, 27th, 2026

Austria and Algeria are playing in Kansas City in a strange World Cup game. If the game ends in a draw, both teams get through to the knockout stage. If one team wins then Iran takes the losing team’s spot in the knockout round. The game is 1-1 in the 48th minute. Iran is still alive in the wartime World Cup, but will Algeria or Austria push and attack for Iran on the pitch?

Austria scores in the 54th minute to take the lead. A clinical quick strike for Marcel Sabitzer. Algeria will have to attack for their World Cup lives, Austria defend for Iran’s.

Almost all of the viral social media videos of Europeans (and Australians) experiencing American excess are part of a CIA operation. The captain of Algeria, Riyad Mahrez, scores in the 60th minute. Tie game, thirty more minutes to either pass the ball around and both go through or attack and let Iran through to play in the wartime World Cup on enemy soil. A match break (necessary due to the extreme summer heat and humidity in much of North America) at the 69th minute.

The crowd is loud, storming through my scream. Chants I cannot understand. In languages I don’t know. Any single individual’s experience is so small, our perspectives so thin. The world is everything outside our periphery and we process all of it inside our narrow passage. The world is everything that is the case. The game has slowed to a crawl here in the 81st minute, both teams seemingly comfortable with the draw. Iran waits.

The scoreboard in the stadium switches to a live Messi goal. Roars and roars of roars. Players looked up and watched. The ball is staying in the midfield, passing and passing time.

Pattycake paddy cake out there. The crowd whistles its disgust at the pace of play.

In the 93rd minute Riyadh Mahrez breaks away and scores again for Algeria. Austria is shocked. Iran is alive.

June 28th 2026

In the last seconds of play Austria’s Sasa Kalajdzic on his first touch, with Austria on the brink of elimination puts a header in the back of the net. The game is called. Iran is eliminated in the wartime World Cup.

Russia threatens to blow up “half of Finland.”

July, War(s)

On this, the eve of the semiquincentennial of American independence, in this century of the empire falling, I take two Xanax before lunch, smoke half a joint, and head to the municipal pool. It is good to get out in the community to take the temperature of a thing. We are under a heat dome, the whole east coast. Highs are 103. It has not rained in weeks. I have heard from my people in DC. The city is under construction. Hazards everywhere, smothered in reds, whites, blues. The things a heat dome can do to a city is diabolical. The work of the devil, it is no wonder the defining feature of hell is the heat. There are no skyscrapers in DC, in our nation’s capital. Did you know this? Many people do not. There is an ordinance relating to height and the capitol dome. It’s a city on a marsh. Most people know this. It’s a city with no representation. Important to know this. I have elected to stay back, trust my eyes and ears to my team in DC (I have just this morning enlisted an audio visual documentarian), and, instead, report on the semiquincentennial from one of the nameless, supposedly charming small American towns which, I’m told, make up something called the ‘heart of America.’ There are so many Americas. We can only stand on one patch at a time, looking out. Perspectives limited, obscured by the sheer size of this nation of states.

I am reading Death in the Afternoon under designer Italian shades at the pool on account of the sun and wanting to be a better writer.

A settling high kicks in during adult swim.

I float on my back and study the clouds. The sun bores down.

Until I find the evening has once again gotten away from me.

July 4th 2026

On her big, beautiful birthday I went to one of her lakes, traded the rest of the courier’s hashish to one of her teenagers in exchange for thirty minutes on the jet ski. I sacrificed a touch of my high for water sports, and I did not regret it.

I would eat an ice cream if handed one, but am too stoned to initiate.

Suburban bombs in the air. Where was I this time last year? Somewhere stuck beneath the pages of Wartime Author and if I had any mettle about me (a little ‘get up and go,’ as they say) I could lug out the manuscript and check rather quickly but inertia sets in, as it often does, and I hear the fireworks, municipal and homegrown alike, and the dogs, hooting and hollering tonight. How long will it last? Is it truly celebratory? What with all these dark forces milling about?

Meanwhile Charles, next door, is blasting some television special. It sounds like Lawrence Welk with explosive diarrhea. I can hear him, through the thin motel wall, giggling. Chortling. The motherfucker is chortling. There’s nothing left but the ride down the mountain of empire, and Charles is chortling.

This July fourth is one of those swampy, endless summer nights. Imagine fireflies. Imagine a heat dome. Skittering children riding motorbikes on the lawn. The city is tensing up. Record heat today, up and down the coast. The night air is a heavy warm blanket. There is no relief, only atrition.

7.5.26

It was so hot the fire alarms went off this evening at the King’s Motel. The leftover fireworks sputtered out around nine, maybe ten. England defeated Mexico in the Azteca, 3-2. I have no reports from Mexico City (where I do keep a few attachés). The heat is making everything seem sinister. Likely I have said this before or made a similar point. This is the curse of the column. I cannot look back in the true spirit of currentivism. And I owe a debt to currentivism. This is me working it off. There are several things I have left out, only one or two on the advice of counsel, and my debts have thus far been spared the shame of being confused for literature. Suffice to say a semi-professional poker player and freelance writer living in a motel at a monthly rate has a few debts to pay. You don’t arrive here flush.

Thunderstorms interrupted the 250th birthday party in the capital city.

An image surfaces of Dear Leader watching himself watch himself on television. Images capture so much more than words and that’s their problem.

July 7th 2026

Iran is attacking ships in the Strait of Hormuz again, the birthday party is over. The United States tells the world it does not favor the rule of a player having to be suspended for the next game if he gets a red card and we have been nothing but gracious hosts, sooo……

And in this era it works.

Football, however, no stranger to controversy, political favors, bribes, is still settled on the pitch. Dear Leader made three phone calls to the FIFA President, his friend, and the suspension was lifted for America’s best player in this North American World Cup. 

Then Belgium completely dominated the United States 3-1, and our goalie made a particularly humiliating, comical physical error. All of the host nations are eliminated. Iran resumed their attacks on the Strait of Hormuz. I shot 109 at the municipal par three in expensive Italian sunglasses and globs of white sunscreen glue stuck to my beard. It was an unattractive sight and I was walking and I was playing alone and there was no worse or slower player on the course and I let every one play through until the night manager had to shut the lights off so I gave myself a triple bogey on 18 to fill out my scorecard (I am working on my short game this week). I blame the quaaludes entirely. For all of it, and I apologize too. For all of it, I must apologize.

U.S. renews strikes against Iran, sanctions back on, peace off, war on.

July 10th, 2026

Overheard tonight, having drinks with the courier, a young pastel polo collared man with boat shoes announces to his table “Have fun with your fucking utopian bullshit. I watched Hotel Rwanda and bought a gun.” The courier needs Manny Machado to hit a home run tonight to hit his parlay.

July 11th, 2026

I wrote this during the war. I wrote in those days, my son. I wrote during the war. I was paid to cover it (am paid to cover it) and bring news home to the common people. I am active on several fronts. It was supposed to last ten days, maybe two weeks at most and I was going to grab my juiciest, nastiest byline yet: The Atlantic. I have dreamed, ever since seeing the photograph of the owner of The Atlantic widow and philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, on a sunny day in a bath suit looking radiant and sexy sitting on a couch laughing with Gishlaine Maxwell (her own gifts pouring through the lens) of finagling my way into their pages. Real writers write pieces for The Atlantic. The Paris Review. The New Yorker. The widow benefactor. The CIA. The Fleischmann Yeast Man’s winnings in a poker game. In other words, the holy trinity of literary superstardom. This is still a real thing. This is the thing that was supposed to happen for me but the war kept on, past ten days and past two weeks and The Atlantic wasn’t real (my ex-wife duped me, it’s a whole story), and the war kept on and I was looking for a missing writer and I had his manuscript and he was down to only writing by hand for fear of the machines stealing his work and the war kept on and the land use attorney cut a back room deal with The Estate and the war kept on and new fronts opened up and a solider set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy and the wars kept on and multiplied as my own wars, public and private, played out against a backdrop of an empire falling. Presently, the night sky. Everywhere I went, every room I went in, for ten whole years, I heard whispers. It was during the war, my son, I wrote these things. I covered it.

July 12th, 2026

I woke up this morning on the Crystal Coast, hiding from several things at once and still chasing shadows. First thing, a fistful of ice, black coffee. A morning smoke and stroll on the beach, beneath the pylons at the fishing pier. A death in the senate is the first news of the world. The oldest senate on record, I believe. Nothing reaches me here. The aromas of the day: salt air, marijuana smoke, tobacco smoke, aloe vera, Deet. I sit with Martin Amis on the beach for three hours, racing right past noon, while he tells me raunchy, hilarious stories of John Self (in the voice of). Every hour for fifteen minutes I close my eyes and leave Martin and instead join John Self in my dreams, clinking glasses and making a fortune, sleeping with everything. It’s a much nicer way when Martin tells it, but sometimes I like to sneak off.

July 13th, 2026

America attacks Iran for the second straight evening, striking in honor of their fallen senator, a committed war hawk.

The deck boards at my beach house are wobbly and I have gained ten pounds, most of it  fried flounder doused in tartar sauce plus all the goddamn sugar in mojitos, and I am myself wobbly. I finish my last joint of the night in fear of falling through, to the deck below, warped wood, two days rain soaked, giving out.

July 15th, 2026

Smoke from the Canadian wildfires returns, and an explosive diarrhetic parasite is in the food, likely lettuces.

Argentina will play Spain in the World Cup Final. It is the summer of soccer. The summer of shit. The summer of smoke. I am taking my coffee hot and black here on the island. My meals are fried. I have gone surf-fishing every evening and surf-caught next to nothing. The mornings are afternoons instead, and I briefly consider taking up residence at the weekly rate motel in this town instead of the rotten capital city I currently shrivel in but after walking in to speak to the manager about a special writer’s rate and seeing the condition of the place (musty is fine, sour and musty is not; peeled paint and popcorn ceilings preferred but the parade of roaches and mosquito breeding grounds in the bathtub are beneath even my own shrinking dignity) I decided to keep my wits about me and not turn a vacation into a home. People make this mistake. Many do. Yes, it’s true, I am taking a vacation. If there are bombs and deaths outside these beach house walls they have not reached me. I am concerned with the tides and the chance of rain each hour, how, when, and where the yellow snapper are biting and little to nothing else, blessedly. I deserve it. After everything they’ve put me through. I’ve fulfilled half of my assignment: a column every month for Farewell Transmission on the war slash wars in twenty-twenty-six. The money men behind the magazine’s operation forced me to do promotion earlier this week. They asked me to arrive at a time and a place and they put their clothes on me and made me speak nonsense into their cameras. Everyone wants to know what a writer looks like. What a writer wears. The contours of his or her scowl. Etc. Etc. I oblige because I chose to be their jester. I take their dirty money and they take my dirty writing and a couple times a year someone from the New York Times calls to ask for me a quote about the “literary crisis in America,” and I sing for my supper.

I will blur every line there is and disintegrate distinction until you too see reality is negotiable. You can change in and out of them. Reality is not fixed. Reality is more like a menu of options. One of those old tv guides. I put up a shingle today in town. “Discrete Investigations 919-518-4242.”

July 16th, 2026

A second heat dome has hit my mid-Atlantic state and I leave the beach house to get back to work, stopping and playing 18 holes at a retirement town (shooting 116, cheating on several holes and giving up on one to sit under a tree and smoke). The highlight of my day. I thought seriously about why I got into this line of work. What keeps me clinging to the life raft of literature in this rotted out psychotic pornographic digital overlay overlaying everything serving you exactly what you ordered (and twelve things you didn’t know you needed)? It’s a fair question. Quite the navel gazing one, I’d caution. I could say I believe in a kind of transference of consciousness between writer and reader and further believing we are all one consciousness briefly separated here on earth and so reading is spiritual undertaking for me and I take it seriously as such, but to say this would not be fitting with the modern style, nor notions. None of us choose the times we live in. I certainly did not. Am I made for them instead? Absofuckinglutely. I removed the shingle this morning, returned the keys to the owner, took out the trash and put in the lock code and ran the dishwasher and headed West (east would deposit you in the Atlantic Ocean) back to the wars, and my existence as a noticing machine.

July 19th, 2026

Iran attacks a U.S. military base in Jordan. Two service members killed, one missing.

My Russian propagandist tells me, tonight, over several coffee mugs of Nolet’s Reserve, a coup may be fomenting in Kiev. He said language matters greatly and I agreed. I assured him I would let him keep his own language if he agreed to a sit-down interview (it has been brought to my attention, by readers and editors alike, in frequent messages, terse and exhibiting alarmingly high levels of executive function, that I ought to report on the war I started to report on and stop reporting on the wars I picked up along the way and especially, please Lord, the private war I started and so I am trying to please my few and faithful readers and my immaculate editors, all publishers past, present, and future, and get some proper journalism done) and he is mulling the offer over at present.

July 20th, 2026

The Tate Brothers are taken in custody in Miami, awaiting extradition to the United Kingdom for serious sex crimes. Dear Leader welcomed them here in February, 2025. Strange.

July 22th, 2026

The house approves Dear Leader’s request for an additional $95B to fight the war in Iran.

July 23rd, 2026

Trade routes. International shipping. Thirteenth night in a row of strikes on Iran. Houthi’s attacked two Saudi tankers in the Red Sea.

July 25th, 2026

I can hear my editor in my ear now. I can hear the ghost of my literary benefactor. “Get to work! Bring me news of the war! Our people are starving.”

I am fucking working here! I am ON THE GROUND! Days, weeks, and an occasional April may go by without much ink touching paper and it may LOOK like I am abdicating all responsibilities, letting down my legion of fans, stealing paychecks from Farewell Transmission, thumbing my nose at my editor, besmirching the good name of my dead benefactor but, like the poem on the wall in a beach house where you only see one set of footprints during the trials and tribulations, when I am not working I am actually working the hardest. And I am also hanging on for dear life. None of this is easy, and none of this felt like my choice. I wanted to get my ex-wife back. For good. I wanted to be a famous writer, and surprise literary conferences with the rare appearance to stunned crowds of literati, academics, and the press. Well, when I was five I probably wanted to be a fucking firefighter. Dreams are a nuisance. Dreams get you a room at the King’s Motel and bed fleas. Dreams get you a still unanswered letter from Baltimore. Dream long enough and you too can cover a war from a behavioral health center. 

I worked plenty this month. I reject all of your claims and insinuations to the otherwise. The war raged on, I’m sure. Empty words, big bombs, a chokehold blockade stalemate prevents safe passage, elections, smoke from Canadian wildfires, the price of goods continues to go up while seven people are getting diabolically richer by the hour. More Iranian citizens were killed. More members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard were killed. More American servicemen were killed. We celebrated our 250th birthday. We proved we can cheat and still never make it out of the round of 16 in the World Cup. I sat around, dumbly, and waited. I laid on my bed in the King’s Motel drunk, high, destructive, sad, waiting. Waiting for something to happen, anything, other than what was already happening and the month came and went and circumstances did not improve. Morale remained low.

Derek Maine writes about the war for Farewell Transmission.

Categories
Dispatches from the King's Motel

June, Wars

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Derek Maine

6.3.26

For God’s sake just tell me who wins the war. I did this all to myself.

6.4.26

If I could do it all over again I would pass. Who wouldn’t?

6.7.26

To celebrate 250 years we will have a cage match on the White House lawn and a divisive, mean-spirited political speech. Seems fitting.

Iran is firing on American military bases in Bahrain and Kuwait. Wednesday, confirmed, sides exchanged fire. Iran accuses America of violating the ceasefire.

6.8.26

Iran fires missiles at Israel tonight after Israel struck the suburbs in Beirut. The ceasefire holds. Dear Leader walks off the barn set, hits his head on a mic trying to avoid hay bales in a belligerent national television interview. The markets tomorrow morning may crater. I am snugly in the woods but the bugs are swarming my cabin.  The problems of the novel are being solved. I am grateful to be in the woods with my dog and the lightning bolts. Tomorrow: a summer haircut, hand edits at Virlie’s Grill, a trip to Circle City Books & Music, and much walking. Tonight: Sun Ra, sleep. My May column came out today. I am still employed.

6.9.26

I did none of those things. I wrote my ex-wife a letter instead, bought a stamp, and shipped it up to Baltimore. Before she left I confessed covering the wars was driving me to the brink of insanity and my novel even further. I told her I couldn’t tell which was worse, what beast may come. She said I was crazy before the war and before the novel, and she thought I was likely confusing the two constantly. She asked me if I ever considered spending time in the real world, and I regretted telling her about the munitions factory last month. She hated the King’s Motel and said that was her real reason for leaving. I told her I hated it too, and that was exactly why I had to be there. I am on assignment, I said. She looked at me with pity. “Some people,” she said, “spend their whole lives running from who they are.” I didn’t know what it meant then and I don’t know what it means now. So I wrote her a letter and asked. I made sure to put my room number at the King’s Motel on the self-addressed stamped envelope I provided.

Music played on the front lawn of the White House, a soundcheck for the upcoming cage match, while America bombarded Iran with air strikes anew.

6.10.26

A second day of strikes against Iran.

6.11.26

We will strike Iran again after the SpaceX IPO. This administration is a market-based administration. No settlement deal. Dear Leader promised we would invade Iran and take control of Karg Island and take over their oil supply and revenues and it was all starting tonight. A few hours later he announced a settlement deal was close and he would cancel the imminent destruction. It’s not even good theater and I am being paid (well) to write about it (half-assedly).

6.12.26

The Ukraine war (my initial military beat) has changed significantly in the last few months. Some stats: after the initial invasion in February of 2022 (and including Crimea which was taken in 2014) Russia controlled approximately 27% of Ukraine territory. Counter offenses by Ukraine pushed the percentage down to about 18% by November of 2022 where it has mostly held. More than one million Russian soldiers killed or wounded in the 3.5 years just to hold this land. The pace of Russian casualties has increased this year, roughly 35,000 every month. Ukraine casualties have been even worse per-capita. 600,000 total killed or injured for Ukraine, or about 7% of available fighting age citizens. Russia has lost 3% of their fighting age citizens, but for the first time in the war they are losing them at a rate they cannot replenish. 

“The war was brought from Russia and it is to Russia that the war must be pushed back.” Ukrainian President Zelensky. Zelenskyy. From Kiev. Kyiv. Declared in March of 2025. Ground counter offensives ended. Too casualty intensive for small gains in territory. Asymmetric, long range (William Vollmann’s article in Granta last July Drones and Decolonization explains it all much better than I can. I am a wartime author, William Vollmann is a reporter and one of America’s finest novelists and moral thinkers in this or any other age). Drones, basically. 

I have timed, but not executed (it’s too early for reasons related to volatility and rules) my short position against SpaceX. There will be a new vibe shift this year. I can feel it. We all can. Something about to come crashing down. We’re all just wondering when. We’re all just wondering how. We’re all just wondering if we’ll be ok. A very few very weird dudes are taking all the money and either building elaborate bunkers or trying to escape the planet. The one who funded the New York art scene for a few summers moved to South America. The man has taste, we give him that. A sense of style, if you will. The last president’s son, a former crackhead and hooker addict, never visited Ukraine “for company business” during “his tenure” on the board of Burisma, the Ukrainian natural gas company. I have reached out and asked him to draw the cover to my second novel, Wartime Author. He has not yet responded.

Neither Russia or Ukraine are in the wartime World Cup. The United States and Iran are. Dear Leader says a deal to end the war will be signed tomorrow and the Strait of Hormuz will be opened immediately thereafter.

6.14.26

On Dear Leader’s 80th birthday, a deal is signed with Iran to end the war and a cage match is held on the front lawn at the White House.

Screams of joy outside the King’s Motel tonight as the local hockey team wins the Stanley Cup. Dear Leader turns 80, surrenders to Iran, weakens an empire, China rising, Australia defeats Türkiye 2-0, Germany defeats Curaçao 7-1, Japan and Netherlands tie with two goals each, Ivory Coast defeats Ecuador 1-0, and I do not watch the UFC fights on the White House lawn. I have no interest in wrestling, I stay true and loyal to the sweet science. My editor seems happy with me. He asks about organizing a reading. It has been dreadfully, deadly hot here and I coughed up dirt for two hours outside a BP station out in the country earlier today delivering hashish and benzodiazepines to Captain Jason. He has taken up residence in the country, out near Federal Correctional Complex Butner and is keeping a low profile until some district attorneys change over in the election in November in Key West. 

6.15.26

The Iranian national team arrives in the United States for the wartime World Cup only hours after the peace deal was reached. It will be signed, in ink, in Switzerland, on Friday.

America surrenders, pays Iran $425 billion of our citizen’s treasure to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Nothing was gained, and the world is less safe and more expensive. All sanctions are lifted against the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism. 

The $40M dollar restoration of the reflecting pool making the water “American flag blue” lasted one week and one image before an algae bloom turned the water a puke green, much worse than before. The image is the thing.

The honor guard, the advertisements, the violence. There are emblems and capitulations everywhere for the eyes to see. Encapsulating our country in snow globes to sell on the seashore. I am deciding between beach towns at the moment. My eyes are filled with candy. Embarkments find me at every pass. 

6.16.26

“This is great for the American family,” Dear leader begins his surrender song, assuring.

6.17.26

What if we just become the best at soccer, randomly, during the century of American humiliation?

The “end” of the war is a sixty day Memo of Understanding whereby if Iran lets the ships through the Strait of Hormuz for 60 days (mid-August) then the United States will pay $425B and immediately lift sanctions. After sixty days Iran can charge a toll with no conditions. Dear Leader says we have to do it, and he says if Iran causes problems then he will bomb the shit out of them again and he says we will bomb them even harder and harder, harder still until all their buildings fall down. There is a summit happening. The World Cup. Co-Hosted by best friends America, Mexico, and Canada. In fact Columbia scored just now against Uzbekistan as I type. President Zelenskyy is at the summit, and Dear Leader, the French leader, others. I have no eyes or ears there. Soon my attention must shift, and my editor says to cut the stuff with the algae. “It’s too obvious.” 

Good encapsulation of our times, both the visual and my editor’s stupid opinion. The times we live in. Too obvious.

6.19.26

Israel attacks Lebanon and Iran immediately closes the Strait of Hormuz and ends negotiations with the United States. The $425B capitulation gift and 60 day ceasefire was scheduled to be signed, sealed, and delivered today in Obbürgen, Switzerland. Iranian officials refuse to participate at this hour.

I called the courier this morning to get the latest on the failed Iran deal and some bets for the World Cup. He is headed to Rome on a reconnaissance mission. “Rome, Georgia,” he adds. “And I’m late.” He hadn’t gotten out of bed. He was considering it. I told him I hadn’t either but was not considering it at this time. We parted with kind words, blessings exchanged.

I refuse to rise until the Strait is open! Safe passage for our maritime marines!

The United States defeats Australia two nil in Seattle, on home turf, to clinch their passage through the group stage in the wartime World Cup. In our away games (Iran) we are getting our asses handed to us. But at home we still prevail, beneficiaries of another own goal as Australia, our good friends, remain excellent guests. I actually have no idea what I am talking about but I do have a scheme to stock up on gas station kratom pills before the authorities crack down and am scouting various middle school parking lots on Google Maps for potential customers. Some part of me is always with her, fighting about something insignificant or making love or watching Forensic Files. Most of me is right here in my motel bed waiting for at least two wars to end and a publisher to bite on my novel so I can move on to the next town, the next attraction, next set of problems. I’m sick of my own.

6.21.26

Everything is on pause. Israel will not leave Lebanon alone. Dear Leader says he told an Iranian official if they closed the Strait of Hormuz then they won’t have a country. Dear Leader tells the Iranian negotiators in Switzerland they will not be returned safe to their country if the Strait is not opened.

Peace talks end early. War beats on.

6.24.26

An episode behind but coming on Below Deck to advertise your adult night club is a fine enough indictment of our times.

If my editors ask, in today’s news: the war and the World Cup remain unchanged, ongoing, in group stage. I have come off two days of errands for Carol, since she couldn’t find any office temp work for me. Carol says ai has changed the world already and it’s going to some more. Carol tells me they don’t need people like you, and I believe her. I told her they never did. And yet they keep making more of us. So far I have picked up her dry cleaning, taken her two shih tzus to get some shots at a vet in a strip mall next to a nail place and twice gotten her Wendy’s. I sit at a desk and read the rest of the day. She pays me $500 which is still real money for only two days work. I call her my literary benefactor. She laughs. My real literary benefactor says I can keep that in. There were other palace shufflings, scufflings, misgivings, signs and symbols everywhere, and the two-hundred and fiftieth birthday of this country coming fast and all the world seemed to be ping pong balls lunging. Will there be a peace agreement before our country’s big birthday? Or will we still be begging to be released from the war we started and lost? I promise you this: whatever I started, I lost.

6.27.26

America strikes Iran. Iran strikes merchant vessels. The Strait is closed, no deal is signed. This month’s column, like the others, like the war, is a snake eating itself.

Derek Maine writes about the war for Farewell Transmission.

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Across The Wire Vol. 8

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.

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Across The Wire Vol. 8

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.

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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.

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Dispatches from the King's Motel

May, 2026

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by Derek Maine

May 1, 2026

Dear Leader says we will be taking over Cuba. “Almost immediately,” he promises. New wars spawn.

May 2, 2026

I have a new method to quit smoking. Charles told me about it. He said every time you want a cigarette you eat one. It’s supposed to disgust you and yet you still taste the tobacco, the leaves get stuck in your teeth. I have been shitting filters for weeks.

May 5, 2026

Iran breaks the ceasefire, attacking the UAE with drones and missile fire for the second straight day. The Iranian foreign minister is in Beijing meeting with his counterpart. The United States’ official opinion is the ceasefire is still holding up. I spent two days in the Lowcountry smoking cigarettes outside of munitions plants and a coating supply manufacturer trying (not very well, or hardly at all) to interview the workers. All expenses paid reconnaissance trip courtesy of Farewell Transmission. I told my editor I needed to get my hands around the means of production, specially volume. Were these guys working overtime? Have production orders changed? Have the bosses been by more, or less? A writer should spend more time with their feet on the pavement, getting the local flavor. You could learn a lot, and fill ¾ of a monthly column, from the munitions factory workers. 

I was too chickenshit to talk to any of them coming or going and was eventually asked to leave by a parking lot security worker. I had taken too many of the wrong drugs at a highly inconvenient part of the day and I paid the price. I couldn’t unclench my jaw to ask a blue collar man what fucking time it was, forget about production schedules! When the rent-a-cop walked up to me I suddenly snapped out of it and ordered a Paloma. I said, “I stubbed my toe on my cigarette,” and he asked me if he needed to call the police or an ambulance. I said “neither officer, I’m no trouble.” I wanted to tell him I was from the papers but I wisely did not. I could tell he didn’t like being called officer, and thought I was being facetious. I was not. He had a gun and a uniform and I was wearing Balmain shorts and had two packs of nicotine gum and a notebook. Everything looked like an authority figure to me. He said he would like to not see me the rest of the day so he can get back inside. I said ‘sir, it’s seventy-two degrees and not a cloud in the sky in Charleston, South Carolina, why would you want to spend it inside?’ But I only said it inside my head as I was walking off the lot. I was unable to secure an interview with a worker at the munitions factory. But not for lack of thinking it was probably a good idea, driving eight hours round trip in a thirty-six hour window, and standing there.

The Chairman of War will not say whether or not America has kamikaze dolphins, but can confirm Iran does not.

May 7, 2026

The Americans and Iranians are firing on each other in the Strait of Hormuz this late hour.

How could a ceasefire hold in these unceasing times? Nothing ceases. Everything happens all at once constantly in our time.

I am going to see Bill Callahan with the courier on Tuesday at the Haw River Ballroom in Saxapahaw, North Carolina. 

Charles told me tonight, outside underneath the lamppost (halos of smoke, moonlight), about a man he ran into some weeks ago, an old buddy, a Marine, Middle East combat veteran, American hero, and the man, (whose name I never got) used to have a wife and kids and a big, pretty house in the suburbs until Covid came along. When Covid came along this man started going out at night and walking up and down creeks behind neighborhoods watching women get undressed and middle-aged couples fuck through their windows. When Covid came he got active again. He was a sniper. He thrived at night. Old instincts, fresh desires. He had his favorites. On the night he was caught, half of his legs in the creek, bitten red by chiggers as usual, a husband shot him in the shoulder with buckshot. His wife left him. His kids found out. It was a pretty small town, Iowa somewhere. So he walked around the country, stayed some places for a while and had a mangled shoulder and kind, misty blue eyes.

May 9, 2026

The school in Iran that was double tapped on the first day of the war was the result of an Anthropic (Claude) agent embedded within Maven, America’s “Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team,” using ten year old data and the American military glanced at the output and approved without any additional research or even a second layer of confirmation.

May 18, 2026

We are delaying tomorrow’s scheduled attack on Iran at the request of Middle Eastern leaders, Dear Leader says. An incredibly obnoxious, obvious political era we are witness to. I blame television. I blame other people. I blame each other. I blame myself. It was probably always going to end up exactly this stupid, how else could it be? 

On to more important things. I prattle too much. Editors cannot handle me. I’m too much meat, no bone. I have the beginnings of a plan. See, well, first of all, here’s the situation. I need to finish my novel. I know, I know, this is the absolute worst literary device and has the insufferable quality of being true to boot but this is who I am.

I have the edits. I have started working through them. In the meantime, I will write a monthly war column and gain readers and interest, and perhaps an ambitious publisher will see the vision, and then think maybe he’s not too old and lazy and living too stupidly to seduce a few readers still. 

The war I cover is the Ukrainian war or that was the war I was hired to cover, I thought, and did cover and still do too but then, of course, Israel, and America. Iran kicked our asses, they will try to tell you different. I wrote it in real time which is the only time I got and you can go back and check my notes, and while you’re at it check my credentials, would you please? I report on wars, for a living, from a motel (where I pay a monthly rate now), at the very outskirt of a mid-Atlantic capital city, I am still the wartime author. 

The plan is I stole a rolling cart desk from one of the office services temp jobs Carol put me in and now, with a proper desk, I can finish the novel. I have not used it yet, or touched it. It’s been here a week, I bet. 

Two Iranian oil tankers made port in China during Dear Leader’s arrival. President Ji had his way with him. Russia and America are struggling, China rising.

Ukraine’s drone strategy has turned the war somewhat in their favor. The superpowers are being tested. All wounds, self-inflicted.

May 22, 2026

Dear Leader has turned Airforce One around, unable to attend his son’s wedding. Iranian airspace has been closed. The Director of National Intelligence resigned. It is the Friday of Memorial Day weekend and I am hiding out at the Crystal Coast.

The courier supplied me with hashish before I departed. My headlights are busted so I can only travel in daylight hours. An awful case of indigestion from the nicotine lozenges, I must take up smoking immediately to defeat it. I came here to fish and edit my novel. I ate dinner alone inside my car in the parking lot of a putt-putt course. The world is opening up to me, and I can sense the intervention of the divine.

May 23, 2026

The hashish empties me out, and I spend the evening splayed out alone, buck naked, catching occasional glimpses of waxing gibbous between mostly stuck clouds. I traveled with sheaths of paper, large binder clipped, Caran d’Ache Ecridor, orange highlighter, index tabs and a clipboard. I am meant to be finishing my edits and finishing my novel. Everything seems so imminent and obvious on nights like this. The whole of it all washes over me and I am glad for it. To lay in the sand stoned is enough. War will always be there. War is happening. We live in wartimes. I cannot count every second.

Dear Leader announces the strait of Hormuz will be opened, a deal ‘largely negotiated.’

May 25, 2026

The encyclical letter is being read aloud at a makeshift Mass on the beach this Memorial Day.

May 26, 2026

Moscow is under attack. The war I was first hired to follow is heating up, and in starkly surprising ways from when I last left it (involuntary). Ukraine is attacking Moscow, a city that has not been touched by enemy fire since World War II. The United States prepares to capitulate to a militant, murderous extremist regime and create a new middle power in the Middle East in the short to medium term. I can see the end of the month coming, and wonder what I have gotten down. Likely not much. My novel is unedited. I have several excuses. None of them are convincing. My ex-wife is in Baltimore, and I do not think I will see her for a good, long while. This time wasn’t as bad as the last (and no charges were filed), but we’ve got nothing but practice leaving each other. I am back in my room at the King’s Motel. I booked a two night stay in Pittsboro, a cabin in the woods not far from the King’s Motel, for the 7th and 8th of June to finish the job.

I predict China makes a move on Taiwan while Dear Leader is still in office, likely around the midterms when America is in the thick of the roil.

My stay on the Crystal Coast was excellent. I read The Information by Martin Amis, seeking clues, and avoided my own thoughts. I turned the safety on. The wars did seem to heat up during my stay in the sun. It all came through me like electricity if electricity was Valium instead. I rustled around my papers and did not open them or make a mark. Is this dereliction of duty? Duty to myself, perhaps. The wars go on regardless.

The yield on the thirty year note is at 5.2% mostly on account of energy prices, the highest level since right before the financial crisis in 2007.

Keep the powder dry. Preserve and protect.

May 27, 2026

I write by mouthfeel, I refuse to fear large language models taking my job as war correspondent for Farewell Transmission.

More strikes against Iran. This is not peacetime. Superpowers rarely take defeats well, and tend to multiply their damages seeking Pyrrhic victories to sell to unwashed masses. I am back in the office buildings, shuffling papers for Carol at my latest temp assignment. I have no one to blame but myself. It’s my country, my war, my ex-wife, Carol’s sadism (a re-insurance company, Carol?!?, really?), my legion of nonreaders, the games on our phone, this dumb century, artificial everything, microplastics, and SSRI’s in the water supply. No one to blame but myself.

May 29, 2026

The Chairman of the Department of War assures select uniformed U.S. service members may be allowed to attend the upcoming UFC match on the White House lawn provided they meet the Department’s standard waist-to-height ratio of 0.55.

Derek Maine writes about the war for Farewell Transmission.

Categories
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.

Categories
Issue 6 Issue 6 Non-Fiction

QUESO PEOPLE

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By Nathan Willis

Our game was hide and seek, and the best place to hide in the whole house was the front closet. That’s where mom kept the dress coat she wore to school concerts, family holidays, and nice restaurants. It was long and black and if you pulled it around your shoulders, only your legs and feet were visible.

My sister would check behind, under, and inside of everywhere else first. This was something we did for each other, even though we always knew where the other would ultimately be found.

There were even times we’d pretend not to see each other’s legs sticking out from under the coat, to start the cycle over again, to keep the game going for as long as we could.  

The nicest restaurant we went to as a family was Chi-Chi’s. The waiting area was always packed with other families in their dress coats, all straining to hear the hostess over the giddy din of middle-class splurging, and the dopplering sizzle of fajita hot plates.

The dining area was divided into four open-concept sections, creating the illusion of simultaneous separation and inclusion. The overhead lights were never on. There was a lit candle on every table. The walls were painted to look like there were patches of plaster missing, exposing brick underneath. Sombreros and serapes were tacked up on any surface that would support them.

At some point, we asked our parents, “What does Chi-Chi mean?” They told us Chi-Chi is a person. A professional golfer. This is the food he likes and he wants to share it with the people of Ohio.

There was a golf course close by so we had no reason to doubt them.

We went often enough that we had our order locked in. Chicken fajita. Cheese enchiladas. Steak burrito. Chicken enchiladas, no onions. Two Cokes, an unsweetened iced tea, and a Diet Coke. The only unknown was chili con queso.

The queso came in a tray specially designed to sit over the candle. The tray had a wide lip to hold chips. It was a whole situation, big enough that the people at surrounding tables could see. Ordering queso was a very public statement.

Our parents argued at night when they thought we were asleep. Money was a recurring theme. As was my dad’s expense account. And lunches. And the company he kept. And the incidentals on his business trips.

My room was next to the stairs. I heard everything. I didn’t understand the math or the accusations, but it was clear we were on the verge of collapse.

It was by no means definitive, but getting queso became a kind of barometer. If we got queso we were still stable. We had enough money, and no one was preparing to leave or for things to fall apart. It meant we loved each other, and the game would keep going.

If queso wasn’t mentioned by the time we ordered our drinks, I would ask for it.  Sometimes my parents said no right away. Other times, they gave each other looks. Plaintive, angry, bitter looks that didn’t have anything to do with the queso. In these instances, us getting queso or not depended on which of them felt bold enough to make some larger point to the other by withholding or requesting queso when the server came back.

There was a movie of the week that aired back then called “A Place at the Table.” The film follows a family who donates their time and money to feed the unhoused and less fortunate. Mom had told us that grandma used to do the same thing. But it was a different time then. The unhoused went door-to-door and grandma would invite them inside while she made them a sandwich.

Mom said she would never do that with us in the house. She knows better. She’s learned the hard way that you can’t trust anyone.

In the movie, the dad loses his job and has to leave town to look for work. While he’s gone, the family relies on the generosity of the community for food and for monetary donations to pay their bills. Not a whole lot of people come through for them.

In the end, the dad is still out there looking for a job. The family is at home sitting before a sparse dinner. The room is dark except for a candle on the table. They glance at the dad’s empty chair. The credits roll as they eat the meal.

Recently, I learned that the restaurant was not, in fact, named for, or owned by, professional golfer Chi-Chi Rodriguez.

“Chi-Chi” was the nickname of the wife of the restaurateur who started the chain.

I tried this once, what my grandma had done. At least a version of it. One of the years that I lived in Los Angeles, on Thanksgiving, my girlfriend at the time and I cooked a turkey and made it into sandwiches that we packed into brown paper bags. We loaded them into the car and drove around looking for the unhoused and less fortunate. We couldn’t find anyone. There were usually people on nearly every street. Then we realized they were probably at all the shelters and churches that were also having Thanksgiving.

We did find one guy on our way back. I gave him a bag and he asked if the sandwich had mustard. It did. He handed it back to me.

We drove home and put the bags in the refrigerator and still felt pretty good about ourselves seeing all that food in one place and knowing it wasn’t for us. Then we got busy and didn’t take them back out again before the turkey went bad. It stunk up the whole apartment. We had to throw all of it away. For the next month, everything that went into that refrigerator came out tasting like spoiled turkey.

There was a weekend when one of the neighbors came over to see if we were sick. He asked if we had gone to Chi-Chi’s the night before. We hadn’t. He said everyone who had gone got food poisoning from bad onions. There would be a story about it in the paper. The neighbor said his whole family got sick. They were still trying to shake it off. He seemed fine.

I thought it was just our Chi-Chi’s that got the bad onions and maybe it was. Maybe the onion thing happened twice. Because this was before my parents got divorced, which would have put it at around 1990. But if you look it up online, the largest Hepatitis A outbreak in the history of the United States was caused by bad onions served at Chi-Chi’s restaurants in 1994—after the divorce, and after the trial.

Back in Ohio ca.1990, after that first, localized round of food poisoning, people stopped going to our Chi-Chi’s. My parents would talk about how Chi-Chi’s was going to shut down any time now. Think of the overhead. The location. They made guesses on when it would happen. First, it was a matter of weeks. Then maybe a couple of months. Then dad moved out and there was no more guessing. They were both wrong anyway.

Chi-Chi’s held on for at least another year. I am sure of this because they stayed open long enough for us to go there one more time, after our last day in court.

We knew it was going to be a hard day no matter what. This would be the first time we had seen our dad since he left, but we knew the lawyers and counselors had met in advance and agreed that none of them were going to put either of us, the children, on the stand.  Then dad’s team switched it up at the last minute and said, On the other hand, let’s go ahead and make this as painful as humanly fucking possible for everyone involved, except the Defendant.

So, we got through that and we needed a light at the end of the tunnel.

We’d never been to Chi-Chi’s during the day. The overhead lights were on. There was no sizzle. The bricks on the walls were just paint. We were the only customers. We could hear the staff in the kitchen complaining about employees from the other shifts.

Mom’s sister, our Aunt Charlene, was with us. She was supposed to make us stronger. She had agreed to co-sign on a loan that would allow mom to keep the house.

When the waitress came for our order, we did not get queso and I did not ask for it. I knew who we were at that point and we were not queso people.

Mom wanted to talk about the house but every time she brought it up, Aunt Charlene changed the subject. When we were done eating, mom and Aunt Charlene talked in the parking lot while my sister and I waited in the car. We watched them wave their arms and shake their heads.

My aunt drove off in her cream-colored sedan. Mom got into our old Camry. She slammed the door to seal us in and she punished the world with an open-throated yell. The world did not care.

She cried and punched the steering wheel. She punched harder than I’ll ever be able to. I marveled at her power and the miracle that none of her bones broke.

Aunt Charlene had changed her mind about the loan. Now, mom didn’t know where we were going to live but she knew she was going to have to figure that out on her own and she would have to juggle multiple jobs and odd hours and we were going to have to budget some of our meals out to a dollar fifty each at the Taco Bell drive-thru that we would then drive across the street and park to eat in the car at the Drug Mart parking lot because they had thirty-five cent soda machines out front.

As she thought all of that through, I like to think that back inside of Chi-Chi’s, the General Manager got the call from Chi-Chi Rodriguez or the wife of the restauranteur, and whichever of them it was, they would say, “We’ve had a good run but it’s time to shut this shit down.” And the General Manager would pull a switch and the place would go dark. The employees would gather their things, go to their cars and drive away and we would still be there in the parking lot trying to figure out how we were going to make it. We would be the last to leave.

Thirty years later, as part of a naive and admirably masochistic effort at reconciliation, mom arranged for us to have Thanksgiving at Aunt Charlene’s house.

Mom’s car was in the driveway when my partner and I got there. We pulled up to the curb and took in the three very large crosses in the front yard. They were solid wood, and they were not seasonal.

Inside, the kitchen counters were crowded with Thanksgiving staples in plastic containers and takeout boxes from homestyle restaurants. Everyone else who came, except for us, brought store bought pies. There was more pie that actual food. I thought of all the times we ate in the Drug Mart parking lot.

The flatware was gold-plated and the dinnerware was ornate bone china, and as we ate, Aunt Charlene told us about all the joys and challenges of training dachshunds.

The three of us left shortly after dinner. Our coats were in a pile on the hall tree. My mom had a nice coat that was fashionable at the time. Her black special occasion coat was long gone. It, along with virtually everything else from our lives back then had been sold or otherwise lost.

Our local grocery store carries jars of Chi-Chi’s chili con queso. I had been walking past it without noticing for years. As I put a jar in my cart, I remembered about the onions, and Thanksgiving, and the trial and the credits rolling, and eating queso by candlelight, as though everything was fine.

I called my sister to ask if queso ever meant more to her than just queso. It didn’t. She never really liked any of the food at Chi-Chi’s and if she had to pick, Taco Bell was much better.

I knew she was right. I put the jar back on the shelf.

Nathan Willis is a writer from Ohio. His work has appeared in Split Lip, HAD, hex, matchbook, Swamp Pink, Pithead Chapel, Moon City Review, and elsewhere. His stories have been nominated for Best Small Fictions and appeared in the Wigleaf Top 50 Longlist. He can be found online at nathan-willis.com.