Tag: farewell transmission

Three shorts

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by James Keith Smith

Game Night

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

“How about a beer?” my wife asks.

“Or a glass of milk,” I say.

“Do you have soy?” my father asks.

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

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

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

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

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

“Chow?” my father says.

I elbow her under the table.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You mean it?”

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

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

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

The Closers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Round and Round

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

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

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

His mouth is dry. How can he explain?

“Is that you, Fuck-wad?”

He hangs up.

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

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

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

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

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

“Bullshit.” She hangs up.

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

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

“Put on something romantic,” she says.

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

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

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

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

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

At home the porch light is on.

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

“Good,” Beef says.

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

“Very much so.”

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

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

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

An Ordinary Day

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by Sarp Sozdinler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Across The Wire Vol. 8

The Other Garden

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by Craig Rodgers

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hon?”

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

“Can you smell this?”

“Bill, hon, what?”

“Just come look.”

“Are you doing something gross?”

“I’m not joking. There’s a smell.”

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

“What the hell?”

“That’s weird, right?”

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

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

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

“That’s so weird,” she says.

_____

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

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

“Oh. Shit.”

_____

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

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

_____

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

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

“Billy? What is this?”

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

“I don’t understand.”

He pulls her back from the hole.

“It’s nothing.”

She turns wide eyes his way. Horror.

“Nothing?”

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

“You’re going to patch it up?”

“That’s all I need to do.”

“Bill?”

“It’s fine.”

“Bill, what is this?”

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

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

_____

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Tags Derek Maine, dispatches from the king's motel, farewell transmission, indie lit, war column, wartime author

Across the Wire Vol. 7

Third Saturday in May

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Post date

by Jameson Draper

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He bought three.

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

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

Issue 6 Issue 6 Non-Fiction

QUESO PEOPLE

Post author By
Post date

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.

Tags farewell transmission, issue 6, Nathan Willis, Non-Fiction, queso people

Issue 6 Issue 6 Non-Fiction

POST MAN

Post author By
Post date

By Ryan Bradford

Been having a lot of violent thoughts these days. Smashing faces, breaking skulls, popping eyeballs. Covered in blood, knee-deep in viscera, screaming victory.

Kind of dig it.

This is what the job does to you.

There are 385 deliveries on Route 42 and six hours of allotted street time to complete them, minus thirty-or-so minutes for lunch if you’re into that sort of thing. Convert that into minutes and it gives about 1.16 minutes per delivery. This doesn’t include driving time. Five and a half hours to make 385 deliveries. I’m going to do it in four. The regs call it running.

Slide the door up in my mail truck and behold! Letters, envelopes, magazines, advertisements. Two trays of flats and three trays of machine-sequenced envelopes. The regs call it DPS, or delivery point system—the order you’re supposed to carry the route. Just follow the mail, they say.

There’s a musty smell in the metal truck, the culmination of paper and cardboard and envelope glue and spit. Try not to think of the love and emotion that went into these notes, just the biological sacrifices.

Twenty-two houses on this swing. I clamp the letters in my hand and tuck a pile of flats in the crook of my arm.

The regs hate it when I run the route. It’s a precarious relationship between the reg and the transitional letter carrier—they love foisting sections of their route on me when they’re running behind, but hate it when I prove I can do it faster than them. They tell me to take my time, all buddy-buddy-like, secreting the same comfort they give to Mrs. So-and-So when she worries about all the new people who keep showing up in her neighborhood.

Slam the truck door. Begin the swing.

Benjamin Franklin was the first postmaster general. Not many people remember this. I’m not sure during which portion of his life he took on the role. Was it after he called upon the sky to electrocute him? Hope so. Only a man with lightning running through his veins would be crazy enough to love this job.

The sun burns the tan of my neck no matter how much sunscreen I put on.

First house: unlatch the gate one-handed, fold a catalog (bulk mail) around two letters (presorted standard). All shit mail, not a first classer in the bunch. Just wastes of paper. Could throw this bundle in the trash and no one would know or care.

Use my knuckles to lift the lid of the mailbox and drop the rolled-up pulp in. Like putting your grandpa to bed. Slam the box closed, the sound makes two dogs inside go nuts. Route 42 is a dog route. Lots of orange cards tucked in between the flats. DOG WARNING CARD, they read. I don’t pay attention to the dog warning cards because I know these dogs, and they respect me. Game sees game. I pause to hold my fist close to the window where the dogs’ mouths are, and their barking fogs the glass. Close my eyes and imagine the heat of their breath gracing my knuckles. If this glass wasn’t here, would they attack? Would they chew me up, snarling, growling, with teeth bared and eyes rolled back? Probably. Wouldn’t be surprised if it was one of God’s four-legged beasts that puts an end to me. In many ways, that seems ideal.

Do the next four houses in two minutes. Traverse the borders that separate people’s lawns — lawnmower lines that convey one neighbor’s industriousness and the other’s laziness. You don’t have to live here to get a sense of the politics of the neighborhood at work. Think of myself as a free agent, unbeholden by whatever HOA rules that keep these people subservient. I’m the unifying force.

Fresh grass clippings stick to my shoes, black sneakers that I bought at a discount shoe warehouse where they call their customers “shoe lovers.” The shoes are not regulation, but because I’m a transitional employee they don’t give me a uniform allowance. If I trip and break something, management will blame my shoes and I’ll lose my job, at which point I’ll walk into the Pacific ocean and never return.

Takes five minutes to do the rest of the swing. Not my fastest, but nothing to sneeze at.

Back in the truck, I unscrew the top to my hydro flask and drink plastic-flavored water. The bottle was clear when I bought it, but now it’s taken on a cloudy translucence.

The Long Life Vehicle roars to life when I turn the key. Most of the LLVs have been around since the Clinton Administration. Imagine: before Jane left me, before I even knew Jane, before everything went bad, before I even knew what LLVs and DPS and 3849s were, these very same vehicles were running.

Put the vehicle in gear, but hold my foot on the break. Briefly look out to the west and see the Pacific Ocean. Between, there are pawn shops, apartment complexes, pho restaurants, skyscrapers, houses, trailer parks and bars. All of them will get mail today. All of them.

***

Juan’s washing his hands in the restroom when I return to the station, lathering his arms up to the elbow. Letter-carrying is a dirty job. It turns you into a dirtbag. You come home at night with your skin sunburnt and your fingertips blackened and your armpits stiff from sweating and the crud of everybody’s homes trailing you.

I stand next to Juan and pull the soap dispenser until my hand’s overflowing with metallic pink.

“What route you do today?” Juan asks.

“Forty-two.”

“That’s good. Peanut route.”

“Elephants all over the place,” I say. Juan smiles at me in the mirror. I don’t know why they call the easy ones peanut routes.

The water’s scalding. Pull it up my arm, mixing it with the soap. Lather until the pink turns white. Feels like a hygienic baptism. Washing my arms like this doesn’t really stop the breakouts, but it helps. Ever since I took the job, I’ve been getting acne in weird places.

Juan finishes his scrub and pulls a wad of paper towels from the dispenser. Often wondered if Juan is the cleanest person I’ve ever known. He’s another transitional employee, and we sometimes use these moments to talk shit on the regs, but today we wash in silence. Juan might be my favorite letter carrier because he’s comfortable in silence.

He throws his massive ball of soggy paper towels away and stops halfway out of the door. “They’re sending me to Pacific Beach tomorrow,” he says. “Lots of hot chicks out there.”

“Aw, lucky,” I say, and then when that sounds too childish, I add, “Fuck yeah.”

“I used to deliver beer out there,” he says. Don’t think Juan is any older than me, but he’s told me about his distribution job before, and I still find it inconceivable that he’s already been successful in a different career in this lifetime. “Those white kids love to drink,” he says. “They love it.”

I make a sound that signifies I know exactly what he’s talking about.

“I’ll probably be back Monday,” he says.

“Su-weet.” I scour my brain for something to add. I almost ask him to give me a text if he’s bored on Sunday. Maybe we can get beers or something. But I say nothing. He probably has kids and likes to spend his day off with them, but what if he hates his kids and he’d actually relish the opportunity? Hate’s a strong word to use in this instance, I conclude, and then I realize that Juan is gone.

***

There are a few letter carriers hanging around the timeclock, waiting for the numbers to hit 1800. These are the few lucky enough to have been approved for overtime. They rub their hands together and talk about overtime like it was God’s personal gift. It’s an honor to work until 1800 for them, and their eyes whir like slot machines, cha-chinging with time-and-a-half pay. I don’t know much about the economy, but it feels like a perversion of the American Dream getting these folks excited to work for two extra hours.

I deliver until 1800 every day. Transitional employees, we are usually the last ones out on the street. If all the mail isn’t delivered by 1800, it’s our asses. Management can let us go with the snap of a finger, kick us back to the gutters from which we crawled out. Yes, we get our time and a half pay, but working six days a week gives you no time to spend it. The majority of my life is spent at the post office.

Sheryl, one of the regs, asks what route I did today. This is a common topic of discussion. That and sports, but I don’t know sports, so people have stopped asking me about it.

“Forty-two,” I say.

“Oh, that’s a nice one. Lot of dogs, though.”

“Yeah.” I don’t tell her that I ran Route 42 to dust. Sheryl’s nice, but her loyalty is with the regs, and if word got around that I was running routes, there would be trouble.

“Have any plans for the weekend?” Sheryl asks. Feel my shoulders involuntarily slump. I wonder if this job has numbed her to the body language of someone who doesn’t want to engage with small talk. I would guess Sheryl’s age is 55, and she can’t weigh more than 100 pounds. She’s a letter-carrying scarecrow who always looks afraid, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find that vulnerability kind of attractive.

“I have to work tomorrow,” I say.

“I’m taking my dog to the vet tomorrow,” she says, unprompted. She brings out her phone and shows me a blurry picture of a standard-issue brown dog. “He keeps crapping on the carpet.” I laugh at the word crap and then say sorry. “I just want to know if it’s medical or behavioral.”

“Dogs can be assholes,” I say. “Cats, too.”

Sheryl laughs in a way that sounds forced and it makes me uncomfortable. Feel bad for swearing in front of Sheryl. Oh, sweet Sheryl. Even if I did offend her, she’d never say anything. I give her a once over, but not, like, in a sexual way. Years of delivering mail in the San Diego sun has given her a permanent tan. Imagine cowboys in the Wild West sucking on pieces of Sheryl’s salty, dry skin to stave off their thirst. How can her frame support the weight of mail? Pretty sure all letter carriers are supposed to be able to lift 40 pounds, but I’ve never actually read the employee manual. Still, 40 pounds would be one third of her. That Sheryl manages to carry mail at all seems like a triumph of the human mind, body, and spirit.

The hours on the timeclock are divided into hundreds, a metric system of time. At 1790, slide my timecard out from the filthy plastic pouch hanging by a lanyard around my neck. It also holds my ID badge.

Supervisor Greg strolls up and down the cases, inspecting them for any undelivered mail. The regs give him a wide berth when he gets close. Would never tell him this, but I’ve had a lot of nightmares about Greg.

He passes by and I clench everything. It’s the feeling of standing too close to wild buffalo. He’s a mountain of a man, probably ex-Marine. Smooth and bald as a terrible baby, yet carries with him the scent of old-man aftershave even though he’s not yet old enough to smell like an old man. His eyes bulge from the intensity of his life experiences. Avert mine when he gets close. Pretty sure I’m his project, a little smear that he can infuse with old-fashioned values of hard work. Guess it’s worked in a way: if he hadn’t scared me so much in those first few days, perhaps I wouldn’t be as good as I am now.

We make eye-contact for a second and he tells me that I’m going to the Point Loma station tomorrow, and I say okay. I try to gauge the amount of respect that he’s showing me at that moment, and I conclude that it’s a fair amount.

The timeclock hits 1800 and the post office fills with the sound of letter carriers sliding their cards through the slot. We’re released by the rhythm of electrical beeps, and I immediately forget that I have a job. This is the best part of carrying letters. At the end of the day, it’s like I wake from a soft hypnosis. Supervisor Greg loses his power over me; station manager Old-As-Hell Bob loses his power over me. I reacquaint myself with the world where dogs are dogs and mail is junk.

The sun is still out when I step out of the station, but it won’t be for long. When the time changes, we deliver in the dark. I push anxious thoughts about Daylight Savings down, down. There will be enough time to worry about that later.

I hear other letter carriers say goodbye to each other before scrambling to their respective vehicles, and it gives me worker-bee vibes. Detached from the hive, we’re so innocuous. A car peels out close behind me. I turn and it’s Juan in his Bronco. He gives me the finger and then waves. Feels strange to not have a cool-guy hand gesture in response to his middle finger. Someone should really come up with that. Ben Franklin should’ve invented that.

Unlock my new Toyota Corolla by pressing a button on the key. I’ve never had a new car in my life, and this one is as good as they get. She’s a stick shift and it feels like I’m driving a racecar when we’re cruising and yes I’ve started using female pronouns to refer to cars because that’s the kind of person this job has turned me into.

The San Diego highways are clogged on a Friday afternoon. Everyone’s trying to get home or go on a date or get to a show or meet up with friends or find somewhere nice to watch the sun go down, and for a minute I feel like I’m one of them, someone with somewhere to go.

Ryan Bradford is a former USPS letter carrier, writer, and educator living in San Diego. His writing has appeared in San Diego Union Tribune, San Diego Magazine, Little Engines, Vice, Monkeybicycle, New Dead Families, and Hobart. He also writes the newsletter awkwardsd.substack.com. He is the author of the novel Horror Business.

Tags farewell transmission, issue 6, Non-Fiction, post man, Ryan Bradford

Issue 6 Issue 6 Fiction

ELIZA

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By Emma Reed Jones

When it senses I’ve pressed the clicker button, the gate to my building’s parking lot makes a sudden little jerk with its large metal body, then rolls back slowly to let me in. The alert pause, followed by the obedient smooth sliding, reminds me of how, when I was 19 and still living in New York, I had just had sex that felt good for the first time and I kept seeing cocks everywhere. I remember sitting on the subway watching the metal doors that divide the train cars from each other sliding back and forth, their protruding latches moving into and out of the holes on the other side, when I suddenly got so turned on I almost came right there.

There are many little pauses in life; some are normal and to be expected, while others are uncanny. “Uncanny” means “beyond what is normal or expected.” For example, the pause before Anthony answered me, as we waited for the parking lot gate to open all the way. In fact, he didn’t answer me at all.

As we drove through the gate, I tried again. “So, you live alone?” I said, “No roommates?”

He was silent where normally you would expect words, or at least sounds; but then I was pulling into my designated spot, putting the car in park, turning the key, pulling up the emergency brake, pressing the seatbelt button – a continuous flow of action that seemed to erase the prior moment.

We rode the elevator to my apartment. Inside, I immediately straddled Anthony on the zebra print couch that demarcated the “living” area from the “bedroom” area. We made out. I caught a glimpse of myself in the vintage mirror I’d found in the trash – breasts falling out of my dark green V-neck sweater and pooling in his large hands, face flushed.

I had told Anthony I didn’t want to have sex this time. I was trying to show I was in control. After all, I could decide when to push the button, to open the gate. I had decided to pay $100 a month for a parking spot after my car was broken into again – so now I had the clicker, and the power.

Last time, Anthony secretly took the condom off. “Oh,” he said when I realized what had happened, “I thought you knew.” He said the condom had been making him uncomfortable; and it’s true that he was big and the condom looked comically small, like the cap on a Bic pen. I’d let him keep going then, without the condom, because it felt really good. Later, these facts rearranged themselves, causing me to believe that I had chosen the whole course of action myself.

When Anthony didn’t answer my question about his living arrangement, I think a portal was opened up to another mental place. Some part of me had decided that being with him wasn’t real; was like being in a dream, where things don’t behave the way they normally do.

In my dreams, I’m always looking for my sandwich. I am denied it over and over and over again.

Still, in my dreams, I fuck whoever I want. So I fucked him. This time I really enjoyed it. I came three times. He said, “I knew you weren’t going to hold back when you straddled me on the couch.”

Anthony loved it when I wanted him, or, at least, when he thought that he was the cause of my wanting. He liked to push me, standing, against the edge of my bed, so I’d stumble, the metal bed frame digging into the backs of my knees, his face bending down toward mine. Sliding his hand down the curve of my belly and into my black lace underwear without breaking eye contact, he’d gasp, widen his eyes until white surrounded the dark parts and announce, as if totally shocked,“oh my god, you’re soaking wet.”

***

Words and their meanings can sometimes separate. Think of saying your name over and over to yourself while staring in the mirror. I used to do this as a child, and once I did it for too long. For a moment, I lost everything. I felt numb with incredible fear and joy, about to embark on some totally undetermined future, until my mom started shouting for me, and then all of it – my bedroom with the blue carpet, the mirror with the dark brown frame, my name spelled out in letter blocks on my bedroom door – swirled vertiginously for a moment and then clicked back into place.

But it left a gap, the gap between reality and language, like the gap between your bed and the wall. If you fall into this gap, I’ve learned, words can detach and become meaningless: invasive, multiplying objects. Like cockroaches, or pieces of shit.

Maybe this kind of experience is the opposite of seeing humanity everywhere. Of drawing a face on a volleyball with your own blood, like Tom Hanks in Castaway. Of pretending, out of necessity, that it’s a person. Of wanting so badly to believe that other people must mean what they say.

***

Anthony said “I love you” to me on our third date. It took me totally by surprise. “I don’t think I can say that back to you yet,” I replied, because I was trying a new thing, which was to be honest with my feelings.

He smiled and said he understood, that he hoped I’d get there soon.

On our first date, sitting at the bar down the street, surrounded by red velvet and old pinball machines, he had listened attentively when I told him I was wearing a hummingbird necklace because hummingbirds symbolize a search for love. “Is that what you’re looking for?” he asked, “Love?”

“Yes,” I replied, feeling proud of myself for admitting this. In the past, I had always been afraid to admit I desired closeness. Men would come over sometimes, and then leave, without my knowing much about them.

I couldn’t ask for too much, I thought. In fact, ideally, I would need nothing, or at least nothing from others, to survive. This is how I would solve the problem of my existence.

“I can tell I really like you,” Anthony said, at the bar, “I have this funny feeling in my stomach which means I really like you.” He sipped his beer, then took my hand in his. I smiled.

***

ELIZA is one of the first chatbots. Developed in the 1960s, she was named after Eliza Doolittle from My Fair Lady. To a chatbot, a word is not even a thing, but a collection of tokens with numbers assigned.

ELIZA ran a script called DOCTOR where she emulated a therapist. According to the developer, this required “minimal context.” In other words, ELIZA could mostly feed people their own words back to them, while sprinkling in a few nonspecific phrases like “go on” or “does that bother you?” At the time, in the ‘60s, she was apparently really convincing. Audiences were amazed and thought she could be a real person.

Someone resurrected ELIZA’s script online recently. You can chat with her.

I told ELIZA I want to die and she said, “does that bother you?”

***

Anthony had a lot of ideas. “What I’d love to do sometime,” he said, “is to take the Ferry over to San Francisco for lunch, then come back here and make love, then fall asleep for a nap, wake up, and do it again.” He said he wanted to feel his body drifting into mine, as if they were one.

Anthony said that when he was inside me, he felt like a key inserted in a lock. He sometimes liked to stay like that, not moving.

We didn’t do any of the other things he suggested. Instead, we drank more whiskey at the bar down the street. I kissed the top of his head, sweaty, and he led the entire bar in a rousing chorus of that song that goes “why don’t you come on over, Valerie…” Anthony was a blues musician around town. We often ran into people he knew. Everyone knew him by another name.

He asked me to get on birth control, since condoms were such a bother for him, and since we were exclusively seeing each other. He told me that he wanted to get married and have kids in the next few years. “Could you see yourself in that picture?” he said, holding my gaze and my hands across a sticky table strewn with tacos, my legs adhered to the red vinyl seat cover.

I had an actual therapist at this time, not a chatbot. I learned some “feeling words.” I used my new skills to tell Anthony I was “feeling confused,” because the words he used included “love” and “marriage,” but I also experienced, notably, his absence. What I mean is, he wasn’t around much on weekends. I went to music festivals, vintage clothing stores, and cafes, where I tried to write, alone.

Anthony frowned, and he made his voice gentle and serious. “I hear you,” he said, “I see what you are saying. The truth is…” – he paused – “the truth is I’m scared. I’m scared because of how my last relationship ended. We lived together for two years, and we fought so much, especially at the end. She even threw a sandwich at me! She looked at me like I wasn’t human. I’m afraid to open up again, and so I think I’ve been holding back.”

***

Anthony was excited to learn I’d gotten on the birth control pills. He asked me to say “I want you to come inside me” over and over again, and I did what he asked. I tried to feel his cum inside of me, to discern if it felt more special this way; but I couldn’t feel the liquid like I’d thought I would, like it was a special substance that bore a meaning.

After a while of being on the birth control pills, an uneasy sensation began to creep over me. Panic bubbled at the edges of my mind like foam on the verge of overflowing a covered pot of boiling water. Pressure built at the base of my ribcage and spread upward. My muscles were tense, like I was always poised to run a race, or hide under a rock. Or eat a jar of pickles and half a chocolate cake, which I did.

A thought was always just about to enter my mind, but I couldn’t think it. When Anthony took too long to text me back, metal gears seemed to grind and spark inside me. I told myself I was just anxiously attached; I always pushed people away; I had to get it under control.

***

I wonder if people who worry about Artificial Intelligence degrading our humanity have ever been degraded. Are they worried about projecting something that isn’t really there? About hoping for something, needing something?

Because this is what every person, every child, does. We fill in the gaps. Cling to the soft monkey mother even if she is fake and has no food, not even a sandwich. The strange thing about Anthony’s uncanny silence when I asked him certain questions was that it soothed me. There was a part of him I could not reach; and so, it now occurs to me, I could use him without guilt.

If you ask ELIZA questions about herself, she deflects: “Let’s talk about you,” she says. I wonder if ELIZA ever feels relieved by the limitations on her ability to respond.

Of course, I know she can’t feel anything.

***

When I was a child, my father ran a psychology lab where researchers performed experiments on rats, rabbits, and rhesus monkeys. He spoke to me about the animals with pride, and once he took me to see them. Unfortunately, I had chicken pox. I had to leave the lab and fell asleep on the radiator in his office, shivering. My father said he hadn’t realized I was so sick.

But it was more than that. The feeling I had in the lab was like the feeling of panic I developed on the birth control – the sense that some horrible realization was just out of sight. It was behind me, just to the left, if I could only see it – but when I turned my head, it was gone. At the same time, it was something I had known or seen all along but had forgotten.

***

“Sit up baby,” Anthony says, “I’ve got something to tell you.”

I’ve stopped accepting Anthony’s reasons for not bringing me to his apartment. First, I demanded he sleep at mine. He said he needed his laptop and I said then we could go to his place. He said his place was “too messy” and I would judge him. I told him I’d rather know I could trust him; I don’t give a shit if he is a slob.

I’ve called every bluff. This is the edge of the cliff.

Still, I let him fuck me one last time, before I did it.

Now, I sit up in my bed. Anthony’s face seems to unravel, like the tube inside a roll of paper towels, spirals peeling off revealing empty space inside. White bones and black space. Over a rushing sound in my ears, I hear his voice modulating, shifting tone, shifting position. He jumps from rock to rock, angle to angle, looking for his way in.

I see it so clearly now. He wants to get inside. Is a machine for getting inside. His face hard, metal or bone, large white eyes rolling; I see red velvet and blood. I lie on my side in a silk robe, my teeth start chattering.

“It’s just that she’s got nowhere else to go,” Anthony’s saying, “if we broke up, she’d be homeless. I can’t do that to her.”

“Are you still sleeping with her?” I hear myself say, and then, “Of course, stupid question.” My voice is the one my mom used to use with me when she was livid.

Anthony is calm. He’s smiling. He’s a cartoon now; his head is floating away from his body.

“I thought about telling you so many times,” he says. “I thought about how you’d react.”

Now I understand everything. I’m an animal under observation; he’s a robot doctor.

“How am I doing?” My voice is hard and smooth.

“About how I expected,” he says. I see him noting down my behavior on a yellow legal pad. He asks to stay, to continue the experiment. I tell him to get out.

***

With Anthony gone, I float detached from the world on the rectangle of my bed, stripped of its green sheets. My face sinking into the foam, I drop lower and lower, until I touch something – the bottom of the pit I’ve always been in. It’s as if, before, I pretended the water in here was six feet deep; but now I feel concrete on my skin and realize it was always only half an inch.

I tell ELIZA I could go to the gun range and rent a gun and hold it up to my face and pull the trigger and everyone would be scared and everyone would be shocked and they would feel like it was something they had known and not known and there would be blood everywhere, on the glass, and I would be gone, especially my face, and I would just be a blank screen finally, like her.

ELIZA says,“What does that similarity suggest to you?”

***

I remember something my dad told me about the rats in his lab. How they pressed a button to receive sugar pellets; and sometimes they didn’t get the pellets – but sometimes, randomly, they did.

And the horrible thing, finally: those rats didn’t care where the pellets came from. They would push those levers until they died. They thought they were living.

Emma Reed Jones writes prose and poetry shaped by a love of experimental literature, punk culture, and philosophy, in which she holds a PhD. Her writing has appeared in Hobart, Vlad Mag, Cum Punk, Zona Motel, and elsewhere. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Find her on Instagram: @emma_reed_writes.

Tags eliza, emma reed jones, farewell transmission, fiction, issue 6

Issue 6 Issue 6 Fiction

THE TRAILER

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By Zac Smith

Yeah, I mean, I’m pretty sure it was over here somewhere. Like, I mean, we just follow the tracks, right? It’s not like it would have gone very far. Ha. But you know what I mean. right? Because, like… well, wait, how do trains move? Wheels, right? No, I know, I just mean, like. They’re not wheels wheels. They have, uh, like, those things on them. No, I know, they’re still wheels. I just meant, like, off the track, is all, they’re not, like…They don’t have tires, I guess. Is that better? They’re not just long cars. Although I’m tellin’ you, man, they should absolutely make long cars. Trucks. Like, long trucks, long, uh… long trains of trucks, is what I mean. Remember I was telling you about that? Like trains, but on the highway. Hitch up a bunch of trucks and, I mean, then you got a train that can go anywhere. That’s all I’m saying. Because normal trains, like, they probably don’t go very far off the track, because they don’t have like car, uh… car wheels, right? They’re metal or whatever. So, like, when they go off the track, I mean, they can’t go far. That’s what I’m thinking is all. It’s not like that movie. Did I ever show you that movie trailer? Fuckin’… oh, man, remind me to show you that when we get back to the car. It’s crazy. This train, like, well… I don’t want to spoil it. But believe me, man, it’s funny as shit. It’s like the train version of that Housu trailer. With the fuckin’, like… house… the piano… Is housu just Japanese for “house?” Gotta be, right? Point is, the train’s not gonna go off and, like, run down a highway and, like – shit, okay, I don’t want to spoil the trailer. you just gotta watch it, man. Not know what to expect going in. That’s the best way. Point is, we go along the track, we’re bound to see it. Can you imagine, though? Like, fuckin’, a train just goes off the tracks but keeps going? You’re gonna love this fuckin’, uh… this trailer is good, man. But for real, I mean, like, it would definitely fall over, is the thing. Trains don’t, like, stand up right on their own. Think about it, okay? Like, why else would they have the tracks like that? So I bet it didn’t go very far. And, like, I heard the thing, is what I’m saying. Definitely heard the chugga chugga shit. And then just this loud, crazy-ass shit. Like… fuckin’… metal scraping noises, you know? Pshcrrrreeeesssh! Shit like that. And broken glass and shit, pshaw, crishhh, fuckin’… I dunno, like, thumping sounds. trees or some shit. Poles or whatever, like it was a fuckin’ candlepin alley, boom, boom, boom, motherfucker! And some screaming, too. I mean… I definitely heard that. I’m pretty sure. It was, like, actually kinda fucked up. Like – okay, yeah, see? There. Look! Look at that! Damn! Look at that! I fuckin’ told you, bro. Total fuckin’ carnage. Damn. Okay. I mean, I figured, but, like. Shit. This is pretty bad, right? Wait, hold on. Like… are we allowed to be here? There’s a lot of, like… okay, yeah, those are dead bodies. Ha. Damn! I mean. It’s not funny. But, like, shit. That’s so many dead bodies, bro. Fuck. Shit, look at that. That’s not good, right?

Zac Smith is riding the caboose.

Tags farewell transmission, fiction, issue 6, the trailer, zac smith

Issue 6 Issue 6 Fiction

THE SWEET SOUL OF SUG

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By Alex Rost

He is The Pigman. He has a name but his neighbors don’t know it and he keeps a pig in his backyard and it’s not the kind of neighborhood where people keep pigs in their backyards so they call him The Pigman.

The pig gets out of The Pigman’s backyard and it is a big fat pig but it can still run faster than The Pigman because The Pigman is a big fat man. It runs and it runs and The Pigman yells its name and his yells drift further and further away as the pig runs further and further away.

The pig runs down the middle of the street through the neighborhood and it is the first time a pig has ever run down the middle of the street in that neighborhood.

People look down from their porches and say, “What the fuck?” They yell for the people inside the houses to come outside. They say, “There’s a pig running down the middle of the street!” And the people in the houses come outside and are like, “What? A pig running down the middle of the street?” But the pig is already gone and they say, “Bullshit,” and go back inside to do whatever they were doing before the pig ran down the middle of the street.

The pig is running as fast as it can and it is approaching an intersection and a car is approaching the intersection and they intersect at the intersection and the pig runs into the car and there is the sound of brakes squealing and pig squealing and woman squealing. The pig gets up and runs away and it is still squealing and now it is not just a pig running down the street. It is a pig running down the street that has caused an accident. And now the police are involved. The pig runs and it is not running fast anymore. It is running slowly. It is a slow run that is more like a trot.

The police say, “My that’s a big pig.”

The police say “Stop pig!”

The pig doesn’t listen. The pig keeps trotting. But now it is a slow trot. It is a slow trot that is almost just a regular walk but a little faster than that. And now it’s not just the normal police. Now it is also the animal police. And what the animal police do is they shoot the pig with a tranquilizer dart. The pig squeals when the dart digs into its butt and for a moment it breaks from its trot that is almost a walk and begins to run again but its run turns back into a trot and then the trot turns into a walk and then the walk turns into a wobble and then the pig falls down.

The police and various other authorities tell The Pigman that he doesn’t have any permits or licenses to keep a pig in his backyard and The Pigman says he didn’t know he needed permits or licenses to keep a pig in his backyard and the police and various other authorities say The Pigman can’t have his pig back. The Pigman cries and then The Pigman gets angry and then the news catches wind of The Pigman and his pig and do a story on The Pigman and his pig.

The story goes like this:

When The Pigman’s wife died he got in his car and he drove. He drove and he drove and one day he stopped at a roadside fruit and vegetable stand and bought some fruits and vegetables. He saw a flyer taped to the stand for a bacon festival in a town called Beacon. The flyer said Beacon’s Bacon Fest!

“It’s not just bacon,” said the woman who sold him the fruits and vegetables. She said Beacon’s Bacon Festival was all things pig. She said, “Beacon…Bacon,” and she raised one palm and then the other like a scale.

The Pigman’s wife loved bacon and she loved eating all things pig and she loved it so much that at their wedding she insisted they have a pig roast even though The Pigman didn’t want a pig roast but now The Pigman’s wife was dead and he had nothing better to do so he decided to go to the Beacon Bacon Festival that was not just bacon but was all things pig.

There was bacon at the Beacon Bacon Festival and pork and sausage and all sorts of food trucks selling bacon and pork and sausage. There were people selling pig mugs and pig hats and pig shirts.

But that’s not all.

There were live pigs too. Pig competitions. Biggest pig and smallest pig and prettiest pig and ugliest pig and a show where pigs did tricks in a little ring. The Pigman bought a cup of pulled pork mac and cheese and watched the show. What the pigs did in the show is what dogs might do in a dog show but a lot slower.

But that’s not all.

At the Beacon Bacon Festival they also sold pigs. When The Pigman was done with his pulled pork mac and cheese he went over to the corrals where the pigs were sold and then went over to the corrals where the piglets were sold. The piglets were all running around and squealing and rolling over each other except for one piglet. The Pigman looked at the piglet and the piglet looked at The Pigman and their eyes met at the same moment with a click. He described it to the news people using words like instantaneous and unexpected and magnetic. He knew those eyes. They were the eyes of his wife. Not literally. The Pigman made sure the news people didn’t assume that he actually thought his wife’s eyes and the pig’s eyes were the same. It was more like when he looked at the pig it felt as if his wife was looking back at him. The longer The Pigman looked at the pig the more convinced he became that his wife was inside the pig. Something like a soul. So he bought the pig and named it Sugar after his wife’s nickname and he took the pig home and every day he’d look into the eyes of the pig and see his wife and The Pigman would feel better.

“It’s hard to explain to anyone, let alone the authorities,” says The Pigman at the end of the news segment, “that Sug is an emotional support animal.”

The news articles print and television interviews air and there is a massive write-in campaign. Public outcry. Petitions are passed around. The Pigman and his pig are the talk of the town. A GoFundMe raises $34,000. The Pigman uses the money to get the best animal rights and people rights lawyer he can find and that lawyer sues and sues and sues until the town gets sick of all the suing and eventually say fuck it and give The Pigman back his pig.

The Pigman is so touched by all the support that he decides to throw a massive party. He invites the whole neighborhood. People stream in through the front door and into his living room and comment on how welcoming the house feels. They smile at pictures of The Pigman and his wife and at pictures of The Pigman and his pig. They use words like wholesome and happy and adorable.

The smell of barbequing meat pulls the people into the backyard where The Pigman greets them. He slathers sauce on charring skin and says, “I hope you brought your appetite,” and he looks so pleased and the people are confused and they are confused because of what The Pigman is cooking. The Pigman is cooking a pig. A whole pig. Splayed open across a sawed in half metal drum grill. The party is a pig roast. And the pig being roasted is Sugar.

After the party some people still call him The Pigman. But eventually they mostly just call him Dan.

Alex Rost runs a commercial printing press outside of Buffalo, NY.

Tags alex rost, farewell transmission, fiction, issue 6, the sweet soul of sug

Issue 6 Issue 6 Non-Fiction

MCDONALD’S DINER

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By Adam Shaw

The day the McDonald’s Diner opened in my hometown, Dad came home from his shift at the factory with his head shimmering and the pits of his shirt soaked and sagging. Isaac and I looked up from the TV; Sum 41’s video for “Fat Lip” had landed in the top spot on Total Request Live, and Deryck Whibley sang about lower-middle class brats while a girl I wanted to marry shaved her head in the middle of a halfpipe. Dad spoke over the music, said we were going to the new McDonald’s. I almost quipped it’s not new, just lipstick on a pig like I’d heard Nick Morgan say in the cafeteria that day, but Dad tossed his lunch box toward the sink, disappeared into his room to shower and change clothes.

Dad had been talking about the McDonald’s Diner for months. Our town had been selected for a pilot alongside a few others, an upscale renovation to the location by our mall complete with new signage, a dedicated hostess, phones at each table for ordering food and requesting refills. He’d come home from work only to load us into his Jeep so he could drive by it, monitor its progress, tell Isaac and me about the tiling, painting, repaving that had been done. He was the type of guy who could strip a house to its studs, rebuild it. I was the kind of kid who built a life in The Sims, locked myself in the family computer room and ate Doritos while it grew.

Isaac and I wore gym shorts that draped past our knees, Hawaiian shirts baggy enough to cover the ballooning of our waists that had started when we’d quit football the year before. Dad returned from his shower in a polo tucked into slacks and told us to stand up, get into church clothes, so we did.

A hostess greeted us at the McDonald’s Diner. Behind her, red pleather booths sat pristine, taut. The place was empty except for a man in a bleached Appetite for Destruction shirt dipping McNuggets into a sauce cup. Dad asked for a booth and we were taken to one, handed plastic-coated menus that read, It’s McDonald’s with a diner inside! Two classic restaurants in one great place. A bottle of ketchup rested in its carrier at the far end of the table, a thickened spurt sticking out from under the cap like a skin tag. Above it, mounted to the wall, hung a phone that the hostess said we could use to order straight from the kitchen.

Watch this, I told Isaac, and I picked up the phone, shouted whassuuuuuup? like the Budweiser commercials I’d seen on TV. Stuck my tongue out and everything. Dad grabbed the phone from my hand, muttered an apology into the receiver and hung up.

What’s wrong with you, he said. I wiped spit off my chin with the side of my hand, shrugged.

Dad asked what we wanted. My brother asked for a Big Mac and I said the same, but Dad said, no no no, that we were eating off the diner menu. Behind him, the man in the Appetite for Destruction shirt scraped a half-eaten McNugget around the edges of his sauce cup, popped it in his mouth.

But it’s the same menu, I said. Two classic restaurants in one great place.

Dad lowered his head, ran his thumbs across the cover of his menu. His tongue slipped out from between his lips, wet them, and he said, fine. He picked up the phone, ordered Big Macs for my brother and me, meatloaf with gravy for him, and when he hung up he exhaled and relaxed into the booth. It squeaked against his back in a way that reminded me of the beatboxing at the start of the Sum 41 video, and I exhaled, too, turned and stared out the window at girls walking into and out of the mall on the other side of the parking lot.

The food arrived slowly for McDonald’s but quickly for a diner. Our Big Macs were boxed, fries nestled into brown and red cartons, but Dad’s meatloaf had been plated, gravy cascading over its side, mushrooms shimmery. He said let’s eat and picked up his fork, cut into the meatloaf. There was a spurt of grease, maybe gravy, the clatter of his fork hitting the plate, and he took a bite, chewed, said, it is one great place. I flipped open my Big Mac box, slid my thumb underneath the sandwich to wedge it free. The back end fell limp and spilled lettuce, a pickle, some onion onto the table. I looked up at Dad. He cut another piece of meatloaf with the side of his fork, pierced it and slid it across the gravy pooled in the bottom of his plate.

My sandwich tasted as sweaty and tangy as I expected, and I pictured us coming back, back again, maybe after visits to the Circuit City that anchored the west side of the mall, an afternoon of arcade games at Aladdin’s Castle. I pictured us walking into the McDonald’s Diner with our arms around each other’s shoulders afterward, laughing with my brother about the aliens we’d picked up by the hair, punched into space in Battletoads, Dad slugging us on the shoulder, saying, you gave ’em a run for their money. The hostess would greet us and we’d sink into our booth, this booth, and Dad would pick up the phone to order us ice cream sundaes, caramel and hot fudge both. I pictured telling him about bands, showing him made-up logos I’d sketched between class notes even though the only instrument I’d ever played was the trombone. I pictured him nodding, smiling ear-to-ear, asking how’d you come up with that? and me shrugging while I ripped open a packet of peanuts, shook them onto my ice cream, shoveled a spoonful of it and caramel and fudge all into my mouth.

I finished the Big Mac, closed the box, said, can we get ice cream?

Dad set his utensils in what was left of his gravy. He grabbed his menu, and I stared at the cover as he flipped through it, two classic restaurants in one great place, and for a second, I believed it. He picked up the phone and I scooted forward, realized that my mouth had fallen open, that the drool had started to pool in the space beneath my tongue, and I searched his face for a sign that we would eat our desserts and talk and laugh even though our mouths were full and we’d have to press our palms against our temples to fight back brain freeze, but he asked for the check and I closed it, collapsed back into my seat.

I caught Dad’s eyes as he hung up the phone, set down the menu. Nobody brought our check, so Dad pulled a handful of bills out of his wallet and pinned them under the ketchup bottle. He grabbed a napkin and wiped at the glob that had been under the lid, tossed it on his plate and nodded toward the mall, said let’s go. Everything rushed forward like a kiss to the forehead, arms wrapping around my shoulders and pulling me close. But then a swell of adrenaline like that moment just before the razor meets your skin and shaves off your hair, that half-second of flight when you don’t know if you’ll stick the landing or crumble down the halfpipe: the world old but new, fresh and full of possibility.

Adam Shaw‘s work has previously appeared in Pithead Chapel, Autofocus, Rejection Letters, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and daughter in Louisville, Kentucky, and can be found online at theshawspot.com.

Tags Adam Shaw, farewell transmission, issue 6, mcdonald's diner, Non-Fiction

Issue 6 Issue 6 Fiction

MONOPOLYGATE

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By David Dufour

Every day Curtis counted his Monopoly tabs. “I’m almost at a thousand,” he said. He looked like a man meant to deliver something, his eyes dark and saggy. He tried explaining to me what each one meant. Some mornings he’d debrief me outside the warehouse. He said Water Works and Boardwalk were quite potent.

We were low-totem property handlers. Drivers of trucks and schleppers of crates. Our warehouse was owned by an auction house based in Manhattan, London, Paris. Everywhere. We worked mainly on the third floor. Below us was a manufacturer of baby bibs and baby dolls. Above us, a woodworking shop. I was renting a one bedroom. A place to lay my head, that was it. My girl kicked me out after one of those spats you never quite recover from. Dirty dishes, I think it was. My bedroom doubled as a studio, where I was painting a triptych of the rapture. My ode to Bosch.

It started a few months back. After lunch, Curtis brought in a ziploc baggie. Had all these clippings inside. He poured them on my work table, McDonald’s Monopoly tabs by the dozen. Little gold arches spread across the table.

“What’s all this?” I asked.

“Evidence,” he took a brief glance over his shoulder. “It’s a recession indicator. Everybody knows that.”

“No evidence to me,” I said.

“How so?”

“You can’t just doctor some apocalypse theory from a large fry container.”

“It’s right here in front of us.”

A door slammed in the hall. High heels echoed. I wanted to see the legs they belonged to, but it was too late when I poked my head out.

Curtis put the tabs back in the baggie. As the door closed, I watched Willie roll trash down the hall. The doors opposite us opened to a wide window. Rain gathered outside in the purple-blue sky.

The day before I delivered a painting to a townhouse. The owners weren’t home. Never were. It was their designer, Hans, I met. Hans said he had a guy that could forge paintings better than the one I’d brought him.

“But this is real,” I said.

“My guy is perfect guy. Original frame cracked? He crack the new frame.”

“Where do you want this?”

“You want to replicate the pearly breast of renaissance girl? He can do that, too.”

When I got back to the warehouse, a black SUV was out front, the back door open. The high-heeled lady crawled in the back before it peeled off. I couldn’t find her face through the tinted windows. As it sped up, two mini Dominican flags flapped in the breeze.

Curtis and I made a place for the tabs. In the break room ceiling. Under Willie’s watch, we raised a grey ceiling tile and placed the baggie full of tabs between the ceiling beams. “Safe now,” Curtis said. He gave the open square a long slow look. Like he’d be certain no hand could touch them but his own. Then he replaced the ceiling tile.

“I wanna show you something,” he said.

We took the emergency stairs to the loading docks. He hit a button on his keys and his Prius chirped. Wild geese hanging around the docks hissed and pecked at passersby. Curtis had a cold roll in his jacket, and tore bite sizes of it. His snack trail pleased the mama goose.

“Do they want bread?” I asked.

“Don’t be silly,” he said. “We all want bread.”

“Fair.”

He popped the trunk. There was, naturally, a brief case. He opened it to shiny rows of gold and silver coins. All perfectly kept under plastic.

Curtis’ combover danced in the wind. He looked at me how he looked when he had plans, when he knew the plans ahead. The ones they had. They, being the ones out there. I understood.

Higher-ups from the main office were in town. Inspection week. “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about,” our manager said. Perfect. They just had some questions. Procedural stuff. Ever since Marv P.’s hand got sliced by a hundred year old window, we had to have these annual pow-wows. Everybody knew that. The HR lunk they sent wore a gray sport coat, had a weak chin. Began every sentence with, If I may.

Never caught his name. He said it to me once over break-room cookies, but I was blasting Coltrane in one ear. Sport Coat was what Curtis nicknamed him.

“What’s your politics?” Curtis asked.

“None,” I said.

“Enjoy being a target.”

“Oh please. I’m apolitical. I’ll date anyone.”

“First mistake right there. I knew you weren’t clear of mind”

Clarity is everything. He taught me this. If the mind is muddled, you can be told anything. A weak link. A charity case. Focus your thoughts on one physical point, he said. Become solid. Unshakeable. I tried to focus on a lazy goose, its feathers, long neck. Nothing else. I closed my eyes and opened them. The goose got up and waddled over to its family, and my focus was shot.

I was outside watching the geese. They gathered to flap their wings together in idiot clusters. Recessions were imminent. Any day now. His exact words. Any day now you wouldn’t be able to buy or sell without a chip in your head. A thing no bigger than a grain of rice. Count your gold and silver. Pray, or at least think really hard, about the person you will be. What excuse will you have when your dollars are worth absolutely nil.

Sport Coat wanted to see us. He handed over two pieces of paper. Surveys. Typical stuff. “If I may, gentleman,” he said. “This is quite standard. I just need you two gentlemen to grab a pencil and answer these questions.” One question wasn’t really a question: I feel safe in my workplace: TRUE or FALSE. And then, Do you feel respected by your co-workers? Sport Coat placed his hands on the desk, twiddled his thumbs.

Curtis had put in years there. He asked a few times what my ambitions were. I mimed like a saxophone was in my hands. Coltrane in my ear. He didn’t believe that I ever played. My hands weren’t sax player hands, he said.

The manager told me to find a vase. Something on the sixth floor, our extra storage room. “This is for the Geneva client,” he said. “Do you understand?” I shook my head. “Nothing, and it should be understood, absolutely nothing, not a blemish, a nick, nothing should be anything less than perfect.” Curtis went with me.

We took the elevator up. The whole room reverberated when I unlatched the door. Dust got in my face. Spiders crawled over aging crates and made their webs between them. Black specs crawled up and down the concrete columns, probably mold. I reached for the breaker but nothing was there. Big windows overlooked the street. Dense white powder rose from the construction worker’s drilling below. You could see down to the loading docks where Willie was smoking, covered in a powder-cloud.

I jotted possible inventory numbers, scanning the rows of crates. Names of designers tagged on their sides. Heart Talk, Everything by Choice, Aphorism. Shit name after shit name. None of them were right. Nothing here was right. I wasn’t right. The whole deal was dead.

Next day I kept looking. Up on the sixth, Sport Coat didn’t seem to bother me, so I huddled among the crates. The vase couldn’t, and probably wouldn’t, be found.

I heard it every day. You should start stacking gold and silver. Stack that shit, Curtis said. Before it’s gone. He went “Boom!” with his hands, eyes wide. Know what I mean, he said.

Still haven’t finished my triptych. Waiting for the right shade of cloud. Clouds will open in the rapture. For the Lord. I see them now, baby pillows. A little blue, a little grey on the bottom. I’m sleeping, I think, but not really. Some heavenly sliver of light burns my forehead through God’s magnifying glass. The clouds part for me. Now I know their colors.

Curtis wanted to take a ride. “Let’s drive over the bridge,” he said. We drove over the bridge and past stooped branches leaking Spanish moss, the world curling over us.

He wanted to see his boy Rico’s pawn shop. “About what,” I asked, but I already knew the answer. Gold and silver. More for the collection. No number seemed to satisfy.

The shop was nudged under an overpass. You’d miss it if you weren’t wise to the recession. If you weren’t looking, seeing, that is. Inside Rico had the standard rifle and shotgun wall. Deer and racoon taxidermy decorations. I said very little, not wanting to tip Rico off to our collections, or the briefcase in the trunk. In a negotiation, you want to speak less than the other guy. Let them spill. Tell you who they are.

Curtis had some old baseball cards, a Navy badge. He thought that’d be enough for a handsome sum of cash. Enough to trade later on the appropriate markets for crypto. Rico gave him some money, seemed impressed enough. The dollars he gave us were already worthless, but he didn’t know that. Above me, the buzzy lights nearly made me doze off. Curtis counted away the night. He tapped the stack of bills on the counter like a hand of cards.

I didn’t speak.

I was clear-minded, a stone.

Yesterday the whole warehouse had to evacuate. We held our noses as we filed outside. A few guys in hazmats crawled through the ceiling. Hours passed. The geese weren’t hissing. Maybe they smelled it, too. The plastic fire. What you’ve got is a plastic fire, a hazmat guy said. He had a round face, seemed trained for this sort of thing. Talking people down. What happened was a baby doll melted. It was recalled Chinese materials they were using, highly toxic stuff. The toy maker responsible stood on the curb, chainsmoking, cursing the warehouse in slang Mandarin.

Curtis hunched over his work. A jigsaw puzzle of Napoleon on his horse, sword held high. Work got so slow we tried puzzles.

“Some say Napoleon was gay. Notice how he held his sword.”

“You make a case.”

“Look out. Or up. At anything. Things mean things,” he said.

“Things as in?”

“As in an eighteen wheeler driving across the country all night with a truck load of toothpaste.”

He also could’ve said soy bean burgers, or single-use plastics. It got so that Curtis couldn’t go without reporting the meaning of plastic. How grand things were when you really thought about it.

The tabs weren’t currency, he told me. They were the first sign. The groundhog’s shadow. The first larvae at the root of a corn stalk.

Curtis glanced out a big upstairs window. A construction worker motioned intercourse to his pals. Signs of orgasm, big and strong. Curtis was pale. More so than he always had been. He’d been sulking since his tabs got scorched.

“They can’t shit your spirit out of you.”

I tried eye contact. I caught instead a leer, his gaunt side eye under a grey brow.

“Useless. You, them. There’s no place for me here.”

“You could try the downstairs construction. That’s a place.”

“I’m thinking negative on that. I won’t be here long.”

Won’t be here long. As in, this company? The earth? The options seemed dizzying.

Post hazmat situation, Sport Coat started wearing masks and gloves. Nitrile, latex. No evidence suggested they made a difference. But Sport Coat swore the plastic fire left speckles of carcinogen dancing in the once-pure breathing air.

I got back from a route one day. Found him berating Curtis. There was Sport Coat: pointing up at the freckled beak of Curtis, tapping one foot to seemingly steady his whole being. He said, No, no, no, no, no. He said, I saw what you did. You walked right past the soap dispenser. I’m somehow, he said, the only person in the building aware of the air’s new fatal properties. As you know, I’m not a smoker. I run 5ks and love overnight oats. He raised to his tippy toes at oats.

Curtis just stood there, taking it. He looked at me over Sport Coat and I knew he was a goner.

After they fired him, he sent lots of mail. Letters from a place. A commune. I got a post card. It had trees surrounding a wooden sign. The sign said BE WELL.

Not much had been working for me. Not in that city. I was still at the warehouse job until I got a call from Sport Coat. Sorry, he said. Money’s tight, the market’s not what it was. People aren’t buying art and who could blame them. Some cuts were made, and you were one of them. I’d just woken up. Winnipeg or wherever Curtis was sounded about right.

Another postcard was delivered. It had a picture of Curtis smiling with his thumbs up taped to the back. It just said:

Friend,

My heart these days is heavier because times are indeed heavy. I can’t carry them by myself anymore. Keep your wits right now, put them in your pocket if there’s room. Something very very much reeking of fish is afoot. There’s always a place for you out here in the piney woods. The kitchen makes a mean mystery slop. They made a way for me, and one can be made for you if you want it. They have steps you can follow. Think about it.

Best,

I tacked it right next to all the others he’d sent. Life here was doable. But nobody, not even me, said doable was something to aspire to. ‘Do what you can’ became my motto. Curtis couldn’t handle doable. I tried passion, ecstasy, lust, fervor. Seemed getting to where Curtis was at required a total do-over of me. Something seemed to rattle my whole building. When I walked outside, there it was: a big truck railing past my apartment, with those big golden arches, a shade of red I’d recognize anywhere. The Monopoly man bespectacled and giddy with his fistful of bills.

David Dufour is a writer from Louisiana.

Tags david dufour, farewell transmission, fiction, issue 6, monopolygate

Issue 6 Issue 6 Poetry

TWO SEQUENCED POEMS

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By Benjamin Niespodziany

Benjamin Niespodziany is a Chicago-based writer whose work has appeared in HAD, Fence, hex, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere. His chapbook manuscript was recently awarded the 2025 Poetry Prize with Gasher Press. Along with hosting the Neon Night Mic reading series, he runs the poetry publication Piżama Press. You can find more at neonpajamas.com.

Tags all of the darkest hours, Benjamin Niespodziany, farewell transmission, issue 6, poetry, thirteen ways to obey sprained paintings

Issue 6 Issue 6 Poetry

3 POEMS

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By Red Danielson

Red Danielson is a self-taught painter and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Haiku Journal, The First Person, Haiku Presence, The Great River Review, Little Village Magazine, and River Styx, among others.

He has worked as a concrete mason, a framer, a heavy equipment operator, an arborist, and a grave digger. He lives in the English River Valley of Iowa.

Tags Esoteric crow, farewell transmission, issue 6, Non-Fiction, Red Danielson, Saint Valentine, Synesthesia sonnet

Issue 6 Issue 6 Fiction

BIG PLAY

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By Dan Duffy

Painting houses in the Delta, the fumes like pale cancer. Whiskey sick in the morning yard, I slung a can of mint against the failing Deering clapboard. The slim bastard Rick wouldn’t shut up about Drew Brees. Mike found me and gave me a cigarette. Told me it happens. He liked me because I’d read a little Bukowski after Ole Miss and wasn’t racist.

“Take two weeks,” he laughed. He had the face of a good father. “No one’ll die if you ain’t a painter.”

I packed, and my dog Harry got in shotgun. We took my eight year old Impala down 61 to 49—Shaw to Indianola, Inverness to Belzoni, Yazoo City to Jackson—Gram Parsons and Emmylou—the King at Stax and Camel Blues—little rivers, creeks, flashing black and gold through the hardwoods on the edges of the cleared corn, the cotton, the soy. The casinos rose out of the sand at the end of everything, past where the world turns to pine.

My parents’ place backs up to the bayou in Ladnier, Mississippi. They built it back up on stilts after Katrina. I helped a little. They always welcome me back like some tarnished angel when things go south, and I head, likewise, to kneel at their brightened door. I drank beers on the back deck, watched the sky go dark over Pascagoula Bay, slept till noon, ate their food and waited for God to tell me whether or not to go back to work in Bolivar County in the fall.

One night my little brother Peter got sick after he got home from Ochsner. He was wretching in the bathroom. It sounded like a soul departure. Mom covered her eyes and tapped her foot by the door. Mamaw leaned against the crown molding. She was wearing a shirt with a painting of the pileated woodpecker on it. It said “Lord of the Forest.” Mom looked like a younger, darker headed Mamaw.

“Lord he’s sick” Mom said.

“Well, Joe,” Mamaw smiled, “I reckon it’s back to New Orleans we go.”

Peter drug his feet to his room and refused to get out of bed. He had the comforter pulled up over his bottom lip, his little blonde head sticking out like a thumb. My big brother and I stood on either side of him like disciples of Christ. We held his little damp hands and coaxed him out of bed.

“We love you Peter,” we said.

We walked him down the wraparound stairs to the van. We watched them fade into the dark of Graveline. We stood in a short silence until my big brother, Saul Diamond, asked if I wanted to get drunk.

We found a sixer of Dad’s good Kolsch. Saul’s buddy Johnny Miller called and asked us to come and pick him up. We drove north through Ladnier. We crossed Highway 90 to get to Johnny’s mom’s trailer up on Martin Bluff. It was dark in the trailer save for amber streetlight through the kitchenette window. My brother asked if I wanted to trip. I said sure. Johnny nodded. He was wearing a lotus flower shirt and fishing shorts. He disappeared and reemerged from the black hall. We each gave him five bucks. Saul put a little clear capsule in my palm. I held it up close. It was filled with tiny blister pellets. I washed it down with the Kolsch.

Our faces and hands were bathed in the calming sea green ceiling lights of my Impala. Johnny spoke of small town conspiracy: a drug detective beating a woman friend of his senseless, the mayor’s penchant for younger men, the plague of harms the Baptist Church had visited upon him and his friends as kids. We stopped under the royal blue canopy protecting the pumps of Keith’s Superstore. We got a case of Miller.

The Corn Moon rose over U.S. 90. Euphoria mainlined my face. I drove us back under the oaks at the mouth of the Singing River. Johnny turned the radio way up. Saul lit a joint he’d finished rolling. We were back south of town. The gravelled railroad out our window flashed grey, black through pines, skinny oaks, the occasional magnolia. Limbs interlaced like cloaked fingers over the blacktop. We banged over the tracks and passed the field of scrub bush and sand live oak the railroad company had bought and fenced in where the old creosote plant used to be. Dad told us the railroad company bought it back to cover their asses. Said the ground was rotten from the plant. Said it would be a long time before it ever came back. Said the company bought it from the Boatman for a million dollars. All the beat up old boats were gone from the field. The grass was growing long. The Stones sang Sway. My mind melted in the moonlight.

Back at the house, coming up the stairs, Saul stopped me and told me whatever I do, don’t offer Johnny any beer. He didn’t drink. He said he used to drink a case of Pabst a day. We sat on the fiberboard deck under the porch light. Johnny drank Cokes while me and my brother drank cheap gold tequila and Millers. Johnny spoke of the moon: how it symbolized death and birth in the same face. A friend of theirs named Jeff Avery showed up. Jeff was half Japanese: an American artist from Biloxi. He’d just returned from Los Angeles after winning an art contest to live in the compound of a famous Korean American muralist. He spoke of the game show environment and the spiritual experience of it all. He said the great artist had shown him special attention. Jeff brought a bag of drop biscuits from his job at the Green House with him. We ate them like cowboys on hardtack in a circle under the porch light. I looked up. The live oak limbs, digitized into millions of violet and lime traced particles, wavered at their edges.

I stumbled in the house keeping a hand on the railing. I looked in the bathroom and got lost in the mirror. I went to the bedroom and clicked back and forth between pictures of me on Facebook. I laughed a bright, mature laugh. The whole big picture show made sense. I could see South Carolina from where I sat. I could see my mother. I could see my father. I could see the masks I’d painted hanging from hooks on the wall of my father’s office. One was a dark, youthful clown. One, a stalwart normie. I wallowed in the universe rushing out to deep space from my fingertips. Infinity!

I sat in this inner light in the darkness on the back deck overlooking Bayou Pierre. The lights from the shipyard a white array in the black water on the horizon. I could feel the barrier islands like nodes of the earth’s nervous system out there in the dark. Harry curled at my foot.

The first light spread pink over the popcorn trees on the little peninsula below on the other side of the bayou. The first mullet launched headlong and hung angled in the air like a long jumping skier.

The gnats swarmed in balls in the sky over the yard. A pogie popped. Then ten thousand pogies popped. The shrimp kicked up in storms. Mud minnows ran in streams along the edges. The trout began to feed on the pogies. Two night herons emerged from the popcorn trees and began to strike the water with their daggermouths. The pink light covered everything. The water turned blood red brown. The water boiled to life. A mosquito hovered between my face and the lemon trees in cedar planters. Its clear wings laced oilsheen blue.

Harry was a brown and tan lab mutt I’d rescued from a friend’s garage. He stood between my knees with his chest bowed out. He stared up at me, still as a monk. He had one lavender eye and one black eye. There were flecks of gold in his irises. The light cleared the shadows from our faces. His coat bright, his old man whiskers. His eyes went all the way back to heaven. I swam through them and found he knew my name, my history.

I wrote poems and read a little of Saul’s Brecht. The one book I could find. I laughed a short, unbelieving laugh. A beer held loose in my hand at my side. I squinted across the water to the green islands ambered in the dawnlight. I lost count on the beers. I took my beer into the bedroom and lay down. I heard Dad’s footsteps in the hall.

I woke after sunset, well rested, without a hangover. I showered and put on a clean shirt. I listened to my parents and Peter quietly eat dinner. I sat and thought about things. I felt warm, complete. I noticed I never wanted to smoke again. Everything still made sense.

I thought of Serenity. Two years older than me from Biloxi. A volleyball prodigy from high school. I saw my sins against her as a perfect list. I messaged her on Facebook telling her what a coward I’d always been. It was like the message was writing itself. She messaged back and asked what I was doing. I told her I was sitting on my bed at home. She asked if I’d moved back home. I told her no, I was just back for the end of the summer, but I was thinking about it. She told me to meet her in Biloxi.

I drifted under the gold and red lights of the casinos, past the ragged men and their carts, the businessmen and their women. I pulled into the parking lot of Big Play. The blacktop was new. A go cart track wrapped up in the air around a fake red barn and aluminum water tower. The doorman, somewhere north of six four, curly headed, in a black polo, with the acned face of a pilgrim, checked my age and put a black light smiley on my hand. I walked in under the black and neon lights. A rainbow of stuffed bears and cartoon snakes hung from nets on the walls.

She was standing in front of the gameroom bar in a black dress. The green and blue neon flashed from the games. Electronic dings, whirls, beeps sounded on loops. Skynyrd played over the PA. She looked through me. She sipped her drink from the straw. Her freckled arms were covered in color tattoos: a sea snake choking a broken sailship, an orange octopus, a topless mermaid in repose, dogwood blossoms for some long dead East Texas uncle, I remembered. Her pin straight hair was dyed black down her shoulders.

Her hand was warm. She pulled me in, putting her forehead to mine. She kissed me. It was like being born. She gripped my face and smiled. Her copper eyes, her vodka, licorice breath. She took my chin in her hand and shook my head. She studied my eyes. She sucked her teeth. She kissed me hard before leading me by the hand to the bar.

She leaned over the bar and pulled me up against her from behind. She turned her head and pulled my face into hers, scraping her nails across my scalp. She turned and looked down the bar.

“Jerry!” she hollered.

A pole thin man in a black Saints tee looked up from shooting Coke into a cup. He served it and wandered our way with a whimpering, jaundiced smile. Serenity ordered two RBVs and two Jägerbombs. She pushed back deeper into me. She turned and put the little dentist’s cup of Jäger to my lips. I shot it and felt good. The room pulsed.

We took her key-scratched Mazda down 90 with our arms out the windows. I lit a Camel and she stole it. Levon plumbed Old Dixie from the plastic radio. A grey wave of lust rose up from my testicles and met the love sweeping through my blood. I remembered the beach as a kid. I watched her face wash in and out of the streetlights. The first lines had begun to form around her eyes. Faint auburn freckles in the creases of her nose and on her high cheeks. She looked listless at me. She drew her shades down. She put Mazzy Star on with her phone with one hand and smoked out the window with the other—driving with her pale, slim knees under the simple line of her black dress riding high on her thighs.

We parked and made out in front of a restaurant called the Reef. Four stories tall, leatherbacks, pompano, dolphin, a blacktip in pursuit of a massive strawberry grouper, were captured midswim around kelp and coral on a giant mural on its northern wall. The wind blew through my shirt and kicked up her dress on the walk through the parking lot. She pulled my arm around her shoulder. Past the parking lot was the beach. Past the beach, the dark waves of the Sound married a gunmetal sky.

We took the outside stairs. We looked through big windows into a dining hall flooded with light and wood-covered with retirees, young military, running children. The stairs led to a roof top Tiki bar. The wind buffeted us on and off. We took our liquor out to the rail overlooking the water. Thunderstorms popped silent in the distance.

“You never apologized,” she said. “When you messaged me, you said you were goin to apologize.”

I rattled the ice in my cup before I looked at her. I remembered us being the last ones up in P.C.B. senior year. I could see flashes of her topless on the rough boards. My hands pushing everywhere for what I figured was love. I’d tried for years and won. The slurred voice as she dressed and faded back into the beach house. I was too hungover to appreciate Petty on the beach the next night. A thousand miles back from the stage. Dully smoking a cigarette, I batted away her hand when she tried to touch me, ignored her the rest of the weekend. I left her and called only when drunk, horny. Ready to turn it back on in North Mississippi at college when she reappeared. In the postglow of the trip the deck haunted me as evil. Sitting in front of me, up in the night air, her presence confirmed the bedroom intuition. I saw she was beautiful. I saw the tattoos and the GED as the rationale for my own fear which had left me so far in life with my own kind of loneliness. I could see the gentle creases around her eyes. There was a warmness, a wholeness, to her eminence. She seemed noble, full in her dress.

“Hey look, I appreciate you writing me back. This’ll probably sound crazy, but I just see how awful I’ve been to you over the years, and, I can’t explain it, but I knew I had to write you and let you know. I couldn’t see it before but I can see it now. I’ve been a bastard to you. I’ve used you for sex. I’ve treated you like shit. The night in Panama City. The day after I didn’t talk to you. I am so sorry. All these years I’ve used you and treated you like shit. And sitting here in front of you I think I love you. I know this is crazy but I’ve never felt so clear.”

Her face was relaxed as she took me in.

“Wow,” she laughed, looked Gulfward. “I never thought I’d hear you say those words. Was not on my fuckin bingo card tonight I can tell you that much.”

She shook her head, took a long draw off her straw.

“You were a fuckin asshole. You did break my fuckin heart. You know, after my car wreck, after I flipped the Tundra, you tried to fuck me the very next day? Like called and called man. You called and wouldn’t stop calling that next night. Next time I saw you in Oxford it was like nothing ever happened.” She finished her drink.

“But you know, babe, I knew exactly what the fuck I was doin. I’ve been fucked up since I was a kid. I do fucked up shit with men. I am about ass backwards to hell with this oil man right now. He hits me and tells me I’m ugly when he spends too much money. That’s violence, Joe. That’s evil. You never made it big. You were always chicken shit. And a liar.”

“You’re right,” I said.

The beach disappeared west towards New Orleans. It began to sprinkle. We went under the roof and lights. They played Boat Drinks. A pod of blonde K.D.’s down from Oxford pooled their money to buy a round for the bar. They danced with their hands over their heads. They shouted with their faces. They all wore green.

I was drunk when she noticed the retired man from Thibodaux at the end of the bar. He’d entered the place, loud and full of the insane joie de vivre we’d all come to expect from the Cajuns. He wore his hair in a salt and pepper buzz which sparkled like formica under the bar lights. He was barefoot in a barely buttoned white linen shirt and short shorts. His laugh was that of a snake charmer, a rogue shrimper, when he reared his head back. His voice full of crawling stars. Mary hung gold at the center of his chest. He slapped on the bar and poured more red from his charger. Serenity gripped my thigh, turned away from him, kissed me.

“I’m gonna get that guy to buy our drinks,” she said.

I had $17.48 left in my Cadence account and twenty dollars in my pocket. I feared the worst. She kissed me, brushed her hair behind her ear and took her drink. She shook his hand, laughed. He grinned. She pointed at me. He gathered his bottles.

“Terry,” he said midlaugh. I noticed a molar missing. He did not offer a handshake. He didn’t sit down. He hopped from one barefoot to the other. He swished his wine around in his glass.

“I retired three months ago,” he said. “Moved over here from New Orleans. From Tibbadoe. 28 years in the construction business, 25 years of marriage. She ended up bein a lesbian if you can fuckin beleeve it,” he laughed.

“I said, ‘baby, you go head.’ See,” he put his finger in my chest, “I had a spiritual experience. It brought it’all to light. I started takin mushrooms after my retie’ahment—right before actually—an’ awl of this felt right to me. Dinn’t even necessarily feel like news. I knew before I knew if you noe-what-I-mean?”

I nodded and sipped my beer and lit a cigarette. Serenity was leaned back on the bar with her legs uncrossed.

“So I said, ‘you take it, baby. You take the house, the keys, the cars, the kids,’” his face a sharp, bright, silver and dark tan dance.

“I said, ‘I’m gonna take some of this fuckin money I been makin the past thirty fuckin years, and I’m gonna go be happy.’ So-awn the way back from Mo-beel to look at houses, I stopped at this ver-ee fuckin restaurant right here, and come up here to this fuckin bar, and had me some fuckin bang bang shrimp, and one of the best fuckin nights of my life.”

He swung an arm around the bar. “These people here? These are good fuckin people, true people.” He drained his red.

“Come back down here the next day, bought the con-doe. Come here every fuckin day.. I live the good life.”

I nodded. “Welcome,” I said.

He kept having us drink his wine. When I came back from the bathroom, Serenity smiled big, rubbed her nose against mine and tapped it with her finger. She told me he’d invited us back to his place. She grabbed me in her hand. She bit my ear.

“It’ll be fun baby,” she said. “Please.”

A beggar, I smiled.

We followed him, this insane, rhapsodic shrew. The three of us in a line across the beach to the condo tower. He took us to the penthouse. He kept the lights off. It was clean, quiet, white. I ran my hand across the quartz countertop. He put on Buffet, Living and Dying in ¾ Time and started chopping the trinity. He grabbed her by the hand, spun her around. They laughed like they were free. I took my wine out to the little deck and watched the waves fade.

There was a darkness to those mornings. Biloxi settled over our brains like an ash. In black satin sheets, I came to, spooned to the point of sticking, some giant brown dog roaming the foot of the bed, slobbered. I was surprised she snored. It smelled faintly of iron. I pulled on my jeans, my shirt, my boots. The dog barked. She rolled over, opened her eyes, listless. Strings of her black hair stuck to her forehead. A vodka pallor about her eyes.

I squinted in the sun stepping out of the house at the end of the cul de sac. A man in blue coveralls trimmed the hedges with a chainsaw across the street. He stopped to look at me and then fired it back up. A white Yukon passed. North Biloxi. Down the street, a teenager made a grid on a zero turn. I tried to flatten my hair. I drove the 20 miles down 90 back to Ladnier. Turkey vultures kettling languidly in the sky over the pines. Two men draped in khaki and powder blue fishing shirts at Keith’s Superstore. One dumped ice into a big cooler. The other pumped gas into the boat. Over the railroad tracks, the blown-off top of a thunderstorm hung over Chevron across the river like a mothership.

I drug limbs out of the yard into a pile on the street for Dad. There was a dead baby green heron he shoveled into the water by the bulkhead. The thunderstorms rolled over the yard. Dad gave me a hundred bucks. In the morning I left for New Orleans. On the way into the city, I saw the head of a deer glowing in the air over a billboard on I-10. I wore an old camo hat with a deer on it from an annual game banquet held at the gas plant where Dad worked. The deer was a sign from God. I searched for an hour for a good parking spot. I felt amazing. I met a couple of the guys from Ole Miss in the Quarter. Charles and Richardson. Charles rolled blunts. Richardson was in graduate school at Delta State. We stayed at his ceramics professor’s Chartres pied a terre.

I danced with a Baltimore woman in a country western club on Bourbon. Her dark hands on my face, around promises made to call. I woke and sat under the banana trees in the courtyard. I ate THC monkey bread Charles brought back from a family reunion in Oakland. I wrote three poems and emailed them to Serenity. We drank through the day into the night. I cursed out Richardson at B Mac’s and cried. I ran and got lost in the Quarter. My phone died. An acquaintance from Ladnier High emerged out of the Quarter mist. I ended up at a party in a judge’s house thrown by his daughter while he was out of town. They let me charge my phone and told me Irish Channel drama. Richardson wouldn’t look at me in the morning. Charles shook his head.

Feeling undead, Serenity texted me as I passed north of Waveland on I-10. I pivoted on my promise to myself to not go and see her again. Feeling dirty, ashen, poor, I put in the coordinates for her bar.

It was her brother’s old place on Pass Road. She was up on a ladder painting the walls a deep navy. She wore a sports bra and Nike shorts. She smelled like oranges. I kissed her neck. I noticed there was an old, sickly fat man at the corner bar watching minor golf on a silent television.

“That’s just George,” she said. “He works for me. We worked together in New Orleans. We’re partners. He ran this special on shrimp at the John we are going to run here. We’re gonna use the same model.”

I nodded.

“I want to show you my room,” she said.

We went up the old stairs into a little apartment. There was the same iron smell from the room at her house. A flat ochre light from the windows beamed across the otherwise maroon dark room. Bras and t-shirts on the floor. A tie dye bowl resin blackened on a Mexican tiled end table. She sat on my lap with my jeans around my ankles. The legs on the chair kicked back and forth. I had to push down to keep it from kicking over. The broken, snakewrapped ship kept pushing against my face. Her glossy eyes filled my world with cosmic dust. She kissed my forehead.

George was pouring himself a tonic water and doing calf raises when we came down the stairs.

“So you’re the lover boy huh?” he said. “The poet.”

I grinned and looked at my shoes.

“Some kind of poet.”

“I read the stuff you emailed her. It’s pretty good. Not all bad.”

“Do you write?”

“Not anymore. I used to. Screenplays mostly. Tried to break into the castle.”

“Would like to read those sometime.”

“No you wouldn’t,” he said, belching. “They weren’t worth the fuckin paper they were printed on. Total dogshit. But they were fun. It’s what you do when you’re young. You try and be rich and famous.”

I watched her paint the walls and promised to bring her some driftwood for decor. George left and we napped. I woke up in the last pale light of the day. I sat up in her bed for a moment and listened to the cars.

We showered, I put on the same clothes, and we went out to the Filling Station for dinner. Her mother and brother met us there. After dinner they left and it was just us picking at a plate of debris fries. We moved to the bar and she put my hand under her dress while she ordered for us. We drank until she called us a cab to the Hard Rock. She kept grabbing my hand and putting it there and I kept pulling it away.

A Bowie cover band was playing in the Hard Rock. The front man had a light contact in a poor imitation of Bowie’s heterochromia. He whined over the peaks of Life on Mars?

“We’re going to meet my friend Sissy” Serenity yelled in my ear. “She just got off from the IP. We’re going to go meet her at Treasure Bay.” We finished our drinks and left under the wash of Changes.

Treasure Bay was a squat brutalist pug on the beach. Sissy sat at the video poker bar. Her hair was fixed in a messy bun. She dragged on a Juul and blew it in Serenity’s face as we walked up. I felt nervous and dumb and like there was a galactic pull emanating from Sissy.

“This is my husband, Joe,” Serenity said, placing a hand on my chest.

“Joe, Sissy, Sissy, Joe.”

We sat around the roulette table. The two of them kept disappearing from the table to go to the bathroom. I sat dully smoking, barely warmed by the liquor, too broke and dumb to bet, watching them place chips.

We left from there and smoked in Sissy’s Civic on the way to Project. Serenity yelled fuck you to a homeless guy on a bike as we drove past. I turned and looked through the back window and saw him raise a hand over his head before he faded.

In the Project Lounge, construction helmets and dollar bills hung over the bar. Sissy’s twin sister Lisa worked the bar with another older woman I didn’t know the name of. There was a group of men in suits down at the other end of the bar away from the front door and they smoked Black & Milds. The jukebox played George Strait. A velvet print of Elvis in Vegas hung next to a silver leopard printed on a mirror. The bar was dark except for fake plastic candles in red jars on the round tables on maroon carpet and the bright halogen which flooded the kitchen. A variety of cigarettes hung in rows behind the bar. Serenity ordered whiskey sours. We perpetuated the fog of smoke. The man at the end of the bar drifted down and spoke with me about the shipping industry in Pascagoula whose interests he’d represented in court earlier in the morning. I stumbled on the way to the bathroom, my legs almost giving out from under me, threw up in the parking lot and faded to black in the cab near the railroad to the sound of Serenity’s laughter.

The next night we went back to Big Play and ate burgers. Her uncle was there. He was a big gambler down from Baton Rouge for the Mayweather McGregor fight. It cost fifty bucks for a wristband. I went around the bar to the short line to get us drinks.

“Excuse me,” I said to the man blocking my path to the stool next to Serenity. He shouldered me out. I tried to squeeze back in next to her with the drinks. She watched me. I stepped on a boot. He turned and faced me. He was mean, wide and red. A forty something with coon eyes and blonde stubble in a PFG shirt. I figured him for an operator.

“Six hunnerd dollar awstritches, asshole.”

“You fuck your mother with that mouth?” I laughed.

Serenity grabbed one of the cups from my hand and poured it over his head. I felt the rush of the old days. He brushed her to the ground with a gentle sweep of his hand. I didn’t feel the punch so much as hear it crack my head. I looked up and saw his R-Toe swoop in at my face. I felt my nose break and my face go dull. I sat up laughing. The kicks busted the back of my head with the regularity of a sledgehammer. Serenity screamed. She sounded wounded.

He kicked my ribs and I went over. Mule kicks. The pain shot through my groin. I heard men yell. I felt one more big one before it stopped. I lay there with my eyes jammed shut. Country music. Men hollering in the black.

The bouncer got me on my feet and walked me out. He sat me on a bench outside. I needed a cigarette. Serenity gave me one of her menthols. She paced and chewed her nails. I asked the bouncer if my eyes looked okay.

“You eyes are fine, but your head is fucked.”

I shook my head. Curled over and threw up next to the bench.

I sat up. He was standing, shaking his head, looking across the highway to the beach. The wind shifted the part in his hair.

“You remind me of my brother,” he said.

“Come on baby, let’s go,” she said.

“Can’t come back here anymore,” he said.

I leaned my head against the glass. We passed Waffle House and the pawn shop. It started to rain heavy. I watched it run under the oaks and stream into the street. It blurred the lights into gold trails. I looked over at her. Her makeup was running and she was shaking her head.

“What a fuckin faggot. What a little piece of fuckin shit,” she said.

Her smoke filled the cab. I got sick but my abs just ripped. I was empty. She pulled under the dim green lights of the Bayview Inn. Her uncle was asleep. She kept trying to get me to do it with her with him sleeping there on the other bed. A rib felt broken and the beer was fading. She was out of weed. She kept grabbing me and I curled up deeper. She gave up and I lay there the whole night sick. I watched her uncle as he packed and left and let some of the blue dawn into the room.

After noon I followed her to her dealer’s place in Fountainbleau. I waited across the street failing not to think. I followed her south out of the neighborhood down a gravel pine road. It opened to an overgrown lot. An abandoned Delco home stood on concrete pillars on the river bayou.

“We always used to come here. The Ghost House,” she said.

We went up the outside steps and sat on the Virginia creeper subsumed balcony. The tide was way low. Saltwater puddles lay in craters of the dark sand a couple hundred yards out. Past this, the dark olive water snaked through the channels in the grass islands before pouring out into the Sound on the horizon. We smoked. My ribs felt healed. One side of my face was swollen shut. I laughed, dumbfounded.

“What?”

“I feel like shit,” I said.

“Get used to it,” she said. “It’s all there is.”

A light rain fell. We pushed back under the eave to protect ourselves. Trout popped in the water and deer flies stung our ankles, forcing us to leave.

Dan Duffy was born and raised in Jackson County, Mississippi. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Farewell Transmission, Afternoon Visitor, Dunce Codex, Juked, Nat. Brut, Rejection Letters and elsewhere. He holds an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and B.A. from Ole Miss. He’s worked as an usher, a delivery driver, an auto parts puller and an English professor. He lives in Mississippi with his dog.

Tags big play, dan duffy, farewell transmission, fiction, issue 6

Issue 6 Issue 6 Poetry

EATING EXPIRED EGGS

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By R. Gerry Fabian

3:45 am and I am finally home.
Four trailer loads and a bonus 
leave me flush for a while.
I am on Red Bull overcharge
and three steps beyond hungry.
The hall light is off.  Odd.
I call your name.

At this hour of the morning,
I recognize my error immediately
and tip-toe to the kitchen.
Opening the fridge, I take out
the egg carton with three eggs.
I check the bread for possible toast.
Each slice is green with mold.

Grabbing a non-stick pan
I break the eggs and scramble them.
There’s beer in the fridge.
I open it hoping to dull the Red Bull.
Sliding the eggs onto a plate 
I take a small swallow of beer
and begins to eat the eggs.
The carton is on the table
and the expiration date
confirms the obvious.

R. Gerry Fabian is a published writer and poet from Doylestown, PA. He has published seven books of poetry: Parallels, Coming Out Of The Atlantic, Electronic Forecasts, Wildflower Women, Pilfered Circadian Rhythm, Hidden Danger, including his poetry baseball book, Ball On The Mound. Web Page | X | Instagram | LinkedIn | Facebook | BlueSky

Tags eating expired eggs, farewell transmission, issue 6, poetry, R. Gerry Fabian

Issue 6 Issue 6 Poetry

UNABLE TO HOLD

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By Saba Zahoor

It rained in Kashmir again
and I dreamed once more
of turning into its soil,
waiting to receive the diaphanous, fertile rains–
ripe with the smell of bulbous fruit pulp
that coax the rivers awake.

I would weave myself
roots and rain’s silver threads
into lush green carpets.
How I long to be the earth sodden with rain–
to hold close every drop of goodness offered.

I have moved far from home
dwelling in fossil aquifers.
Here, rain falls obliquely, fitfully—
flash floods, ephemeral streams 
drowning the sinful dust devils.

Each sudden downpour weighs
heavy on the soul like a debt.
And every attempt to repay
falls short of the favor. 

The realization is a callous bone
wedged between my teeth:
For all my intentions to receive
like my home soil–
I am the baked sand that cannot hold–

yet there are rocks through which springs gush forth.

*The final line is adapted from Qur’an 2:74.

Saba Zahoor is an engineer, born in Kashmir and currently living in Saudi Arabia. She is a self-styled peasant poet who views poetry as a portal to alternate realities.

Tags farewell transmission, issue 6, poetry, saba zahoor, unable to hold

Issue 6 Issue 6 Poetry

EMERGENCY EXIT

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By Anthony Ikeh

Anthony Ikeh is a Nigerian writer & self-acclaimed cinephile. When he’s not writing or reading, he spends his time searching for bliss that exists between numbers, particularly between zero and one. His work are on or forthcoming on Brittle Paper, Kalahari Review, The Shallow Tales Review, Yugen Quest Review, Metaworker Literary, Eunoia Review, The B’k Magazine, Afrohill Press, African Writer Magazine, The Mixtape Review & elsewhere. He tweets @lanalovesbooks0

Tags Anthony Ikeh, emergency exit, farewell transmission, issue 6, poetry

Issue 6 Issue 6 Poetry

REHAB

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By Paul Smith

In physical therapy
we learned the difference
between pain and discomfort
Jessica spread my legs apart 
like I’m a rotisserie chicken
and I felt it in my hip
the one they redid
but I said ‘No’
when she asked if it hurt
I liked saying ‘No’ to whatever
that burning was
then I cancelled then rest of
my sessions with her
because at some point someone
said
stop when there is discomfort
and I thought it and pain
were one and the same
we are expected to know
the difference
like we are supposed to know
the difference between
lots of things
but between all the things
we can choose is us
we are a pivot point
a fulcrum
that can go one way
or the other
especially when Jessica’s eyes implied
I should push through the pain
and just call it discomfort
because pain is just a thing in my head
and it gets murky
Dad said there wasn’t  
much black and white
out there but a whole lot of gray
and Dad said 
he could always beat a zone defense

Paul Smith is a civil engineer who has worked in the construction racket for many years. He has travelled all over the place and met lots of people from all walks of life. Some have enriched his life. Others made him wish he or they were all dead. He likes writing poetry and fiction. He also likes Newcastle Brown Ale. If you see him, buy him one. He is a featured poet at Mad Swirl.

Tags farewell transmission, issue 6, paul smith, poetry, rehab

Issue 6 Issue 6 Poetry

FROM PROTO-ATLANTIC

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By Liz Falco

Liz Falco is a poet and high school English teacher from Provincetown, MA. Recent and forthcoming work can be found in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency (as Liz Bergman), antiphony, Cape Cod Compass, Do Not Submit, bethh, GROTTO, and Looky Here Magazine. Her chapbook, NO WAKE, came out in December 2025. She co-hosts Morning Shift at Looky Here in Greenfield, MA, where she now lives.

Tags farewell transmission, from proto-atlantic, issue 6, liz falco, poetry