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Across The Wire Vol. 3

B L A C K  A U R A

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By Bill Whitten

A Georg Jorgenson retrospective is at the Whitney. Georg has been dead for almost twenty years. Among the two-dozen paintings on display is one called Disancorato – Georg’s only known portrait – wherein a pair of disheveled brunettes with brown eyes and insolent faces stare at the floor. I am (or was) the young man in the torn t-shirt and filthy blue-jeans while the young woman in tattered bra and panties was Georg’s sister-in-law, Carolina. The painting is valued at 3.5 million dollars. On the other side of death, Georg’s ambivalence about success has become irrelevant. 

I was reading the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini on the F train when a man seated across from me remarked that Cellini, an embezzler, rapist and murderer, differed from contemporary artists only in the fact that he was honest. 

At least, I’d responded, Cellini hadn’t collaborated with the Nazis like Picasso. We exited the train together at the Broadway-Lafayette stop and as if predetermined by fate, entered the nearby Bleeker St. Bar to drink beer.

We discussed the use of the camera obscura by Brunelleschi, the type of motorcycle Antonio Ligabue drove and a film I’d recently seen called Accion Mutante, about disabled terrorists bent on exterminating beauty from the world.

He nodded his head as he lifted a pint of Guinness. “Terrorists and governments despise beauty; it’s too destabilizing for a controlled society.”

Georg Jorgenson was a 6’5” redheaded Max von Sydow lookalike, a graduate of Yale, a boxer of some talent and a reckless alcoholic. A person to be feared in certain situations. He behaved like an aristocrat, like someone without problems or cares who’d grown up surrounded by servants, which as far as I knew wasn’t the case. Fifteen years older than me, he was not only a painter but had designed and fabricated the black shoes, shirt and pants he wore like a uniform. 

I was a rock musician living in Soho amid the ruins of the ’80’s art bubble and had met enough of its former fantastically prosperous denizens – while plying the trade of art-handler/furniture mover – to have cultivated a genuine hatred for artists and the art-world. Georg, I discovered, was no different; he looked down on his fellow artists and considered his collectors – those who occupied the commanding heights of the capitalist class – to be among the worst people on the planet. He understood that the very same cohort who bought his art and kept him in whiskey and cocaine were responsible for despoiling the environment, mercilessly exploiting the working class and more or less destroying Western civilization. But Georg – an avowed hypocrite – needed to make a living. 

I thought his technically masterful canvasses lacked the visceral punch of his personality; they seemed to turn a cool, blank face to the world. That was the influence of Georg’s hero, Lucien Freud. Unlike Freud, Georg’s interventions were devoid of anything resembling a human subject, instead they presented the ghostly interiors of abandoned, uninhabited mansions that were populated by obscure ’70’s architectural motifs and occult pop-culture references. Georg claimed the inspiration for his paintings derived from his drug-fueled career as a teenaged house-breaker in Ridgefield, Connecticut. As the leader of a circle of young friends inspired by Charles Manson’s ‘creepy crawling’ expeditions (in middle of the night the Family would enter a house, quietly rearrange the furniture and then leave) he’d become addicted to nocturnal breaking and entering. To Georg, the vacant structures in his paintings ultimately reflected the architecture of the cosmos, which according to his bleak, clinically depressed worldview, was empty. The Creator – deus absconditus – was long gone.

When Georg suddenly jetted off to Italy with a fellowship and teaching position at the American Academy – due in no small part to the influence of his new (third) wife, the daughter of an Italian diplomat – we carried on our friendship via airmail. He often sent me hastily scrawled, telegram-like notes – I SHALL DERIVE MY EMOTIONS SOLELY FROM THE ARRANGEMENT OF SURFACES – or pornographic sketches made on copies of the Coriere della Sera. 

Returning to my apartment on Broome Street one evening after work, I found a postcard in my mailbox: I’M SICK OF ITALY. EVERYONE IS FIVE FOOT SIX IN THIS FUCKING COUNTRY. COME AS SOON AS YOU CAN. 

I arrived at Georg’s doorstep in Monteverde Vecchio in a white taxicab. I carried a brown leather suitcase that had belonged to my grandfather. In the bright morning light the neighborhood looked forgotten, even abandoned. Its occupants were either still sleeping or at work. I rang the doorbell and five minutes elapsed before Georg finally opened the door.

Georg’s studio – scattered with requisite rags, canvasses stacked in piles or leaning against walls, sheets of paper covered with half finished charcoal sketches, stalagmite piles of newspapers and magazines, broken charcoal sticks, brown paper bags scribbled with words or images, overturned chairs and stools, rat and mouse droppings, hoghair paintbrushes, a photo of Gabriele D’Annunzio torn from a magazine and nailed to a wall, saucers full of pigment, empty coffee cups, unstretched canvasses – was formerly a bicycle factory.

  “Look at me, I have Cushing’s Syndrome; I’m in the same frame of mind as Che Guevara when he went to Bolivia and got himself killed by the CIA. Have you ever seen pictures of him from that period? Moon-faced with a psychotic glint in his eyes? That’s me baby, that’s what I see whenever I look in the fucking mirror. A black aura is hanging over me.”

Shirtless and bearded in a paint-spattered, unzipped white boiler-suit with the arms tied around his waist, he took a step back from a canvas, paint brush dangling from his limp wrist, shoulders hunched, head bowed, looking like Bill Walton just after completing a free throw. The painting was of a chest X-ray. Instead of alveoli and bronchiole there were nebulae, white dwarfs and strands of sidereal light. Behind every image is another image that is more faithful to reality and behind that another image even more faithful.

‘Painter’, I’d come to understand, was a magnetic category. Painters were monks or criminals, eunuchs or satyrs. Paintings were a sacrificial offering that implied the inevitable destruction of their author or a non-stop celebration of the self from which there was no escape… 

Georg looked as if he’d gained fifty pounds since I’d last seen him and his face had indeed taken on a moon-like countenance. Bruises, some yellowish, some blue were distributed across his torso like countries on a map. Ghastly pale with little splotches of red beneath each cheekbone he walked across the studio to a gigantic mahogany desk piled high with books, magazines and videotapes. He sat down behind the desk, opened a drawer, pulled out a mirror and then opened another drawer, removed a foil packet and dumped a pile of iridescent whitish powder on the mirror. Sighing, he rose from the desk and carried it to me.

“I get my drugs from a former member of the Brigate Rosse, a real fucking mensch. When I was in better health we used to shoot his machine-guns together.”

“What’s wrong with you Georg? What happened?” I held the mirror in my hand and looked around for somewhere to put it. I didn’t feel like snorting cocaine. Hungry and thirsty, I suddenly remembered that in Georg’s presence I became a lesser person, a sidekick, an underling. With any two friends, one is always the slave of the other.

Georg walked back to his easel, picked up his brush. “I have Sarcoidosis – something usually only blacks and Scandinavians get, I mean what a mindfuck – its in my lungs, it’s in my eyes and its even gone to my brain. The same disease killed Thomas Bernhard, maybe Gide too. Usually it’s a manageable chronic illness. My case is different. I’m supposed to be treating it with 50mgs of prednisone everyday single day…but it drives me mad, madder than I already am and it makes me violent. It was a rational choice on Alessandra’s part to leave me. Perhaps, when I eventually return to the hospital, after they’ve given me Last Rites, she might stop by…” 

Nothing is so unbelievable as exact truth spoken in a calm voice.

“What a nightmare.” 

I found it difficult to look into his bloodshot eyes. His personality seemed to have expanded along with his bloated body; he was somehow more Georg-like than he’d ever been before. What was the opposite of apotheosis? 

“You must be seriously jet-lagged, Robert. Snort a line of the coke. It’ll sort you out, cheer you up.” 

I looked down at the mirror. “When did she leave?”

Georg began to cough, a long series of dry sounding, lung-scraping coughs. Red-faced, out of breath, he spoke in short, halting bursts: “You don’t…understand…I am a prisoner here…like the man in the…iron mask…She’s waiting for me to die…Prays for it…You know…how… Italians…are…about…divorce.” 

“Come back to New York with me. They have the best doctors in the world.” 

Georg walked back to the desk and pulled out a pack of Lucky Strikes, removed a silver Zippo from a pocket of his boilersuit, flicked it open and lit a cigarette. He exhaled smoke through his nose and smiled. He seemed to breathe easier. “I’m totally broke Robert. I have huge gambling debts. You can’t imagine how much money I’ve simply thrown away. I can’t stop working. And even then I can’t paint fast enough to cover my losses.”

“What can I do to help you Georg?”

“There’s a painting I need to make. It would be of you and my teenaged sister-in-law. The inspiration comes from a photo of Belmondo and Seberg. I don’t do portraits so this might be dicey but there is a dealer who has…who has…made a kind of bet with me that I can’t do it. A huge bet. Tomorrow, you and Carolina will sit for me.”

…Later that evening, we walked up Monte Testaccio, the eighth hill of Rome and one of the world’s most famous middens. Monte Testaccio was formed entirely from broken, discarded amphorae (something like 25,000,000 of them) between 50 and 270 AD. Georg wanted me to see the spectacle of Roma at night – the Pantheon, the Castel Sant’angelo, St. Peter’s, the San Carlo al Corso Church, Santa Maria Maggiore – from the vantage point of an ancient trash heap.

Cold winter wind blowing off the nearby Tiber, we crawled through a hole in a chain-link fence and followed an overgrown path up a slight incline. Above us, the bright machinery of the Roman sky. It seemed that the point of my trip to Italy was to reinforce my belief that things could go wrong at any moment and artists made their best work when they were on the brink of extinction. 

Ancient pottery sherds crunching beneath our feet, nightbirds spreading their sound around us, Georg, his words punctuated by gasps, spoke of exile: “I don’t really miss New York, you understand, but I do miss my memories which were left behind in the subways, on the sidewalks, on the facades of tenements…”

“You can go back, Georg. You’re not going to die.”

Georg pulled a handkerchief from a pocket of his tweed jacket and wiped his mouth. “Exile must be accepted in the same way a terminal illness must be accepted; graciously, without defiance or shame.”

He stopped and coughed for forty seconds. Then he pointed his chin at the Eternal City: “If Emperor Julian had remembered to put on his breastplate that morning in Ctesiphon, the first moon landing would have taken place in 1342.” 

A voice rang out. “You are trampling on the dust of empires!”

  We turned toward the voice. It came from a wraithlike figure – a girl – backlit by the glowing city. Tall with brown hair that fell in straight lines from beneath a black felt beret, she wore a black cape and under that a man’s black suit and white shirt. Was she an apprentice waiter fired after her first day of work? A child refugee fleeing a war-zone? 

  When she smiled her sharp white teeth protruded slightly.

“Carolina, this is Robert.”

A new painting is like an animal glimpsed at the edge of the forest. Is the painter the hunter or the prey? If he has courage, the painter will dissolve into the painting, he will – in an act of faith – become it and live in the ecstasy of that trembling moment of dissolution.

And thus at dawn on a somber day in December, Georg positioned our bodies before his easel and painted us with paintbrushes as fine as eyelashes.

  “Think of yourself as hostages not subjects.” 

Carolina, who smelled – like all beautiful women – of cigarettes and dirty hair, sat on my lap. She wore tattered black underwear of unknown provenance that had been procured by Georg. They are clean was all Georg would divulge. 

I wore a white tank top with slashes across the chest and ripped blue jeans that were stiff with black paint and automotive grease. 

“I distrust anything that hasn’t been weathered or worn out.”

For most of the day Carolina and I barely spoke to each other which was what we both knew Georg wanted; any rapport or complicity would have excluded him or set us against his project which was to put onto canvas an image or shadow of a dream.

  “Seeing is the paradise of the soul.”

Occasionally, Carolina would rise and pace around the studio. She’d pull on an old Russian greatcoat, walk over to Georg, take the cigarette from his hand and smoke it. 

I’d wander over to Georg’s desk and try to read from a paperback copy of Borges’ The Aleph, in particular The Circular Ruins which seemed to be an allegory of exactly what was happening in Georg’s studio. 

“Illness is servitude.”

After nine or ten hours Georg began coughing and cursing simultaneously then picked up a Ka-Bar knife and seemed ready to slash the canvas. Not long after, he announced that it was finished.

“We’ll go for drinks now. I have unlimited credit at The Tomb of Cestis. Come on.”

In The Tomb – the ceilings were so low we practically had to crouch – a man in a tracksuit and shaved head led us (come Giorgio) to a tiny, dirty room that was empty except for a round cafe table and four plain wooden saloon chairs. He left a bottle of Liquore Strega and three glasses. 

A single dangling light bulb lit the space. On one wall was a poster of Maradonna, on the other a framed reproduction of Parmigianino’s Bardi Altarpiece.

The room smelled of bleach, sweat, shit, piss and Lysol.

Georg sat, chest heaving, gasping for air.  

  I was becoming smaller and smaller to the point of vanishing completely. Mingled with galloping fear, I felt a kind of ecstasy. The Rome I encountered was entirely made from this fear, this ecstasy. It was like a stage set. Everything meaningful had been undermined, destabilized. When I closed my eyes, images of earthquake, plague, riot, fire, mobs of people flickered before me. 

Carolina drank two glasses of Strega and leaned her head against my shoulder. A woman – early sixties, five feet tall with black eyes, steel grey hair and the demeanor of someone resigned to face a firing squad at some point in the near future – entered the room and placed three bottles of Peroni on the table. 

  To know what something is, we need time to recognize it, thus we always miss when it happens. Conversely, if we want to know when something happens, there’s no time left to say what it was. 

When Georg finally slid from his chair to the floor, I could at last comprehend the situation. 

The onset of horror has something fresh about it; it shines, it clarifies.

The ambulance arrived twenty minutes after Carolina ran screaming from the room. Then we were hurtling through the narrow, dark and beautiful streets of Roma.

On the Alitalia flight back to New York, I was seated in the rear of the plane, alone in the last row and the stewardesses were merciful and brought me drink after drink. I eventually slept, not waking until the plane taxied on the cinematically lit JFK runway. As I hoisted my bag, deplaned and walked towards customs I thought of Georg lying in a hospital bed in the Machiavelli Medical House, oxygen masked affixed to his face, an IV bag of antibiotics dripping into his arm, the last line of defense as pneumonia bacilli waged war on his lungs. His eyes had scanned the ceiling repeatedly, without pattern, as if guided by some faltering reflex action. Was Georg ‘gone’ or merely in hiding as his body tried desperately to repair itself? I had seen that look before, I’d seen the same eye movement in the days before my father’s death. 

Carolina had been grim and preoccupied as she drove me, in her sister’s Fiat 124 Spider, to the airport, smoking cigarette after cigarette, fiddling with the radio, her eyes seemingly never on the road ahead. Death lurked everywhere as we careened along the A90 ring road. Eventually she pulled up to the departure terminal, kissed me on the cheek and handed me a bulging envelope with my name written on it. 

“From Giorgio. Your salary for sitting for him.” 

Neither of us was aware that Georg had written the word Disancorato in charcoal on the back of the canvas. Did Disancorato – which means unmoored, adrift – describe the painter, his subjects or a way of life? 

It was twenty-two degrees when I landed in New York. After clearing customs I opened the envelope. One million Lire. I changed the money and bought a bottle of Strega at the duty free and still had seven hundred and twenty-five dollars. It would be just enough to cover my rent.

Bill Whitten is a rock musician, writer, reader….The singer and songwriter for St. Johnny (1989-1995), Grand Mal (1995-2010) and William Carlos Whitten (2018-?)…author of BRUTES, a collection of short fiction (2022)

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Across The Wire Vol. 3

TAMALES

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by Elwood Weebs

Three of us in a one bedroom – Alaska, Vegas, Rust Belt. All living in the shadow of Humprey’s Peak.

Alaska brought like twenty pounds of salmon he caught himself. Frozen and carried three thousand miles.

He grilled our first night together. It was unlike any salmon I’d had.

Just gamey.

Gamey as fuck.

I struggled through three bites, Vegas never made it past a nibble.

We only had this small refrigerator, about the equivalent to the size of two minifridges.

The gamey salmon filled the freezer, spilled over to the fridge.

The entire apartment stunk, mild at first, but always building.

Alaska wouldn’t throw it out, and we wouldn’t eat it.

Alaska had a Mexican girlfriend who stayed over all the time and cooked tamales.

Vegas had a friend who didn’t do shit but sleep on our salvation army pull out sofa bed for five, six nights at a time. He always talked about how much weight he’d gained, and kept to a strict diet of canned tuna.

He didn’t like the salmon either.

Five of us – count em – one, two, three, four, five – in this four hundred square foot space that reeked of fresh(ish) salmon, tamales, canned tuna, and body odors from all over North America.

I’ll tell you, all those aromas will kill your morale.

It was inescapable. 

It stuck to my clothes.

Formed a film coating my skin.

Seeped through my pores and into my nightmares.

And I caught everyone fucking, all in the same day.

Alaska and his girlfriend when I stopped home for lunch, Vegas and his friend when I got home that night.

Doggy-style, both times.

Alaska ignored/was ignorant of the smells, but Vegas couldn’t stand it.

It was walk-in-the-door-and-let-out-an-“Oooof” bad.

One day, Vegas and I came in together and let out identical “Oooofs” that said everything that needed to be said.

We filled paper bags with salmon and carried them to a dumpster down the block.

When Alaska came asking about his special Alaskan salmon, we both swore that it was not us, but his girlfriend that threw the fish away.

We said we’d witnessed the whole thing, that she swore us to secrecy.

Well, they got into a blowout fight.

Trust was broken.

And our apartment, in the shadow of Humprey’s Peak, no longer smelled.

Alaska moved out first, Vegas a few months later.

The only thing I missed were the tamales.

Elwood rambles through the rust belt hills with the fatboys. Some people call him Slim, some call him Automatic. No matter about names, he’s often in the middle of a sticky situation. You might find him on Twitter @dntcallmeelwood

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Across The Wire Vol. 3

Three Prose Poems

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By Steve Gergley

1. Candied Pears

My wife and I eat dinner on the back deck of our rotting French colonial. It’s August. It’s ninety-six degrees out. It’s been nineteen months since we spoke to another human being. The sun bakes my hairless skull like a smooth stone stranded in a Texas scrubland. For the next forty-three minutes, I watch my wife devour the mound of candied pears sitting atop her spotless ceramic dining plate. As she eats, her lips shine sticky with sugary syrup. The shadows of the circling buzzards flicker across my mud-crusted fingerpads. A pond of silky blood kisses my gold-plated salad fork. Excusing myself from the table, I clomp into the overgrown backyard and begin digging the rectangular hole at the foot of the gnarled sugar maple.

2. No Names

There is a room with no door at the end of the upstairs hallway. My wife has been in there many times. At dinner she talks about the elderly man and his young trophy wife who have lived in that room for the past fifty-nine and one-sixth years. By my wife’s word, the couple spends their long days in the dark carving foot-sized blocks of yellow cedar into intricately-detailed sculptures of Tudor-style mansions. Sipping my sparkling water, I tell my wife that this is a beautiful and interesting story. I tell her that she leads a complex and thrilling life. I tell her that I am glad she regularly experiences these fascinating adventures. In response, she sips her sparkling water and agrees with a satisfied smile. We eat in comfortable silence for three minutes and forty-four seconds. The man across the street tries, and fails, to slam his front door. The ice cream truck with the unsettling robotic voice drives past the front of our house. I ask my wife to spell out the names of the married couple living in the sealed room upstairs, but she only surrenders the middle three letters of the old man’s first name.

3. My Greatest Ambitions

At 6:17 a.m., I wake up on my back in bed. My wife lays on her side beside me. We do not get up for many hours. A square of yellow sunlight crawls across the carpeted floor. Our cell phones buzz on the end table like ambulances dissolving into a humid summer night. Next door, the teenager with the coal black hair plays a riff on his electric bass for two hours and twenty-three minutes. At noon, a male goldcrest lands on the sill of the open window and stares at us through the thin mesh screen. I stare back at the small bird and yawn. A red Honda Civic parks in front of the Tudor-style mansion on the other side of the street. The teenager next door begins playing a new riff. The male goldcrest flies away. My wife rests a soft hand on the warm skin of my throbbing shoulder. The stabbing feeling in my stomach disappears for the first time in thirteen years. These are the days that supply the component parts of my greatest ambitions on earth.


Steve Gergley is the author of The Great Atlantic Highway & Other Stories (Malarkey Books ’24), There Are Some Floors Missing (Bullshit Lit ’24), Skyscraper (West Vine Press ’23), and A Quick Primer on Wallowing in Despair (Leftover Books ’22). His short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Maudlin House, Passages North, Hobart, Always Crashing, and others. He tweets @GergleySteve. His fiction can be found at: https://stevegergleyauthor.wordpress.com/. In addition to his own writing, he is also the editor of scaffold literary magazine.

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Crayon Barn Chris

VI

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By Dylan Smith

When I woke again my left eye wouldn’t open and through the one that would I saw the spire of a cathedral through the sunroof of my car. It hung over me at an arced angle curving wobbly in the glass, its pitch a wave of vertigo and the whirling made me sick. The Arch. The Tarot Guy. The Square. My left knee ached badly and my face ached all around my left eye where something new and terrible had happened. A moon-colored cloud up high on the wind and water, I needed water. I tried to open both eyes again slowly this time and with intent but the left eye stayed caked shut and I winced because my busted rib. That piece of shit Chris. The spire was a towering swirl of sandstone and lime and it reeled, it lurched. I tried to stare it still by studying its stained glass dormers and the dark spaces between its salt-streaked shutters stained green from bird shit and rain—but on it spun, and I felt sick. Sunday bells soon to toll through the morning. I brought my hand up to my left eye and felt the swelling there and a cut and the dried blood below my brow from I still didn’t know what yet. Bereft. Barefoot. Bewildered. A train screeched somewhere down far below and tore along like underground thunder and a toy-sized plane full of real-sized people inched through the far away blue high above. I’d left the key to my Volvo in the ignition overnight and when I went to turn it, nothing. Dead. The Sunday bells started. A whirlpool of wounded pigeons. I opened the car door and vomited onto the street. 

I wondered whether Chris would come looking for me before work and figured he probably would. His security shift started at nine. A stack of orange parking ticket paper fluttered beyond the bird shit covered glass and I cursed Chris and the spire bells tolled eight times after a long ominous song. I found an old water bottle on the floor and drank from it like something dead come alive again. My head ached. I needed to hurry. My duffle bag lay upturned on the passenger seat beside me and I dumped it out, emptied my pockets, took an inventory of what remained. I found eighty five dollars and my credit card and the bottle of Chris’s pills and one pair of socks. No driver’s license. Half of a red crayon. Art’s flask was missing. I found the telescope Chris gave me and the red unopened card and Sarah’s address scrawled on a scrap piece of napkin in red pen. I’d hidden my cell phone in the duffle bag but the screen had cracked bad and it was dead, and I found my passport in the glove box along with a pair of dark sunglasses and a toothbrush and a packet of blue gum. Thank God. I brushed my teeth while chewing on the gum and I put on the socks. I poured a little water on my head and pulled down the rear view mirror to take a first look at my eye—but that’s when I noticed the CitiBike behind me. The back seats had been pushed down and the bike lay back there like the body of a broken dead blue horse. Vaguely the features of the film guy’s face formed in a violent blurry fluorescent vision. I opened the car door again to spit out the whiskey colored red, and I had Calder’s wizard hat in my lap. His ring of mysterious keys. I had no time for wonder. I poured the last bit of water onto my dirty work shirt and brought it up to the dried blood below my eye. Objects in the mirror may appear closer than they appear. What? I hid Calder’s hat underneath my seat. I felt very paranoid. 

With my duffle bag packed I limped barefoot and carefully toward the deli on the corner. I needed to quiet the hammering in my head. My left leg felt like a peg below my knee and now I’d probably need an eye patch. Shipwrecked. Seasick. Stuck. Sarah’s street crossed an avenue which had been torn up to be repaved and the glass doors to the deli were covered in a haze of construction dust. You could barely see inside. Across the street was a playground wherein children screamed constant bloody murder and parents stood around staring into cell phones and ignoring their leashed barking captive dogs—but inside the deli things were dirty and silent and perfect. An old woman behind the register gestured toward laminated pictures of Mexican breakfast specials and then down the long narrow linoleum tile toward the newspaper stands and the beer. I could have kissed her. A blue countertop with barstools against the window where another customer looked out drinking coffee. Curled on a stack of dusty boxes slept a deeply purring cat. I brought a tall cold yellow can of beer to the counter along with a coconut water and The Sunday Times to hide behind. The old deli owner smiled at me and blinked. She had understanding eyes. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten. I pointed at the picture of Mexican eggs and coffee. The shop owner wrote down the price and put my beer in a paper bag and I took a stool hidden from the unpaved avenue by a pillar. I opened the beer and took a long important drink. The world arranged itself accordingly. Edges softened. The hammering stopped. Through the window dust I could see the cathedral and my car and according to Chris’s note, Sarah’s apartment was in the building right above me. The best place to hide is beneath your enemy’s bed. Or better yet—a church. I took another drink. The customer next to me stirred his coffee and looked me over. I watched him pull down on his mustache and notice my shoeless feet. He looked back out at my Volvo and nodded. I could have reached out and taken his hand. He smelled like old broken cowboy leather. 

“Pay mind to your vehicle out there, son.”

I didn’t think I could talk correctly yet so I didn’t. 

“They’ll tow ‘er today if you don’t wake up and move it.” 

“Tow,” I said. My tongue felt strange against my teeth. “Tow.”

“That’s right. See you’re the only one out on the street? Think they won’t fuck you on a Sunday boy, but they will. Warning signs nailed up to all the trees. Like wanted posters in some old western.”

The shop owner rang a little bell to announce my eggs and the cat woke up and did a fluorescent downward dog. I came back to the window with a tray of steaming eggs and green peppers and then I limped to the fridge for another beer to go with my coffee. 

When I sat down again the old man had risen to leave. 

“What year is she?”

“What year is who?”

“The station wagon, son.”

“Oh, man—I mean. Shit.”

The guy pulled on his mustache again and looked out. A starry eyed look. He seemed from another time. 

“I could really use a jump,” I told him. 

“Can’t help you there, son. Been out here visiting my daughter. My grandson. Newborn just yesterday.”

“Right,” I said. 

“You know, son. I recognize something in you.”

“In me?”

“You ever heard it said: from Danger grows what Saves?”

I thought about that for a while. 

“I’ve got some friends in that church there. Good ones. Passengers of the same wrecked vessel as you. Why not make your way over with me after breakfast. Get you cleaned up. Find you that jump.”

Trees alive with birds and leaves waved like painted hands in the window. 

Under the deli door, a low wind hissing Chrisssss.  

Eventually I just didn’t respond. 

“Well. Easy does it, son. You know where to find me. I’ll pray you get the help you need.”

The man put his hand on my shoulder and left. I watched him cross the street and walk into the basement of the cathedral. I took a couple bites of the eggs, covered my head with the front page of the paper, and when I woke again the cathedral bells clanged out their thunderous song. Somebody had drawn a little heart deep in the dust on the window by my beer and my eye bled brand new blood. The vision in it looked all fucked up and cloudy. Smeared. I counted ten tolls of the bell and the eggs and coffee were cold. I wolfed down the eggs and drank up the coffee and I stuffed the beer into my bag with the Times. People poured out of the cathedral and I felt alright knowing Chris was at work. I stood outside the Volvo holding jumper cables. Like the soft roar of some far off surf, those kids on the corner howled from within the wind and my puke stunk. Nobody stopped. I needed to get cleaned up. The bathroom was in the basement of the cathedral. I checked under the stall for cowboy boots and locked the door. My eye looked bad. Black hole in my visions. Like I’d stared too deep into the sun. The lid flapped like the belly of a gutted fish and I marveled at the miracle of running water. Gently I cleaned the cut and ran wet fingers through my hair and then I snuck back up through the barn-like dark to a space in the back where I wouldn’t be spotted without shoes. I admired the cathedral’s hammer beam roof and the pillars of the nave were ancient hand carved wood. People were still leaving. I needed a shower and some shoes and I needed to get back on the road before Chris got off of work. The panes of a rose shaped window sparkled like a kaleidoscope of crayon-colored pixels and others showed scenes from the Bible. Like giant stained glass figures from the Tarot, I thought—and then I remembered the door in the west side of the Arch. Calder sitting there crosslegged and shirtless, showing me his keys. Oh God. I remembered entering the Arch through that little door and a staircase spiraled up into the dark brick dirt-floored room where Calder kept his things and slept. Squatted. A long wooden table full of broken cups and dried flowers, candelabras, skulls and swords and mirrors. In the corner a loud cage of doves and a cot and a bottle of whiskey shining red. I must’ve eaten mushrooms or something. Leaky skylights. A snake. I remembered the way Calder fanned his cards before he tabled them. It felt like a bad dark dream. The Devil. Lovers. The Tower. Strength. The sun blasted through the stained glass walls of the cathedral and I felt alive again. I opened a Bible. Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. What a word, I thought. Firmament. I read a page or two from Judges. Delilah and the lion. Soon the bells tolled once for ten thirty and Chris had my poems, my secrets, that snake, but so what. I’d rewrite them. Rewrite them better than ever, I thought, for I knew them all by heart—and I knew that somewhere deep down within my life’s unholy mountain of fears and wounds and lies I’d kept alive a little cave of light, a little candle on an altar luminous and alive with my heartbeat and breath still burning fire for Alma, Alma, Alma. I closed the Book. Put it back in the pew. The cathedral was empty now. Silently I opened my beer, took a drink, and I wondered what it would take for me to change.

Dylan Smith is looking for a job if anyone knows of any jobs in Brooklyn.

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Across The Wire Vol. 3

THE GREAT COMPETITION

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By Nathan Bogart

Artie sat in his old beat up puke green Grand Marquis outside his father’s house, still wearing his Bagel Boy work apron, doing his best to compose himself before heading inside. He looked out at the dirty snow that lined the sidewalk to his father’s front porch. Winter had washed the sky of color and the trees stood leafless against the cold wind. 

 The house looked like all the other pre-war houses in suburban Detroit. Except his father’s house was in shambles: the roof was beginning to cave in, the porch steps were missing, and there were holes in all the window screens that let mosquitoes and wasps in during summer. 

Artie’s cell phone rang. He hesitated for a moment. 

“Hey, Laurie. I’m outside his house right now.” 

“I just wanted to remind you…”

“I know.” 

Artie stared up at the house, he could make out the electric glow of a television through the front window.  

“Stop hesitating and just do it. Just tell him already. If you don’t do it, I’m going to.” 

“He’s a difficult man.”

“That’s not an excuse, Arthur. Tell him. Jamie needed help with math homework and you weren’t here. Yesterday it was science. Enough is enough.” 

“You know it’s complicated.” 

“Tell him.”

“Okay, I’ll see you at home.”

He hung up the phone and sighed. Artie felt every night he visited his dad was like crossing a threshold into a different world, like landing on an unknown planet and realizing that not everything operated according to the laws of earth: there were places even gravity could not touch. 

The porch creaked beneath him as he made his way to the front door. 

“Pop, it’s me,” he called through the door. 

“Who?” 

“Me, Pop. Your son.”

“Well, come on in already.” 

Artie opened the door. The floors were covered in empty whiskey bottles and unwashed clothes. The smell of cigarettes hit his nostrils. His father sat on a mustard-colored recliner, his feet up on a coffee table, eyes fixed on the television screen. A half empty pint of whiskey sat between his legs. 

“Hey, Pop.”

He held up a yellow finger, cuing Artie to shut up.  

“Look, kid,” his dad said and gestured at the television. 

A line of muscular men flexed on a stage, their veins popping and their skin glistening with oil. Artie knew all of them by name. 

“See him? On the left?”

“Yeah, Pop. I see him.”

“That’s Frank Zane. The man was a living statue. That’s art. Look at his posing. Beautiful front-double. See that?” 

“Yeah, I see it, Pop.”

His dad lit a cigarette, handed it to Artie. 

“That’s the art of bodybuilding right there,” his dad said, “not the bullshit you see nowadays. True bodybuilding is sculpture. Proportions, symmetry, flow. That’s what it’s all about.” 

“Definitely, Pop,” Artie said and took a drag of his cigarette and tried not to cough. He made his way quietly to the couch, making sure he didn’t walk in front of the television. 

“So, Pop. I’ve been talking to Laurie.”

“Please, son. Not now.”

“Well, it’s just that—”

“Your ears okay? I swear you can’t hear sometimes.” 

Artie’s father leaned closer to the television: 

“And there’s the man of the hour. You see who that is?”

A familiar man with a barrel chest and large arms made his way to center stage. The hair, the chiseled jaw, the mountains of muscle; he resembled Superman. Or at least that’s what Artie thought every time he saw him. He flexed his biceps, puffed out his chest. The crowd cheered and the judges marveled. 

“Yeah, I see who it is. It’s you, Pop.”

“Damn right,” he said. A wide smile smothered his face. “This is the year I almost won the Mr. Universe competition. That’s what a real man looks like.” His eyes turned to Artie for a moment, then back to the television. 

“Look at my transitions. People don’t know this, but it’s not just the poses, but how you move from one to the other. It’s like dancing. Look at that front-lat spread! I’m unstoppable.”

Artie looked from the television to his dad. His bloated stomach hung out from under his shirt and his legs were swollen and red. A once chiseled jaw was hidden beneath puffy cheeks and a scraggly gray beard.

“You know, Joe Wieder told me I would be the next big thing. That if I wanted I could become an action star, a real celebrity, a somebody. Maybe even get my name etched in one of those sidewalk stars. Everywhere I went, I kid you not, people stared. I felt like a god.” 

Artie tried to muster the courage to break the bad news. He’d spent many late nights recently in front of the bathroom mirror, splashing cold water in his face and practicing what to say: 

“Pop, we’ve got to put you in a home.”

“We’ve got to place you in an elderly care facility, Pop.”

“I can’t take care of you like this anymore. Your health is declining. You’ve fallen twice. You broke a rib last month. I no longer spend quality time with my children. I’m becoming an absent father like you were.” 

“You’re fucking going away, Pop. That’s that. I’m tired of this shit. I’m not you’re fucking servant. I’m your son. I deserve better. Why don’t you respect me?” 

Admittedly, he hated to think about his father at an elderly facility. Perfectly manicured lawns, soft-spoken orderlies, tiny paper cups filled with pills: all hiding the fact that it was a house of death. He wondered if he struggled to tell his dad for his own sake, his own fear of seeing Superman tumble from the sky. 

“You know, bodybuilding used to be a circus act,” his father suddenly started. “Strong men were freaks, like bearded ladies or wolfmen. But Eugen Sandow changed that. He held the world’s first bodybuilding show, called it ‘The Great Competition.’ What we call bodybuilding now was born from this great man’s vision. Great men, Artie, shape the world.”

His father’s monologues still had the ability to move him. When he was a kid there was nothing he aspired to be more than one of the great men his father talked about.  

“Well,” his father said, “I’ve got to hit the shitter. Don’t touch the remote.”

He went to sit up and failed. And then tried again.

Artie rushed to his dad’s side and grabbed his arm. His dad slapped his hand away. 

“I don’t need your help. I’m perfectly capable of getting up on my own.”

He slowly pushed himself up out of the chair and then grabbed his cane and marched off to the bathroom. 

Artie sat alone in the living room. The silver screen flashing with images of past muscle men, some long dead. He wondered where those still living were now. He closed his eyes and imagined all of them clambering onto stage in their old age, including his dad, barely able to make it up the steps. Gray hair, wrinkled flesh, hanging jowls. Each standing almost naked in their posing trunks, greased and tanned and not long for the world. 

On the screen, he watched their former selves pose. He knew all the moves, all the various postures: front lat-spread, most muscular, side chest, crucifix, ab and thigh, etc. He was an expert in a subject he didn’t care about. 

He studied his father’s face on the television. He looked exactly how he remembered him as a kid, when he was only ever a visitor in his life, always coming and going, always on the road competing, posing for magazines, running around with women that weren’t his mom. 

The walls of the living room were filled with pictures from magazines of his father in the seventies, at the height of his career. Plus, any clippings from newspapers that happened to mention his name. In the center of it all, right above the television, was a picture of him holding up Artie as a baby on stage like a trophy, his father’s handsome face beaming. Artie was too young to remember the moment and his dad never talked about it, but it was the first picture his dad put up when he moved into the house. 

Artie started to pick up some of the dirty clothes and empty bottles on the floor when he heard a crash come from the bathroom. 

He ran towards the noise. 

“Pop, you okay? Everything okay?”

“Everything is fine God damn it. I just slipped, that’s all.” 

Artie threw open the door. His father was sitting next to the toilet with blood running down his face. 

“I said I’m fine, God damn it.”

“Pop, you’re bleeding.” 

Artie stared down at him. His dad suddenly looked small, frail. 

He thought about all of the stories of great men his dad told him. Eugen Sandow, Frank Zane, Brian Buchanan, Lee Priest. ‘A great man takes no shit from anybody,’ his dad told him once. ‘He does what he must, he looks fear in the face and says fuck you.’ Artie slumped down on the floor next to his dad and handed him a rag. 

“Pop, I’ve got to put you in a home.”

His dad looked over at him in silence, blood running from his forehead to his chin. For a moment nobody said anything. The only sounds were his father’s heavy breathing and the bodybuilders posing in the living room. 

“Fine, but I’m taking my tapes.”

Nathan Bogart is a Pushcart-nominated writer from Detroit, Michigan. He’s been published with Flash Fiction Magazine and Macrina Magazine. He’s currently an MFA student at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

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Across The Wire Vol. 3

Eyes in a Jar

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By JD Clapp

When Titus tired of seeing his life, he plucked his left eyeball from his head with a grapefruit spoon and put it in a mason jar filled with moonshine. He put the jar in a burlap sack he carried everywhere. When he needed escape from the struggles of life, he’d pull the jar from its sack and close his right eye to view his life through a drunken haze. 

He began to favor this drunkard’s view, and one day plucked his right eye out and added it to the jar. For a while, Titus carried his eye jar of ‘shine around, happily seeing the world through drunken, pickled, martini olive eyes. 

With time his eyes became tolerant to the ‘shine. It was then that Titus came to understand the world was as he’d seen it before, made worse from being hungover. So, Titus ventured to the edge of the sea and opened his jar and drank the ‘shine, leaving his eyes at the bottom, staring dully up at him. He filled the jar with sand and put it in his sack and tossed it into the waves.

Unable to see and stone sober, a good man came by, took Titus by the hand, and led him to his home, where he fed and cared for him. And together knowing the joy of friendship and compassion, they ventured out each morning and spread the good word, and the inherent kindness untapped in all people, Titus not seeing their words held little sway on the drunken, deaf masses.

JD Clapp lives in San Diego, CA. His work has appeared in Cowboy Jamboree, Bristol Noir, Roi Fainéant Press, Trampset, Punk Noir and numerous others. In 2023, he was a Pushcart nominee in nonfiction, and had a fictional story selected as a finalist in the Hemingway Shorts, Short Story competition. He is a regular contributor to Poverty House.

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Across The Wire Vol. 3

Blinds

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By Alexander Fredman

The deer out there will still be eating when we finish. (We’re eating tomatoes on toast.) The fence of the garden is for rabbits, for show. Anything that wants can hop it. It’s a foot of chicken wire taut between wooden posts. 

There are four of them. A buck and two does, one fawn. It is natural to wonder what happened to the other fawn. (There must have been another.)  

Green stalks turned in, trampled. The buck’s antlers haven’t yet come to point. We’ve watched him for years. You’ve said Get the gun and meant it. So what if that was another. In crepuscular light on a cool morning, hungry. I picked the ripe tomatoes this morning. I prepared these plates for us both. It’s silly, I know. 

It’s still too early to shoot, even if—let them have at it. See the pale juice bead their elastic lips. So happy they are to have a mealy tomato, undone. What would go well with venison? Recollection is sparse. When I last had it deer were still rare here, it was a task to hunt them, it was a succession of failures. Childhood was spare and sketched in places to hide. Or ways to see the world and forget you’re in it. You know it wasn’t hate, that ancient thing, perched on a platform on a tree, watching for something to break the stillness. Gun in hand. It was love, of what? You taught me, but I let the years crawl on. 

This house has been patched on with fresh space in the time since. Sometimes I sit where the old floorboards give way to new. Smooth wood, lacking the gaps that grew with time. The gun is gone but what could be done there, there there, your voice–there are such things as laws in this country. Damn what I could do about it. 

Outside a deer kicks at a post. The wood is soft and rotting, but it doesn’t give way.  After the tomatoes, they move on to the zucchini. Our largesse. In the pall of a thicket just beyond the garden a fifth stands, its body slight and shadowy. The other fawn, but as a cloud ducks the sun and a young light comes I can see that it’s not, it is an old one, the early markings of this year’s larger antlers. A blanched face, he emerges shy for the feast. He stands on the edge of the dark overgrowth and in the white light he is particulated, smoke in the air. He watches his progeny gorge themselves. Get fat to get through the winter, if they get there. Season starts October 1. Licenses cost twenty-two dollars for state residents. He knows this, the old one.  He is cautious, from a different time. Like you, I think. Eat your toast, I think, and look to where you would be, the seat that still wears the indentation of your body. The oak chair with a memory of you in relief. 

 By hunting season, the gourds will be in. Orange flesh melting on black dirt brings the memory of what you once loved. That pie that I made just for you. You did love it, I tell myself, insecure even in absence. With the shifting wind comes the smell of cardamom and ginger. 

No gun, but there are still some unspent shells in a drawer. Somewhere. I could throw them on the ground and hope for a pop. At a campfire as a kid—I smile at that thought. No carcasses that day but bullets tossed like bullets. We were happy without. Even in lean times you laughed at that. The fire made the woods dark.  Faces in weird clarity.  The day was stripped bare. We tossed bullets like bullets, through the fog. Off to a good start but they hit without a bang. We threw and gathered them, us kids. Later I slept against your leg. You kept your hand on the gun. Your age then is now young. It has been longer without you than with. 

The curtains feint in slack air. I push them aside. The deer eat on. I pick a fleck of black on the window, shut one eye, and aim. Get the old one right in my sightline. Cock my head, pop my tongue. Then I laugh. As long as I watch the deer they can’t leave. That was my trouble with you. I let my sight slip, then and now. My eyelids soften here on the leather chair facing the window. Dreaming, the man of the house waits patiently for the past to arrive. 

Alexander Fredman lives in New York. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Post Road, Heavy Feather Review, and Hobart.

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Across The Wire Vol. 3

It Wouldn’t Hurt You

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By Claire Hopple

They are burying him in a red nose and overlarge shoes and a rainbow wig, all of which they found inside the chest up in his attic. His mistress is the first to scream at the big reveal. Then some kids who look like they’ve been playing in the mud even though they’re wearing their dressy clothes reserved for special occasions. I consider joining them. Screaming has a certain allure to it, and nobody knows what to make of this configuration in front of us. A good release is in order.

He would’ve hated this final act. They did it because they all wholeheartedly agreed he deserved it. These are his children, mind you. Grown children. They felt Jackson deserved this treatment because he was not a very nice person. Joe, the firstborn, said it was okay. Joe gave them the all-clear, and that was all they needed. They thought he’d never looked more appropriate, more himself, in this getup. They had to tuck in the wig at the sides before they closed his cardboard coffin for good. 

Now here we are, incurably witnessing them hoist the coffin up, over, and down into a freshly dug hole for a somewhat un-fresh body.

We don’t really concentrate on Mikey, the youngest son, drinking one of his kid’s unnaturally hued beverages from a plastic container in the shape of a barrel, strips of foil lingering around the top’s circumference. 

Their dad found himself at a safe distance from safety one too many times. Jackson was struck by lightning while opening the garage door of his mistress’s house, we’re told. Everybody tried not to read into it. You could say the man had a death wish long before that, but that’s the one that did the trick. 

I stare Mikey and his plastic barrel down a little too hard and he gives me this look like: What? It’s not as if I went looking for this drink. I don’t know about you, but it’s easy for me to picture Mikey rummaging through his father’s valuables. We met in front of the dunk tank at our town’s carnival. His wife had left years earlier. Our relationship is not of great importance to you, and I’d like to keep it that way. 

These exploits might sound rather morbid––maybe even cruel and unusual, to use the government’s phrasing––but I am accustomed to morbid. 

A teacher of mine once recited a famous quote that went something like: Every time an old person dies, it’s like a small library is burning down. And that quote really stuck with me. So I moved to an apartment beside a crematorium in case their ashes of wisdom would float over and stick with me too. Plus I’ve been waiting my whole life to become an old woman. Imagine living long enough that everything becomes nostalgia. Nostalgia is magic because we know we make it through what’s already happened. We’re safe. The phrase “your whole life is ahead of you” means you should be overwhelmed if not frightened, whereas “your whole life is behind you” means you’ve worked hard and you can rest now. You can be your best and worst self––sometimes simultaneously––without having to make excuses anymore. Every day, I’m one step closer. We all have our rituals. We’ve entangled ourselves with violent affection. And these rituals will lead to our downfall.

We live in a town that’s famous for its number of Arby’s restaurants per capita, if that tells you anything. 

Mikey says we’ll get an inheritance sometime in the near future. The overdue bills tell me it’s already the near future. Arguing with paper gets you nowhere. There is ample evidence. 

Tim, the middle brother, decides right then and there to interrupt the minister––who’s actually a friend of theirs that got some kind of religious certificate from the internet and won’t let anyone forget about it––to speak his peace.

“Our subject was loaded. And we were, we are, his blood relatives. That has to mean something,” Tim says.

“A shopping spree,” Mikey says.

“Something else,” I say.

Joe approaches the grave and throws his phone into the hole beside his father’s body. “There will be little to no consequences for these actions,” he says, inching back to his place in the crowd.

“I never put much stock in communication,” Mikey agrees.

“I’m sorry, I have to leave early. My cat is sick,” says a distant relative.

“But you don’t have a cat,” says another relative. 

“It wouldn’t hurt you to at least pretend,” says the first relative.

Jackson’s wife clears her throat. Here comes.

“He was a wonderful husband. I don’t care what anyone says,” she slurs.

We’re unsure whether she said too little or too much. Some of us were expecting a showdown, albeit a one-directional showdown.

A reporter peeks his head above the crowd for a few seconds, scribbling notes. 

“Get a good look,” she says. Then she whispers to the coffin, “I know you’re in there.” 

You will notice we’re all here for different reasons, and these reasons have shackled themselves to each of us. We’re losing patience with these very reasons as we speak.

“And that’s how you host a burial. Piece of cake,” says the fake minister. 

Jackson’s wife, Joe’s and Tim’s and Mikey’s mother––she was a person before any of them came along, and her name is Cassie––will disappear after this. What they’ll find is a used box of hair dye, some rusty scissors, and a pile of old clothes in the single-seater bathroom at one of the (almost) innumerable Arby’s locations.

You can call this guy, Terry, and he’ll make you a new life just like that. Or so Mikey will say to me after his mom’s gone missing. It will be too soon to tell whether she will ever come back. It will always be too soon to tell, just like it will always be the near future. 

In the meantime, Mikey will keep a copy of his father’s will and testament under his pillow right next to his high school soccer trophy. He will say sleeping atop these objects doesn’t hurt one bit.


Claire Hopple is the author of six books and the fiction editor at XRAY. Her stories have appeared in Wigleaf, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Forever Mag, and others. She grew up in the woods of Pennsylvania and currently lives in Asheville, NC. More at clairehopple.com.

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Across The Wire Vol. 3

America Bird

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By Michael McSweeney

Burning past Buffalo through the wildfire haze, I wanted to feel momentous, part of a final history, a mover in the American age of malaise, a reporter in the heat of the breaking news belching from the Quebecois woods, spotlit by a low and violet sun. But in reality, I was alone, thirty-five, and afraid to die on the road to Chicago. Then a bald eagle flew through the window and landed beside me.

The eagle’s alabaster crown shone in the dying daylight. Feathers brown like melted chocolate. Its talons chewed the leather seat. 

I waited for a lot of things to happen. All that happened was that I drove for seventeen more miles to the next rest area where I claimed a parking spot near the rear of the lot. When we stopped the eagle sang, a strident terrifying portamento. Its amber eyes tore me. Exposed my lowest, most degrading fears. Then quiet pooled inside the car. 

I took a bag of jerky from the center console and peeled it open. Raised a chunk of salty beef. The eagle blinked at the jerky before seizing the meat with its beak. I watched its cruel efficiency and I chewed a piece of my own.

Peace lingered as we emptied the bag. The red sun squatted against unfamiliar hills. The dashboard blinked an eight chased by dueling zeroes. I took my phone from my pocket. Skimmed through a friend’s two-dozen unanswered texts. I wasn’t having a mid-life crisis. I was having a quarter-life crisis. I shouldn’t presume that I’ll die so young, they said. 

I thought about answering. Then I dropped my phone in a cup holder and tugged the car into drive. 

The eagle settled down after a few miles. I tried not to wonder about the costs of leather repair. It’s not every day a bald eagle catches a ride with you. I grazed the radio. The eagle flared at stations for techno, country, and bitter talk radio. It relaxed to some jazz. Closed its eyes. Ornette Coleman bore us into Pennsylvania. 

I wondered if the eagle cared where I was going. A reading in Chicago. The next night and the next. A throng of writers and musicians for the renegade fall of America. 

Two hours later the car curled around the hotel’s rear. I looked at the eagle. I couldn’t leave the bird in the car. Streetlights betrayed the choking air. The hot summer night threatened its advantage if the AC died. The eagle raised its head, as if expectant of a plan. 

I got out of the car, came around to the other side, and opened the door.

Out you go, little guy. The eagle stared at me. I briefly considered risking the onslaught that would follow any attempt to lift the eagle or otherwise urge it physically out of the car. I gave up, returned to my seat, and closed the door. Then the first mad etchings of an idea came to me. 

Uh…wanna climb? I asked, then held my arm out.

The eagled cocked its head and stared. 

Okay, that’s not gonna work, I said. Then I said, Okay, let’s try this.

 I stiffened my body and stared ahead. After a few moments, the eagle rose on the seat. Its eyes never left me. But the eagle’s movements, the feather twitches, the talon tweaks stopped. The bird didn’t so much as blink.

Yeah, I said. Yeah! I said louder, and the eagle chirped and gripped the ruined leather seat. We understood each other, I thought.

I mimicked immobility again. Then, carefully, in painstaking centimeters, I took the eagle in my hands. Held it close. Got out of the car, scooped my backpack from the rear, then paced a line of slow and anxious steps toward the hotel doors. Across the road rumbled a tavern, its outline neon-red. A pack of smokers heaped extra mouthfuls beneath a ragged awning. I kept walking and entered the cool touch of the conditioned lobby. The eagle made a soft noise but remained inert. 

Cool bird, said the front-desk guy. 

Thanks, I said, reaching for my wallet with my free arm. Never leave home without it.

Who did the work?

Eh?

The restoration. It’s really good quality, said the guy, and he leaned forward. I turned my body, to prevent a closer look.

Oh, uh, I’m not sure. My dad gave it to me. Found it in a dumpster. Really lucky find.

Pretty clean for something you found in a dumpster.

Don’t I know it, I said. 

Our conversation waned as the guy chose my room. Two beds in the far corner. The pulse of fireworks broke through the walls and the eagle stirred in my arm. I cleared my throat.

Party outside? I asked, raising my voice. 

That bar across the way, said the guy. Fucking maniacs. Fourth of July every night this week. I call the police but they do nothing. 

That’s too bad.

I feel like a loser. Getting upset. But you get used to the quiet.

I know what you mean.

The vulnerable moment, the weakness the guy betrayed, slipped into nothing. He handed me two keycards and pointed me to the elevators. Once the doors shut the eagle stirred. Talons tested the bounds of my flesh. I shuddered under the immensity of its strength, restrained, watchful. We rose through the bones of the hotel.

Once in my hotel room, the eagle detached and drifted across the room to the bed. Plucked and tore at the sheets. I cried out and approached and the eagle snapped its beak at me. As if to say, I’m in control now. The eagle continued to tear at the bed. Like the wet heart of prey lay inside the sheets. I imagined dollars pouring from sliced arteries, dropped my things by the door, and went into the bathroom.

The mirror wouldn’t reveal whether the smoke had aged me. I flashed my teeth and remembered I forgot to buy toothpaste. Another misstep on the road. I searched beneath the sink and found the dead worm curl of a toothpaste tube. I squeezed it for signs of life. A tear of white squirted out. I rubbed it against my teeth, around my gums, the dry scrape of pharmaceutical mint. Then I stripped my clothes and stepped in the shower. 

The eagle stood perched on the TV when I left the bathroom. One of its claws punctured the dark screen. The eagle twisted its head and watched me pull clothes on my still-wet body. I felt like prey. A cold and hollow wash. I imagine this is how the rabbit feels when it first spots a shadow circling on the grass. 

I decided to go to the bar. I finished dressing, pulled on my shoes, and grabbed my phone from the bedside table. More texts from the friend. Don’t let that breakup fuck with your head. This isn’t the crisis you think it is. Call me. Call me. Ignore the anxiety. Happy 4th of July if I don’t hear from you. 

I made for the door. A scuffle of talons followed close. The eagle, head tilted in seeming curiosity, croaked at me, as if wantingly. I extended my arm and the eagle climbed my leg and settled on the offered perch.

Alright then. I guess we’re gonna go drink, I told the eagle. 

We left the hotel and traversed the toxic-mouthful paces to the bar. Patriotic glam rock slammed against us when we entered the sweat-breath swell of people. It made no sense how busy the place was, here on some highway-flung tavern an inch on the map from Lake Erie. I pushed closer to the bar. The eagle chirped and tucked its head close to my shoulder. 

I tried to buy a whiskey sour and the bartender, a middle-aged woman with gray hair tied up in a knot, put her hands on the counter and leaned forward.

Is that a real bird or what?

As I started to stammer in reply the eagle raised its head to the bartender. Before the bartender could react, some drunk guy to my left leaned forward and shouted, Hey, this asshole’s got an America bird with him.

Eagle, someone else yelled. An American eagle. Or something.

America bird! the drunk guy repeated. Somebody get this America bird a drink. 

The drunk guy tugged on my eagle-free shoulder.

Hey, buddy, let me buy your America bird a drink.

The drunk guy took some cash from his wallet and crumpled the bills on the counter.

Some beer for this America bird, he said to the bartender.

The bartender looked at me and then the eagle and then the drunk guy, and then his money. Picked up the cash, counted the bills, and then from behind the bar took a small wooden bowl and poured some beer in it from the tap. As she poured a crowd gathered around us, drink-brandishing gawkers sipping and watching and whispering about the eagle. 

The bartender set the bowl on the counter and we all watched the eagle.

Go on, little fella, I said.

The eagle clambered down from my arm and rested on the counter. It lowered its beak to the bowl of beer, considered it, and then began to lap up the beer with its thin, pink tongue.

America bird’s drinking a fucking beer! the drunk guy shouted. The crowd clamored and cheered. The bartender poured my whiskey sour and I took a greedy swig. Then I bought the eagle another beer. 

A woman in an American flag tank top pushed her way to the bar. She reached out and stroked the eagle’s feathers. The eagle kept drinking. 

This is the greatest July 4th pre-game I’ve ever been to, she said to me. Then she asked, Is it safe for it to drink beer? 

I have no idea, I said. 

The bartender took her phone out of her pocket and typed. There’s a video on here about a crow that drank beer, she said. 

She held the phone up to me. A grainy news clip from the 1970s showed a black crow hopping around a bar counter and sipping from mugs of beer. The crow knocked one of the mugs over and hopped around in the mess.

That’s amazing, the woman said.

We finished another round of drinks, and then another. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gotten that drunk. I took my phone from my pocket and skimmed through the texts from my friend. It’s not like I wanted to ignore him. I just preferred to speed past my problems. Leave them in a ditch by the road. Drive until the accumulated damage blew the tires out.

The eagle jerked forward and snapped at my phone with its beak. It pierced the glass and I dropped the phone onto the counter. I reached for it, slowly. The screen still responded to my touch but now a crack-swirled puncture ruled its center. The eagle screeched. I released the phone again. 

Trying to text someone important, the woman in the tank top said. The bar had grown louder so she had to yell to be heard. 

Sort of, I said.

The bird is right. You should stay in the moment.

Maybe.

Don’t text at the bar. That’s a rule I have. It’s too easy to tell the truth and lie at the same time.

How does that work?

The woman thumbed her glass for a moment. I don’t know, she said. It just makes sense when I say it aloud.

I’m having a crisis, I told her.

How come?

It’s like, I don’t know why things are the way they are anymore.

Like what?  

Like working. I work because I should work. And when I’m working, I worry about the next time I’ll work, and I worry if one day I won’t have work.

Like being laid off or some shit?

Yeah. 

What about right now?

I don’t know. I guess I sort of forgot about it until I took my phone out.

Then keep that shit away. Live in the moment. Find hope in that. Hope in the moment. 

The woman put her drink on the counter and laughed. Then she said, Maybe that’s hard to feel when we’re all choking on smoke. But it’s the truth.

Then someone dropped their glass and the people in the crowd expelled a collective ohh, and the eagle did too, hunching and croaking with delight. 

The drinks kept flowing. I told the bartender I’d known the eagle since childhood. Best friend growing up. The eagle leaped off the counter and soared across the crowd and everyone cheered. Then the eagle flew back and landed on my shoulder. Talons tore through skin. I flinched but the whiskey dulled the pain. I was too happy to worry about anything. 

The woman asked if I wanted to smoke. I said yes and she led me up a narrow staircase to the roof. I barely noticed the smoke in the air. Took an offered cigarette. After a few puffs, the eagle shifted and croaked again. I turned my head and the eagle was eyeing my cigarette. I held it up to the eagle. The eagle nipped at the end of it with its beak. Elation swelled inside me and I laughed.

Okay, I definitely think it’s bad for a bird to smoke, the woman said.

This eagle, I said. This fucking eagle. 

You guys seem close.

He saved my life.

How?

Good luck. He’s a good luck bird.

Okay.

I wandered to the edge of the roof. The smoke in the air was still just as thick but I noticed, for the first time, that I could still see the vague etchings of light cast by cars on the highway. Speeding through the danger. Swiftly seeking home. The hint of forest stretched on forever. That’s beautiful, I said. Look at this night. Beautiful.

Be careful over there, the woman called.

I didn’t reply but I raised my hand to gesture with my cigarette. As if trying to wave my thoughts into focus. Invincibility, connection, America. I knew I had to do something to mark the moment. 

Let’s go for a flight, I told the eagle. Just a little flap around. 

There was no doubt that the eagle supported me. Believed in my ability to fly. We’d come too far together. The moment demanded we be airborne. I raised my arms and stepped beyond the edge. I remember the tumble, a shout from behind, the spin of my body, a harsh yelp, a furious flutter, a hot wet crack in my arm, the pavement, a swift and concrete unconsciousness. 

***

I woke up in my car. Sprawled in the back seat. My left arm, stiff and swollen, was bound in a sling made from a bartender’s apron. My lungs ached. Everything ached. I sat up. Someone, the hotel staff probably, had collected my bags and left them half-open in the front seat. No note. Just a swift and silent ejection. 

The world was clear through the smudged windows. The smoke drifted elsewhere in the night. I saw chipped-face commercial buildings with big garage doors like brown teeth. 

After a stretch of wounded time, I moved to the driver’s seat and groped around for my belongings. No cash in the wallet. Keys under the floor mat. I clicked my phone’s broken screen and squinted at the time. 3 p.m. Half the day, gone. I should’ve been on the outskirts of Illinois by now. But there I was, injured near Lake Erie, wondering where the eagle had gone.

All I had were the remnants of the eagle’s presence. The fucked-up car seats. Scabbed-over cuts on my arms. The beak-broken phone. Stray feathers on the dash. Signs, but not proof, of a profound and wondrous experience. I wished the eagle hadn’t left. But maybe that was the point. The eagle was always going to leave. People experience miracles until they don’t. Nations fail because their people stop believing that temporary miracles are enough. 

I started the car. The gas needle flicked up to the halfway point. Not enough to reach Chicago. Not enough to flee back home. No digital map to guide me. 

But I had a destination, a westerly point, a daytime star. Skies clear for the first time in days. I’d survived a fall. I hadn’t died on the road to Chicago, not yet at least. 

My body in revolt, I reached for the seatbelt.

Michael McSweeney is a writer from Massachusetts. He lives online @mpmcsweeney.

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Across The Wire Vol. 3

Rose Rocks 

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By Mason Parker

It ends with me on hands and knees looking at my teeth in a puddle of blood as Darling stomps her feet on the floor. A rose rock spins, tilted on the linoleum. Outside, the rain falls west-leaning in big floppy drips from the sky–I could look up and see nothing forever, because the night is filled with streetlights and neon signs. She is bleeding from a cut over her eye, streaming through the wrinkles in her face. She is too young for those wrinkles, deep canyons carved from years of untreated BPD. I pick up my teeth and put them in my pocket. 

“You have to see someone,” I say. “We can’t live like this. We’re going to die.”

“Don’t gaslight me.”

“You can’t gaslight an actual crazy person. That’s not how it works.” 

We fuck savagely.

I clean up my blood with a wet rag and tell myself this is love.

Rewind ten months and two days, we’ve swiped right, and I’m messaging her, sitting at the end of a long table inside Terry the Tweaker’s house with a couple hot rails cut up on a white plate that has pink carnations painted on the lip. Terry the Tweaker met a girl on the app who had four kids. Terry had two kids, so now they have six. When he buys the family snow cones, it costs him forty dollars. That must be love.

Darling likes that I’m into yoga. She asks what kind I practice. Pranayama, I say, emphasizing that I’m not into the suburban housewife hot yoga bullshit. I’m into mind-expanding breathwork. She sends me videos of her spinning an LED hoop as Too Fine to Do Time by PantyRaid plays in the background. She is very good, but I’m just watching her tits bounce like a pig. I dunno, maybe I deserved all the beatings.

Fast forward eleven months and nine days, I’m inside an old woman in the back of a Subaru Forester parked off Wabash Street in Deadwood, SD. Not old. Maybe late fifties. So, yeah, old I guess. When we finish she starts talking about her son, Percy. Percy’s my age and dying of pancreatic cancer from drinking a handle of whiskey every day. The drinking started after Percy’s military service when his high school sweetheart got knocked up by her weed dealer and dumped him during deployment. Her name was Sara. Percy came home and started fucking a guy, but he swore to his mom and everyone else that he wasn’t gay. It wasn’t like that. She tells me she didn’t care if he was gay. Says it wasn’t worth drinking himself to death over it. She talks about Percy in the past tense. I get the feeling she’s lying. She hated that he was gay, told him as much, and is hoping to clear her name in hindsight. The conversation bums me out, so I take a pull from a bottle of bourbon. I crack the window and try to breathe clean air, but all I can taste is cigarettes. I have a bag of rose rocks in my backpack. There’s only a few left. I run my eyes over the woman, not remembering her name, but letting my gaze get caught in the cleft of her crow’s feet. I wonder if this could be love, but I miss Darling. 

Rewind ten months and twenty-one days, Darling shows up at my house for the first time sloppy from drinking and maybe benzos. I don’t know. I’m sloppy from drinking and maybe benzos. I don’t know. Zach is over, and he always has pills, but mostly opiates and opioids. They make me nauseous until I’m blissfully puking into my unwashed toilet bowl. Darling is falling out of her chair, eyes heavy, nodding off. I’m puking and smiling with lunch caught in my molars. This is only our first date, but we feel big love simmering inside the chaos.

Fast-forward a month and three days, I’m starting to get jealous because it feels like maybe Darling has fucked every guy she’s ever met. It makes for awkward conversations at house parties and shows at the Attic. Every time someone says, “Oh, you’re dating Darling, huh?” I start to get self-conscious and think, Why? Did you fuck her too? I’m trying to be socially progressive and forward-thinking about it, but all I can picture are gangbangs and spit-roasts and bukkakes. I know I’m not supposed to slut-shame. I’ve watched that one scene in Chasing Amy, but it feels out of my control like the thoughts rise up from nowhere. It makes me angry. First at her and then at myself. If I’m too jealous and territorial, it’s only because I’m in love, right? 

Fast-forward one month and nine days, Darling talks me into doing a kick door at her old neighbor’s house to get her sewing machine back. I tell her I’ll just buy her a new sewing machine. She says she wants that one. It’s the same machine some hutterites used to teach her how to sew, so it has sentimental value. I say yes, because I’m in love and easily persuaded into committing petty crime. We slip on ski masks. Darling’s is hot pink, which feels a little too conspicuous, but this is her burglary, I’m just living in it. 

She asks me to kick the door in, so I do. She pulls a .38 from the pocket of her hoodie. It’s my .38 that I keep hidden between the quilts in the closet. 

“Why do you have a gun? Is that my fucking gun?” I whisper, frantic.

“Just in case things go wrong,” she says too loudly, like we’re not balls deep in a felony.

“It seems unnecessary to kill someone over a sewing machine.”

“That sewing machine means a lot to me, Julian.”

“Please quiet your–just shhh, and don’t say my actual name. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Biggie’s second Crack Commandment says to move in silence and violence, but Darling appears to only understand half that edict. The door is wide open, off the hinges and no one is home. It’s so quiet inside that the sound of Darling pulling the hammer back on the .38 fills the empty house. I start to wonder what Darling does all day when I leave and drag ass to stock groceries at Whole Foods. She rummages through my stuff, but what else did she take? She could just ask. I’d give her anything she wanted like I did with the iPad and the sheet of acid. But, to be fair, I wouldn’t have given her the gun. 

Darling starts loading up a big duffle bag with more than just the sewing machine, which doesn’t bother me. We’re already here, so why not? But I’m nervous about the gun. There’s part of me that thinks she’s going to turn it on me, because I’m such a big fat fucking asshole. It would be good cover if I was found dead wearing a ski mask in a stranger’s house with the door kicked off the hinges, though my boss at Whole Foods, Larry, would be surprised. I show up on time. I quietly stack pomegranates. I read on my breaks. I go home. I’m not like sloppy ass Luke. Luke comes in drunk, passes out in the vegetable cooler, and blames it on a spider bite. I come in hungover and handle my shit. Larry would be shocked. 

Nah, I decide there’s no way she wants to bump up a B&E to a murder charge.

Fast forward three months and fifteen days, a warrant goes out for Darling’s arrest because the person we robbed knows damn well it was Darling and somehow there’s a witness–some crusty nosy-ass neighbor. My name isn’t brought up. I babysit Darling’s seven-year-old daughter while she goes to a work party where she’s busted for public intox and weed. They find the pink ski mask in her backpack, and she catches a few cases. I rage call her all night until the sun comes up thinking she’s prolly cheating, prolly gone home with some guy or guys, prolly having a train run on her. In reality, she is sitting in a jail cell, being interrogated, not snitching. We spend lots of time in and out of the courtroom. The judge settles on weekend jail. 

Over the next few months, she works as a prep cook in an Italian restaurant, where we meet by the back door to smoke cigarettes. We stay up late drinking and sometimes, if it’s after 2 am, we sneak into the back of the restaurant and pull bottles of house red from the wine rack. She says she’s going to replace them but never does. Then Friday rolls around, so I take her to jail. I kiss her goodbye and tell her I love her. I spend weekends alone or with my family and friends. Everything is perfect. These are the good days. This is love. The blue sky looks brighter. The trees sing. I turn up the music in my car and drive to the lake. I lay on the shore. I think life would be better if Darling spent weekends in jail forever. Then, on Sunday night, I pick her up, and we get dinner because she’s tired of jail food. Nothing expensive, Taco Bell or Burger King.

One night we’re deep into it. All of it. And I’m feeling reproductive, so we have to go to Wal-Mart in the morning for Plan B. When we have sex, she blames the quirks of her body on her pregnancy. The hair in odd places. The way her breasts sag. The bumps and blemishes on her skin. I don’t mind any of it. It makes her feel lived in. 

We find the Plan B by the other contraceptives. She tells me she hates taking Plan B, because it does weird stuff to her body, but she doesn’t want a second kid and definitely not with me. Fair. 

We exit through the fish section, and though Darling won’t bear my children, she’s willing to share a betta. We look at the fish and find a particularly grisly one that’s red and black and stares through the glass like it wants to eat our souls.

“I like that one,” Darling says. Her eyes are as blue as oceans and dead people. You can see the white all around them when she’s excited, and she is always so excited. She smiles and her cheeks pull her lips from her teeth. They are white and imperfect just like us. 

“Yeah, me too,” I say. 

We name the fish Brotha Lynch and put him in a bowl with a Buddha statue on the bookshelf. He is always staring out, watching us, waiting for fish food and souls.   

We have hobbies together, fire dancing and costume making. She says the thing she loves most about me is that I’m not very attractive, but I’m confident about it. She shows me her favorite spot for collecting rose rocks off Highway 9. Rose rocks are swirling red stones that formed millions of years ago after the ocean receded and was replaced with sandstone. We fill zip lock bags with rocks before laying in the grass until nightfall. Above us there’s a meteor shower and a million stars. I try to count them out loud, but I keep losing track. Darling thinks it’s funny at first, but she soon gets annoyed and tells me to stop. I continue counting stars in my head with my arm wrapped around her. 

After Darling’s last weekend in jail, I pick her up and we go to the Chinese buffet to celebrate.

 I say, “I’m about to gord myself on sesame chicken.”

“You’re about to what yourself on sesame chicken?”

“Gord myself. Like, get really full on it.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean, but the word is gorge. You gorge yourself on food.”

“Gorge? That doesn’t make sense.”

“It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t make sense. That’s what it is. That’s the word.”

“It’s gord like Gordie the pig. That’s why he’s called Gordie because he’s a pig and he gords.”

“No.”

We look it up, and Darling is right. We sit down at the Chinese buffet and gorge ourselves. 

Fast forward two months and all of it comes crashing down. She’s supposed to be at work, but I catch her with her ex at an Irish pub while walking to the cigarette store. I turn away before they see me. That no good snatch. How could she? Did that C-L-O-W-N clown kick in a door for her? Did he babysit her kid while she was doing an overnighter? Did he drop her off every Friday for weekend jail? Did he give her an iPad and a sheet of LSD? This is love, God damn it, but she’s not acting like it. I’m going to demand she act more in love, or I’ll leave her ass. 

I wait for her to get home before I ambush her. No calls. No texts. I want her to feel caught off guard, trapped. I tell her I know everything. I know she was getting railed by some dude today. She starts crying, so I know it’s true. Then she starts screaming like she does when she’s lying. 

I shout, “Fuck you!” Which prompts her to push over the fishbowl, dumping our demonic little betta onto the floor. She picks up a rose rock from the bookshelf and hurls it at me. It hits me in the mouth, so my teeth are raining into a pool of blood–I’m thinking, God damn, this is apocalyptic. This is the end times. But I’m rushed and exhilarated, knowing the only thing that could make us care this much is love. I pick up the rose rock and throw it back at her. It hits her over the eye, and she collapses. She is knocked out for a second, so I start picking up my teeth. Brotha Lynch is flip-flopping beside her head until he stops flip-flopping. Brotha Lynch dies. Darling wakes up and we have sex. She asks, “Is this how you like me?” as blood streams down her face. I grunt and mutter, “Yes… yeah… this is how I like you,” and it’s fucked up because it’s true. She falls asleep. I snatch our big bag of rose rocks from the cabinet, get in my car, and turn north. I’m not going back. I’ll drive away from everything until I run out of gas and money in South Dakota then I’ll hop a train. Larry is going to be so disappointed in me, shocked that I quit without putting in my two weeks. It’s so unlike me. I’m so dependable. 

I sell our rose rocks to tourists for cash on the streets of Deadwood. They buy them for ten or twenty dollars a rock depending on the size. I left my phone on purpose, so when Darling tries to call, the vibration will rumble through the emptiness of our apartment, and she will know that there is no way to get a hold of me. I’m a ghost on the plains, the only sign of me an echo moving through the lonesome silence of her life.

The day after I have sex with the old homophobic woman, I sell my last rose rock. I have no other way to make money, so I start hitchhiking south. The plains stretch under the heat, so they look liquid from the passenger seat of a Sentra driven by a professional bowler named Diane. Diane tells me it has been years since she bowled under a 150. 

“I still use bumpers,” I say.

Diane slams the brakes in the middle of I-35. 

“That’s sacrilege! The ball, the pins, the lanes–that’s the holy trinity. The bowling alley is a sacred place, and those bumpers are a desecration.”

I want to tell her I was only joking. I don’t use bumpers, and I rarely break a hundred, but she’s caught up in her feels. 

 “You’ll never get by in this life beating balls against bumpers. How old are you?”

“27.”

“A 27-year-old man still using bumpers. I couldn’t dream up something so crazy, not in a million years. Kid, you gotta spend some time in the gutter before you start bowling strikes. That’s just how it is.” 

I’m thinking, what the fuck is this, a metaphor? Is this old lady supposed to be some lame ass archetype–the oracle, the soothsayer, the guardian angel here to tell me I need to change my life? How fucking corny. I never tell her that I don’t even use bumpers. It was a joke. I just suck at bowling. And I definitely don’t spill that, at this point, I’m prolly gonna spend my life in the gutter, because that’s my home. The gutters are all I see. I wouldn’t even know how to conduct myself anywhere else. Jesus, what am I, Oscar fucking Wilde? No, I won’t give her the pleasure of feeding her cheesy metaphor. Instead, we talk about the myth of George Jones ripping off Johnny Paycheck until Diane drops me off in Wichita. 

After a few more rides, I get to the spot off Highway 9 where I collected rose rocks with Darling all that time ago. God, how long has it been? I begin filling a grocery sack. The rose rocks are everywhere, and I’m picking them up in a frenzy. They aren’t rocks, they are twenty-dollar bills. Overhead, the clouds are moving quickly. One of them looks like two buffalo fucking.

I’ve lost track of time when I see Darling laying on the ground looking up at the sky from inside the tall grass. She is bathed in light and full of darkness. I lay next to her. 

Everything ended when we drew blood, and we’ve been drifting ever since. Maybe we will float these plains forever, looking for a warm body to make us reborn. 

“Is that all there was for us?” 

“I think so.”

A long cloud is moving quickly east and then it freezes. 

“It was love. What more could we ask for?” 

“Happiness.”

“Yeah…”

The sun sets and there are no meteors in the sky. If we lay here for a million years, our blood will become rose rocks. Maybe these stones are made from the bodies of our old lives, and we’ve already been in this place a million years. What are they worth, the little pieces of ourselves we share with one another? At least ten or twenty a pop. We weave our fingers together. They blossom from our hands in petals of skin and bone balled up tight, red with blood. I lay my teeth across her stomach, she guides my finger over the scar above her eye, and we wait there for happiness. 

Mason Parker is an Okie-born, Montana-based writer. His work has appeared in X-R-A-Y, Hobart, and Schuylkill Valley Journal, among others. His first book Until the Red Swallows It All is available from Trident Books.