Farewell TransmissionBy Ewen Glass
Ewen Glass is a screenwriter and poet from Northern Ireland who lives with two dogs, a tortoise and a body of self-doubt; his poetry has appeared in the likes of Okay Donkey, Maudlin House, HAD, Poetry Scotland and One Art. Bluesky/X/IG: @ewenglass
By Jack B. Bedell
Jack B. Bedell is Professor of English and Coordinator of Creative Writing at Southeastern Louisiana University where he also edits Louisiana Literature and directs the Louisiana Literature Press. Jack’s work has appeared in HAD, Heavy Feather, Brawl Lit, Moist, and other journals. He’s also had pieces included in Best Microfiction, Best Spiritual Literature, and the Wigleaf Top 50 long list. His latest collection is Ghost Forest (Mercer University Press, 2024). He served as Louisiana Poet Laureate 2017-2019.
By Alex Rost
Chuck misses three days of work then comes in with swollen eyes and through choked words tells me his wife is gone, that after seven years of marriage and two daughters, he found pictures on her phone, iPhone live photos with devastatingly fellatious clarity.
“Two guys,” he says. “Same time.”
She’d been coming home later than usual from her bartending job and Chuck found a sandwich bag in her purse an inch deep with Adderall she claimed the cook gave her.
“Yeah, she said she didn’t pay or nothin. He just gave it to her.”
She’d said the cook was ‘really cool.’
“I should’ve known then,” he says, then sulks back to his car and drives away.
***
Chuck finds out his wife has been coaching his kids to say, “Daddy’s a piece of shit.” They were reluctant at first but came around when she cheered, like they’d scored a goal in a game they didn’t know they were playing.
***
Numbers he doesn’t recognize keep sending Chuck photos of naked men. He blocks the first few but eventually engages.
“The guy tells me he got my number online, sends me this.” He hands me his phone.
It’s a picture of his face on Grindr, his number spelled out. It describes him as a power bottom. Ready now, is the tagline. Bigger IS better, written underneath.
No,” he says when I point out his wife might’ve made it. “She wouldn’t do that.”
***
Which of course, he finds out she did. Her and the cook. Who ends up, she’s been fucking regularly.
***
There’s pep in Chuck’s step, and he’s all smiles while telling me that he and his wife are going to try to work things out, that she came over while the kids were at his mom’s and cried while he held her.
Using words like—
“Miss you,”
and
“Just need time,”
and
“Of course I still love you.”
He’s so full of hope that I don’t have the heart to tell him that I’d just now seen her on a dating website wearing a tiny skirt and low-cut shirt.
Using words like—
“Divorced,”
and
“Single mom,”
and
“Looking for love.”
***
Chuck isn’t doing too well. He’s blasting screamcore again.
The boss comes out of his office and says, “I don’t know about you, but this music makes me want to murder a baby.”
I start to agree with him, then I’m like, “Wait. Murder a baby?”
***
Chuck explains his hazy state of mind through an episode where he started to cut a zucchini only to realize he meant to buy a cucumber.
I try to relate, say about my ex—
“There’s still cans she bought in the cupboard—artichoke hearts, black beans—and sometimes I pick one up, think about the food inside sitting in its juices. The dates on the cans, they’ll last longer than our relationship did. I’d eat it, but I don’t like artichokes, the black beans were for a recipe she made. I thought about tossing them, but when I look at them, there’s like, this moment. I don’t know. I figure when the cans are about to go bad I’ll say fuck it, make a casserole or some shit.”
I look at Chuck’s glossed over expression and think about how most of the words we use are wasted.
And just like him, I long to be more than a memory.
***
Chuck’s press is already running when I come in through the back and give him a passing, “What’s up, Chuck?”
“Living the dream,” he says.
And what he really means is—
This is just another day. Today is yesterday, yesterday is tomorrow, and I regret nearly every choice I’ve made.
“Living a dream,” I say back, smiling.
And what I really mean is—
I feel exactly the same way.
***
I go to leave at the end of the day and see Chuck sitting at the picnic table despite the muddy cold, staring off across the lawn at nothing.
I sit next to him, neither of us speaking for like three, four minutes, until I finally ask how he’s doing.
And in this long winded way, he explains how there is nothing left to say when the words from our hearts have lost their meaning.
“She told me that she’d tried to make me happy when I was unhappy,” he says. “But when I finally wanted to make her happy, she was done trying to be happy with me.”
And I think of my ex, telling me she just wanted to be happy without shedding all her pride.
After a moment, Chuck smiles, says, “Ahh, who cares about women anyway?”
“We do,” I say. “We don’t have anything else to care about.”
Alex Rost runs a commercial printing press outside of Buffalo, NY.
By Sal Difalco
1
“Empty your pockets,” the officer says. His thick black moustache distracts me. Stalinesque, in a word. I could never grow such a moustache. He repeats his command. I empty my pockets. What do I have in those pockets? Forty dollars—one twenty, one ten, two fives—in a silver billfold I received as a groom’s gift for Sam Perri’s wedding. That was twenty years ago. I still see Sam on occasion, but everything else has changed since then. It’s a different world, I’m a different man. Some loose silver: quarters, dimes, nickels. We got rid of pennies long ago. A red lighter. The red leans toward orange and yet is not orange. What is that colour precisely? I don’t know. A receipt from Shoppers Drug Mart for toiletries and a bag of russet potato chips. Another receipt from Phipp’s Bakery for a blueberry scone. A ginger lozenge free from its wrapper and collecting a beard of lint. A small steel cylinder containing one gram of Afghani-adjacent hashish. “What’s this?” the officer asks, holding the cylinder up to the caged lightbulb of the interrogation room. “Hashish,” I say. “You know,” he says, “just a few years ago I could have busted your ass for this.” I want to say, “The law is a bitch, my friend,” but think better of it. Legalizing cannabis may have been the greatest thing my country has ever done. “You think you’re smart, eh?” the officer says. “No smarter than average,” I reply, speaking the truth as I know it. “Well, you’re in big trouble now,” he says. “How so?” I ask. “I think you know,” he says. But I have no clue.
2
As a matter of fact, I’m held overnight without explanation. I share a cell with two interchangeable long-haired thugs who boast of robbing a convenience store. “Ever robbed a convenience store, bro?” one asks. I don’t answer him. Not to be rude, but to show how honestly indifferent I am to his reality. “What are you in for, bro?” he asks. I look at him and look at my hands. “He’s a mute,” says his cohort, reclining on the dented aluminum bench. Both chuckle. The yellow cinderblocks of the cell anger me for some reason. Is yellow a triggering color? I thought red was the winner of that contest. Show a bull a red cape and what happens? But I’m not a bull. The first fellow eyeballs me. “You look like you want to beef,” he says. “He looks like he wants to beef,” he repeats to his friend. I don’t quite know what he means. I don’t have a beef with him, if that’s what he’s implying, at least not for the time being, though I suspect that within a minute or two I will have a beef with both him and his amigo. “He has mean eyes,” says the amigo, sitting up. I know I have mean eyes. I’ve been told that many times during the course of my life. Even as a young lad I was told I had an unfriendly look about me. This often led to fisticuffs or beatings from older people. But I am mean. I am a mean man, and I own that shit. And I like myself just fine. You want me to list a few real monsters? No need, huh. We all know who they are and how we compare to them. “Hey,” I say, “you want me to show you how mean I really am?” Both say nothing. Good for them. A little dust up would have been gratifying, but they saved me the clean-up and potential further charges. “You guys are lucky,” I say.
3
Luck has nothing to do with it, some might argue. Who the some are remains unknown. If we maintain the thread and not break from the dream, perhaps we will end on a satisfying note. Otherwise, preserve the wanking for the lads at the pub over pints of flat Guinness. The pending charges fell away after further investigation. Without looking back at parts one and two, and with a memory scored by pinholes caused by drug abuse and congenital cognitive issues, I suspect the officers were lovers mid-spat who decided to make sport with me for a while as a diversion from their own supper of eels. Later they stripped nude and wrestled on a mat they kept for such moments. I state that with no judgment save an aesthetic one. I have no beef with cops. It is impossible to know what goes on in the minds of others, what gears and wheels crank and spin in their braincases. My friend Malvolio, who recently self-published a collection of poetry, tells me that the key to life is not trying to figure out what everyone is thinking, or attempting to determine the motivations of people. “People are idiots,” Malvolio says. “We have barely evolved, emotionally speaking, since the cave man.” Malvolio’s poetry leaves me cold, I must say, as does most poetry written these days. This is not the fault of the poets. It is the fault of social media and politicians and systemic bias. I had to pause for a moment to wipe a speck from my eye. I’m sorry. It’s easy to blame the world for our mediocrity. As mentioned earlier, I am a mean man. I feel mean and say mean things. I’ve been told that enough times and am self-aware enough to realize the validity of this assessment. I’m not violent, just mean. But if there is room in this world for mediocre poets is there not room in it for a mean man? As a matter of fact, most people get away with meanness every day—look around you—but none would admit to being mean. I admit it. Why should I be shunned by the world for being true to myself when everyone else thinks they merit a parade just for being?
Sal Difalco writes from Toronto, Canada.
By Cody Cook; Art by Will Schaff
It was 2005, and What Comes After the Blues had just been released. Magnolia Electric Co was announced on the lineup of the Intonation Festival in Chicago. I had a couple of friends who wanted to go, and I agreed. I didn’t have a car, so I took a Greyhound bus from St. Louis. It took twice as long to get there, stopping in every town on the way. I passed the time by listening to that album on my mp3 player. Nobody else on that bus was going to the festival; it was full of the kind of working-class people in the songs I was listening to. I must have looked out of place with my tattoos and rock band shirt.
I had been a big fan of frontman Jason Molina and was excited to have a chance to see him play live finally. He felt mythic to me. Some people had The Beatles or some other important favorite artist, I had Songs: Ohia. The festival was painfully hot, almost unbearable. My friends and I sought shelter from the heat in some shade, and Jason strolled past us in black jeans and a long-sleeved black metal band t-shirt, effortlessly cool, like he wore what he wanted, and the weather had it wrong. I worked my way up to the front during their set. They played most of the new record but slipped in some old favorites and a Warren Zevon cover. I hadn’t liked the new album as much, but hearing the songs live gave me a new appreciation for them. I reflected on the long bus ride home, listening to the album with new context. I had found a new love for those songs, and as I stared out the window, I started jotting down some notes. Those notes turned into a review of the album and ended up being my first piece of published writing.
Around that time, I started a job working in a music venue. Minimum wage plus unlimited draft beer and rail liquor. I didn’t care about the money, I was in love with live music and determined to surround myself with it. Drinking on the job wasn’t just tolerated, it was encouraged, it was good customer service. I got caught up in the social side of it, going out with coworkers every night, having fun. It became a nightly ritual. I had to play the role of being social and charming, and alcohol made it easier. The character I was playing led to making a lot of friends who drank, and led to finding love.
I got promotion after promotion at the venue. I was charming and funny, and people enjoyed being around me, but it was largely a drunken role. When I was training to become a manager I was overwhelmed with how much math and paperwork I’d have to do. I told the guy training me that I didn’t think I’d be able to do it and drink as much as I had been. He laughed and said, “Don’t worry, you’ll figure it out.” I got good at working drunk. Sometimes there would be mistakes in the paperwork and I’d brush it off, apologizing for “rushing.” It seemed like it would catch up to me one day and it never really did. One night, I had to take a break from doing my closing duties to go throw up, but I sat right back down and finished up like it was the most natural thing to do. For a while, it worked.
I married a woman who had found this version of me to be very charming and attractive. She offered me her number across the bar and before you knew it, we were inseparable. In those early days she drank just as much as I did. Everyone in our social circle did.
Over time, it became a necessary social crutch. I hated that I couldn’t be this person without drinking. If I tried to socialize without it, I would be uncomfortable and withdrawn. It became less and less about drinking to be comfortable in public and more about just wanting to be drunk. I started hiding it from my wife. For her it was still a social thing. I kept empty Old Crow bottles stashed in cabinets and buried them deep in the trash when she wasn’t home. Figuring out how to get drunk was my daily challenge, and I couldn’t stock enough alcohol in the house to keep up with my thirst. I’d walk to the local drug store and go through about ¾ of a handle a day. On nights that we would go out, my wife would keep pace with me, but at home she didn’t drink. She never confronted me with it either. I assumed she knew more than she said. We went camping and I waited for her to go to sleep, saying that I just wanted to sit by the fire for a bit. I pulled out the bottle and the next thing I remember is waking up on the ground next to the fire, with scrapes on my face. I got into the tent, and she woke up, took one look at me and said, “Oh good, you’re alive” with disgust. She’d known what I’d been doing, there was a coldness setting in.
Months later, my brother and I went home to Ohio for a memorial service for our uncle. He’d struggled with alcoholism, and I suspected it had a role in his death. We were staying in a hotel and, again, I had snuck a bottle in my bag. After he was asleep I drank the entire thing, knowing I’d need it to be able to go to sleep. I woke up in the bathroom on the toilet in total darkness, with no idea where I was or how to get out. I searched for the door or a light switch but was so drunk I could barely stand at all. My brother woke up to my struggle and came and rescued me. He made one passing joke about it the next day, and we never spoke of it again, my uncle’s fate hanging over us.
I was no longer the charming drunk I had once been. I had to get drunk every single day, and nobody could know how drunk I needed to be. I had to be so drunk I could barely walk. Once I vomited in our bed, I started sleeping in the guest room. I claimed that my wife and I had different sleep schedules and it was easier that way, but I’m sure she was glad to have me out of her bed. I knew it was wrong and I hated myself for it but didn’t want to change anything.
I studied Molina through all of it. When stories started coming out about his health issues from drinking, I felt an eerie kinship. I understood how he felt, why he couldn’t quit doing something he knew was killing him. He had so many people who loved him, so much success, and yet he still wrestled this demon. We both had a public persona that alcohol was the fuel to maintain, and a private persona that was using it to drown ourselves. I imagined that, like me, the fact that it was killing him was the point.
Hearing about Jason’s passing stirred up a lot of revelations for me. It should have been the wake-up call that I needed to beat this thing. This was not a game. This was not romantic. Jason was not some tortured mirror image of myself, he was just a man. A man who had just lost his life by doing the same thing I was doing every night. I’d be right behind him. My life was the only thing I had that was worth having, and I could not share the same fate as Jason and my uncle. I had no clue what demons he might have been wrestling with, only that he no longer got to fight them. I still had time.
But I didn’t fight, I kept drinking. I was terrified. I didn’t know who or what I would be without alcohol. I considered it a necessary elixir to bring out my true self. The haze underneath the drunkenness wasn’t a complete person, it was a blank slate that I did not want to face.
I thought of Jason often. I’d sit alone in my living room while my wife slept, drinking Old Crow shots chased with cheap beer until I couldn’t feel anything. Once I was good and trashed, I would crawl into bed and put on my noise-cancelling headphones and blast his music. “Old Black Hen” always got me. Lawrence Peters belting out Jason’s words would pierce through the fog and manage to make me feel something. The lyrics referenced the “bad luck lullaby” as a recurring force that can’t be overcome by the narrator, and it came to symbolize my need to be totally and completely drunk by the end of every night. I felt powerless. I’d play the song repeatedly and just sob at my inability to break this nightly ritual. I don’t tell people these parts of the story often, but in those moments, I found myself resolved to the fact that this would be my end, content with it. This person sleeping next to me deserved better, and I knew that I’d be alone if I kept going. Death was less intimidating than being alone. I felt death was what I deserved.
Jason had been gone for two and a half years before something got through. I found myself in the hospital with pancreatitis. A doctor told me that my liver was failing and if I continued the way I had been, I’d be dead in about a year, maybe less. Lying there, I realized I’d been waiting for someone to care enough to say something. I did not want to die. I was miserable and depressed, but I was still alive. I could still pursue happiness, I could become a person, a partner, worth saving, but the only person who could save me was myself.
I like to say quitting was easy once I finally made the decision. That’s mostly true, but committing to that decision was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. In those first months, I found myself listening to Jason’s music constantly. William Schaff, an artist who’d collaborated with him, had made a drawing he’d meant to help navigate Jason’s path to recovery, a literal map with song references and affirmations that sadly did not make it to Jason before his passing. Schaff had released it as a print in hopes that it could help someone else who was lost. I read the story of the map and felt that I was the perfect audience, someone who could still be helped. I hung it in front of my desk and would study it, recognizing scattered lyrics and motivational phrases throughout. Even though it had been drawn for someone else, it still led to the goal I sought. Like a whisper that the road was still there for me, even if I had to crawl. I made it my lock screen so that it could be a constant reminder that there was still time. It was my north star. There was still a kinship with Jason, but now, instead of understanding his pain, I was trying to honor him by not squandering my opportunity.
Courtesy of Will Schaff and Fort Foreclosure
I remembered a young man sitting on a Greyhound, looking out the window, listening to Jason Molina sing, “Ever since I turned my life around, it still happens from time to time, don’t know what pain was yours, or what pain was mine.” I thought about how I might have interpreted those words on that bus, having no idea how prophetic they would be. Now the lyrics made me think of my uncle, my failing marriage. That blank canvas of a person was no longer something to fear but an opportunity to finally live. First, I tried to be what my wife needed me to be, but I realized that was just as wrong as letting alcohol decide that for me, and we went our separate ways. It couldn’t be for her, or Jason, or my family, I had to learn to identify my own pain, and that was the real map.
This year marks ten years of not a drop. That William Schaff print still hangs at my desk, and not a day goes by that I don’t look at it and feel grateful that I chose to stay alive. I still work in a music venue, I run the place now. Sometimes, I even put on my noise-cancelling headphones and listen to “Old Black Hen,” with a smile, grateful that it can still make me feel something.
Cody Cook has spent the last twenty years working in a music venue in St. Louis, where live performance continues to shape his writing. He is currently at work on his first poetry chapbook. You can find his work in Blood + Honey Lit, and say hello on social media @codycookstl
William Schaff has been a working artist for over two decades. Known primarily for his mastery at album artwork, (Okkervil River, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Songs: Ohia, etc.) Schaff is also the founder of Warren Rhode Island’s “Fort Foreclosure”. The building, lovingly named without the least bit of irony, serves as Schaff’s home and studio as well as home and meeting place for other artists (most notably former resident musicians Morgan Eve Swain, and the Late David Lamb, both of Brown Bird). William also performed for a decade with the What Cheer? Brigade, as one of 20 musicians in a brass band that travelled the U.S. and Europe. An experience that shaped so much of his life. In 2015, recognizing the importance of art in this world, he expanded his community to the West Coast, where he started “The Outpost”, in Oakland, California. There–– financial earnings be damned!–– William filled his days creating works of art for private commissions, bands, exhibitions and his own examinations of human interaction. He has since returned to Rhode Island and can be found, daily, doing the same at the Fort. He has a Patreon page if you’d like gifts in the mail and to help keep the lights on.
By Chris McCreary
Chris McCreary‘s latest book of poems, awry, was published in 2024 by White Stag. He lives in South Philadelphia and on IG at @chris___mccreary.
By Mike Nagel
My sister-in-law Molly grew up as a pastor’s daughter but at some point in her mid-thirties she became more of a witch. I thought that being a witch meant you invited the devil into your heart and learned how to cast fertility spells, but it turns out it mostly means you just get really into backyard gardening and start saying things like, “Happy winter solstice!” instead of “Merry Christmas!”
Early on, I let her do a few tarot readings on me, as practice. I’d never had a tarot reading done before, and I figured it was going to be complicated. So I was surprised when she just fanned the cards out like a magician and asked me to pick one.
“Whichever one feels like it wants to be picked,” she said.
Molly was still pretty new to all this witchy stuff back then — “woo woo shit,” she called it — and wasn’t always familiar with what some of the more obscure cards meant.
“Six of wands…” she’d say, tapping her upper lip. “Hmmmmmmm.”
“Sounds bad?” I’d say, trying to be helpful.
“It does sound kind of bad, doesn’t it?”
“Like maybe I should be extra careful or something?”
“You know what?” she’d say. “It wouldn’t hurt to proceed with caution.”
Around the time Molly became a witch, my friend Amy got really into something she called “Water Theory.” She’d watched a documentary about it on YouTube. “They put all these water molecules under a microscope,” she explained to me over lunch one day without me having asked any follow-up questions. “Then they said some very nice things to half the water molecules and some very mean things to the other half.”
I nodded and stirred my soup, which was a creamy tomato with a glop of sour cream slung into the middle.
“And the water molecules they were nice to, they turned into these crystal-looking structures that looked like I don’t know what. Cathedrals or something. And the water molecules they were mean to…they just turned into these cancer-looking blobs.”
“Yikes,” I said.
“And the human body is what? 90% water, right?” she said.
I blinked a few times.
“Right?!” she said.
More recently, my other sister-in-law, Marsha, became a devout believer in natural fabrics. She read an article about it online. It said that all our synthetic clothing is killing us. All those fake chemicals leeching into our skin. It’s causing all kinds of problems. Cancer. Heart disease. You name it. Now Marsha is on what basically amounts to a fashion diet. A wardrobe cleanse.
“I’m doing natural fabrics only,” she explained at a recent family get-together. “Wools. Linens. Silk if I want to get fancy. Hemp.”
“And that…does something?” I said.
She shrugged.
“Apparently.”
I like to think of myself as an open-minded person. Just not when it comes to things that will require me to change the way I live or shop or that otherwise strike me as being inconvenient. When it comes to those things, I can be pretty closed off, actually.
Which is why I was surprised to find myself spending a recent Sunday afternoon attending the type of group meditation session that involves yoga mats, essential oils, and a playlist featuring more than one contribution by Imogen Heap. I wondered if I was having some sort of crisis. It would make sense. For the past 18 months, my wife, J, and I had been living with my in-laws, helping out after her dad’s stroke. He was seventy-four years old and could no longer walk, talk, shower, or go to the bathroom without our help. After such a harsh reality check, it was only reasonable that I would go looking for consolation in other realms. If there was ever a time to be open to this woo woo shit, it was now.
“Sure,” I’d said when my sister-in-law Molly texted me the invitation. “Why not.”
Molly was running the session and was convinced that I, in particular, might get something out of it. I tend to trust her judgement about these sorts of things. In addition to dabbling with the occult, Molly also recently became a certified life coach. She took a class online.
“I want you to imagine a bright, beautiful star living between your eyes,” she instructed us as our guided meditation began, melting each word into the next like they were made of wax. “Now follow your bright, beautiful star…inward…into your inner space.”
There were six of us here today. Seven if you counted Molly. We were laying on yoga mats that had been arranged in a large rectangle in the middle of the room, on the second floor of an arts collective in Downtown Garland called Into the Well. The place had the worn-out wooden floors and large, dusty windows that I associate with old-timey New York factories. It looked like the kind of place where a couple hundred toddlers could have made an honest living a hundred years ago, hammering together lunch boxes and rubbing shoe polish onto their faces. It was me and six women, all of whom were wearing hot-colored yoga pants. I didn’t mind. I like being around women. I’ve been told I have a feminine energy myself.
“You remind me of my friend,” a woman had told me recently at a literary conference in Boise.
“Oh yeah?” I’d said. “What’s his name?”
“Her name is Sarah,” she’d said.
“I remind you of your friend Sarah?” I’d said.
She nodded.
“Same energy.”
I wasn’t offended to hear that I have the same energy as a woman named Sarah. It was better than the other energies I’ve been accused of having throughout my life. Nervous energy. Anxious energy. Weird energy.
“What’s with all the weird energy, Mister,” J had said a few days earlier. This after I’d just been sitting there on the couch, minding my own business, reading a Jonathan Franzen novel, the one where everybody is having a hard time.
“Don’t act like you know about energy,” I’d snapped. “You don’t know anything about energy. And you don’t know anything about me!”
She was right, of course. I was in a bad mood. I can’t remember why. Later, I apologized and asked how she could tell I was feeling off. “Are you kidding?” she said. “When you’re in a bad mood, I can feel it across the room. The whole house changes.”
So, I don’t know. Maybe there’s something to this energy stuff after all. Laying there on my yoga mat in the loft, I let Molly take me on a guided tour of all the energies hidden within my body, starting from the bottom and working our way up.
“I want you to notice the energy in your toes,” Molly droned in that same voice poets use at open mic nights, where every sentence curls up at the end like a water ski. “And now in your ankles… And now in your calves…”
She must have read an anatomy textbook or something because her instructions started getting pretty specific.
“And now in the medial meniscus of your right knee… And now in the articular cartilage of your left hip…”
I didn’t know what these parts of me were, what they did, or what they looked like, but I started to imagine myself as one of those skeletons that doctors always have hanging in their offices in movies and TV shows. Just a collection of parts and pieces. Proximal filanges. Mandibular notches. It was relaxing to see myself that way — as a hanging doctor’s office skeleton — and pretty soon, I started drifting off to sleep.
“And now the transverse cervical nerves in your neck… And now the sphenoid bone in your skull… And now your skull…”
I figured Molly would stop when she got to the tops of our heads, but then she kept going, out of our bodies and off into outer space.
“And now up past the clouds… And now up past the moon…”
One reason I think Molly makes a good witch — and now a good life coach — is that she has a great voice for this type of thing. It’s soothing and firm at the same time, like a waitress at a fancy restaurant telling you your credit card has been declined. She could tell me anything and I’d go along with it, if only because it sounds so pleasant coming from her.
“Your anal chakras are completely out of whack,” she could say, and I’d say, “You’re making a lot of sense to me right now.” She could read me the Ikea instruction booklet for a bedside table, and I would have an out of body experience.
Some people are just made for this type of thing, I think. You spend five seconds with them, and you can tell they have access to other realms. I’m thinking of this guy I saw the other day who was sitting in the middle of my favorite coffee shop, 1418 Coffee in Downtown Plano, eyes closed, transcendentally meditating. He was wearing the type of free-flowing outfit that cult members put on before walking into a live volcano. His necklace looked like it was made of billiard balls and horse tails. I was so distracted by his level of concentration that I couldn’t get anything done. I just stared at him for an hour. Then I got up and went home. Later, I described him to J as an asshole.
“So this asshole is sitting there meditating in the middle of the coffee shop,” I said, as if he’d been sipping a chai tea latte naked. “Full lotus pose. Eyes closed and everything.”
“What a showoff,” J said.
“Exactly,” I said. “Thank you. He was showing off. Shoving his mindfulness in all of our faces.”
“What was he trying to prove anyway?”
“Just what an asshole he is, I guess,” I said. “And boy did he succeed.”
One of the many things I love about J is that I can always count on her to back me up when it comes to thinking people are assholes. Especially people who believe in things. A few years ago, on a train to Downtown Dallas, J got in a fight with a woman wearing a t-shirt that said, “ASK ME ABOUT WATER BAPTISM.” The fight started innocently enough — just a friendly conversation between strangers, really — but ended with the woman informing J that she was going to hell and J yelling, “Great! I’ll save you a seat, bitch!”
I don’t know why we’re not more open to these spiritual sorts of things. I don’t know why we resist them so strongly. Wouldn’t it be nicer to see the world the way Molly does? As a series of energy fields we can hop between like lily pads? Wouldn’t it be more pleasant to see people the way Amy does? As human-sized water bottles just waiting to be transformed into Disney-style cathedrals by a kind word or gesture? Wouldn’t it be more comfortable to dress like Marsha? In natural fabrics that are not only breathable and self-cleaning but may prevent cancer?
Realists, J and I call ourselves. But what’s so great about reality, anyway? What’s so appealing about it? In reality, people have strokes and never bounce back from them. In reality, people die for no reason and nothing interesting happens next. In reality, we’re all nothing but doctor’s office skeletons, just hanging there in the corner, hoping someone will come along and give us a poke every now and then.
It’s enough to keep you up at night, if you think about it too much. Which is maybe why, laying there on my yoga mat up there in the artists’ loft, I never did fully drift off to sleep. I just laid there, hovering somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness, right there on the edge of reality, as Molly led us out past the moon, and then out past the planets, and then out among the stars where she made a U-turn somewhere out there in the cosmic black and led us all slowly and gently back into our bodies — and then even more slowly and more gently back into the room — where she dusted us off, spun us around a few times, and kissed us all on the cheeks before sending us, blinking and stumbling, back into the real world.
Mike Nagel is the author of Duplex and Culdesac, both from Autofocus Books. Find selected nonsense at www.beefham.com.
By Jimmy Cajoleas
I needed to talk to the redhead at the bar. The signs were clear. She had a nose ring and a tattoo of California. A roach perched on a bottle stared directly at her. I dropped some change on the counter, and it was a nickel and two pennies. That equals seven, the number of completion. I shredded a napkin and it spelled out my name. You ignore the natural world at your peril.
I came to Dutch Bar every night at exactly the same time in hopes of getting served. Otherwise I didn’t have a chance. When I was twelve I was hexed by my neighbor after I squished his pet bullfrog who had wandered into the street. I was on my bike. It was an accident, but the frog didn’t care. He said “Ribbet!” three times and no one has noticed me since.
I tapped Greg the bartender on the shoulder.
“Sorry, didn’t see you there.”
I’d heard that signs might lead somewhere terrible but you should follow them anyway. But tonight didn’t feel right. Maybe it was because I hadn’t had a successful conversation with anyone but my mother in nearly a month. Or maybe it was the mild and constant nausea I felt since my father disappeared.
At that moment the jukebox played the song “Turning Japanese” by the Vapors, a song of great spiritual power, so I decided to follow the signs.
I said hello to the redhead but of course she didn’t notice. Finally I tapped her on the shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “ are you talking to me?”
Her name was Jo Anna. She smoked Kools and offered me one, said she liked my hairdo.
“My mother curls my hair once a month.”
“You shouldn’t tell people things like that.” Jo Anna pulled out a picture of a smiling woman in a short yellow dress. “Have you seen this girl?”
“Are you a bounty hunter or something?”
“No. This is my sister Marilyn. She ran away two years ago and I’ve been searching for her ever since. Got a lead she was down this way. Think you could help me find her?”
That felt like a quest. Quests are how curses are broken. I was getting pretty desperate out here.
“Well? Can you help me?” Her eyes were soft brown, the color of a newborn deer.
“I think I know a place where we could look.”
Jo Anna called a cab and I took her to the Slops.
The Slops were an old neighborhood where millionaires lived in the forties. A development company bought the Slops a decade ago and gutted all the buildings and then went bankrupt. Cops didn’t come to the Slops, but broke and lonely people did. Late at night, the Slops were overflowing with them.
A woman in a leopard-print leotard set up a snare drum on a street corner. A man beside her played the saxophone. I hate the saxophone.
I tapped Byron Knight on the shoulder. Byron ran the cee-lo game. He was a popular guy, knew everybody in the Slops, even the ones with the knives and missing fingers.
“What are you doing down here?” He slapped me on the back because I’d saved his pet albino rat from a dog once.
“We’re looking for this girl. Her name’s Marilyn.”
I handed him the picture of Jo Anna’s sister.
“It’s a couple of years old,” Jo Anna said. “I doubt she’s changed much.”
He took the photo and studied it.
“I know her. That’s Lord Chaney’s girl. Works at the Double Time.”
Jo Anna hugged me. She said to take her to Lord Chaney right now.
I told her it wasn’t that simple.
Lord Chaney was a wrathful man. He owned a bar called the Double Time near the outskirts of the Slops. They said he could read crow bones and lit black candles at midnight. They said he had concubines. They said he had killed so many men their ghosts lined up outside his door, weeping and wailing and waiting on their turn to haunt him.
I was scared, but this was a quest. You have to be scared for a quest, otherwise it’s impossible to be brave.
The Double Time was the last bar in the farthest reaches of the Slops, where men with guns rode slow down neighborhood streets and everyone was afraid. It was housed in an old clothing shop from the thirties. Half the mannequins were still there, defaced and painted up. Some looked like clowns and some looked like little girls.
There was a pool table with a blood spot in the middle of it. One guy didn’t have any hands. He held the cue between two nubs. A girl with a scar on her lip winked at Jo Anna. She had a tattoo on her shoulder of a broken heart. The mannequins stood among the people like quiet angels.
“This place doesn’t feel right,” said Jo Anna.
“That’s because it isn’t.”
Jo Anna spotted her sister first. She had long pigtails down to her waist. Her arms were covered in illustrations, redbirds and stars and a dead tree with roots that spread down into her shirt. She had a hunting knife in her back pocket and was pregnant, a tray of beers balanced on the top of her belly.
“Marilyn?” said Jo Anna.
Her sister’s eyes squinted then got real big. She dropped her tray and drinks went everywhere and I tried to clean up the mess. The sisters embraced.
Marilyn bent down, her face crinkled up all angry and whispered at me, “Get her out of here!”
“We’re not leaving without you. We’re on a quest.”
“Meet me out back,” said Marilyn, and ran behind a curtain to the back of the bar.
I took Jo Anna by the arm. She was trembling.
“We got to save her.”
Jo Anna and I went outside and waited. I thought Marilyn wasn’t going to come. I thought she’d bring Lord Chaney and bad men with guns. I thought we’d get carved up and dragged a mile down the blacktop.
But when Marilyn came out the back of the Double Time, she came alone. Marilyn and Jo Anna hugged each other. They cried. There was good in the world and I was a part of it.
I grabbed Jo Anna by the hand.
“Let’s hustle.”
It was slow-going with Marilyn’s belly and all. I kept looking around for Lord Chaney. A crow flew right by my head, perhaps a sign. Everywhere was a dark alley for someone to jump out of. All the lonesome people with their blankets watched us from behind dark windows. But we got back among the people. I thought we’d be safe there. I listened to Jo Anna and Marilyn become sisters again. I bought us corn dogs from 7-11.
Then I felt a pair of eyes on me. My left elbow hurt.
Up walked a stray orange cat. I knew what that meant. The music quieted down and everyone perked their ears. A man stepped into the light. He had long curly hair down to his shoulders. He had an earring made out of a finger. It was Lord Chaney. He grinned, four teeth left in his mouth.
“Marilyn, honey? I think you better be coming back with me.”
“She ain’t yours,” I said.
“That a fact?” Lord Chaney said to her. “You ain’t happy with me, here in the Slops? Living like a queen?”
“Feel more like a slave,” said Marilyn.
Lord Chaney doubled over laughing. “Oh Lord, she feels like a slave. I could’ve made her my slave but I didn’t. Hell no. I made her my wife. And she can’t leave me. You hear that?” He grabbed Marilyn by a pigtail. “You can’t leave me.” He bit her on the ear.
“It’s true.” Marilyn pulled up her pants leg and showed us the tattoo. It was a fishhook with a circle around it and an Egyptian eye in the middle. Done with a knife. It meant she was his. Those were the rules.
“Plus you got our son in your belly there. You got a piece of me living inside you for always. Only thing that can set you free is death,” said Lord Chaney. “I know you’re brave, but you ain’t brave enough for that.”
I wasn’t afraid of dying, only worried about my mother and her fish back in our apartment. I felt my pocketknife. It was green. I won it by throwing rings around a bottle at the fair.
“Fuck it,” I said.
I jumped at Lord Chaney. But Lord Chaney had the Twitchy Eye, and he noticed everything. Also he was quick, and his knife was bigger. He stuck it right in my belly.
“Too slow,” said Lord Chaney, while I bled on his shoes. It was like we had signed a contract. Byron Knight and an old man were watching us. They were witnesses. Byron bowed his head. Lord Chaney walked away, jingling the change in his pocket. Jo Anna cried.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Am I going to die?”
“I didn’t mean for you to.”
“When I’m gone, take me home to my mother.”
The band struck up a song. An old woman prayed to Jesus. I thought of my mom making grilled tilapia and talking to my dad’s empty chair. People gathered around me, shaking tambourines, singing. Looking right at me. The curse was broken. I was so happy. The blood was all over the pavement. Jo Anna cried and her tears fell in my mouth.
It was all for me.
Jimmy Cajoleas is from Jackson, Mississippi. He lives in New York.
By Guy Cramer
Guy Cramer is a medical worker and writer from the Ark-La-Tex region. He has been published in a number of online journals, including Vestal Review, JAKE, Citywide Lunch, and elsewhere. He is on IG: @guy.cramer
By Craig Rodgers
The postcard comes first. Basic cardstock, a tourist find. Photo of a beach somewhere. Old, coverall swimsuits decades out of fashion. A single boat sails in the distance.
Bertrum holds it up. He holds it out. Maybe the image will bring a memory but it does not. He turns the card over. Writing. A neat, precise hand.
Hi Bert. It’s been too long.
– Perry
He turns it back again. The swimmers scattered there. Girls in their wraps. Some vague familiarity, like a still from a movie. The fog memory of a dream.
He lays the card down on the counter. He thinks back, back. Reaching. Perry. Perry?
***
It’s an outdoor place. Tables strewn in the road. Wait staff prowl among, pouring drinks, bringing sides. A hundred kinds of salad.
His drink comes, her drink comes. A local beer for him, a milky booze for her. They each take sips and nod. Small talk now, the bullshit of friends. More sipping, more talking. Then.
“Something weird came. Can I show you?”
“I love weird.”
He lays the card between them on the table. She puts out a hand and nudges. The beach girls tolerate. Then she turns it over and reads. She looks up.
“Okay.”
“Okay what?”
“Okay what’s weird?”
“What do you mean?”
“What do YOU mean?”
“Perry. Who is Perry?”
She snorts and sits back.
“What? Perry. From school.”
“What school?”
“High school. All school. Perry.”
“Jen, I don’t remember any Perry. I mean. Ever.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not kidding.”
“Bert, come on. Perry.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Well clearly he remembers you.”
She taps the card with a finger.
“You really don’t remember?”
He shakes his head no. She slides the card away.
***
He looks it up everywhere. Social media. High school pages. There’s no Perry. The reunion, those attending. Invites. Nothing. He pours himself a drink. He goes to the local paper. Searching, scrolling. There is no Perry. He pours himself a drink. He searches births, he searches deaths. There is no Perry. He pours himself a drink.
***
The committee meets each Wednesday in the weeks leading up. Planning and the like. Catering, decorations. What kind of banner will go where. They’re renting a ferry out on the lake. One of those big numbers. The whole class will fit. Room for more still.
Bertrum sits in the back. Just like the old days. Spacing out, nodding when he must. Their talk circles and some accord is reached and people begin standing and he stands too. He shakes hands, he smiles. Small talk. We’re all well. Then the crowd filters out, then only stragglers remain.
The committee chair is there at the table. She flips through pages in a phone. Leslie something. Bertrum steps near.
“Oh. Oh hello.”
Her face is blank and then a glow. Filled again with spirit. She puts out a hand and he shakes it and she pats his. Then.
“I’m sorry to bother you. I have a question about the reunion.”
“That’s fine.”
“It’s an odd one.”
“Okay.”
“Was there someone named Perry who got invited?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Anyone. Anyone named Perry.”
She touches the papers in front of her but her eyes never leave Bertrum.
“Hey. Don’t you worry. Of course Perry will be there.”
***
The lot is vast and full. Stars shine above like a mirror shattered in the black. Bertrum sits parked and watching. The boat tied bobbing to the pier. Faces come and go. He tugs at a flask and still watches.
The passenger door pops open. A bell is pinging. She slides in beside.
“Is there more of that?”
“Whole bottle behind the seat.”
She laughs in great whooping sounds. He reaches back, he hands the bottle over. She unscrews the top and sniffs and wrinkles her nose. She gives him a look and she takes a drink. Cheap but smooth. She takes another.
“You gonna go in?”
“It feels like another life.”
“Yeah,” she says. “It is.”
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Are you going in?”
“Bert. I’m here now. What choice do I have?”
***
The line trails. Down the ramp and around. How could there ever have been so many. They make their slow way up.
Music thumps ahead. A song familiar. Something old now, something from all the way back. People chat in line. This way, that way. The vaguest familiarities from another life. Inching on. Up. The song ends, another starts. Louder now. A memory of a song. He turns in place. The noise everywhere. The line moves on. Nearing. Another song now. He knows this one too but it’s wrong somehow. Off key maybe. Jarring. Louder still. The line moves. The door is close. A foyer, tables. The ballroom beyond. The line moves.
“Hi.”
He says hi too. She asks for his name and he says Bertrum and she scans a table of names. She looks up again as if he might be mistaken.
“Bert.”
She nods and looks again. She looks for so long. He puts a hand down and he says okay but still she looks. He says it’s okay but she goes on looking.
***
At the edge of the pier the land drops. Stairs lead down carved into the cliff. He swings the bottle as he walks. One hand pressed against wet rock. Ground now. Each step sinks into soft beach sand. He walks along and he stops to push off shoes one and then the other and he moves on. Soon he finds himself sitting. Drinking pulls from the bottle. The water right there. Shore’s gentle lapping. The ferry’s lights trail off as the long distance swallows the boat away. He goes on drinking. Toes squeeze the wet sand. Hot night air runs along skin. He drinks again. Somewhere laughter comes. Gentle tittering. He turns and watches. Friends in the sand down the way. Just in the reach of lake’s wash. They play. A few and a few more. Pushing, running around. The sound of their laughter carries. Bertrum watches. He admires. He takes a drink and remembers. What it was like. He smiles and they play in the sand, their swimsuits of a sort decades out of fashion.
Craig Rodgers is the author of several books, dozens of stories, countless notes, and one convoluted plan to fake his own death.
By Mitchell Galloway
Mitchell Galloway lives in Gainesville, Florida. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Forever Magazine, The Panacea Review, R&R (Relegation Books), and Subtropics. He can be found on Instagram @mitchellgalloways and on X @mitchgalloways.
By Claire Hopple
Brandy is a fine girl. She does not, however, make a good wife.
And then she dies. She suffers. She doesn’t go quickly. It cannot be helped.
She’d been married to a drug lord for a number of years, which everybody made a big deal out of. But it was same-as-usual for Brandy.
She divorced him until he agreed to host a pool party, remarried him at the pool party, and then divorced him again that afternoon when he acted like a hotshot with a pool noodle.
There were times when they only lived on the moonlight and their mutual determination to build the perfect sandwich. They were responsible for the highly regarded sandwich determination quotient, or SDQ.
The drug lord––we’ll call him Rob now––hosted a metal plate in his head. Some claimed he was torpedoed. Others insisted it was due to a hunting accident. And then there were a select handful who stated he had the plate for no reason other than he wanted one. Regardless, Brandy was once entranced by it. This was back when they were inventing aliases for themselves in the wilderness. And it was truly all it was cracked up to be. Until it wasn’t.
Rob started saying things Brandy thought he really meant, being fully honest with her, and it seemed uncalled for, unsavory even. She set his glockenspiel on fire in response. It had the desired dramatic effect.
Oh. Now everyone is staring at him. The town is holding an assembly. There’s a projector and everything, just like grade school.
Rob wedges into the crowd until it froths up, spilling over into an outcry. Then he distances himself, holds a rolled-up flyer to his ear to check whether he can hear the ocean. Echoes of the pool noodle return, so he stops.
Crying doesn’t matter at an assembly. Who’s he kidding? He’s pure embarrassment smashed into the earth by gravity.
Rob scans the room to decipher which one of these citizens he’s so cleverly avoided up until this moment deserves to be bribed. Perhaps any citizen will do.
There’s a college kid draping himself over a chair just to get noticed. Rob approaches, but the kid speaks first.
“What brings you here?”
“Business transactions,” Rob says.
“I will tell you everything I told––” the kid starts.
“Nah. Whatever you’re about to say isn’t what I’m after. I’m trying to find myself,” Rob says.
“That’s nice.”
“I mean I made a voodoo doll of myself. And I lost it. Now I’m trying to find it.”
Rob had already faked his own death before. If the worst happens he’s already warmed up.
“Why, uh, why…I’ll keep my eye out for it, chief,” the kid says, saluting him.
He tries his luck with the snack vendor. But they fall into an argument surrounding mathematics. Rob doesn’t believe her when she says she can do her times tables. Rob briefly considers assigning her a times test so he can observe her claims. She falls asleep at the snack table while he’s deciding. What can he do but dwell on all her unguessable thoughts. This is what happens when you talk to people at regular intervals, expelling the determination typically reserved for sandwiches.
He leans over and whispers to the sleeping vendor, “Brandy always listened to me.”
He washes his hands of the search. Someone will find the doll version of him under a rose bush, and she’ll have the privilege of deciding which version is the dummy.
There’s nothing wrong with vanishing from society, even if it doesn’t amount to much. Which is exactly what Rob does, never to be seen again and feeling the same way he always had, now and forever. At least his metal plate is there for him. The metal plate has been there all along.
Claire Hopple is the author of six books. Her stories have appeared in Southwest Review, Forever Mag, Wigleaf, Cleveland Review of Books, and others. More at clairehopple.com.
by Alan ten-Hoeve with illustrations from Adam Soldofsky
Torrington | Ledge Dr (Lakeridge Maintenance) | Boss states he terminated an employee, employee was refusing to leave, but did eventually leave | 3:57PM – 9/11/2025
Watertown | 380 block of Plungis Rd | EnCon dispatched for a bear that took a goat | 8:19PM – 6/7/2025
Woodbury | Route 6 just north of Big Daddy’s | Report of an injured goat under or near a guardrail | 6:07PM – 6/15/2025
Torrington | 70 block of Wolcott Ave | Caller reports a bear broke into the chicken coop and is currently laying down and devouring a chicken | 4:30PM – 9/6/2025
Torrington | THE GOOD OLD SOUTH END CUMBY’S YEEAAAHHH BUDDY!!! | Report of a male lying down, possibly intoxicated | 5:58PM – 9/5/2025
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Torrington | Concord Rd | Report of two sisters verbally arguing | 11:54AM – 9/2/2025
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Torrington | 29 Main St (Crossroads) | Caller reports a tent setup on the sidewalk, states the people manning the tent are not letting people use the sidewalk and are also mocking people as they walk by | 1:08PM – 6/15/2025
Alan ten-Hoeve is the managing editor of Farewell Transmission and the author of Notes From A Wood-Paneled Basement. He lives in Connecticut.
Adam Soldofsky is the author of the poetry collection Memory Foam, recipient of an American Book Award and Telepaphone, a novella. His latest collection, Three Short Novellas, is available here.
by Conor Demmett
Conor Demmett is a writer/filmmaker/educator from Long Island, NY.
by Joel Tomfohr
On the Eve of My Hospitalization
Here is a short list of the dead: uncle by hanging in a hospital room, G’s suicide by gunshot to the head under the pink Sandía Mountains. My own father who said no to life when the time came. Say hello. Shake their hands.
Once I liked to throw the baseball with my dad. I stayed up late in summer playing capture the flag. I liked to hide in the woods and climb trees. I watched Nightmare on Elm Street. I liked when my mom made smoothies with orange juice concentrate from the freezer. I liked the sharp ice pick of brain freeze when I drank them too fast. I liked to laugh about how much it hurt with my younger brother. I laughed about it all.
I see that the third floor of the hospital is a long empty corridor with doors to rooms. A social worker has faded tattoos up and down her right arm. I have two tattoos on the inside of my right forearm. The pale white of a pale white fish belly turned up at the tepid shore of a lake. Two coffee cups my younger brother drew. One for him and one for me. We drink hot coffee together outside a café during a blizzard while our mom works late into the evening. While our stepdad drinks Scope in his office downtown. The snow accumulates all around us. Great chunks of it like buttercream frosting on a cake.
My older brother tried to kill himself twice, but it didn’t work. Here is what happens when someone in your family tries to kill himself twice. Go to the hospital for family week. Watch red-eyed adults drink stale coffee from a carafe, with powder cream and little packets of granulated sugar. Sit in a circle in a gymnasium on an uncomfortable metal chair with your younger brother. No school for a week. What a relief.
See the snow falling into the black river. See the snow again for the first time every time it falls again, but that same old feeling of something breaking apart inside violently, gently. A hammer wrapped in velvet. See the snow fall again for the first time. So long, long ago.
——————-
The Veld
I only write this because if you know someone who has done it, I guess that means that you are more likely to do it yourself. I write a short list of the dead. So, what does that mean for me?
There is my uncle in the tall grass and, can I go find him, Dad? Will you join me? Will you help me find him in the tall grass this fall morning? I am so young I don’t remember anymore. I am too young to remember. Please do not go, Dad.
The grass is tall and dry like a faraway veld from a world unknown to me. Like the realm of the dead across a black river. We walk along the river on an orange and red fall afternoon and now I am the one who is hiding in the tall grass. Where is Carmichael? Where is he?
Shh.
Later we will throw the ball, and I can see him in the shade of the trees of my grandparent’s backyard. Over there stands my dad. My dad has a mustache. My dad wears glasses. Sometimes he shaves his mustache and then I don’t know if he is my dad. My dad is the tallest man I know. My uncle is the second tallest man that I know. I am in love with them both.
Ghosts haunt the corridors of these pages. These pages are written. They were always written. I didn’t write a thing.
————————
Gun Collecting
I have a collection of pictures of G in my head, and I try to write about them so that I can release them. I write them down and then they come back up to haunt me in the silence of the morning when the light is low, and it is hard to see the words on the page.
I am done writing about G I say to myself, and so I am done thinking about him. Except he doesn’t go away, which is what I was talking about in the program yesterday to my group when I was talking about how when I write about someone, I release them. Except even though I have written hundreds of images of him, it’s not possible for me to not see him in my mind’s eye sometimes in the morning.
He has long shiny black hair. He has a black goatee. He has round, brown, sad eyes. He cinches his camo jeans with a snakeskin belt. He keeps a python under a heat lamp in an aquarium next to his bed. He feeds it rabbits from a chicken wire coop next to the garage. He has a serious gun collection. Sometimes he takes them out to the desert with his older brother and fires off a few rounds. Hahaha. I am not supposed to love a person like this.
Square this detail though: he drives a sweet Galaxie 500. It is brown and it shines under the red sun. He takes me for a spin on Tramway Road underneath Sandía Peak. Time stands still and we roar past it. The desiccate desert beneath us. The sun detonates in the sky. I think about pythons and rabbits and gun collections and firing off rounds at lost coyotes out on the mesa.
At night he doesn’t sleep and so he sits in my living room and when I come out to say hello, he says hello and then shows me memories of myself where I am in their living room, and I am watching him circle the kitchen island counterclockwise beneath the fluorescent light as if he could reverse time. As if he could return to an age when he wasn’t so afflicted. He knows I am sitting there on the couch in the living room studying him and he knows how scared I am of him. Carmichael, he says. Don’t be afraid.
But maybe he doesn’t know that I love him, because how can you love a gun collector who feeds rabbits to his python that he keeps locked up in an aquarium for its entire life. How do you love someone like this? You might be able to love him because he takes you on joyrides in the desert in his Galaxie 500 with the windows rolled down, blasting Alice in Chains for all the coyotes out on the mesa to hear.
————————————————
Joel Tomfohr is a writer living in the Bay Area. He is the author of the chapbook, A Blue Hour (Bottlecap Press). His story, Sandia Is Spanish for Watermelon, was the winner of the RUNNR Residency Challenge (August 2025). His fiction has been featured in Maudlin House, Bright Flash Literary Review, Short Beasts, Bending Genres, Joyland, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, X-R-A-Y, BULL, Hobart, and others.
by Adam Soldofsky
Adam Soldofsky is the author of the poetry collection Memory Foam, recipient of an American Book Award and Telepaphone, a novella. His latest collection, Three Short Novellas, is available here.
By Craig Rodgers
Craig Rodgers is the author of ten books, a handful of lies, and all manner of foolishness.
by Jon Doughboy
We’re the 9/11 Roadshow. Brought to you by Saudi Jihadis. Brought to you by George W. Bush, by decades of clumsy Middle East intervention. Shia? Sunni? Step right up and spin the Mesopotamian roulette wheel! Brought to you like a tray of hot kabsa, whether you want it or not, by the dissolution of the British and Ottoman Empires. What is it, my fellow Americans, that attracts you to the desert? And brought to you, of course, by oil. Black gold seeping through sand all the way to the surface, to your gas tank, to the furnace hiccupping heat in your basement, to your technical outerwear fleece $99.99 while supplies last, while the earth still giveth up that sweet, sweet crude that we love.
We ship the remains of the Twin Towers, shattered glass and charred steel and melted bolts. Respectfully, we ship them, grieving with unipolar solemnity. Employing a caravan of patriotic Teamsters operating under stormy skies, we load the debris and bring it to Americans across the land so they can experience the awesome terror first hand. Make way. We’re following an executive order. We have bipartisan support. Trauma binds a nation and its people. We wear black armbands but our blood, dear sirs and madams, flows red, white, and blue. No one can doubt our loyalties. They’re incontestable, known knowns.
In the mountains we greet you, America. We remove the remains from our trucks and lay them out at the foothills. A nearby creek gurgles white with glacial till. Varmints slip through chicken wire. A derelict barn shakes in the wind. Hikers stop by on their way to the trailhead. They weep. They ask us if we know anyone who died that day. They ask us if we’re cops or firemen or if we’re with the CIA. Locals pull up in rusty pickup trucks and ask about enlisting. Do you think we’ll catch Bin Laden? Do you think they’ll execute Saddam live on tv? What really happened to Hoffa? When we pack up later, lashing America’s woes and fears and rickety hegemony back on the trucks, we notice a few bolts are missing, even a shard of steel beam that was closest to the second plane’s collision. We double check the inventory but don’t notify the higher-ups. We’re American too. We mourn with you.
The debris looks ancient installed in the prairies. People gather round like it’s a carnival, like we’re clowns and carneys and all this fear and heartache is part of the show. Children scramble over what was once a symbol of American might, their fingers sticky from cotton candy. At night, the grass murmurs with insect life. The light above crosses the sky steadily, an NSA satellite keeping vigil over this fair land.
Gradually, as our journey continues across towns and cities in this great and fertile country, we lose more and more of our precious cargo. America is eating its molten horrors, sucking them back within its crust. Land to sea, day to dusk, people scurry over in the dark and clamber onto the truck feasting on the remains of 9/11 as if our role all along was simply to set this table, to serve this feast. Streetlamp twilight reflects blue in their bared teeth until dissolving in shadowy maws. They ingest glass and steel and concrete, gnawing the bones of empire until all that’s left is one tiny bolt lashed carefully to its bed. The half-sated crowd pauses to examine this tiny remnant. We went to war for this? they ask. Is this a joke? But this anger, too, is a form of grief. We remain silent. We let them mourn as they see fit. The night passes. Waves break foamy on the shore.
Come morning, even the final bolt is gone. Ratchet straps lie in a tangle in the middle of the flatbed like a chalk outline marking where the bolt had been. A moment of silence. Then, even though our cargo is gone, we roll on to our next destination for we have a mission to accomplish and even if we wanted to, none of us can recall the way home.
Jon Doughboy is a story installer and docent at the Museum of Unpublished Prose. There are no visiting hours. @doughboywrites
By Jon Berger
I moved to a new town last summer where I didn’t know anyone. Drank a lot of beer and ate a lot of weed edibles and didn’t shave or get a haircut. I looked homeless and I loved it and I was losing weight because I couldn’t afford food and I’d been riding my mountain bike over 100 miles a week on endless gravel roads and single-track trails and doing pushups and ab-wheel and kettlebell workouts in my 600 square-foot studio-apartment while staying hydrated on tap water.
I accidently ripped off 4 door handles in my hipster apartment. Frank Lloyd Wright did not design my apartment. I could’ve designed my apartment, dude.
This one guy rode his bike around town and honked his horn. He rode up and down Center Street late into the night. I watched him from my big window. He rode an electric bike. He’d stop at the four-way and try to direct traffic and everyone ignored him. He had a cognitive impairment or something.
One morning I was in the parking lot of my apartment building with my mountain bike turned upside down, oiling the new chain. I broke my old chain a week ago while riding single track. 8:30 at night, one last lap, and my chain snapped on a sharp rocky incline. I had to walk my bike home and didn’t get back to my apartment until 10 pm. I had the bike shop do a tune up and give me a new chain.
I loved my bike as much as I hated my car. My bike is a single speed 4130 Chromoly frame from a small frame builder in Arizona. The bike was assembled in Colorado. I started riding when I lived in the Western UP.
I have a high engagement hub that makes a loud clicking sound. I was running the chain lube across the chain as I cranked my pedals with my other hand, letting the hub purr wide open, feeling the deep clicks of the hub echo off the walls of the surrounding buildings.
Electric Bike Guy could hear my hub clicking from across the street and rode his bike over to me. I was finally going to talk to this local legend. He sped up to me then sat there on his bike and watched me, slack jawed. He was skinny and looked to be about 50 years old. He was wearing a winter hat even though it was 85 degrees outside.
He started pointing at my bike and making a funny noise. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to imitate the noise of my hub or what. He started waving his hands around.
“Hey, bud. How ya doing?” I said with a wave over my shoulder.
He started telling me something I couldn’t understand. I think it was about a crash he was in because he kept making big explosion sound effects with his mouth and waving his arms around and then flying into another wave of explosions like the rhythm of the ocean.
Everyone who lived in my apartment building knew each other but they didn’t know me and they didn’t talk to me but this guy did and I was fine with that.
I stood up. “You wanna ride around the block with me?”
He went into another fit of sound effects and hand gestures.
“Alright, let’s go.” I threw a leg over my bike and off we went. He was following close behind honking his bike horn and squawking and making sound effects as we rode through the quiet neighborhood and people in their front yards stared at us.
My bike felt good but the pedal tension didn’t feel the same. It somehow felt weaker. I rode across the street to get a tallboy from the gas station. I sat my bike up against the side of the building. He did the same.
We entered the gas station like two barbarians on an impromptu quest to destroy the town. The gas station was nice and cool. As we walked in, the cashier yelled, “Hey, Bobby, you can’t be here!” She was talking to my new friend. His name was Bobby. In response to being yelled at, Bobby took his winter hat and pulled it over his eyes and mumbled something inaudible and extended his hands out in front of him like he was blind and then started walking around the gas station like Frankenstein.
“No, Bobby! Get out!”
Bobby ignored her and started walking down the candy aisle like Frankenstein. There were a few small children in the candy aisle and they feared Bobby. They cautiously shuffled away from him.
I walked back to the fridge to get my beer. I decided to let the situation with my new friend Bobby and the cashier and the children play out on its own. I grabbed an All-Day IPA six-pack and walked back up to the clerk. “You!” she said pointing at me. “You and Bobby can’t be in here. You bother all the customers. I’ll be reporting you two to the foster home.”
I stopped and stared at her and my brain flexed and pumped green toxic sludge through the gears of my mind and I realized she thought I lived in the adult foster care home with Bobby.
I gave her a blank look and said, “Okay.” I sat my beer on the counter. She looked at me like I was a hologram.
“I shouldn’t let you buy that.”
“Okay,” I said absently and showed her my ID and gave her cash.
She exhaled sharply, sucked her teeth and shook her head and gave me my change. I left the gas station. As I left, she yelled, “Hey, take Bobby with you. You have to stick together.”
I kept walking. I waved back at her. “Okay!” I said it like I just won a stuffed animal at the county fair.
I left Bobby in the gas station to scare the children. This is what he decided to do at this certain point in time on earth and who am I to say otherwise.
I rode my bike back home and loaded it on the bike rack hitched to my Ford Fiesta.
I was going to ride the trail by my apartment called the Jail House Trail but figured it would be a better idea to get out of town for a bit. I pictured a grumpy fat guy with a big net and a tranquilizer gun in a dog-snatcher-styled box-truck driving around town looking for me and Bobby so he could catch us and bring us back to the Adult Foster Care Home.
It was a beautiful day. I went back into my apartment and changed into my mountain bike clothes and grabbed my helmet, a cooler for the beers and ate a weed gummy.
I decided to ride a trail in the town over. A smaller, easier trail. The trailhead was somewhat busy. A river nearby with people fishing. I offloaded my bike and put on my helmet and pedaled hard down the trail. The trail is a 4-ish mile loop.
I tell myself it’s a 5-lap minimum for this trail. I tell myself I will drink one beer after each lap.
The trail has a sign at the trailhead and it says which direction to ride for each corresponding day throughout the week. I ride whatever direction I feel like.
I do the things I tell myself I am going to do.
The trail is sandy and has a lot of tight turns. My bike is long with a steeper headtube angle, so I have trouble on tight turns. It rained the night before so the soil is sticky and I can fly down the trail at top speed before slamming on my brakes at the turns. I listened to my hub click through the silent woods, my mind and body free.
A few miles in, my bike was riding different. Maybe the handlebars were at a different angle. I needed to break the bike in. That was my goal for the day. To make all the parts settle back into each other like layers of the earth beneath my feet.
I saw a guy through the woods, also riding a bike. He was not wearing a helmet. He was going slow and struggling. He was going the wrong way on the trail, or I was going the wrong way on the trail. I’m not sure.
He didn’t seem to notice me. I’m breathing hard, pedaling rotations through a 19-tooth cog.
I pedaled around a corner and he finally saw me and I veered off the trail and into brush and rode through the brush like a deer in rut. The guy stopped completely in the trail and stared at me. I kept riding.
A few more miles down the trail, on a small log section, I came around a corner and hit a patch of sand. I tumbled over the handlebars and landed on my forearm and elbow. I thudded to the ground and my bike clanged into a tree. I was super fucking pissed I crashed. My bike never had a tune up before and now my muscle memory of how to ride was gawky and misplaced.
I got up and picked my bike up out of the bushes near the tree it hit and I got back on and finished my lap.
I’m leaning against my car, drinking a beer and watching people walk around the cemetery. My shins were covered in dirt and my right side had streaks of dirt and my forearm had light little lines of scratches that bled. I drank some fucking IPA. You drink IPAs when you mountain bike because you can drink them warm. IPAs were invented by the British because they didn’t go bad when the British Empire shipped them out of India.
I got back on my bike and rode two more laps. I drank a beer after each lap. The air is getting cooler. A family of 4 was walking on the trail and I waved at them and they stared at me like zombies.
I was 3 beers deep and on my 4th lap. I built up speed. The time of dusk was floating through the forest and I breathed its thick coldness.
I was maybe a mile into the 4th lap, trying to build up speed for this one section I really enjoy riding that has some little dips in it and you go through a little stream that splashes mud.
The bike was still riding wonky but creaked less.
I crashed again. I sailed over the handlebars and felt my shin hit the top tube of my bike. I heard a vibration tear through the dusk air like a gong. I sat up. Blood trickled down my shin and flowed over the specks of dirt and hair. I picked my bike back up and kept riding.
A sharp pain, like a nail pounded into my shin bone sideways, weaved and pulsated. The start of a hematoma. I’ve had so many I know the familiar pain of them forming. A hematoma is like a little trickster goblin fucker growing out of your body who mocks you every time you bump it or move just right or breath too hard and they stick around just long enough to where you get used to it and then one day it is gone and you miss it.
I made it back to my car and got off my bike and leaned it alongside my car. I checked my leg and there it was, a pulsing hematoma forming on my shin, covered in dirt and blood. My shin throbbed as the hematoma grew and drenched my sock in blood.
I opened a beer. The sky was the brightness of a night light and I still had another lap to ride.
The other guy I saw riding his bike, going the opposite direction of me, came out of the trail, slow and crouched over, not pedaling. He coasted down the slight hill to his very own junky vehicle parked near mine.
I nodded at him as he approached.
He avoided eye contact with me.
I took a sip of my beer and watched him get off his bike with a groan. He was doughy and not used to riding a bike.
That is okay.
I took another sip from my beer.
His bike was silhouetted against the lamp shining above doors to the bathrooms behind us. I could tell there was something wrong with it.
He bent over his bike, looked down at it and didn’t seem to know what was wrong.
I approached him slowly and asked if he needed a hand.
He looked up at me with round startled eyes. His mouth moved up and down like a bad translation in a foreign film. “I just bought this bike.” He had a speech impediment and he sounded insecure.
I walked over to his bike and looked at it. I didn’t recognize the brand and the bike was falling apart. The brake caliper had come off, the seat was bent down, the handlebars were bent down. It made a grinding sound when he cranked the pedals.
“Where did you buy it from?”
“Oh… Walmart.”
“Alright.” I walked over to my car and opened the back seat and got out my set of bike tools.
I walked back over to his bike and took out a few Allen wrenches. I tested the sizes until one fit the fastener on his seat. I propped his seat up and tightened the screw.
“Um… you’re not going to break it are you?”
“No, man. Just tightening it up for you. A lot of the workers at Walmart who assemble these bikes don’t do it right,” I said, leaning over the seat and finishing up the tension so his seat would stay still.
I started working on the handlebars next. I reefed them up and adjusted them until they were snug.
I stood back and looked at his brake caliper. The world was dark now. Fully dark with the cemetery next to us, the dark woods on the other side, and I heard ghosts whispering to each other as they shambled out of the ground and the deer whispered to themselves about us as they stood motionless in the thick brush.
I was still sweating. Sweating all the beer out, I could smell the hoppy IPA beer seeping out of my pores and whispering back to the deer as it evaporated from my skin into the night sky above me.
“I’m not sure about the brakes, dude,” I said, taking out my phone.
“Oh.” He said this like he had no idea what I was talking about.
I handed him my phone with the flashlight on. I told him to shine it on the brakes. He didn’t really shine them on the brakes but I didn’t say anything.
I fumbled with his brake calipers. They were sidewall brakes. I clipped them back on so they would work but it wasn’t a permanent fix.
I picked up the rear of his bike and cranked the pedals and heard the drivetrain grind and hobble.
“I can’t fix that. Take it to the bike shop in town. Have them fix it.”
“Oh… maybe I’ll just take the bike back.”
“You can try, friendo.”
I helped him load the bike into his shitty minivan.
I picked my beer up off the cement and finished it and tossed it into a garbage can by the bathrooms.
He was climbing into his minivan as I was throwing a leg over my mountain bike.
“Where are you going?” He asked me with that blank look in his eyes. He had the same look as Bobby.
“I’ve got one more lap to do,” I said as I started to slowly pedal away.
“Oh… it’s dark out and you’re bleeding.”
“Yeah.”
“Why are you doing another lap?”
“Because I hate the world.”
“Oh… well… be careful.”
“You too.” I gave him a salute as I rode away.
I pedaled up the hill, past the cemetery and into the dark cold woods. I could hear the deer leap away from me in the dark to make room as I pedaled forward.
Jon Berger is a teacher in Rural Mid Michigan. His short story collection Goon Dog and his poetry collection Saint Lizard are available at Gob Pile Press. He has work forthcoming at Southwest Review. He tweets @bergerbomb44.
By Nasta Martyn
“When you look into the past”
40×30 cm
2025
I have been making my collages since 2022. At first I just cut out ready-made images from magazines, but then I wanted to add elements and that’s how my collages appeared.
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Nasta Martyn is an artist, graphic artist, illustrator, writer and poet. She graduated from the State Academy of Slavic Cultures with a degree in art, and also has a bachelor’s degree in design. She writes fairy tales, poems, and illustrates short stories. She draws various fantastic creatures: unicorns, animals with human faces, she especially likes the image of a man – a bird – Siren. In 2020, she took part in Poznań Art Week.
Instagram: @nasta.martyn33