By Craig Rodgers
Craig Rodgers is the author of ten books, a handful of lies, and all manner of foolishness.
Categories
Tag: farewell transmission
Approximately 18×24 cm
Colored Pencil
Sofija Popovska just doesn’t know anymore.
IG: _aughtmilk
By Frank Carellini
they undressed methodologically. unprovocative. like they were about to examine each other for lumps. folding his clothes neatly into rectangles. those worn brown chinos. the chambray button down shirt with underarms that smelled with years of his bitter sweat. sweat that at one time, attracted her. she used to liken it to “my salty Mediterranean man that smells like the rind of a lime.” where that man went, neither of them knew. the fauvist views of succulent fruits clinging to branches above a sparkling sea are a lifetime removed. she, folding her jumper into a square that ballooned at the edges. never had a penchant for perfection. their bodies were cold and clammy as they came into mutual embrace. they tried to make love. tried pressing the atoms of their bodies into some form of miracle. paused at each others lips, not moving, but waiting for some sort of momentum to build. nothing. barely air passed between them. they tried in the kitchen. in the bathroom. on the couch. looking around at the set of japanese steak knives, the Breville, a distressed velvet ottoman. as if to put the blame on them for lack of ambiance.
checking into The Schofield. Corner suite (always wondered what it looked like). Lots of mirrored surfaces. their bodies moved like lava in a lavalamp from one distorting surface to another. two beds. weird, he forgot to request one king. lots of vague objects. a miniature Calder mimic. she put pressure on one pendant. let it ricochet. watched it ease back into balance. then into stillness. the lack of its optionality into a chaotic form was upsetting. couldn’t be broken. he went into the mini-fridge. two bottles of tonic. little bottle of bombay. grabbed glasses from the desk. they had a nice weight. a weight that felt official. called for ice. and a lime. two thank yous and a $10 tip later, he mixed them a drink. thumb stung from the lime juice. she was sitting on the edge of her bed. patting her skirt. she wore that perfume. he sat at the desk chair. swiveled around to cheers her.
“i used to wear a beret.”
“and smoke cigarettes.”
“i once knew Yves Klein. he asked me to be one of his brushes.”
this went on. the days in montmartre. maybe it was true. he was no Yves Klein. he could see it. her body draped in that ultramarine. being spread across a canvas. the gushing figures materializing on canvas.
this aroused, then irked him. didn’t dr. muchlenbach teach her not to bring french painters to romantic getaways.
he downed his drink. she hadn’t touched hers. the ice had melted and it looked diluted. he went and sat on the bed opposite hers. turned the tv on. Joe Rogan’s Fear Factor, Couples Editions. the programming at this place was meant to keep things spicy. she sighed and got up off the bed, placing the drink down on the desk. walked by him without any acknowledgement. he heard the bath turn on. ran for a while. this episode, contestants had to stand on top of a moving vehicle and grab flags as they sped by a set of markers. she, in a bathing suit (why were they always in bathing suits) and he, a muscle shirt, cutoff jean shorts. after they win first place, they’d go back to their trailer and have mind-blowing sex. maybe the exercise the entire kama sutra. this irked, then aroused him. annoyed at the thought of an erection through jean shorts. felt like an insult. the faucets turned off with that creak that the old guard turnstile knobs made. he could hear her swishing around. sitting up. falling into the water. now she was rolling onto her stomach and back. now she was—
the second task was a water one. one of the team would be submerged underwater. the other would have to crawl through a tunnel of roaches to find a key. the key opened the tank and let the water out. jean shorts muscled through the tunnel. even ate a roach for style points. bathing suit floated glamorously in the tank. did a twirl to the right, then to the left, then winked at joe. then to the camera.
drive home was eventless. across the bridge. down the parkway. Nicholas greeted them at the door. Said something about the dogs behaving well. they sat on the couch. he turned on the tv. maria appeared from the linen closet with a “miss, the blue does not come out of your underwear.” she blushed.
“I used to wear berets.” she uttered. “and smoke cigarettes.” she was speaking to a void. he went to the refrigerator. took two bottles of tonic. he put ice into his. lime into hers.
Frank Carellini was born in Connecticut in 1993.
Categories
Comic Strip #7
By Craig Rodgers
Craig Rodgers is the author of ten books, a handful of lies, and all manner of foolishness.
Categories
The Facts
By Kyle Kouri
Yves is dating Alfonse who’s in love with Paulo who’s fucking Stefan who’s focused on his career but married to Sydney who knows he’s gay but feels safe because they’re best friends, which makes Cristof jealous because he’s pining for both of them; and Cristof’s brother Rosco is dating Nifath, mysterious Nifath, and they’ve been in an open relationship since July when Nifath got distant and Rosco suggested they experiment; but Nifath’s been fucking Conroy since May of last year and Conroy hasn’t been tested for decades (no self-reflection); he’s been drinking with Jason who can’t get his dick hard but has been thinking it’s because he has feelings for Seana, the trans girl, who dated Sarah all throughout undergrad; and Sarah, stubborn Sarah, feels cheated because Seana’s not Sean anymore, in fact she’s never been, just appeared that way, and Sarah’s straight and sure of it, but did have a few experiences with Massie, the Bohemian, who swears relationships are soul-suckers, monogamy equals weakness; though in high school Massie dated Scottie, who is a cheater with a big ol’ penis, and has never once been loyal, but is charming, and still supported by his mother, who’s having an affair with Aldo, her personal trainer who does this frequently; and Aldo’s brother Santo is in prison and having a hard time while doing hard time because his girlfriend Mary is pregnant and works at the ShopRite which Peter has managed for sixteen years; and Peter, peculiar Peter, has had physical contact with another human only once during his entire adult life, instead he looks at little kids on the dark web; and sometimes, around lunchtime, he’ll make a detour carrying his canned tuna and pass by the elementary school’s playground where Fanny, Ms. Fanny Appleton, is the teacher and always gazes warily around the perimeter, because she’s worried about just this kind of thing; she purses her lips, eyes vigilant, and waves at Peter but doesn’t suspect him, because at the ShopRite he’s always been a nice man, a little sweaty, true, but even makes Ms. Appleton’s nephew laugh; this kid’s name is Stephen, and when Fanny’s babysitting, they stop by the store for ice cream sandwiches, but she has never noticed Peter touch him inappropriately, which, on one occasion, Peter has; anyway Ms. Appleton is single, has not had a boyfriend since college, where she was manipulated by Michael into doing things that didn’t feel right; and then one night Michael snuck into her dorm room, wasted, and raped her; now Fanny trusts no one and lives a quiet life but has a crush on Lucien Carr (no relation to the murderer), who teaches English and seems in Fanny’s opinion sweet but sad too, and everyday she swears she’s going to ask him out for coffee, but just hasn’t committed yet; and Lucien doesn’t realize she’s even interested, because the truth is he has a drug problem, and every day after his class he goes home alone, draws the blinds, snorts cocaine and drinks alcohol until he’s completely deranged, then sleeps for two hours, wakes up the next day, and repeats the same thing; sometimes he picks up his phone to call Courtney, then changes his mind, because Courtney was his wife and his best friend but then got sober, they both went through the Program, and she changed, he couldn’t beat it, so she left him, and now he’s back on a bender; and Courtney, somber Courtney, sweet, sad Courtney goes to meetings every evening and spends her days working at T-Mobile, just trying to get by; on occasion she flirts with Teshawn, her co-worker, he makes her laugh, they take break at Chipotle; Teshawn’s twenty-one and goes to the community college with Rasheeda, who he’s in love with, and she likes him, but he’s so nice, she finds that off-putting; plus she likes to go out on the weekends, in the city, where she meets Sky Pepper; and Sky Pepper, so Sky Pepper, is a model and comes from money and once her and Rasheeda went home with Sven Odenfield, the photographer, and they had a threesome, which was fun but a little intense for Rasheeda, though Sky doesn’t remember it; Sven remembers it, in fact he catalogued each moment of the evening in his Moleskine, because that’s his thing, along with photography, he’s in love with pleasure, has fucked half the city, and meticulously records each conquest; but Sven, complex Odenfield, still Facebook stalks Nadia, his step-sister, who lives in Berlin and will not return his phone calls, plus things were never the same after what happened that one night, when they shared a hotel room next to their parents and both got drunk off the liquor in the mini-bar; and their parents are swingers, they go to the private parties that Thor hosts; and Thor is from the midwest but got outta there the day he turned eighteen, and lives glamorously, hosting orgies, with celebrities, but has a soft spot for his sister Irene, who moved to New York, but couldn’t make it and so moved back home and married Alan, her high school sweetheart, who’s perfectly content in Wisconsin, he’s an engineer, would never leave there, couldn’t imagine life outside of Waukesha; and now Irene’s pregnant, she’s only twenty-five, and Alan is overjoyed (also in debt) and Irene is happy, she has always wanted to be a mother, but she wanted a career too, that’s why she moved to New York, but now it seems that ship has sailed; so once a week Irene FaceTimes her best friend Meredith, who moved to LA, and isn’t sure exactly if she’s the only one but is pretty sure she’s now dating Smash Lowe, yes, that one, the movie star, and is having so much fun and, “No, no, Irene, I do not have a coke problem, I don’t do it during the week, okay? Anyway I’m young! And Oh Irene, oh my god, you’re so freakin’ preggers!!!” and Meredith is having a great time, really living life, posts often on Instagram, but she’s secretly jealous, because throughout childhood she was in love with Alan too; her, Irene and him were inseparable, sometimes they all slept in the same bed, and Meredith once even, just once, after they’d been drinking, tried to kiss Alan but he was honest, he was loyal, he said, “Gee, Mer…I….I’m with Irene!” and was truly baffled, simple Alan, he was embarrassed, felt his honor compromised, but Meredith sobered up, she said, “Of course, no, you’re right, I’m sorry, can we just forg”—and Alan interrupted her, stood up very straight and said, “Enough,” then went into another room of the party and spoke to Johnny who developed his alcoholism at a young age and now is dead after taking too many Lorazepam on a March night, after a long bout of drinking, a few years ago; and at Johnny’s funeral his mother Aubrey cried, and his father Alec held her, stoic, but his mouth twitched and he thought that later that night, he’d sit by the fire with Skaal, his brother, who just flew in from Norway; and Skaal used to be easygoing, believed in the essential good of things, was always smiling, didn’t watch indie movies, liked buddy comedies, but that was before the Norway massacre, which killed 77 people, one of which was Anita’s little brother (that’s Skaal’s girlfriend); I shall not say her brother’s name, respect for the family, understand, but after the murder Anita became focused, she became political; Skaal, in contrast, became quieter, more sensitive, had less conviction, the world made less sense to him, and so when Alec called about his son’s death, Skaal’s nephew, Skaal blinked twice, held the phone and felt utter numbness; that trance persisted the entire flight to Chicago and still at the airport; and walking through the long terminal, dazed, startled by ascending airplanes, Skaal accidently bumped right into Olivia; and Olivia, who was about to board her own flight, took this as a sign; she turned around, left the airport, and caught a taxi back into the city, and ran to Henry, he was just stepping out of his apartment, she embraced him, and Henry was shocked, he thought he would never see her again, and he held her, but was anxious, frankly part of him had been excited for his new life, and thus was not expecting this return; and one night a month later, Henry got a little drunk and struck up a conversation with a woman at the bar near his office, she was wearing a black slip, her name was Terry; and Terry knew his type, she did this often, she got him wasted and then she fucked him, then kicked him out of her apartment and smoked cigarettes, thinking men are idiots, they are malleable, they are so easy; and Terry was the hostess at a very upscale restaurant on the Northside; and one night the famous musician and notorious womanizer Augie Rainwell came to the restaurant and ignored Terry, he did not seem interested, she was astonished; the fact was, however, that for Augie it was nothing personal, he was secretly dealing with an eruption of genital herpes, and that was affecting his confidence, he looked around the restaurant warily, helplessly, thinking everybody knew his deformity, everybody was doubting his masculinity, his sexual viability; he had no idea who had given him herpes, there were about seven women and two men that it could have been; and what was worse, the worst part of it, was that Augie was married to Jaclyn, and he had slept with her twice, without protection, since fucking strangers, without protection, and so now it was possible, perhaps likely (who knows how it really works), that Jaclyn also had genital herpes and would, once and for all, know that Augie was cheating on her; and Jaclyn, fed-up Jaclyn, would finally move out and go stay with her mother; and her mother, Avi, in the living room, would say, “I knew that boy was no good for you,” and Jaclyn would say, “Oh mother, please!” and turn away, look at their wall of photographs, where her grandmother Maya is featured prominently; and Maya was a Holocaust survivor whose husband Ira didn’t make it, but whose best friend David made it; and after the Holocaust, David wrote a book about the horror, but it was never published, and so he became a businessman, was quite successful, he married and lived a long life, ending up in a lovely home where he had a nice relationship with the nurse Genevieve, who is a redhead; and Genevieve loves to fuck, but has this feeling, this deep-rooted conviction, that abstinence is the only true path to happiness, but if that is the case she prefers unhappiness, and so has many lovers, and many secrets; and each one of these lovers say the same thing: “Genevieve was, by far, the best I ever had, but honestly, to this day, I know nothing about her;” and one of these lovers was Elliot, and Elliot has had a strange life; not only did both his parents die on 9/11 (one of those freak things, they were just visiting), he also happened to be in one square mile of two mass shootings in real life (one Isis-related, the other a white kid, with a micro-penis and a manifesto); but Elliot is committed to mathematics, he refuses to become superstitious, and right now is in grad school, getting his PHD; and Elliot, ponderous Elliot, the orphan prodigy, has never been in a relationship that lasted more than six months, they’re not practical, plus he cherishes his alone time, takes long walks, and thinks about probability, possibility, the infinite number of things that could happen to you, the infinite ways in which they could happen too, and the ways that lives intersect and influence each other, or maybe never cross paths at all, he thinks about all of this; and one day Elliot passed a family on one of his long walks; it was a mother, father, and their young boy; and that little boy was me, many years ago, my family lived around the corner, in that neighborhood, this was our park, it was small, now I see that, but back then it was the world to me; I held my mother’s hand and looked up at my dad’s body, obscured by sunlight, a vague shape, this awesome bulkiness, I tried to grab his leg, but he was too far ahead, didn’t even notice I wanted him; not at all; my father was focused on a sculpture, in the garden; this sculpture was a rabbit with big and ugly, rotting buck teeth, it wore a top hat and a sports coat, it held a watch in one paw and between two fingers on its other hand it balanced a scale, but unevenly; this rabbit smirked, taunting, mischievous, he knew everything, she was not impressed with it; they were sexless, gushing with sex though; I stared at my father and squeezed my mother, tighter, tighter, but then some smell, a floral fragrance, with the slightest rot in it, made me look away; I saw a man with long hair, very thin, very feminine, his shirt was see-through, rib showing, he was almost glowing; getting closer to us; he was not my parents, this excited me, my eyes opened, I tore from the woman who gave birth to me and ran, past the man who fucked her, I ran, and almost tumbled, but stayed on my feet, I ran forward and reached for
Kyle Kouri is an award winning actor, writer, filmmaker, and producer. He received his MFA in Fiction from Columbia University, where he served as the online arts editor for the Columbia Journal. He is the co-founder of Slashtag Cinema, a film production company. Slashtag’s first film, the multi-award winning KEEP COMING BACK, which Kouri directed, co-wrote, and stars in, premiered at Screamfest in October 2024. His writing has appeared in Cleaver Magazine, the Columbia Journal, Ghostwatch Zine, The Los Angeles Press, and Maudlin House. His first book, THE PROBLEM DRINKER, is forthcoming from CLASH Books in 2026. He lives in and around LA with his four rescue dogs and his girlfriend, the writer CJ Leede.
By Alex Rost
We weren’t getting along too well just then, so we went bowling.
We walked in at the far end of the alley.
“I love how it smells in here,” I said.
You wrinkled your nose. “It smells like dirty socks and stale beer.”
“I know, right?”
It was a long way to where we had to pay and rent shoes – past rows of alleys, past bunches of people milling about, talking or not talking or whatever.
“No one is bowling,” I said.
“Yeah, what’s up with that?”
“Why isn’t anyone bowling?” I asked the employee after we covered the ten fucking miles to the register.
“League play,” he said. “Hasn’t started yet.”
“Oh,” I said. “That makes sense.”
Now I could feel it – anticipation. That was what really smelled.
The employee must have said something, because he was staring right at me.
“What?”
“It’s gonna be like twenty minutes. We only have the last ten lanes for open bowling tonight.”
“Only ten lanes?”
“Leagues,” he said, and pointed off behind me.
“Okay.”
“Or thirty.”
“Or thirty what?”
“Or thirty minutes. Twenty to thirty minutes.”
I turned to you. You shrugged and nodded at the same time.
“Okay,” I said to the employee. “Let’s do it.”
“How many games do you want to play?”
“Three. At least three, I think.”
I turned to you again. You shrugged and nodded at the same time.
“Three games,” I said to the employee, with confidence.
He typed something into the computer on top of the register.
I noticed an index-sized laminated card propped on the counter. It said, ‘Buy three games, get a $5 arcade play card.’ It said, ‘STATE OF THE ART ARCADE!!!!!’ with all those exclamation points.
“Hold up.” I flipped the card around and showed it to the employee. “What’s this all about?”
“You get a free play card with a purchase of three games,” he said.
“Both of us?”
“Yes, both of you.”
“Were you going to say anything? Like if I didn’t notice this, would you have given us the arcade cards?”
The employee raised his eyebrows.
“Is it really state of the art?”
He pursed his lips, glanced at the line behind us.
“I mean, is it worth it?”
“Are you going to buy three games?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Then I’d say it’s worth it.”
“Okay,” I said. “Done deal.”
I turned to you, grinning, and said, “State of the art, baby.”
You shrugged and nodded at the same time.
“What size shoe?” the employee asked us.
You told him your size and I said, “Sometimes a twelve, but sometimes a thirteen.”
He slapped a size twelve and a half onto the counter.
“Whoa, man. Twelve and a half? Thank you.”
We paid and headed to the bar. I held my shoes up, showing you the 12 ½ printed on the heel.
“I can’t believe they had a twelve and a half,” I said.
“I think it’s pretty standard.”
You didn’t understand.
“I feel like I should tip him.” I looked back at the employee. He was helping someone else now, looking sleepy and annoyed.
“He was kind of a dick.”
There was one bartender, busy filling a tall tube with a spout at the end full of beer.
“Check it out,” I said. “A hundred twenty ounces. That’s like a full twelve pack.”
“That’s ten beers,” you said.
“Sure is. Should we get one?”
“No way, that’s fucking gross.”
“Really? Why?”
“How do you think they clean those? Rinse them out with a hose? No way they’re sanitized.”
Maybe they had a sort of chimney sweep tool they jammed in the tube to scrub it, but I doubted it.
“You’re right,” I said.
“Plus, it’ll get all warm and flat before we drink it all.”
“You’re right,” I said again. “Fuck.”
We ordered beers – boring ass regular size beers – and took them to the arcade.
It’d been a while since I’d been in an arcade, and this one being billed as state of the art had me all excited.
“What the fuck?” I said when I saw it. I said it louder than I meant to.
“That guy said fuck,” said a little kid, walking past.
“I heard him,” said his little kid buddy.
The arcade had a bunch of claw machines in the middle, like an island, and your standard ticket winning games like basketball toss and whac-a-mole along the walls. The featured attractions were two ten-foot screens – one showing a giant version of Pacman, the other Asteroid.
We stood under the ten-foot Asteroid screen.
“State of the art?” I said. “You can’t take a forty-year-old game, put it on a big ass screen, and call it state of the art.”
“So you don’t want to play it?”
“God no.”
We picked the basketball toss. You were a hotshot ball player in high school, supposedly. You were also super competitive.
A couple kids came over holding basketballs from the game.
“You can pull them out from underneath,” one said. “You don’t have to pay.”
“Yeah,” you said, “but then it doesn’t keep score, right?”
The kid stared off, passed his basketball from hand to hand.
“Which machine did you take that ball from?” you asked him.
He pointed at the one you stood in front of.
You held out your hand, made a beckoning motion for the ball. The kid handed it over. He looked defeated. I knew that look. It said, ‘I tried to help someone and got fucked over.’
“Good idea though, man,” I said. I brought up my fist for a bump. There was a second where he just looked at my fist. Like he wasn’t sure if he wanted to touch it. Another second passed – enough time to wonder if the little shit was really gonna me hanging.
But he didn’t, thank God. He balled up his fist and gave me a hesitant little bump.
Fuck yeah, brother.
At first I threw up bricks, one after another. I could see you from the corner of my eye, in the zone, knocking down baskets.
Then I made one.
Swish.
And another.
Swish.
I caught a rhythm, didn’t look down to pick up fresh balls, just locked in on the front of the rim and let my hands work their automatic magic.
Swish. Swish. Swish.
“Three, two, one,” the kid behind us announced.
The buzzer buzzed.
I looked at my score, at yours. I won, by one basket. You looked pissed.
“Again,” you said.
We inserted our prepaid arcade cards and the balls released.
Swish, my net went. Swish. Swish. Swish.
“Three, two, one,” the kid announced.
The buzzer buzzed.
I won, again. By one point, again. You looked pissed, again.
“One more,” you said.
I pointed at the card slot. “It says two fifty a game. We’re out of money.
“I’m getting more.”
Most of the balls were still free of the game’s lock, and I motioned to the kid, told him the balls were all his.
“Thanks,” he said, and started to toss them at the basket.
The balls went – Swish. Swish. Swish.
“Kid’s good,” I said and followed you to the kiosk, but right when you were about to slide your credit card, they announced our name.
Our lane was open.
It was time for the main event – bowling.
But I don’t want to talk about bowling.
What I want to talk about is the people dressed as animals in the next lane. Furries, they’re called.
We were assigned to the first of the regular walk-in lanes, and both teams in the league game next to us were fully geared up furries – dogs, a bear, a cute little wolf in a tutu, and all sorts of animals in the greater cat family.
Most of them seemed peaceful, but there was a faction wearing leather jackets and heavy chains and studded collars. One of the rough bunch was dressed as a fox with a spiky mohawk, completely immersed in his sly routine. I watched him sneak behind the bear furry, do the old tap-one-shoulder-but-stand-on-the-other-side. The bear’s head blocked his peripheral vision and he kept falling for it.
“I can’t keep my eyes off them,” I said while lacing up my sweet size twelve and a half shoes.
“They want you to watch,” you said.
The fox was onto other mischief, like stealing people’s beer and running a few steps away and pretending to drink them. All sly like.
“This guy is great,” I said.
And we bowled.
Everything was going pretty well, but a tiger from the furry crew kept crossing over onto our side. It wasn’t intentional or anything, but there were a few times where we were winding up to roll the ball and the tiger’s ass backed damn near into us and we’d have to give each other lame, embarrassed-to-be-dominated looks.
“Next time he does it, I’m gonna grab his tail,” you said.
“No. No way. You never grab an animal’s tail.”
“Watch me.”
I didn’t doubt you. I never doubted you.
Sure enough, the next time the tiger’s ass came pushing its way into our lane, you reached out and gave his tail a proper tug.
The tiger turned and said, “Hey! Did you just pull my tail? That’s not cool.”
“Then quit wagging it all over our lane,” you said.
“You never pull an animal’s tail,” said the tiger.
The cute little wolf furry came up beside the tiger and bent over in front of you, lifted her tutu and exposed her tail, swayed back and forth seductively to make it wag.
You giggled and gave the tail a tug.
The wolf put her hand over her mouth all bashful and skipped away giggling. You came and sat next to me, a grin across your face.
We watched a bulldog furry follow around the cute wolf and act theatrically jealous until the wolf finally relented and bent over and lifted her tutu. The bulldog gave her tail a tug.
The wolf straightened and hugged the bulldog, her head against his chest. She was tiny and looked safe in his arms. They stood together like that, slightly swaying to the melody of clattering pins.
“I like bowling,” you said, and interlaced your fingers in mine.
I lifted your hand and kissed the back of it.
“Me too.”
We were getting along really well just then.
Alex Rost runs a commercial printing press outside of Buffalo, NY
By William Schaff
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 MorganEve 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.
Categories
Handsome Mallard
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, will be available this Summer.
By William Schaff
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 MorganEve 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.
Categories
His Castles
By Craig Rodgers
Each day he builds a castle. So many he’s lost count. The oldest of them is sand piled and shaped, no craftsmanship, no detail. The ones he first made when he washed ashore are only the idea of castles.
As the days go on and the line of castles spread each day’s work grows more elaborate. Parapets and crenellations begin to appear. Little carved windows. A drawbridge of sticks.
He finds the bottle while digging out a moat. Fogged glass buried long years in sand. He holds it up, he shakes it, thinking. Wondering.
He writes the note on the label. Bleached skin peeled from the bottle with delicate hand. He puts coordinates such as he knows them. HELP, he writes. SEND ME A SHIP RIGHT AWAY.
The cork he palms hard into place, tight. He gives it another pat just in case. He shakes the bottle again. The note rattles inside.
His best throw is so little, and the ocean so vast. Once it’s beyond him he sits on the beach for some hours watching it bob along before it vanishes from sight. Then he returns to his work. His castles.
Each day he builds a castle. The oldest of them has begun to crumble with age. Its detail fading like the lost wonder of a once great kingdom. The newest is formed through long hours with care. Stone walls are raised to protect the soft sand within. A sigil is shaped on the door of this fortification in an impossible realm. And each day when his task is done he sits and watches the sun fall away behind the world as he waits for another day to come, a chance to do it better again.
Each day he builds a castle. The oldest of them has sunk back into the sand, lumps of some forgotten wonder. The ones he first made when he washed ashore look like nothing at all. He’s carving twigs into flagpoles topped with leaves, he’s filling the moat with borrowed sea. Long hours go by in great care, staring and imagining and willing this citadel into being.
It is a glance that shows him the glint. He turns again and it’s still there, riding the seesawing lap of ocean’s reach. The bottle stirs at sand’s edge. He sits, he stares. He can hardly believe. Then he is running, and he is stumbling, he is falling where it lay in sputtered foam. He takes the bottle up and with a hand he wipes it clear. And there inside, where before there was rolled his note, now sits anchored a ship.
Craig Rodgers is the author of ten books, a handful of lies, and all manner of foolishness.
Categories
Spitgum
By Dylan Smith
June 22
Dawn comes late in these woods, the sun slow to rise up over the hill behind my shack. From bed I dreamt about one of the opening passages from the Bible. That bit about dividing the darkness from the light. I woke to a word. The word was Water. Then it was one word followed by another, language like a slow constellation of lightning strikes in my head. I felt graced by the presence of something new and wild in the dark outside my shack. A family of deer in the window, maybe. Or maybe a new word. I rose slowly. A calm flow of light fell through my naked body and I laughed without the language for knowing why. I drank a little water. Built a fire to boil water in the purple morning rocks. Even without any rain, the trees swayed gratefully. I must have still been drunk. I pulled on some jeans. Lit a candle at my desk. And then I realized what had really divided the darkness from the light. It was the word Darkness. The word Light. Coffee brewed in a giant glass jar and some white coals hummed brightly in the gentle summer dark outside. Language had divided me from Alma. Shaped this distance between me and Chris. I went to work on a poem. Words would emerge and I would arrange them. Words with significance in and of themselves. Sculptural words. Words with a visual meaning. I tumbled them onto the paper. Creation. Bicycle. Dancing. Myth. I typed them and I retyped them repeatedly into the typewriter, banging on the keys, the keys making music. Alphabet. Wildfire. Apocalypse. Water. A passageway opened between the poem and my hand and an infinite unity unfolded beyond the body. A structure formed. An archway within. Slowly the windows got more blue.
When I looked up again I saw seven dark deer hiking down the hill toward the barn. I read the poem back to myself. I hadn’t quite captured it yet. I blew out the candle and dug up Alma’s engagement ring from the sawdust and dirt at the bottom of my pocket. I didn’t know why I had the ring. I hadn’t had it for long — I shouldn’t have taken it. I’d been meaning to return it to that red unfired bowl beside Alma’s bed. I held it up to some blue sky between the trees in my window. Something startled one of the deer out there. Its head lurched up from the low swaying ferns, its dark body rearing as it turned — then it leapt out arching into the golden gray blue green. The others followed in slow motion, their thrumping bodies loping up the hill toward the light, and then I heard a deck board groan outside my shack. Somebody was here. My first thought, of course, was Chris. I swung around as the door drifted open and a silhouetted figure darkened the daylight in the doorway. A wordless shadow. An eclipse. I tried to scream as I stood, working Alma’s ring back into my pocket. The figure’s back was turned to me and it was hooded and tall and draped all in black. I couldn’t scream. Nothing came out. My brother, I thought. My killer. And in that moment I thought about the word nightmare in a new way. Like one of the horsemen, I thought. Mare of the night. I closed my eyes. Wasn’t drunk anymore. In fact I felt very hungover. When I opened them again the shadow was still there, only now it was up on its tippy-toes, peering up into the bird’s nest that had been built between the rafters above my deck. Impossibly tall. Weirdly elongate. The figure looked like a thin opening in the air.
“Take me down into the field,” I whispered hoarsely, weakly. It wasn’t what I’d meant to say. The figure ignored me. Though I thought I heard it whispering something too. Hissing these strange little bird sounds.
A pale hand emerged from the blackness, and finally I gathered my courage to cry out:
“Come and get me, Chris! I know what you’re here to do. Let’s go down into the field.”
The figure fell back onto its bootheels and, turning toward me, removed its hood to reveal a head of closely shaved hot-pink hair. The unveiled face was horse-like in its length and yet still sort of moonish – like a sickly androgynous vision of Chris – but it wasn’t him. I thought the kid looked profoundly malnourished, not nearly as plump or stately as Chris, and as they passed over the threshold and into my shack I saw for the first time their eyes: they were pale eyes, burning eyes – they were dazzling violet lavender eyes, and like a strange ghostly doppelganger of my brother, they looked about my shack with a smile.
“What the hell are you?”
They looked into my eyes without judgment.
“Nothing. Huh? I dunno.”
“Nothing? You’re not some kind of death vision of Chris?”
“Oh, nope. Nothing like that. Name’s Spitgum. Who’s Chis?”
“Wait — Spitgum?”
“In the flesh, hater. First and last. Don’t hate.”
“Holy shit — I’m so sorry, man. You’re Art’s — wait, I’m sorry — here,” I said, pulling over my fallen chair so they could sit. But as I carried the chair toward Spitgum and the summer light outside my shack they swayed their way straight through me, and toward the poem I’d left lying beside the window.
“Don’t be sorry.” They picked up the page and started to read the poem. “What is this? Art told me you’re a poet, but this is just a list of words.”
“It’s a sonnet, man. But look, Spitgum — I’m sorry I yelled at you like that. I thought you were my brother.”
“I understand. You were afraid. It’s okay.”
Spitgum set down the sonnet. My new telescope stood upright on the windowsill beside the poem. They picked it up and looked out the window through it.
“Woah,” Spitgum said, jerking away from the glass. “Woah — that sun nearly burnt my eye out. Whose telescope was this? A sailor’s?”
I poured myself some coffee and took a seat in the chair. The summer air filled my shack through the open doorway behind me as I took a sip. I set the cup down on a floorboard. The coffee had gone cold. I noticed the imprint of a bent roofing nail in the darkly stained wood. Bird shit on the window screen. I put my face into my hands. Wrangled up a painful breath.
“Probably a pirate’s,” I said.
“Woah. You think so? Can you see Art’s barn from up here?”
“Not now. The leaves block pretty much everything. But definitely in winter.”
“You’ll have a hell of a view of it then.”
“A hell of a view of what?”
I opened my eyes. Spitgum had the telescope trained on me now. The lens magnified the lavender color of their eye. Blown up all wonky and brightly wide open. They looked like Chris’s thin sickly twin.
I could barely fucking breathe.
“Spitgum, put that telescope down. You’re freaking me out. Here. You want some coffee?”
I held out the cup.
“Thanks. But this telescope is the only reason why I’m up here.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“Art sent me up here to get it.”
“What for?”
“We can’t get the new well pump to work and now it’s stuck down in the hole. Art thinks with your telescope and his flashlight we might be able to see what’s blocking the way, but whenever I look down into it all I see is stars. A whole night sky’s worth of stars. All the constellations look inverted — or reflected — and there’s this slight trembling of the ground. I also see red lights. Red blinking lights.”
I did my best to process this. Spitgum’s fingernails were painted black and they had sky blue earplugs pressed inside their ears. I wasn’t doing very well.
“Does Art seem alright?”
“Not nearly as bewildered as you. Haven’t seen him since I was a kid though. So how should I know.”
“How did you get up here?”
“Hiked.”
“No — I mean how did you get upstate? I thought you weren’t supposed to be here until the Fourth.”
“Bus. Well, I walked. Walked to the barn from the bus. The fourth of what?”
“What? Of fucking July, man. How did you find the barn?”
“It’s called an iPhone, hater. Google Maps. I saw you holding that wedding ring up to the light.”
“How old are you, man?”
“I don’t have to answer that. Time is fake. Magic is real. I got refried.”
“Refried.”
“Yeah. I’m out there, Billy Willy. My brain got deep fried twice.”
I could hear the baby phoebes chirping in the hopeless rainless godless heat behind me.
There was a quivering quality to the air.
I felt like I was going to cry.
“Please, Spitgum,” I said. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
“One time in a blackout I took a megadose of LSD. Got myself stuck in what they call the infinite time space continuum. Fried the holy crap out of my brain. Then a couple weekends later I did it all again. That time I was only brownedout though, so I suppose it was sort of on purpose. All my life. All my life all at once. Part of me’s stuck in that loop. Beginning, middle, end — it’s all happening at the same time for me. Big time. Forever. All at once. Refried.”
“Jesus,” I said.
Spitgum took the cup from my hand. I looked up at them. They’d been smiling down at me and my busted eye. My vision was still cloudy and throbbing. They really did look a lot like Chris.
“Spitgum, why are you dressed like that? All in black robes. It’s summer.”
“I burn too easy. But enough of this talk radio bull shit, Bill. I have to be somewhere by noon. So close your eyes.”
“What?” I said.
“Just do it. Shut the good one first, then slowly the left one.”
What the hell. Why not? I did what they said.
Spitgum held the coffee cup and telescope in their right hand and, with their left, they slowly reached out toward my eye.
“Shut the bad eye now.”
“Seriously, man?”
“Shut up. Slowly. Just do it.”
I did.
“And now, with your eyes closed, Bill, close your eyes…”
I swatted the little freak’s hand away from my face.
“Fixed,” Spitgum said.
“Oh come on, man. Fixed?”
I was blinking a lot. It started to feel like something had happened.
“Yeah. Fixed. Now I need to get back down to the barn. There’s only one meeting at the church today and legally I’m not allowed to miss it. Are you coming?”
“I don’t know. I’m having a hard time accepting the way things are today,” I said.
Spitgum nodded and took a sip of coffee. Slowly though, turning their shaved pink Chris head toward the light, they spit the coffee back up into the cup.
“Spitgum, man. Are you serious?”
It all splashed out onto the floor and all over my feet. But I didn’t care — I didn’t even flinch. Suddenly I could see.
“This coffee tastes like piss dirt.” Spitgum wiped the darkness off their chin. “You shouldn’t be drinking this.”
“Look—” I said.
“No you look, Billy Willy. Spitgum spits the truth. Be grateful. Don’t hate.”
I put my face back down into my hands. Was this what a nervous breakdown looks like? I must be cracking up, I thought. I looked back up at Spitgum. My eye had stopped throbbing completely. The veil over everything had been lifted. Spitgum was honestly the most beautiful sight I’d ever seen.
“I think you should come with me,” Spitgum said softly. “Let’s go down into the field, like you said. It’s better than you just sitting up here alone all day doing nothing.”
I looked around my shack. Spitgum was probably right. I thought about Alma. Alma would be down there.
The power must have come from the palm of Spitgum’s hand.
“Alright,” I said. I closed my eyes again. “Alright. Just give me a couple more minutes.”
Spitgum walked over to the book of Word Roots lying open on the floor beside my cot.
“You really don’t have any electricity in here?”
I didn’t answer. I heard them pick up the book.
“Give me a word from the list. I mean, from your sonnet.”
“Not now, man. My eye feels better but I think I’m still having a panic attack.”
“I’m a poet of sorts too, you know. We’ll end up being good friends before the end. Now don’t be a hater. Give me your favorite from the list.”
I peeked over at my unfinished poem.
“Apocalypse,” I said.
“Excellent.”
They flopped the book back over toward the A’s. Ran a long bony finger down the page.
Some time passed. Spitgum seemed to be studying the root. I heard them whispering and clicking their tongue, but they never did read anything aloud.
I started to feel a fever coming on.
Spitgum tossed the book back onto my cot. I watched them discover the postcard of Saint Francis I’d pinned to the wooden wall. They took six steps back and looked at the painting through my telescope. Light glistened in the basin of creek water I keep on the ground for washing up. Spitgum giggled. Then they returned to just hanging over me in my chair.
More time passed. I looked up at them again. They really were just standing there. Leaning on my walking stick. Draped all in black. Smiling down like some silent shining saintly idiot.
“Sometimes it’s like a big shadow on my brain,” Spitgum said.
“What? Jesus Christ. What is?”
“The truth.”
Dylan Smith is looking for a job if anyone knows of any jobs in Brooklyn.
By Cletus Crow
Cletus Crow is mostly a poet from Middle Tennessee. His full-length collection, Phallic Symbols, is out from Pig Roast Publishing.
Categories
Webs
By Rob Kaniuk
A hot woman followed me on Twitter, but it seemed suspect. I clicked her profile. She was a barista in LA who wrote screenplays. Attractive. Funny. Definitely not real.
My friend Jenn texted me to ask why I didn’t follow her bot back. Said she made it with some Mad Libs style template that would shuffle all the words and phrases she uploaded and the bot would fire off a nonsense movie idea every hour.
Does it respond if someone comments?
Yeah, like, she calls me master when I reply, but she calls everyone else babe.
Oh shit––I should make one to resurrect Jeremy.
Oh god, that’s so sad and creepy––Yeah, and I’ll make one for my mother that tweets the lyrics to ‘Hallelujah’ in a never ending loop and says she’s proud of me when I post about my b-hole.
For a few days I laughed at the concept, played it off, then found myself digging through the ammo box jammed full of letters Jeremy sent from prison. I called Bekah.
“Yo, if I gave you all those letters, would you do me a favor?”
“From him?”
“Yeah.”
“Whatcha thinkin?”
“I just want to make, like, a digital file.”
“All of em? Dude, there’s gotta be like two hundred letters.”
“Can you do it?”
“Why can’t you? No offense.”
“Can you help or not?”
I dropped off the ammo box full of letters from different addresses within the Florida State Corrections system. I told her how to fill the templates with all his -isms. Bekah was the only one capable. She knew the way he spoke and wouldn’t clean up any of the poor grammar or correct words like set to sit.
Weeks went by and I wanted to call and see if she’d made any progress, but I didn’t. It was a lot to wade through. We spoke a few times––their daughter had been enrolled in preschool and started saying goodnight to her daddy’s picture before bed––but I didn’t bring up the ammo box.
The week of Father’s Day, she texted me:
You still got those recordings?
She was talking about the songs we used to sing together. I had piles of recordings from over the years––hundreds of hours of Jeremy and I and whoever was with us at the time.
Yeah. Haven’t figured out how to rip them from the MiniDiscs yet.
I just need one song.
I’ll see what I can do. What song?
Didn’t you and him do Wish You Were Here at Matthew’s?
Yeah, I’ll look for it this weekend.
Think you can get it to me by Sunday morning?
You got it.
Bekah wanted him there for Father’s Day. It had been little more than a year since they kicked the door off the hinges and found his body.She wanted him there to sing a song to their daughter.
I looked at the handwritten notes on over thirty MiniDiscs. Studio 566. Jimmy Mac sessions. Sanford’s vacation. Brickette lounge...I eliminated a bunch because the dates didn’t line up. Which left me with eight. Eight MiniDiscs, three hours each.
I listened to the first few tracks, just to hear his voice. He never knew how to close a song. He just kept playing. It was annoying as hell. I’d look at him, try to cue him the song was over, but with all the bong rips and Busch pounders, his eyes were always shut. The song would only end if his makeshift matchbook pick finally disintegrated. Or if he was ready to steal another cigarette. Every track ends with him laughing at me for bickering at him for ruining an otherwise solid recording.
I popped in the disk marked Half Spent / Stemmer’s Run and advanced a few tracks. A calloused finger drags along the E string. He inhales sharply through clenched teeth. Shakes a cramp from his hand. A click from a lighter and I smell bong water, stale Marlboros and the rotten brown couch. A car goes up Westdale so I know the windows are open. It’s summer. Hot. He’s got on his tattered beige cargo shorts but probably not a shirt.
We’d always bitch about never doing anything fun, but my fondest memories have nothing to do with Hershey Park or chartered fishing boats. I miss the moments where we’re bored and talking shit. Shit talking is where the love is. Ninety degrees with a box fan in the window, six-pack of pounders sweating on the coffee table. Working on a song. Telling my best friend he fucked up the end.
I’d forgotten Bekah was on this disc for two songs. “All in This Together” and “How Can I Try.” The three of us harmonizing caught me off guard. They’d known each other less than a week.
****
I met Bekah at an NA meeting and told her about my best friend who was locked up. I told her I was the only one who wrote him and as a kindness to me, she asked for the address. Pretty soon she was asking a lot of questions about him. I told her all the stories about us growing up and getting in trouble. The arrowheads we forged on the riverbank as children to fool his dad. Quitting our jobs because we figured out the bass at Longwood were hitting a white spinner bait. Coming to blows in the hotel room on Fisherman’s Wharf over a handful of missing oxys and a woman whose name neither of us could remember.
She asked if he was reckless. She had fallen in love with reckless before and it landed her in rehab. I laughed because he was in prison. But I saw what was happening––he was courting her and she was falling. I told her the only true thing I knew about my friend.
Jeremy’s like an old dog. He’s been kicked around and left in the backyard too long by his former owner, but he’s yours now. He’s gonna do dumb shit and cause you grief, but he’s fiercely loyal. Doesn’t matter how far you throw the ball, he’s gonna bring it back. Yeah, he’s reckless. And that’s why I love him.
Florida Corrections gave him fifty bucks on a Visa card and an open bus ticket to anywhere in the lower 48. Bekah came with me to pick him up at 13th and Filbert when the Greyhound came in. They had never met, never touched, but they were in love. I peeked in the rearview. They smiled and glanced at each other but this wasn’t a love letter. He’d always been so confident, but I could see he was afraid of a five foot three curly haired girl wearing a Last Waltz shirt. It was at a stoplight when I turned around in my seat. I asked him what he wanted to eat and I saw it. Did she reach for his hand, or was it he who reached for hers? Their fingers were sewn together and they were smiling. After three years in prison he told me to decide what we’d have for dinner.
****
On her mother’s porch Jeremy noodled on the Simon and Patrick guitar Bekah and I bought him. I’d mailed handwritten lyrics and tabs of new songs, and on the rare phone call we had together, I’d play a few bars so he could hear the melody. He practiced in the chapel every week before Sunday church service. Bekah wrote to him about the ones she liked, so he focused on those. I listened to the songs we sang on her mom’s porch and there’s a part at the end where the laughter dies down and it’s quiet for a few seconds. He was looking at a spiderweb between the yew bush and the brick of the house.
“Ain’t it funny how that web is home for one thing and certain death for another?”
“Wish You Were Here” was a few tracks after our songs from the porch. I had found the song she wanted and two more. I couldn’t figure out how to digitize the tracks in a way that would preserve the sound quality. So I hooked up an auxiliary cord from the MiniDisc player to a Bose speaker, then I set up the voice recorder on my phone and recorded in real-time. I labeled each one and sent them to her in a text message late Saturday night.
Along with my morning coffee, a text from Bekah:
Thanks
***
I’d forgotten about the ammo box letters until Bekah emailed me. I copy/pasted the file into the Twitter bot generator.
>@IrishHillblybot: What say me and you find a quiet spot and get as high as a giraffe’s asshole?
>@kaniuk22: @IrishHillblybot haha hell yeah
>@IrishHillblybot: @kaniuk22 what’s up, brother?
>@kaniuk22: @IrishHillblybot i really miss you
>@IrishHillblybot: @kaniuk22 what’s up, brother?
>@kaniuk22: IrishHilblybot i wish you would’ve called
>@IrishHillblybot: @kaniuk22 what’s up, brother?
Rob Kaniuk is a proud uncle and has the best wife in the world. His mm is pretty cool, too.
By EDBOY
I tap his shoulder in the back room of Bob’s Java Jive, and go, “Bro, you look just like Richard Brautigan.”
He’s missing the broad-brimmed outlaw hat, but he’s got the glasses, the bushy handlebar mustache.
He leans back, says, “Who THE FUCK is Richard Brautigan?”
I show him the weathered copy of Trout Fishing in America that’s conveniently tucked in my jacket pocket.
“Wow,” he says, bringing the book to his face. “That IS me. What did he do? Bag groceries?”
“You know, I wouldn’t be surprised. He was a poet and did a lot of random shit,” I say. “He was born here.”
“He was born in fuckin’ Bob’s Java Jive?”
“No man…Tacoma,” I say. “He was born in Tacoma. He died in 1984.”
“Bro,” he says, “I was born in 1984.”
“You were?”
“Yeah man,” he says. “I’m obviously him. I’m Richard Brautigan. I’m fuckin’ POET, dude.”
The karaoke DJ summons him.
He sings Elvis Costello’s Pump It Up. When it gets to the Pump It Up part, he kicks the air like he’s kicking over a beer can tower.
When he returns to his booth, I show him another picture of Richard Brautigan.
“That’s my next Halloween costume,” he says.
“You’re welcome,” I say.
“Hell yeah,” Richard Brautigan says. “I’m finally gonna be somebody.”
Edboy is an American writer. He runs Spaghetti Days Press out of Tacoma, Washington. Follow him here: @spaghettidayspress.
Categories
LEMONADE STAND
By David Luntz
Sprouting like weeds all over the hood. Lemonade stands. Suburban cliché. A cliché of cliché. I loathe them. Which I suppose reflects badly on my character. But I don’t blame the kids. They’re being forced into it. Every time I see one, though, I can’t help but wonder about those children’s hygienic practices, how many flies dipped their feet in those tepid brews, and the quantity of lead in the water that had been used to make them.
But one day I was thirsty, ragingly thirsty. I approached the nearest lemonade stand. Three pleasant blond-haired children manned it. They were clad in the latest designer brand clothing popular with a certain income-level of suburban households. I drank five cups of lemonade without paying. To be honest I had no intention of paying. But I promised those children I would go home and return with their payment.
I placed my empty plastic cups gingerly on their stand. I took a step back. I thought some sort of apology was needed since I wasn’t going to pay. I waved my right hand before them and explained since they were in a business, albeit a small one, and given it was unregulated and they did not pay taxes and that my hand was clearly visible when it had helped itself to their lemonade (in contradistinction to Mr. Smith’s teachings), they should therefore take my drinking of their produce without recompense as an opportunity to learn the difference between extending credit and giving a loan—which, perhaps in the grand scheme of things, like war and politics, as von Clausewitz taught us, may be a meaningless distinction, but, I added, with a disarming smile, that was another discussion for another day.
Yet, for sake of clarity, I told them I was drinking their lemonade on credit, not as a loan. Yes, I know, I know, I said, my “credit” here amounted to my word. But if it’s good enough for the U.S. government, then it should be good enough for you. Trust me children, it’s not lost on me that the mere promise of a few pieces of that specially-inked paper no longer backed by gold, with its all-seeing eye of providence inside of a creepy bisected levitating pyramid, got me those cups of lemonade. And yes, I get I’ve just compounded my legal woes by inadvertently entering into a binding contract with you, for I am painfully aware much to my prior detriment promises are considered ‘consideration’ in contract law and oral contracts are binding and enforceable in courts of law.
Oh sorry, child, did I spill on your precious Brandy Melville dress? No, no don’t fret. Don’t cry. I’m sure the stain will come out. No? …What? No, you cheeky little fucks, I’m not going to leave my two-hundred-year anniversary special edition Phillipe Patek timepiece with you while I go home to fetch your little bit of sweet extortion, nor am I getting skinned for the cost of a whole pitcher of lemonade—you should learn to place it better on your stand!
Look, shit happens, accidents happen, deal with it. But putting all that aside, children, I know what troubles you. I know. I know. So, let’s mix metaphors and talk turkey and get down to brass tacks and address the elephant in the room: you don’t know me from Adam. You fear I will run off and never return with your precious payment. I get it. I get it. I’ve lived it, too, in my own professional life. You fear all your labor, hard work, your investment will have gone to waste, been all for naught. But look! I come with good news! Here’s another chance to learn something very important—what’s known in the parlance of the industry as a “transferrable technology” that you can acquire without any startup costs and sweat equity.
Imagine that! See, now you can learn in real time about write-offs and the cost of doing business, which had you known before, you would have priced into your cups of lemonade without having to learn about Bayesian priors, sunk cost fallacies, double entry book keeping, the utility theory of value and law of diminishing returns. Which you will thank me for later when you don’t end up like King Tarquin who, you might recall, tried to buy all nine of the sybil’s oracles but wouldn’t accept her price, so the sybil kept burning her oracles until King Tarquin caved and ended up purchasing only three oracles for the same price as he could have purchased the set of nine. The point being here to understand the value of what you’re purchasing, because one day you’ll find yourselves on the other side of the lemonade stand, so to speak, and realize that sellers sometimes like markets can afford to remain irrational much longer than you can afford to remain solvent, to paraphrase Mr. Keynes.
What? Why the look? Oh this. No, no, no it’s nothing to be worried about, just 17th century with an ivory handle made from…but this is not what you should be looking at. You need to see the bigger picture. So, pay attention! I’m trying to show you that your lemonade stand is but a tiny pucker on a tentacle of an enormous sprawling octopus of insurance companies, media conglomerates, investment banks, and law firms—no, what’s that, it’s not registering, fine, fine, if such abstraction eludes you, then picture some vast ancient army moving through the night, felling trees, making fortifications, their naphtha-fueled braziers burning along the western shores of the Danube and the Rhine, the tooth-chipped coins clinking in leather pouches strapped to the legs of the weary whores, the clanking pots of the cooks, the surgeons, barbers, and bloodletters with their cloudy jars of leeches and cedar boxes stacked with fleams and catheters, the learned-Greek doctors and stoics, bantam cock spleen readers, prestidigitators, prognosticators, students of the aleatory arts, dice men, procurers, devotees of Astarte, horned moons tattooed on their tongues, spies, interpreters, masseuses, forgers, rhetoricians, rumor-mongers, apiarists, bird catchers, butchers, dowsers, trappers, curers, washerwomen, the whole slow moving slug depositing its slick residue over a wasted land bathed in its own sebaceous glow, for your stand is part of a similar vast dark enterprise and nothing is really still, which is the first illusion you will have to learn to unsee, the illusion of stillness, but the point here is that you can never learn too early, for here, right here is where theory and practice both merge and come apart depending on which side of the cliché—stop screaming you little bitch, I’m not squeezing your arm that hard—depending on which side of the lemonade stand you stand on, for like that other cliché—or is it a trope, I can never get them straight—about the cat in the hat or in the box it all depends where your observation point is, for from where I am standing you’re all basically dead, or rather should I say, doomed, and from where you are standing no doubt you’re looking at some adult you wished had never passed into your perceptual field, but alas in life sometimes we can’t choose what not to see, can’t arrange to sweep these inconveniences under the proverbial rug, just as we never know the exact moment of our deaths, which is perhaps a good thing come to think of it, but let’s not be too maudlin, for when I spoke about death earlier, I meant it mostly in metaphorical terms, so let’s pretend you’re like Adam and you’re getting evicted out of paradise, not for paying your rent late, but because you did the one thing you were told you couldn’t do, and your maker sends down an angel who takes you up to the top of the highest mountain in paradise and from there you see the whole history (which is also your future) your one act caused, and in Adam’s case it was very bad, Hobbesian, chaotic, the general state of affairs that existed before the state contracted to monopolize violence from its subjects, I’m talking untrammeled murder, disease, war, theft, rapine, but in your case I’d say the future’s less gory, though, that said, I am not sanguine either about your prospects because this stand is a kind of gateway beverage to a life of office cubicles poring over grim actuarial statistics that had their origins in Graunt’s Mortality Tables, the sponsoring of derivative securities and other dubious negotiable instruments on the Amsterdam stock exchange that not coincidently came about with the science of probability in the seventeenth century, and the probability for you dear children is sharing cubicle space like penned cattle, of smelly refrigerators stuffed with moldering food cartons left by your coworkers some of whom you will no doubt develop unhealthy thoughts towards that may adversely affect your relationships with those whom you really care about, so you will find yourself coming back to your dingy rental you can barely afford in a packed subway car and wondering, “How did I get here, where did it start?” and then you’ll spit on the name of Mr. David Hume who told you it was impossible to find true effects from causes, you will curse yourself for taking him at his word, for here the effect can be traced down the chain directly to this instance with no other intervening causes—oh please, please don’t look at me like that, this blade hasn’t been sharpened in ages, it’s quite dull in fact, but admire if you will the ivory and jewel-crusted handle, genuine 17th century Ottoman smithing here, beautiful, no?—I mean it happened so quicky, he surprised me, yes, I hate to admit it, I liked it, I know, not nice, but you can trust what I’m saying because before that I shot the fucking albatross, well not the actual one in the poem, let’s say a metaphorical albatross, truly, the details are not important, but what matters is there is no coming back from it, you see, it’s a slippery slope, and nothing’s been the same since, sometimes I can’t help myself—now, now stop shaking dear children, stay calm, besides, we all have dead birds in our lives, so to speak, don’t we, even those we tried to save, so I suppose it doesn’t matter, it all balances out in the long run, but speaking of birds, take to heart and cling to it for all you are worth this sage advice of Mr. Russell’s who warned us that thinking the sun is going to rise tomorrow is like the chicken who thinks the approaching farmer is coming to give him his breakfast (because he’s done it every morning), when in fact the farmer is really coming to wring its neck, so yes, I think you know now what I’ve really been trying to tell you, and no, it’s not that you were never going to get your payment, I think that’s obvious now, sorry, not sorry, but this is where the nightmare begins, this is where it begins, so please children run, run for your fucking lives.
David Luntz. Work is forthcoming in or has appeared in Post Road, Hobart Pulp, trampset, X-R-A-Y Lit, Rejection Letters, Maudlin House, HAD and other print and online journals. More at davidluntz.com Twitter: @luntz_david
Categories
MIDLIFE HARD-ON
By Jon Doughboy
I did four pull-ups in the park and my arms are about to fall off. I’m in decent shape, or so I thought. Three days a week I do a little exercise routine in my basement. Body weight stuff like push-ups and squats. A few dumbbell exercises. I jog when the mood and motivation strike. But pull-ups are another story. Hefting the big hunk of aging meat that is me—my shoulders feel swollen. Like I’ve just been inoculated. But against what?
I jog to my girlfriend’s parents’ house in the less affluent part of an affluent New Jersey suburb, wheezing past lush, diligently-watered yards and professional-trimmed hedges. The odd raised ranch. My triceps are burning. Cape Cods. My shins are aching too. Stone Victorians. Even my forearms are tight. New bright white farmhouse McMansions with mass-produced timber—ooh, look at the grain! Feels like we’re in Jackson Hole, honey! My girlfriend and company are travelling as a family to the Canary Islands. I declined their invitation. The bill was a bit steep for me, the itinerary a bit tedious, the concept of family a bit strained, so I’m here housesitting. A neighbor walks up with two red mums. “For Nicole. I know she loves mums. I had a funeral last week. A wedding tomorrow. That’s life, right? But they’re with us, aren’t they?” she says, pointing to the sky and then resting her hand on her heart. “My grandfather fell off his motorcycle at 80. Then he developed kidney issues. But he fought, you know? Just like my uncle. We took him off dialysis and he lasted weeks like that. We thought he’d die in days. But life, you know? It wants what it wants.” She goes on like this for a while. Life and death. Funerals and weddings. I get an erection but lean against the door in such a way that she doesn’t notice. This is my midlife crisis, I guess. I can’t afford a Porsche or hair transplants or a mistress so I’m not complaining. Though they happen sometimes at random, without a stimulus. I’ll be cooking oatmeal or aerating the lawn or sitting in traffic listening to a podcast about the Hanseatic League and boing—my cock is practically erupting through my pants. The neighbor leaves eventually. I masturbate quickly in the bathroom. I have to remember to water the mums.
I meet my childhood friend later for beers. I tell him about my aching shoulders, my midlife erections. He’s married now. Has one kid with a second on the way. They’d been trying for almost two years with joyless, scheduled intercourse. He’d go out to Long Island for work—he’s an electrician in a tiny union and is sometimes the only guy on-site, wiring new supermarkets or big-box stores—and he used FetLife to find all these kinky women. One could only get off when he fisted her while wearing his wedding ring. He said, “I tried to take my ring off once because I felt guilty, you know. I’m not a monster. I felt terrible. But she froze up when I tried to. Stiff as a corpse. So I left it on. But I always wondered what would happen if my ring got lost in there. If I’d need to take her to the hospital. Or rent a metal detector or tie a magnet to a dildo or something.”
“My girlfriend has been very horny lately,” I say. “Some hormonal change. Perimenopause maybe. Not that she didn’t have a sex drive before but now every time we have sex, she wants to have more sex right after. And I tell her I’m old. That she needs to think about the refractory period. Then she takes my soft cock in her mouth just licking it, playing around, and I’m sort of embarrassed it’s soft but also flattered that she wants me or it or us so much and like fifteen minutes later we’re fucking again. I came three times in an hour. I haven’t done that since I was a teenager in heat.”
“Well, I say enjoy it while you can, man. Because we don’t really have sex anymore. It’s just work and parenting and on Sundays I watch football and fuck around on the guitar all day. Lots of Black Sabbath. The riff master.”
He shows me some videos of guitar prodigies on YouTube. Loads of fancy finger work. But the music sounds busy to me. Like they’re playing way too many notes.
The next day I meet my mom and my sister at a Chinese place for lunch. Mom points to the kitchen and says, “Look, they’ve got actual Chinese people cooking. That’s a good sign. On Queens Boulevard we used to get all-you-can-eat Chinese food for two dollars. Piles of egg rolls. Buckets of lo mein. Now dumplings cost ten bucks. Ten bucks! What happened to this country, huh?”
My sister is telling me war stories from the psyche ward where she works. “The schizophrenic patients aren’t that bad. It’s the bipolar ones you have to watch out for because they get manic. And the drug addicts. They’re disgusting. They’re all criminals with bedbugs and scabies. And so entitled. One of them refused to eat the food in the cafeteria and was screaming ‘my insurance pays for this shit’ meanwhile their insurance is Medicaid so actually my tax dollars pay for it, bitch.”
“Did you say that?” I ask. I admire my sister. She’s very strong. Until she isn’t. Then she’s staying in another psyche ward in another county for a week or two. Meds. Sleep. Repeat.
“No.”
“Ten bucks for dumplings! Dumplings!” My mother says.
My sister goes on: “But one time we had this real piece of shit patient who had cancer and he beat cancer but was back in the ward for something else, it’s a revolving door of nutjobs, and he was screaming, calling all the nurses cunts and saying he had AIDS and trying to spit on us and when we finally restrained him I whispered into his ear, ‘I hope your cancer comes back and kills you’ and you can bet your ass we were cackling about that on our smoke break.”
My mother calls the waiter over. She doesn’t have time for menus and likes the—any—attention. “Do you have a shrimp dish?”
The waiter, a young Asian kid, says, “Yes, many shrimp dishes.”
“With garlic?”
“We have shrimp with garlic sauce.”
And I get an erection. In this dumpy Chinese place while my sister is telling me psyche ward drama and my mother is nagging the waiter about the size of shrimp. Are they big shrimp? Are they prawns? How many shrimp come with the dish?
We order. I excuse myself to masturbate in the filthy bathroom by the fire exit at the end of the hall. There’s no soap so I use the hand sanitizer on the sink. There are dark fingerprints smudged on the wall. When I return to the table, the food is already there.
“These aren’t prawns,” my mother says, examining a shrimp she’s skewered with a chopstick.
“Did I tell you about the Bulimic girl who was really sweet and read my tarot but had the bones of an old lady because of her eating disorder? She was like sixteen or something but with 80-year-old bones.”
“Ten bucks for dumplings. Unbelievable,” my mother says.
I sit down and take a sip of Coke. My chicken smells like rancid fry oil. My shoulders still hurt.
The next morning the landscapers wake me up. Watering, mowing, seeding. Mornings in the suburbs are noisy with hired labor keeping yards tidy and clean. I lie in my girlfriend’s childhood bed wondering if she lost her virginity in it. If she had her first orgasm in it. Wondering how close the Canary Islands are to Africa. Wondering, remembering. Annalise. A Peruvian pre-law student who was volunteering at the library with me to teach new immigrants how to read. I was there for court-mandated community service. She was there to pad her resume. Afterwards, we’d fuck in my Ford Explorer under a huge, half-dead Catalpa tree at the back of the parking lot. She’s a lawyer now in North Carolina. Practicing law. What am I practicing now? Life? Except you don’t get a free trial. Or maybe you do. I should listen to the podcast I downloaded about karma. I go to the bathroom. I jerk off. I hope the landscapers watered the mums.
Two days later my shoulders and back are less tight. I jog to the park again. Step past the mums, across the tended yard and past the various architectural styles of the affluent houses. I do three pull-ups, four, five. I’m hanging from the bar. I have an erection. My abs are tight, my shoulders. I want to be young again, fucking in the back of a beat-up SUV and thinking about my future. I want dumplings that don’t cost ten bucks. I want money. I want to be on a Spanish beach with my horny girlfriend. I want to have a kid, to teach my kid how to master riffs. I want to be twenty pounds lighter, twenty years younger, twenty times stronger, smarter, better. I want. I don’t want to want.
But life, you know?
Jon Doughboy is a recovering “literary fiction” writer who now produces “prose entertainments” to pass the time, available for the amusement of none and all @doughboywrites
Categories
CHILDREN’S CRUSADE
By Avee Chaudhuri
Whenever our father Martin wanted to go on a bender he said he had to take an urgent letter to the offices of the North Eastern Atlantic Railing Corporation in Portsmouth, three days away, for the chairman’s eyes only, and that he would leave as soon as he could find the keys to the Buick. He preferred traveling at night, he told us, because the roads were clear. Thirty minutes later he would be down at the bar getting silly on scotch with a public-facing hand up the proprietor’s skirt, who poured scotch gratis. We told ourselves Mrs. Brenda had been widowed. Our father was many things but he wouldn’t with a married woman. No, it couldn’t be. Mrs. Brenda’s husband surely had been shot out of a cannon at too high an angle during his time as a prisoner of war, and he had not survived the impact of his collision with the warbling pines of the Black Forest. Our own mother had actually died giving birth to the twins.
Martin, our father, liked to go on a bender every week. He loved drinking. “It feels good,” he said.
One time we ventured, the twins hiding behind us older children, “Would it not feel good to make a real home for your children. Would this not feel as good as, if not better, than drinking scotch?”
Our father was an attorney, who handled the affairs of many North Eastern concerns and he hated vagueness as a point of professional pride. “Well, how much scotch are we talking? What do you mean a real home? Bedtime stories and so forth.”
“Presence, just presence, consistency, tact.”
“Fuck that noise,” Martin said as resigned as ever. “And wait a minute. You know I’m doing you children a favor doing my drinking out in the world. Not corrupting the family hearth with the sound and odors of profuse wretching. Scotch is a poison after all.”
“No, you wait a minute. Don’t frame that as a virtue. There’s your fingering of Mrs. Brenda, a proud business owner.”
“I don’t know what you’ve heard or seen. You kids don’t understand. I was concealing some documents on her body, important tax documents.”
“Sure, Martin. Sure.”
“Martin?! Goddammit, you treat me with respect. I am your father!” And he stormed off for his most serious bender yet, reaching as far south as Savannah, Georgia. He stayed there for three weeks until Mrs. Brenda summoned him back posthaste.
During this absence we had a frank discussion among ourselves and decided we ought to go out in a blaze. We were burdens to Martin. Maybe he could find love again with Mrs. Brenda, if only he had the temerity to move beyond hand stuff, to take her wholly in his arms and do her. We decided to fight for the Holy Land.
But the twins, who were rather precocious, pointed out: “That place, ought we to project our rather meager version of faith onto it?” It’s true, I think we had only been to church the one time, at our maternal aunt’s insistence. She had to watch us because Martin got into a brawl with a bunch of Machine Democrats at a bar in Yonkers.
“We are only really culturally Catholic,” the twins said in unison.
But we wanted to do something useful with our sacrifice. There was a bookmaker in town Martin had run afoul of. In addition to being a drinker, he liked to let it all ride on the ponies. Our mother was a very beautiful and kind and understanding woman, and I think this explains our father’s obvious misery with the prospect of living, the horror of it, the vanishing likelihood that he would take Mrs. Brenda into his arms and do her. I mean, every time he saw us peering at him from around a corner, curious as to his movements, equally curious and concerned about the type of man we would grow to resemble or eventually be drawn to marry, he must have seen in our faces an apparition of our dear dead mother. What greater prophylactic can there be than children underfoot. We were going to detonate in the presence of the malicious bookmaker. The twins had cultivated an interest in applied chemistry and fitted us all with bombs. It was Monday, nine in the morning when they went off in the bookmaker’s shop and we were blown upward. And now we are jumping nearer to seraphim, trying to feel at the firmament of their jaundiced wings, but they simply float higher than we can reach in a conscious denial. Even in heaven on high we children remain objects of pity and scorn.
END
Avee Chaudhuri teaches Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the chef/owner of The Sepoy’s Revenge, a restaurant he runs out of his office on campus (Andrews 320).
Categories
YOU ARE MISALIGNED
By Kia Guindon
Terry is in a mood. Eyes drippy with resolve. He looks like he’s one long glance away from trouble. “We’re gonna get out of this place,” he says, “Thelma and Louise style.” I want to tell him we are here voluntarily, that we can leave whenever we want.
“Don’t they die?”
He tells me he doesn’t have all the details sorted yet.
*
I’m in the garden watching the sky leak by. Terry is beside me, combing through the Times. He likes to read the headlines out loud. Something to do with feeling more attuned to the communal suffering of the world.
“Alphabetical or random,” he asks.
“Dealer’s choice.”
He begins, “Killer asteroids are hiding in plain sight—a new tool helps spot them. New Mexico wildfires map an early, record-breaking season. Liviah’s new liver: a family grapples with the girl’s puzzling hepatitis—a doctor prescribed an obesity drug, her insurer called it vanity.”
“What else?”
“There’s one about coral reefs. But I know anything to do with the ocean breaks your heart.”
*
It was my mother who insisted on my stay. Un petit rest, she called it. Chicken soup for the troubled soul.
“You must know what this looks like,” she said in the hospital.
I wagged a finger. “You are misaligned,” I said when what I meant was misinformed.
What happened was this. I was found floating tummy up, far out in the Pacific Ocean. Coast guard pulled up beside my limp, star-fished body and asked, “Miss, are you in need of saving?”
I couldn’t talk but flashed a thumbs up to indicate yes, that would be nice. As my consciousness turned spongy and edgeless, I brushed my tongue along my palate and was comforted by the taste of salt.
*
Terry ate oatmeal with water. That’s what I first noticed. That, and he took long, drawn out spoonfuls. Like he wanted to remember each oat.
“He sure likes to suck out the marrow,” one of the cafeteria ladies said.
I sat down close. His balmy breath was palpable. He kept eating, paying me no mind. We sat like that till his plate was cleared and it was time for group.
I was fed up after a week of smeary oats and silence.
“Good luck Hon,” cafeteria lady said to me.
I followed Terry to the common area. Tracked him through the TV room and rec center. When he settled in the garden I stood in front of him, arms crossed.
“What are you here for?” I said.
“Did you know almost everything on earth, including you and me, was formed from the heart of a star.”
“I thought we consisted mostly of water,” I said.
“That’s what they want you to think.”
“Who’s they?”
“You know.”
“I don’t. That’s why I’m asking.”
The sun thrummed down. Terry picked at his skin. I stood staring, resolute.
“What’re you here for?” I repeated.
“DNA, honey,” he said. “What’s your excuse?”
*
Truth be told, I wasn’t trying to do what they thought. Problem is my story sounds fake. Even to me. When I think back to that day my brain feels like a vat of air. I remember the ride to the beach. Talking Heads on the radio. Stale stench of summer. Pulling from a bottle of clear liquor. Then the tape zips forward to the bit where I’m saved. Sure, I felt some misery. But it was my baseline. Nothing that would tip the scales.
*
The Chosen Ones join group today. “One, two, God is coming,” they sing, “Fighting for us, pushing back the darkness.”
We are sitting in a circle on plastic chairs. Most of us are wearing what we came in with, minus any shoelaces, necklaces, drawstrings, belts. Terry is beside me, rambling on about time.
“Funny thing is,” he says, “no one knows why we only experience it in one direction.”
A nurse paces, clipboard to her hip. The chalkboard reads: Falling is not collapsing, falling is extending. “Know the signs,” she says, and we all nod along.
“Three dimensions for space,” Terry says, “And only one for time.”
*
This month makes three. Terry and I have a motto now: Maybe they’re born with it; maybe it’s clinical. Talking is prohibited after lights out so we sneak into the TV room with flashlights and blink morse code to each other. We are still learning so most of our words are simple: throat, wave, white.
No one knows Terry’s exact age. But gossip is stock here. Some say he burnt his birth certificate a long time ago on account of the government tracking him. I asked him about it once, but he just said space and time are the framework within which the mind is constrained to construct its experience of reality.
Others tell tales of Terry selling fake never-before-seen pictures of Elvis. Or harvesting kidneys for the black market. One story lands him in Italy, married briefly to a countess. Whatever the truth, I can tell from his large pores and yellowed fingers that he’s experienced in life. More so than I am anyways.
*
Mother calls. Her voice sounds springy.
“So,” she says, “what’s the cup at today, baby?”
“Quarter empty,” I say.
“Don’t be like that.”
She tells me about Walmart Guy. He has a bump nose and large skull. They go to dive bars and peel off labels of Michelob and play rock paper scissors. Loser eats the label. They are to be married. City hall style. Very little shebang. Next to no rah-rah. It isn’t appropriate to celebrate with extravagance, she says, for a woman of her age.
“And you?” she asks.
I remind her that my environment is not exactly ripe for love.
“Not a single prospect?”
I tell her I have Terry and that he’s like a husband in that we don’t have sex and sling our irritabilities at one another to relieve the pressure in our hearts.
“Oh yes,” she says, “I understand.”
*
We are guests. But that feels like the wrong word. We were not invited nor do we wish to stay. What got us here was a need for a blip of rest. Nothing permanent. Most of us here are happiest when life is like a film. We have an affinity for illusions.
*
Chef makes a thousand eggs a week. Divided by seven, that’s one hundred and forty-two eggs a day. Numbers help. No ambiguity.
“Incoming news,” Terry says between forkfuls of wet yolk.
“Sock it to me.”
“At a dangerous 125 mph, the well-known Britney Spears eludes the police,” he says, his voice all Southern lilt. If I close my eyes, he could be Harry Connick Jr. or maybe Dennis Quaid.
I pencil a three into a Sudoku row. Terry is naming billboard hits from 1959 alphabetically.
“I don’t know why you bother with that crap,” he says.
“Think good, look good,” I say.
He blinks ‘okay’ then ‘yeah right’ at me.
I don’t tell him about my tricks. Memorizing sonnets. Sudoku. Omega 3s. I don’t tell him the average brain’s weight and volume shrinks about 5% per decade after 40 and that I’m halfway there and my odds don’t look great. I don’t tell him about losing the word vacuum. “What’s the name of that machine?” I asked one of the others, “That sucky device that gets all of the dust.” Other things too. Important things. Like the brand of my mother’s perfume. Or the name of my hymen-taker.
What stays, stays. Survival of the fittest. That’s Darwin. What else do I remember? Not much. Was it me or Dostoevsky that said it’s very pleasant to break something from time to time? Terry says memories exist outside of time and space, but I think only the strongest memories endure. No one tells you though if it’s the right things you’re remembering.
*
“I thought of something,” Terry says. “We have to try to imbue our lives with ambition.”
“Do or do not,” I say, “there is a lot of try.”
“Listen, listen, listen,” he says, “ambition gets a bad rap, but channel it correctly and boom.”
“Boom what?”
“Boom, life.”
*
Terry had no moral compass. That was his problem. This was when he lived at the Western tip of the I-90. Tough is what he calls that time. At night he’d tread out into the dark on sodden patches of grass and fix his eyes on the dimmest part of the sky. He wanted to return to dust. Unburdened by time. Be up there, just another star.
That’s all in the past though. Acceptance is his mantra now.
*
“I’m not myself,” I tell Terry before group.
“Who here is?” he says.
Group is a time where the past gets a good going-over. The Chosen One’s have access to the past. Bonafide memory savants, the lot of them. They remember every infraction of morality, small or large.
Terry too. He can rattle off names and dates of birth from his high school rock band.
I want to know if it’s wrong to only recall the shape of a day. Light flaying the sky. Muted pinks and purples out a window. When I watch films I’m left with feelings. No facts. I do not know if the lady was in red or blue or white or green. But I can remember her forlorn face in a mirror. The way she twirls a spoon in a cup of coffee. Even my mother. I have been here long enough to not know if she stands at 5’4 or 5’6. Or if her eyes are flecked with yellow. But I have tucked away moments of her mouth laughing. That I do have.
*
I come clean.
“You just ended up out there?” Terry says.
“Yeah.”
“And you don’t know why?”
“No.”
“There’s gotta be something.” He makes a list. Probable causes. He wants to get to the source.
“Parents?” he says.
“Alive.”
“Boyfriend?”
“Negative.”
“Friends?”
I move my head from side to side. “A few.”
“Hard drugs?”
“Too young.”
He blinks ‘shit’ at me. “Maybe that’s your problem—no fun.”
*
Terry has a plan. We’re going to the beach. Exposure therapy. To confront the scene of the crime.
“Better than any of the cockamamie you’ll get in here,” he says.
The Chosen Ones remind us to be wary of the impurities of the outside world. There is filth everywhere. Terry tells them he’s beyond corruptibility. He was born with sin in his blood.
“Do you really think that’s a good idea?” my mother says.
“Better than any of the cockamamie in here.”
“I trust your judgement.”
“I don’t,” I say. “That’s what got me here in the first place.”
*
We arrive midday. It’s still there in all its aqua wonder. Unchanged. We stand gazing out. Undulating waves of blue and green. Miles and miles of water.
“Anything?” Terry says.
I tell him I feel like a croissant. Flakey, layered, a little wet. We are encouraged to use metaphorical language to describe our feelings. Looking at things head on, we are told, can be overwhelming.
“Sometimes a leaf is just a leaf,” he says.
“Sometimes a leaf is just a leaf,” I mimic, an octave higher.
“What I’m getting at, kid, is maybe you’re just sad. And it is not like anything else.”
So I tell him. From the top. The parts I remember. My mother and her men. And then the town. Its people. Sagging faces. About all the ordinary ways life stacks up.
*
I was there all of six months. We didn’t escape. But we didn’t die either.
On my last day Terry blinked the word moist at me.
I thought, I’ll never see him again.
I thought, there’s two ways to deal with the cards you get dealt. Mete life out into measurable acts of compliance. Or use whatever you must to escape the oblong shaped, far away threat that is as real to you as your ten fingers and toes. Be it God or the space-time continuum. To the former, the latter are deranged, wrong, mad.
Pick a word.
Kia Guindon is a Canadian writer based in New York.@km_guindonn
Categories
AS I LIVE AND BREATHE
By Reilly Tuesday
Sometimes Tara feels like she’s the only girl in this city who grew up eating Lucky Charms every morning. Her friends in Montreal didn’t grow up with sugary cereals in the house and probably seldom slurped the blue milk output of 8 distinct marshmallows. One humid evening the self-declared almond-mom offspring, all grown up, come over for a barbecue. They gather to grill the 12 frozen Compliments-brand beef patties, on sale for $19.99. Together they joyfully slurp dripping grease and mustard and golden beer.
Once every last drop is lapped up, they go home. Tara then realizes she forgot to buy a barbecue brush with those wiry bristles to thoroughly clean the portable grill. She tries her best to clean the waxy grease with bunched-up paper towels, tries to limit the black gunk that gathers under her fingernails, and tries even harder to ignore that weird tight feeling in her chest.
Her father, Darren, won the barbecue in a charity golf tournament for hurricane cleanup in her coastal Canadian hometown. Darren works for a company that specializes in making cardboard boxes for seafood companies, which are waxed on the inside to help better ship the oysters and mussels and lobster and haddock and so on. They cannot be recycled.
The town of Summerville’s harbour is Lucky-Charms-milk blue on calm days but pink on stormy days, when the churning sea rustles up the red sand on the ocean floor. Tara returns from the big city and goes jogging on the boardwalk, following the piles of seaweed along the Atlantic shoreline, just like she always does and just like she always has. She knows that the town’s sewage was formerly dumped into the water, that the shit then became fertilizer and the black seaweed then multiplied and multiplied. She learned this in the Nitrogen Unit of Grade 6 Science.
For the Water Unit, the teacher brought in plastic tubes and big Rubbermaid containers full of water and taught Tara and her classmates how to siphon. She remembers practicing with plastic straws in plastic cups of Nestea in the Wendy’s sunroom with her brother, Blaze. Sometimes Darren took them to McDonald’s, but less so Burger King and Dairy Queen after they got shut down and sat deserted in the sea of plazas. She remembers proudly showing off her skills but Blaze was only in Grade 3 or 4 and could only blow bubbles because he hadn’t learned to siphon yet.
They no longer dump Summerville’s sewage into the harbour but every once in a while the tangled lumps of seaweed are shoveled into dump trucks and taken to an unknown location. Now there is a water filtration plant right next to the shore but not next to the part where tourists go in the summer. It created 25 new jobs. Tara jogs past the plant and practices holding her breath so as not to breathe in the smell. A little further ahead she reaches the wet seaweed lying in the sun. She doesn’t hold her breath but inhales deeply because the smell reminds her of home. She stops when she feels a dull pain in her chest expanding.
Tara forgets the Deep Woods 30% Deet Bug Spray in the garage and gets 25 new mosquito bites. On the drive back to her parents’ house she gets stuck in farm equipment traffic. The tractors aren’t so bad, but the sprayers are unbearable, too big to drive around until they eventually turn off onto a red dirt road to spray the Cavendish Farms potato crops with herbicide. Tammy, Tara’s mother, calls them cancer trucks. She tells anyone who will listen that the constant fumes in the air gave Blaze autism as a child. She will tell anyone who will listen anything so Tara doesn’t mention how when she sleeps on her side she’s awoken by a sharp pain over her breastbone.
When Tara finally gets home, Tammy is cutting potatoes and watching the news. The anchor says that Cavendish Farms has donated 1 million dollars to Queen Elizabeth Hospital and a unit will thus be renamed Cavendish Farms Same Day Surgery. It instills hope across the province that keeps hearing about patients dying in emergency waiting rooms because it takes 17 hours to be seen by doctors that keep leaving like Burger King and Dairy Queen. Tara places her hand over her chest. Darren comes home and cooks fish that someone at work gave him in a waxed box. Blaze comes down from smoking weed and eating Lucky Charms in his room and the four enjoy a dinner of haddock and potatoes and it smells like home.
Tara goes back to Montreal and writes headlines for rain jackets and backpacking tents made with special waterproofing chemicals that cost more than her monthly rent. She works for 20 minutes at a time then opens Instagram reels to see vintage resellers testing their retro dishware for lead paint. She brews filter coffee with tap water and cooks breakfast with non-stick cookware from Amazon that leaves flecks in her eggs. The sink is full of dishes that look just like those on Instagram reels. When she washes the plastic cutting board she bought at Dollarama, the dark-green plastic fibers of the dish sponge get stuck in its grooves.
She contemplates a garden of microplastics then contemplates synonyms for fresh air then contemplates if she should see a doctor. Her heart aches for something she can’t quite figure out. The weird pain in the left side of her chest keeps getting worse and she doesn’t know why. Tara goes online and finds one available appointment with a medical professional in a far-away neighborhood. She feels grateful that she didn’t have to wait 17 hours in a windowless room named after a J.D. Irving company. The doctor gets her to inhale deeply and performs run-of-the-mill tests then orders her to get her chest X-rayed for possible tumors in her ribs and lungs.
Tara spirals and thinks about all the homemade-bong particles, vessels crafted with water bottles and hollowed out pens, among everything else. She goes to a different clinic in a different neighborhood to watch dust particles dance under the fluorescent lights as an X-ray technician tells her when to breathe. She doesn’t smoke weed for a week as she waits for the results. She doesn’t do much at all.
The sky is Lucky-Charms-milk blue on calm days and pink on days when the smoke arrives from the forest fires in northern Quebec. The X-rays come back normal but the pain comes back once 10 days of prescribed painkillers run out. Tara feels very grateful that the health insurance from her underpaid outdoor sports equipment copywriting job partially covers physiotherapy. The physiotherapist asks Tara if she works from home and she says yes. She sits on a cold massage table and slowly twists her body from side to side. Yes, she feels it there, and yes there, and yes, there.
Alas, there! Yes! It’s not poisons or pesticides or poor decisions but rather propelled inflammation, from where rib #6 or #7 meets the spine. Her back has become too immobile from not doing much at all, which in turn has been putting pressure on her ribs, and then her sternum. She goes back to working from home. She gets assigned exercises to do from home, too. She buys a foam roller at 30% off with her employee discount.
Tara goes to more barbecues and more parties and eats her hotdog anyway when it falls on the ground. She jokes about gut health with new friends and old friends and almond-mom offspring. When she’s drunk she sometimes brings up the fucked-up week of waiting for X-ray results and thinking she had lung cancer. She will tell anyone who will listen anything. She asks if she can bum a cigarette. She wonders if she should give more of a shit about microplastics. She insists that even the siphoning classes and Cavendish Farms Same Day Surgery unit are real. She wonders if truth or fiction is more powerful. She can’t get into it right now, the Greenwashing Lunch & Learn is starting.
Reilly Tuesday is a writer from Prince Edward Island, Canada. Her work has appeared in Expat Press, Hobart Pulp, The Car Crash Collective Anthology, Dream Boy Book Club and elsewhere, including The Page, which she created and edits. Find her meandering around Montreal or as @reilliz on Instagram.
By Jesse Hilson
Women are enemies, and men are enemies in a different shape, but the same distasteful antagonism. You see them in public where you rarely go, in excursions out of your mousehole. You do go out sometimes, to Tony Larry’s hangouts, the farm stand he maintains with his boyfriend Brian, the farmers’ markets you go out of your way to visit. Otherwise you stay away. Everybody is an opponent to be melted down with contemptuous eyes. Does it disguise desire, does it hide a potential love-charge? Those false dates with Tony Larry, he never suspected were dates, but you half-feared them to be before they happened, wondered at while they were happening, and drove away from them afterwards in confusion.
What do you know about that? You know nothing about that. You were thinking just this morning, about how you were that gay kid, that kid with the gay vibe in high school who nonetheless escaped all the allegations and went on to fuck women, double digit body count, never touching male ass or having your own ass be taken by sodomites, but still the contradictions remain, potent after many decades of a benighted lifetime. The womanly compartments within you resonated nevertheless, the “feminine side” others may detect but they were cruelly (perhaps mercifully) disguised from you, like many other things. Until you crossed paths with Tony Larry.
At lunch with Tony Larry’s boyfriend Brian, eating tomato sandwiches at the café, glasses glowing with sparkling water in the sun. Brian’s clothes were dirty from the farm, as if by self-conscious design, to be seen as a “farmer.” Brian was going on and on: “I wouldn’t actually want my AI to have the voice of an upwardly mobile Black man. I just wouldn’t. Call me a reactionary backwards bigot, or whatever. It’s truer to say if AIs must have Black voices they should sound more like stand-up comics on Def Comedy Jam, or rappers. That’s the history I want evoked when I interact with the tech regimes of the future, if I must do so. The whole question of deciding your AI’s voice ahead of time is crazy to begin with. I’m not sure why exactly but it feels wrong in the same way tailoring your Zoom background with bookcases and designer lamps feels wrong with a capital ‘R.’ Be natural, be true. Be racist if need be. Be authentic. Don’t kowtow to the neoliberal agenda.”
You filed all this commentary away in your internal dossier on Brian. He was too trusting, too open with his opinions over lunch. You were surprised he was telling you all this, with no monitor, no checking of your signals, none of the paranoia another person might have shown. Tony Larry’s affections had made him too secure, too complacent. They gave Brian a protective shield you scan for cracks, even though you are not in competition with him. You notice whenever they say goodbye to each other they exchange “I love yous” in a quick, monotone voice, identical to each other from long repetition, like androids running through a tired subroutine. This privately infuriates you. It feels dead. It doesn’t seem organic enough for Tony Larry, to your mind. Then, also privately, you whip yourself for thinking so as you drive alone around the countryside.
Who was Brian to you, and you to Brian? Was he trying to gag you and shock you with extreme politics, was it a defensive maneuver somehow, to protect his relationship? Tony Larry told you about Brian’s hobby as a writer. It seemed like a false, dangerous surface just like the farmer persona. He wrote stories about BDSM. It was beyond him, though, to seek a truly Dostoevskian moral confrontation, you sensed. Besides, you don’t wear BDSM like an accessory, an outward fashion statement. At least you thought so. Later you worried that you didn’t know the correct thing to do either, you didn’t have the savoir faire, either. Brian was an idiot, but what were you going to do, tell Tony Larry that his boyfriend was a corny faker, with falsely acquired attitudes and that you were realer than he was, because you were older? You had allowed these attitudes to come to you more naturally over time, and it was a generation gap. Tony Larry being a millennial should have been able to see that. But you could barely see that, or see anything, you know that now. You tend to see more, as time goes by. You have more info to add to the hopper and you can judge from a place of higher visibility.
“Not necessarily true,” Tony Larry told you when you shared just a fragment of this with him, editing out all explicit reference to Brian and hoping he’d gather from your half-hearted hints that older was superior. “Not if you’re shoving it all down over time, Noah. People sometimes get more blind as time goes by.” You thought you were suggesting you were smarter about life, the soul, whatever, than Brian was. To displace Brian from his position even though they ostensibly loved each other. What room for displacement was there, though, what foothold for jealousy existed that would avoid being spotted on its face? Like did you think Tony Larry wouldn’t see the emotional angle? Were they laughing at your attempts? Tony Larry seemed to humor you, to your face: millennials were wise that way, you discovered to your envy and disgust. Somehow these counseling sessions were conducted in a gel-like environment created by Aubrey’s wake after she left. She was a millennial too. You’d told Tony Larry about the spanking and rough sex Aubrey had goaded you into. You call it goading, you suspect you aren’t truly curious enough to take possession of the actions in the bedroom, ownership of the pain you caused Aubrey’s body to make her cum. You wanted to distance yourself from that, even as you told Tony Larry with hetero pride how you’d made Aubrey have an orgasm without ever taking your clothes off. This dom role felt aligned with the fact that you were eight years older than Aubrey and Tony Larry, you were Gen X. You were on the demographic outskirts of a sexual territory only the young, the queer could occupy safely, solidly. You were not a member of the group somehow, even though Aubrey used you to perform those rituals with her, rituals that extended beyond sex and into conversations, sour niceties, pain silently inflicted.
What were you doing telling Tony Larry any of this? You couldn’t say, especially since, as the visibility and awareness of your age grew, you developed unbidden feelings for Tony Larry, dreamt about him. Dreams that seemed non-sexual in nature, or you hoped so, after awakening and taking your first thoughts of the day, the way ignorant people hoped for certain outcomes in the news, political developments, tragedies scrolled over on the iPhone with a vague prayer for forgetfulness. Feelings had a surface area laser-mapped onto an unseen plane, a zone of men when the beams had heretofore only fallen on women’s physical bodies. And the male surfaces were not embodied, it wasn’t carnal with men, in a way you could point to or perhaps admit in your imperfect epistemic understanding of yourself and your own desires. Maybe you were a sexual cripple because you could only lust after women as you had seen them for decades, and never conceptualize anything else, any other tools ill-fitted for the hand. Some bisexual conscience hectored you, teased at you, from dream-angles, dream-ventriloquisms your waking mind couldn’t own up to puppeteering. A disillusionment never acquired such profundity that it would shake the faggot machinery within into awful automaton life, sending down cascades of magnetic dust and debris, the golem in motion. The inner android drew on a lifetime of observations that the straight, hetero self made, the storage of data for mysterious usage. This scientific knowledge might have positive value to the android’s purposes, if they could even be isolated themselves. To think of yourself as a machine made it all seem like something dark and less than human even though it was the automatized search for love and meaning. How could that ever be inhumanly colored. Why dust, falling, why not the ice that seizes life, breaking off in a shower of tinkling fragments and freeing an imprisoned organic being? You do not want to be the robot, do not want the machine-model of mind to apply, whether in disability or sexual confusion. You would rather this inner self be an isotope or inherent version of your mentally ill outer self, a hidden iteration from whom all consequence has been removed. You no more want to own an unconscious that produces dreams of Tony Larry than you would want to own a weapon that, by its very existence, potentially threatens the peaceful life of the household.
Jesse Hilson lives in the Catskills in New York State. His work as a writer and cartoonist has appeared in X-R-A-Y, Hobart Pulp, Expat Press, Maudlin House, Exacting Clam, and other venues. He has written two novels, Blood Trip and The Tattletales; a poetry collection Handcuffing the Venus De Milo; and a short story collection The Calendar Factory.