(You were alive. Now you’re not. Make peace with it or don’t. It won’t change anything.)
NAVIGATING THE AFTERLIFE
You exist, but only as an inconvenience. Being a ghost isn’t hard. You just have to stop pretending you matter.
You are neither here nor there. You will get used to it, but not in a way that feels good.
DEALING WITH THE LIVING
They refuse to acknowledge you. Not because they don’t believe in ghosts but because they believe in themselves too much. They are the center of their own story. You are background noise.
It’s not that different from being ignored when you were alive, except now it’s not personal.
UNDERSTANDING YOUR NEW FORM
If you weren’t weird before, you are now. Accept it and move on. Or don’t. Either way, you’re stuck with it.
You always felt a little disconnected from reality. Now it is just official.
AVOIDING BUREAUCRATIC NIGHTMARES
Nobody tells you that the afterlife has paperwork. Probably because if they did, no one would die voluntarily.
Bureaucracy doesn’t die with you. It just gets less comprehensible and more passive-aggressive.
HANDLING HAUNTINGS
You are a problem now. Embrace it. It’s not like you have anywhere else to be.
You wanted to leave a lasting impression. You got your wish.
FINAL NOTES
There is no next step. No light. No revelation.
You will wander. You will watch. You will wait.
Eventually, you’ll stop expecting something to happen. That is when you realize the afterlife isn’t a punishment. It is just more of the same…
Mallory Smart is a neurotic Chicago-based writer and editor-in-chief of Maudlin House. She hosts the literary/music podcast Textual Healing and the horror podcast That Horrorcast. Her new book, I Keep My Visions to Myself, is available now through With an X Books.
The ladies of the nineteenth floor love George right away.
“Oh my God, he’s precious.”
“Look at him, that sweet boy.”
It’s his birthday today. Number fifteen. They tease at first, poking and laughing. Pinching cheeks. He laughs and shakes his head. He says thank you ma’am, he says aw jeez. Rose laughs too, and she pinches his cheeks again.
The men from accounts are having a meeting. A few from upstairs too. Some standing, some sitting. The blinds are up and they look over at times, to watch the ladies ribbing George, to laugh along between bouts of their talk.
George tries to work. He scrapes the top layer off worksheet errors and he notes their corrections. The women watch him go. They woo and he blushes. Mary waves and he blushes more.
The men in their meeting huddle. More are sitting now. Spells of quiet congeal. Figures are thrown out and booed. The day exists beyond the window over the city roofs below.
The ladies crowd his station. They ask about his day. How he likes the office, how he likes the work. He goes on with his tasks as they talk and he talks and then he wipes his brow and he puts the eraser in his breast pocket and he tells the ladies I don’t know, I don’t know. They laugh still, they pinch his cheeks still. Ruth says she’s going to give him a kiss, and Mary says she is too, and he laughs, and he huffs, and now they’re all laughing, and he’s running, around tables, past desks, and the ladies are running too, laughing and running, and his feet twist and he falls forward, and now there is a gasp.
The men stand at the table where some accord is found. Some stare down at pages of numbers while others reach and stretch. One by one they turn as the screams begin to sound, where Ruth weeps and Mary sits blank faced on the floor alongside where George’s body is flopped. The eraser thumps with a slowing pulse, protruding from his heart, and the ladies nudge him with hands that shake but he is already gone. The office stills with but little movements continuing on. Hands over mouths, whispers of woe. Somewhere outside wide windows the sun moves, stretching between the bones of a rising tower. A man turns away and then another, their gaze drawn from this tragedy and on to the day’s minute onward tick as knockers and climbers rivet into place blocks of long steel that in their slow way shut out the sun’s insistent presence.
Craig Rodgers is the name stamped on ten books, a number of letters, and one day a grave.
Every time my three-year-old falls down, he tells me he “crumpled,” like, “I crumpled, mama,” and I hold back a laugh because I’m not sure where he learned the word. From me, I suppose, though in different context. He probably saw me ball up and toss some junk mail, crumple it, the way I saw my mother fold into herself over and over, creating irreversible creases each time. My son saw me cry last night, asked if I was okay. Asked if I’d like to jump up and down with him. Asked if that would make me feel better. I told him, yes, let’s jump together, and he laughed without reservation each time my feet left the ground.
When he saw that my still-puffy eyes hadn’t yet returned to the happy-crows-feet-mama eyes he knows well, he said, “You’re really sad, mama. Can I make you happy?” I pressed my lips to his forehead, told him, “That’s not your job, baby. Mama can make herself happy.” I listed things that make mama happy, to prove I knew how. To alleviate the burden. Coloring. Walking outside. Deep breaths. Things he understands, careful not to mention all the things he does to make me happy. Careful not to leave him feeling responsible.
Two days ago, he fell and cut his finger on the stick-like stem of our oregano plant. It’s a small cut, but the kind that peels back a layer of skin revealing fresh, raw skin underneath. We bandaged it up, kissed the wound, cursed the oregano plant, even though it wasn’t the plant’s fault. Now, he looks down to the healing cut. Band-aid removed, new skin acclimating to the air, turning color to match the rest of the finger. “Ouch,” he cries again. “It hurts, mama.” I try to convince him the wound is healing. It’ll be better soon. Probably by tomorrow. Soon he won’t even remember it happened. It’ll look good as new. He’s unconvinced. Tells me it hurts. I ask him if it hurts now, or if he’s just remembering that it hurt when it happened. His face crumples as he tries to determine the difference, and I realize I cannot explain the difference to him either. I realize maybe there isn’t one. I stop trying to make it better. I hold him while he hurts for as long as he needs me to.
Aubri Kaufman is the co-founder and co-EIC of Icebreakers Lit. Her work can be found in Pithead Chapel,trampset, HAD, Rejection Letters, and elsewhere. She’s on a bunch of the socials as @aubrirose and she totally wants to talk to you.
The Youngsville realtor had no answers when we asked why the trees at the edge of the woods bent sideways, why the puddles towards the back were neon green, or where the water came from that fed the pond across the street from our house. We were fine with not having answers because this was the only house my parents could afford, and it seemed like they were trying not to pick at a thing we could not change.
This was the first house that either of my parents had owned, so it did not matter that the yard—camel-colored packed mud, dry and cracked as a sun-baked desert—would be impossible to seed; it did not matter that the house was too small and poorly made with paper-thin walls; and it did not matter that the neighborhood our house sat outside of was filled with people my mother had already decided we would want nothing to do with.
Our new house sat at the edge of Horseshoe Acres—the only real neighborhood in our town of 900—and Horseshoe Acres sat in a valley below the farmland that surrounded us. The town consisted of a single intersection and around that intersection sat everything a person from a town like this might need—a gas station, a diner, a Piggly Wiggly grocery, a video rental store, a small doctor’s office, a post office, a bank, and a small strip of three antique shops.
While moving in, my mother got agitated by what she characterized as inappropriate attention from the neighbors. Curtains were pulled to the side, people stood on their back porches looking in our general direction, and cars seemed to slow as they passed our house.
“Don’t these people have anything better to do than to spy on us?” my mother complained. “Haven’t they ever seen somebody move in before?”
“They’re probably just curious about us,” my step-father explained.
“Let’s. Go. Say. Hi!” I begged between strained breaths while playing tug of war with my dog, Kentucky.
After a few days had passed and most of our boxes were unpacked, I convinced my parents to walk the neighborhood and introduce ourselves to all the people we wouldn’t be spending time with. I hoped some of these people had kids my age and that, once my mother met them, she’d realize they were fine and then let me play with them. I pulled on my shoes and fantasized about Friday night sleepovers—giggling over J.T.T. from Home Improvement, arguing about the proper way to sing the chorus of Hanson’s “MMMBop,” freezing each other’s bras like I’d heard some of the older girls talk about in Girl Scouts. I’d never had a real sleepover but I imagined they went something like that. In fact, I hadn’t really lived anywhere long enough to make real friends, and I was nervous. I wondered how I should act to make sure all the kids liked me, and practiced introducing myself in the bathroom mirror.
“Hi,” I said, hand extended for a shake, “My name’s Ryan, what’s yours?” No, that wasn’t right. Kids don’t shake hands. At least, here they probably didn’t. The last thing I wanted was for them to think I was some pretentious asshole. I did, however, want them to think I was smart. It was basically the only thing I had going for me.
“Hey, I’m Ryan. Who are you?” No, that sounded lazy and rude and my mother would never let me hear the end of an introduction like that.
“Hi! I’m Ryan! Want to play?” No, no, no. That definitely went against the rule of not spending time with these people and I’d be opening a can of worms my mom would have to spend years sealing back up.
“Hi.” That’s better. Be quiet, be small, be good. “Hi” wouldn’t get me into trouble. It gave nothing, asked nothing, and made no invitation. Perfect. I practiced saying hi with my mouth while pleading please invite me in to play with my eyes.
Right before we left for the walk, my mother said, “Remember, don’t tell anyone here anything about our family. They are not our friends and don’t need to know our business.”
Just a couple door-knocks into our stroll and my mother’s suspicions were confirmed—those people were not our people and we were to do everything in our power to ensure they didn’t think we were one of them. Those people smoked in the house, watched television at all hours of the day, and let their kids run around barefoot. Those people kept their dogs chained up in the backyard (we would never do that to Kentucky, I thought), swore out loud, drank in front of their kids, and had bad teeth. My mom always told me that these were the kinds of things poor people did. And we weren’t poor. Poor kids ran around outside without shoes on. It was how they got worms, she’d said. And the implication was that we don’t get sick with the same kinds of things as poor people because we are educated; we know better; we are better. I saw lots of kids playing outside during our walk, the bottoms of their feet caked with earth. I felt bad for them. They probably had worms and didn’t even know it. I wondered if I should warn them. I imagined what it would feel like to have a pile of worms twisting around inside my stomach and was perfectly happy to do whatever I must to avoid that. My mom was already mad about how often I needed to go to the doctor and worms was definitely on the list of preventable ailments I’d be punished for.
*
When I was a baby, I had bad ear infections. So bad that the doctor wanted to do surgery. For whatever reason, the surgery never happened and I ended up with scars on my ear drums. As I got older, I had to be really careful. If I wasn’t wearing special ear plugs, I wasn’t allowed to get my head wet at the pool, for example. If someone splashed my face or I forgot and did a cannonball, I’d get inconsolably upset. I’d push my beach towel as far into my ears as I could, to get all the water out, but I’d often still end up with an ache anyway. I’d try to hide it from my mom, but she could always tell. For days during an earache, she would obsessively inspect my ears after baths and showers, making sure no water was left behind that might nudge the ache into infection territory and I let her, because an infection meant a doctor’s visit, and a doctor’s visit meant time off work, and time off work meant we wouldn’t have enough money, and that was a big problem because my mom didn’t want to be poor.
By the time I was three, she was carting me back and forth to court-ordered physical exams and therapy appointments. Some stuff about my dad that I didn’t fully understand. Just that there were lots of stuffed dolls involved and, after it was all over, I wasn’t allowed to be alone with him again unless a legal chaperone was present.
The year we moved to Youngsville, I’d also been diagnosed with a skin condition, lactose-intolerance, and some phantom digestion issue that made my body turn all my food into big, impassable lumps. I was on lots of medications for that. Laxatives that made me vomit, and pills for the heartburn caused by the vomit. And the worst part was that it didn’t even make things much better. I’d alternate between explosive diarrhea in the middle of the school day (often shitting my pants and needing my mom to bring me a change of clothes) and hours on the toilet at home, with a huge lump of shit sticking a quarter of the way out of my ass, crying and begging for it to pass. I really didn’t need to add worms to the list.
*
I was careful not to act too excited during our walk. I really liked everyone we met but didn’t want my mom to notice. She would have felt betrayed. She was a very “with me or against me” type of person. When their doors opened, I could smell how different our neighbors’ homes were from ours—smoky, warm, and sweet—and I could see how different they looked inside. These were not the homes of people who ate boiled chicken and broccoli every night for dinner and kept everything tidy and sparkling. No, these were clearly pizza people—peoplewhose walls were covered with family photos, whose floors were covered in toys, who shouted dinner time into the void from the back porch at dusk each evening. Most of them were friendly and easygoing. I noticed they didn’t seem to think too hard about things before they said them, or worry much about what we thought. I wondered how I might be more like that. I wondered if I’d get a chance to learn.
Turns out, I would spend most Friday evenings at home, watching ABC’s T.G.I.F. programming block on my own or with my mom and step-dad. I didn’t talk to them about how much I liked J.T.T. because little girls weren’t supposed to think of little boys like that. My mom was already worried that I was too ‘mature’ for my age, so I just kept it to myself.
*
We soon discovered that heavy rains made the pond across the street flood and push over into our yard where it then sat for days atop the unyielding clay before finally, slowly, finding its way back into the ground. We learned that the little creek in the far back would darken and swell and overtake that end of the yard, reaching toward the bent-over trees, making mosquito birthing grounds of my new favorite hangout spot. We stayed out of the yard and away from the woods when it was wet out. On dry days, though, the backyard was mine. Sometimes I’d lay across the crooked trunks at the edge of the woods, imagine my body was part of the tree, and wonder if it felt me there. On others, I’d crawl through the brush to explore. I liked to get far away from the house and pretend to get lost. I wondered if my parents would search for me and secretly worried that they wouldn’t.
While I was out there, I searched for the lime green, electric looking puddles. They seemed like the stuff monsters were made of, and something told me not to touch them. Instead, I poked at the greasy water with a stick and watched the oil make magic on the surface where large mosquitos sat, miraculously without sinking.
*
That first summer, my mother became obsessed with growing grass. The days were made of endless trips to the hardware store where we could never seem to get enough grass seed, mulch, and fertilizer. We rented aerators and seed-spreading machines and the three of us—my step-father, my mother, and I—worked together like a solid little army, synchronized and determined to make something grow. While my mother used the aerating machine, I’d beat at the earth with a metal rake, and my step-father would follow closely behind with the seed-spreader. I helped by adding more seed when it started to run low, and after, we would take turns watering. By the end of the summer, our yard looked like it had been fitted with hair plugs. Grass grew frail and sparse and my mother made sure none of us walked on or cut it until it was strong. How long would that take, I wondered?
On days my mother started drinking early—early enough that the sun was still high in the sky—I took advantage of her condition. I’d swear that, if she would let me play outside, I wouldn’t mess up a single blade of grass. I’d only walk on the dry spots, between the blades, I’d tell her, and then just hang out in the far back where it was all dirt and moss anyway and there was nothing to worry about me ruining.
*
Even a couple summers into living there, I really hadn’t made any friends. Me and the other kids, we weren’t the same. But it wasn’t because of money—I’d realized by now that we were pretty much in the same boat as them, if not worse off—it was because I was a difficult kid with a difficult mother and other people’s parents just didn’t want to deal. The stomach issues were also a complicating factor. What was some other parent supposed to do when the neighbor kid got stuck in their only bathroom for hours? It was always just easier to be close to home if something wasn’t feeling right, so I spent a lot of time back there in the yard on my own. I’d talk to the trees or sit by the creek, looking deep down to see what was inside. Sometimes I looked so closely that I’d start to lose my balance. I’d imagine falling in and sinking down, deeper and deeper and deeper. I wondered if it would be cold down there or if, at some point, temperature starts losing meaning. I wondered if there were creatures and could have sworn I saw the long, thick body once of a prehistoric-looking snake.
I wanted Kentucky to hang out with me back there—something about having him around made me want to disappear less—but my mom said he had to stay up at the house on the chain, or in the garage. He didn’t know how to be careful with the grass, she said. But I’d get lonely back there talking to myself, so I started pretending that one of the weirdly-shaped trees was a person.
And I named that weird person-like tree Jonathan.
I was eight by this point. It was 1995. I was still watching Home Improvement and my crush on J.T.T. had grown into a bit of an obsession. Especially since his role as Simba in The Lion King the previous year. I’d cried desperately along with Simba when his father Mufasa was trampled in the wildebeest stampede and I wondered if knowing that would endear me to him one day.
So when I saw an advertisement for his fan club in a copy of Teen Beat Magazine during one of our trips to the Piggly Wiggly, I ripped out the page and pocketed it. I just had to join. At home, I emptied the piggy bank I’d squirreled a little cash and coins away in, stuffed the money into an envelope along with the entry form, put it in the mailbox across the street by the pond, with the flag up high, and awaited my personalized letter and fan kit from J.T.T.
I started fantasizing about a life with him and imagined the reactions on people’s faces when I told them the story of how we met—Oh it was WILD! It all started with a fan club when we were both kids. We just started writing letters back and forth and, eventually, his parents flew me out to meet him in person and join them on set for the taping of one of the Home Improvement episodes. It was just…love at first sight…and it’s been happily ever after ever since.
I really thought it could happen. That this was how things did happen. That this was how little girls like me found a way out of towns so small they’d like to squeeze the life and dreams and future right out of you.
I started spending time with tree J.T.T. in the afternoons, rehearsing conversations I imagined having with him in real life someday. At first, I’d sit across from him and talk ‘face to face.’ Soon, I was sitting against the tree, imagining J.T.T.’s arms wrapped around me. I asked him, between soft kisses, whether I should call him J.T.T. or Jonathan, and started rubbing my body against the bark.
I was mostly hidden from view, but my heart raced and my palms slipped with sweat during intimate moments like this. I was terrified of getting caught, so I’d keep one eye trained on the back porch where my mom tended to sit, talking on the phone with friends and drinking wine after a long day. I knew that if she saw me, she’d stop allowing me to play out there by myself. I had a sense that I was damaged, and that everything she did was to keep the seams sewed up tight so none of that would ever spill out in front of other people. She was always talking to me about how important it was to be appropriate. She’d probably even take me back to the therapist, but I was too old to play with dolls now.
So I’d stand there quietly, secretly, hidden just out of view, and coo, “J.T.T., oh, J.T.T., I’m your biggest fan. I love you, J.T.T.,” while grinding against the tree’s rough, bark-covered trunk, “ … and I think you could love me, too. You will love me, too. One day. You’ll see.”
Ryan-Ashley Anderson is a conceptual artist and writer from the rural South. She has publications in X-R-A-Y and Icebreakers among others, work forthcoming in Rejection Letters and Vlad Mag, and is an editor at Pool Party Mag. Anderson is currently writing a memoir about sex work, the patriarchy, and belonging, and pursuing dual masters degrees in critical studies and art.
“Remember,” Mr. Dye reminds your class. “You should start thinking about what song you’re going to perform for your final.”
Your classmates groan. They sigh. They respond the primary way a room full of kids on the brink of teenagerdom respond to almost anything said by an adult.
“We don’t have a final paper or test,” Mr. Dye continues. “Just practice your performance. And remember, you need to turn in typed up lyrics as part of your homework. There shouldn’t be any curse words or anything else that wouldn’t be allowed on the radio.”
You wonder what he means by that “anything else.” What else other than curse words aren’t allowed on the radio? What else might disqualify a song?
You also wonder who actually needs the reminder. You’ve been thinking about it for weeks.
After school, you close yourself in your room and again listen to all your Weird Al tapes, over and over and over, trying to find just the right song. You listen through “Weird Al” Yankovic in 3-D and you listen through Dare to Be Stupid and you listen through Even Worse. You lay on your bed and close your eyes and mentally note the pros and cons of performing each song; you get up and stand in front of the full-length mirror hanging on your closet door and sing along, watching what you look like with each. “Eat It” or maybe “I Lost on Jeopardy,” “Like a Surgeon” or “Fat” or “I Think I’m a Clone Now.” You keep listening and considering, relistening and reconsidering.
You’re worried which song performance will lead to the highest grade. You’re also worried someone else might do the same song. You’re really worried someone else is going to do the same song and do it so much better. But, more than any of that, you’re worried about which song will least likely embarrass you and/or most likely make you look cool, two ideas that sometimes overlap and sometimes don’t but are always, together, at the core of your being.
You’re shy, but maybe more than anything, you’re self-conscious. Your shyness and tendency toward indecision are borne largely out of a fear of doing or saying something stupid or, even worse, wrong. You are so scared of having a wrong opinion, of liking something that everyone else knows isn’t cool, or not liking something that obviously is. How does everyone else know what to like, what clothes to wear, what music to listen to? You know enough to be embarrassed that you like New Kids on the Block, but not enough to know who you should like instead.
A couple of months from now you’ll overhear a couple of the other kids at your bus stop raving about some new tape by someone or a group or something called Candyman and so the next time you go to Wherehouse Music with your dad you look through everything until you find it, flipping through pop and rock and finally finding it in rap. Ain’t No Shame in My Game by Candyman. You’ll buy it, having no idea what to expect and even still it isn’t what you expected. But, apparently, it’s what people are listening to, so you keep listening until it grows on you, until you’re ready to overhear others talking about it so you can chime in. You’ll never overhear anyone mention it again.
You wear cardigans to school, which seem dressier than what anyone else at your junior high wears and you feel like you stick out but that’s what your mom buys you when she takes you school shopping and they seem nice when you try them on in the store. You don’t have any other, better ideas. You get excited for new clothes, like you’re presenting your best self and isn’t that what everyone’s trying to do? You wake up early to put a lot of mousse in your hair and try and get it just right…but it never looks just right, and it doesn’t look like anyone else’s, all these kids with their parted straight hair and you with your curls that your mom and grandmother say are gorgeous, they say girls would kill for, they say you’re going to have so many girls you’re going to beat them away with a stick, but that very much isn’t the case, no girls ever tell you they’d kill for your hair, no girls even come close enough that you’d be able to touch one with a stick, but less so many of them swarming to the point where you need to fend them off. You roll your eyes and wish your hair was straight and would just part in a wave to the side like everyone else’s.
You look through your tapes, looking for anything else that might fit.
Novelty songs, you remember Mr. Dye saying. Novelty songs work especially well for this.
You wonder, for the first time, how Weird Al came to be almost the totality of this genre, all by himself.
“Any ideas for novelty songs for me to lip sync for my class?” you ask your parents.
“What about Kermit the Frog singing ‘It Ain’t Easy Bein’ Green’?” your mom suggests.
You roll your eyes. Rolling your eyes and sighing and mumbling “whatever,” or being a sarcastic Smart Alec, is becoming one of your most common reactions to your parents.
“I love that song,” your mom says. “It’s so sweet.”
What is your mom thinking? You don’t want to be sweet. She doesn’t know anything about being twelve.
You go back to your room, close your door, lay on your bed and keep brainstorming.
Mr. Dye says he’s going to take volunteers until no one volunteers and then he’ll have to just start calling on people, until everyone’s had their turn, and then the semester will be over. You don’t want to get called on, but you don’t want to volunteer either. You really want to go somewhere in the middle. You want to blend in. Well, you want to stand out for doing a great job, but not too much, and definitely not for the wrong reasons.
No one volunteers at first and you feel your whole body—your fists and your arm and leg muscles and your teeth and your neck and your chest and your brain—clench. Is Mr. Dye going to have to call on people the whole time? Am I going to end up getting called on first?? You wonder who would possibly ever volunteer to go first. And then one student raises their hand, and then another.
Please don’t do my song, you think to yourself as every student walks to the front of the class and waits for Mr. Dye to hit play. Like a mantra, telepathy, a prayer. Please don’t do my song, please don’t do my song, please don’t do my song.
No one does a Weird Al song. No one does any kind of novelty song at all. Not the first volunteer, not the second, not any of your classmates who go that first day. Not anyone on day two either.
At first you watch, thinking they’ve all made a misjudgment. Hadn’t any of them been at parent-teacher night? Hadn’t Mr. Dye told you all what kind of song worked best? It was like he’d given you a sneak peek at the final exam and you had to look up all the answers on your own, but you knew the questions. Why would anyone not follow a suggestion given by the teacher, the person who would be giving you your grade? But then, as you watch classmate after classmate perform popular, Top 40, non-parody songs, you realize you’ve made the misjudgment. You’re going to seem silly. You’re going to look like a little kid singing this dorky joke while everyone else has chosen a real song. You wonder if it’s too late to change. You’ve already turned in your lyrics but maybe you can talk to Mr. Dye, maybe you can explain your mistake, maybe you can quickly find and memorize and type up the lyrics to a real song, before you make a fool of yourself. And then Mr. Dye calls your name and it’s your turn and you stand up out of your desk and make your way to the front of the classroom, dreading what’s about to happen.
Ten, twenty, thirty years later, you won’t remember what song you ended up choosing and performing. You’ll remember all the practicing and choosing one song and then changing your mind and choosing another one and practicing anew. You’ll remember typing up lyrics on your family electronic typewriter, with its little display that would show a couple of lines at a time, saving it all onto some kind of typewriter hard drive, and then printing out the whole thing all at once on command. You’ll remember listening to the song over and over and over, typing as you listen, rewinding your tape every twenty seconds or so before it gets too far out ahead of you. You’ll remember how typing up the lyrics like that helped you memorize them even more than all your practicing, and also how it reminded you—at the time, and will still remind you all these years later—of one of your favorite episodes of Growing Pains from a few years before.
“Reputation.” Mike Seaver—played by Kirk Cameron at the peak of his popularity and charm, long before he starred in the Left Behind series; before, in fact, he’d become a Christian at all, converting midway through the height of his career on Growing Pains and beginning to insist that storylines be edited to remove anything he thought to be too adult or inappropriate—had gotten to the point of being in danger of failing the class, so he’d stayed up all night writing notes on the soles of his shoes. In class the next morning, Mike sailed through the test, knowing all the answers, not once needing to look at these two cheat sheets on the bottom of his feet. After the commercial break, the teacher gave back everyone’s graded test, announcing with total surprise that the best grade had been received by none other than class slacker. Mike Seaver. Mike jumped up out of his seat, did a little dance, high-fived the classmates sitting around him. Sitting back in his seat, proud of himself for doing so well on a test for once, Mike leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head in a perfectly 1986 sitcom way, and kicked his feet up onto the desk of the student sitting next to him, putting his night’s work on full display to the teacher and the camera. Cue the studio audience gasps, cut to commercial.
You’ll remember that not one other person did a goofy or funny or parody song, though you won’t remember what they did do. You won’t remember if anyone did Janet Jackson or Mariah Carey or Madonna; it seems unlikely that anyone did “U Can’t Touch This” or Faith No More’s “Epic,” because surely you’d remember that, but it’s possible; they were both huge songs that year.
You’ll remember only one performance. Matthew.
Matthew sits in the back of the class. He’s a year older than you, has long, almost shoulder-length hair, a little like Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites, though that’s still four years away, or maybe like Kurt, though you don’t know who that is yet, you haven’t heard of Nirvana, you have no idea Bleach came out last year. Matthew’s hair hangs down, veiling his face, as if hiding him away from Mr. Dye or anyone else who might notice he isn’t paying attention.
When it’s his turn, when Mr. Dye finally calls his name, having run out of volunteers, Matthew slumps and sighs like he can’t believe he has to do this. Did he think he’d just somehow never get called?
“Matthew, I don’t seem to have your homework with the lyrics anywhere here,” Mr. Dye says, looking around his desk, through his stack of papers.
“Yeah, I didn’t get to that,” Matthew replies.
“Well. How are we going to fix that? You can’t go unless I can look over the lyrics first and have them to follow along, and you can’t pass the class if you don’t do this assignment.”
Matthew shrugs and then starts digging through his backpack down at his feet. Everyone in the class is quiet, watching, wondering how this is going to go.
Matthew pulls his Walkman and then a cassette case out from the bottom of his backpack. He takes the tape out of the Walkman and opens the case and pulls out the liner notes and walks both up to give to Mr. Dye.
“You’re gonna faaaaaail,” Matthew’s buddy says, chuckling at himself, laughing like his buddy having to repeat the eighth grade is the funniest thing he’s ever heard. Mr. Dye looks at him and shakes his head.
Matthew’s buddy stops and the room is silent, everyone watching Mr. Dye reading the small-print lyrics that Matthew has pointed out in the unfolded cassette tape liner notes.
“What are these asterisks?” Mr. Dye asks.
“What do you mean?” Matthew gets closer, looks over Mr. Dye’s shoulder at where he’s pointing. “Oh. That’s just whistling.”
“Are you sure? There aren’t going to be any surprises, are there?”
Matthew shakes his head. “Just whistling. I promise.”
Matthew puts the tape into the class boombox and rewinds it back to the beginning of side B.
“Let me know when you’re ready,” Mr. Dye says.
“I’m ready.”
Matthew doesn’t look ready. He’s in the middle of the front of the class, where you all stood when performing your songs, but he’s just standing there. His body is slack; he doesn’t look nervous or excited. He looks bored.
Mr. Dye hits play and there’s seconds of silence while you all wait for the song to start. Matthew does that thing where he reaches up and grabs his hair and pulls it back out of his face and then lets go and it falls right back to where it was. Someone on the tape says, “One. Two. One, two, three, four…,” and it’s startling, this break of silence, like you’d forgotten what you were waiting for, why everyone was quiet in the first place. Then an acoustic guitar and Matthew starts swaying, subtly but perfectly, and somehow you realize Matthew had mouthed along to the counting, so casually you hadn’t even noticed at first, but also purposeful and natural, like he’d known exactly how many seconds of silence there was going to be, like he was in fact counting down to the song starting rather than just mimicking.
Some whistling joins the acoustic guitar—the asterisks!—and Matthew purses his lips and closes his eyes and keeps swaying. You think about all that time you spent practicing in front of your mirror, figuring out what to do with your body, your hands. Not quite choreography, but almost. You overenunciated every word, overemoted every lyric, thinking that was the goal, that would be how everyone knew you were doing a good job. Meanwhile, Matthew doesn’t look like he practiced, he kind of doesn’t even look like he’s doing anything at all, but it looks so much… better. There’s almost a minute of whistling and acoustic guitar while Matthew sways and lipsync-whistles, and it’s mesmerizing.
“Shed a tear cause I’m missing you…”
You finally recognize the song as Guns N’ Roses’ “Patience,” and then Matthew’s swaying back and forth makes even more sense than already just looking natural and perfect. It’s that Axl sway. You’ve seen the music videos—“Welcome to the Jungle,” “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” “Paradise City.” You usually flip past them when they’re on, but sometimes you watch when your parents aren’t around. You find them curious but you don’t really get it; you group them together in your mind with all the other hair metal bands—Poison and Ratt and Cinderella and Mötley Crüe. All these bands that have long hair and wear makeup but also their album cover art feature snakes and skulls. You find it all silly, but also confusing, but also dangerous and kind of scary.
Next year, Guns N’ Roses will release Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II on the same day, and they’ll be huge, but then a week later, on the very next record release Tuesday, Nirvana’s Nevermind will come out, a week that will feel like a clear demarcation of before and after. Two entirely different eras.
At the end of that school year, one of your friends will write “Guns N Fuckin’ Roses!” in your yearbook and you’ll be shocked, at both the language and the sentiment. You’d thought they seemed silly and then passé, like you’d been too young for them, and then immediately too old. You’d assumed everyone your age thought the same. You didn’t think anyone you knew listened to them. You’ve never talked with that friend about them. You’ll take a black marker and cover up “Fuckin” so your parents won’t see when you show them your yearbook.
“Said woman take it slow, and it’ll work itself out fine. All we need is just a little patience…”
It doesn’t seem like a Guns N’ Roses song, and it doesn’t seem like a junior high Public Speaking class lipsync assignment performance. It’s a long song—almost a full six minutes of acoustic guitar and whistling and power ballad singing and it feels as long as it is, it feels like it lasts forever, but you’re never bored. You’re hypnotized. You kind of want it to last forever.
And then it ends. Matthew stands there, finally still, no longer embodying the song.
Matthew walks over to Mr. Dye and takes the tape and the empty cassette case and the liner notes with the lyrics and the asterisks and puts them all back together. He walks back to his desk and you turn around a little, trying not to stare or make your admiration and the awe you’re in too obvious. You watch him slump back down into his seat and drop the tape back in his backpack and then the bell rings and class is over and the school day is over and it’s time to go get on your bus and head home.
Aaron Burch is the author of A Kind of In-Between and Year of the Buffalo, among others, and the editor of How to Write a Novel: An Anthology of 20 Craft Essays About Writing, None of Which Ever Mention Writing, and the journals Short Story, Long and HAD. His next book, TACOMA, is forthcoming from Autofocus Books. He’s online lots of places, including here: www.aaronburch.net
Wilts saw the ocean for the first time when he was twenty-six. Thank you, he said. We were on the Oregon coast where a waterfall was coming off the cliffs, landing on the beach and running through a spiderweb of trenches to the shoreline. The sun had set and what was left of the light had turned the waterfall, and everything really, the rocks, the sand, us, the ocean, translucent and purple.
Thank you, thank you, he said, breathing like he wasn’t sure he would ever get to do it again. I half expected to turn around and find him facedown making angel shapes in the sand, like he was talking to God, or the earth or something. I hoped he wasn’t talking to me. I wanted to be riding around on Aprhi’s shoulders in the shallow, taking selfies. I didn’t want to be credited with whatever Wilts was experiencing. I ignored him, but he kept saying it. Thank you. Thank you for bringing me here.
It was always like this with Wilts, we’d be doing something normal, like getting gas or watching an ambulance tend to a car wreck, and Wilts would experience some profound depressive episode. It was nothing to be jealous of, but there I was. I wanted to push him over into the sand, fill his mouth with it.
Man, thank yourself, I said. You pitched on gas too.
The second time Wilts saw the ocean he almost drowned. We were burning driftwood on a campsite in northern California, surrounded by long beach grass. The sand was cold and the air was a thick, salty mist. The moon never rose and so turning away from the fire basically left you blind.
You go swimming? Aphri said, looking over my shoulder to where Wilts stood, soaked and shivering, with some girl in his arms. He kept grabbing her like he was checking she was there. They bashed their foreheads together and panted in unison. It was obvious, whether he saved her, or she saved him, or they’d just tripped into a puddle together, Wilts saw it as a cosmic sign. The universe was always telling Wilts that this was it, he’d arrived, and it always ended with his heart looking like sidewalk vomit.
Who the fuck is that? Aprhi asked.
The fire flashed in the girl’s wide eyes. She pet Wilts’ chest, looked up at his chin.
The three of us had been staring into the fire since before dark.
We hadn’t even noticed he left.
He moved into the girl’s van and the next time Aphri and I saw him was in Hollywood. Though he disappeared early that night too. Aphri borrowed then bled on Wilts’ only nice shirt while in a friendly fist fight over a flowery necklace given to us by a homeless man.
It was me who punched him.
I got into it with Aphri twice that night.
Later, while Wilts was asleep, or wandering all woebegone through the Hollywood streets, Aphri warned me against going behind a bar to smoke weed with a black guy who had neck tattoos, so I called him a racist and he smacked me in the face and told me a story about how he was robbed at knifepoint in Guatemala.
I said, I wish I had a knife, I’d take you for everything you got.
What did I tell you about threatening me with violence? he said. I’ll whoop your ass.
I dumped what was left of my beer in his lap and took off while he was still trying to figure out what happened.
But I was so unaccustomed to being alone, I didn’t know what to do. I ended up in some bushes, just off the Boulevard, with my pants down. I thought I might jerk off, but it was hopeless. The mood wasn’t right. I don’t know what I was thinking. Parts of my life were slipping away so fast it was as if I never lived them. Maybe I was hoping to get more time with them. Maybe I thought I’d get that time while in prison as a sex offender. I don’t know. But that was me there, bare ass in the mulch, hand on my soft dick, scrolling through old photos on my phone of all the people I loved and never told.
Wilts told us he was leaving for good one night in a dry lakebed outside Boulder, Nevada—the Boulder no one talks about, that consists of a laundromat and mechanics shop and not much else, the one I’d confused for Boulder City, Colorado and for years wondered what all the hype was about.
We pulled off the road, into a dry lakebed and drove in circles as fast as we could until we lost interest when we realized that was the extent of it, circles. There were no giant cracks or other worlds for us to fall into. No one was chasing us, no one was watching.
We parked, dug a hole to protect our fire from the wind, ate mushrooms and stared blankly into what was a bleak, album cover sort of horizon.
When the sun set, Wilts, Aphri, and I wandered around the dry lakebed in the dark. Wilts had my guitar with him. He plucked the odd low note and let it ring out. Eventually we laid down.
That’s when Wilts told us he was leaving. He laid on his back and looked up at the sky and spoke to us as if he were telling us he was going to die. Again, that’s how he was. His tone always terminal, his sentences always punctuated with deep sighs of resignation. He spoke of love and chapter endings, new beginnings, and a whole bunch of other shit I was embarrassed to even hear.
I gave him a hug and told him we’d miss him but other than that, I stayed quiet. I didn’t want anything I said to betray the fact that I saw this as a non-event. There was no great sense of beginning or end. Wilts was leaving. I always knew he would. It was clear from day one, when Teo left and Wilts replaced him, that he couldn’t hack it. Not on the road, not with Aphri and me. He was too open and too sticky. Everything we passed became a part of him, yet the crucial pieces of himself, the ones that stand you up in the morning or stop you from tripping backwards into your own head, those he’d just let fall out wherever he happened to be or he’d give them away.
There was never a choice. Not for him. He was always going to leave.
I’m surprised he lasted this long.
He asked me if he could take my guitar and since I wasn’t playing it, and I said, Sure. If you got fifty bucks.
It was a fluke that he’d ended up in the van to begin with. Years ago, I was sitting in the park in Toronto with this girl I’d started seeing even though I was about to leave town, when Wilts called. I hadn’t spoken to him in months. I remember thinking, is this really something I feel like taking on? The shortest phone calls with Wilts could leave me with an overwhelming sense of guilt and a deep pain in my gut. He had the power to both brighten the world, bring it into clarity and at the same time make it feel hopelessly out of reach.
I sighed a sigh I learned from him, one of his deep, what difference does it make, sort of sighs, and answered the phone. Hello?
He was silent for a while, then all he said was, I see you.
He was right there, right behind me in the same park, somehow wearing on his face every possible implication of the time past between our seeing or speaking to one another.
I told him I was leaving and he said, Can I come?
It’s only ever a matter of gas pitch, I said.
But I still wonder, what if I didn’t answer the phone? What if he’d seen me screen his call? Would he still have approached me, still have had me turn around?
Years later, after Wilts had come and gone, I ended up back in Toronto for a stint, more or less squatting in his apartment, while he tended to another broken heart in the safety and comfort of his childhood home.
I’d been to the apartment once before, when his girlfriend still lived there. I remember being amazed by how full of life it was, how full of stuff, creamers and sauces, photos stuck with magnets to the fridge door. They had cactuses and clay cats and little glass bottles lined up along the top of the door trim. They had little things lined up along any little thing that jutted out from the wall, really, anything that resembled a shelf. Coffee cups with sailboats on them, pictures of people at weddings.
But now that she was gone, the apartment was barren. All the life that I’d seen was hers. He’d just been clinging to it, calling it his own.
The next time I heard from him was a few years after that.
I was back in Toronto, waiting for my car at a mechanic shop. He sent me a message saying he had all his stuff and nowhere to go. Not a clue. He said his most recent breakup happened to coincide with his landing on the wrong side of a line drawn in the sand by his mother after his father’s death. He said, I don’t really want to get into it.
He said, But I hear you’re in Toronto. Me too.
I was living with the woman that would become my wife, that with more time, would have our child, and live quietly with me in a life most would call normal—and I guess what I’m really wondering is if that sort of normalcy can find me in time, then why not Wilts?
I knew he would be a terrible house guest, that he’d permeate our entire four-hundred square foot apartment with his incurable melancholy, but I’d already answered the phone.
Where in Toronto? I said, and immediately spotted him across the street from me, a hopeless lump slumped over a rolling suitcase. He still had my guitar.
He stayed on my couch for two weeks. My wife—my then girlfriend—worked at a bar and so we spent most evenings on our own, Wilts and me, getting stoned and showing each other music on YouTube. Between songs he told me of his plan to fly to California and win back the last girl—in an endless string of girls—who’d broken his heart.
I was working on my own at the time, turning people’s tiny, unfinished basements into illegal apartments, with six-foot ceilings and windows you couldn’t fit a basketball through, if any. So, on the day of his flight, I took the morning off. We had breakfast together at a diner and over cheap coffee and eggs Wilts sighed and went through his plan with me one more time. He would post a photo of himself on the coast in a place of romantic significance for him and his ex, then wait until she saw it and came to find him …
Pulling away from the airport that morning, I cried like I’ve never cried for my own life, like it was my mother’s heart he carried around in his chest.
I mourned Wilts’ death years earlier, while still in his company. He didn’t need to tell me he was suicidal. I mean, he did, on several occasions, but he didn’t need to. It was obvious. And it didn’t take much for me to accept it as an inevitability.
I was in no shape to help him.
We lived in different worlds.
His every breath was the result of a war being waged inside him—you could hear a village burning when he opened his mouth—and there I’d be, standing right beside him, feeling nothing, staring at a shoe.
I was his friend.
I answered the phone when he called.
I say all this, but he might not even be dead. Maybe he hasn’t done it yet. Maybe he won’t.
At this point, I wouldn’t know.
It’s been years.
Corey Lof lives on an island in the North Pacific with his wife, son, and many animals. His writing can be found in Hobart, Vlad Mag, Rejection Letters and several other places online. He would like to acknowledge that the first 300 words or so of Wilts was published as a flash by Back Patio, under the same title, in 2022. (@coreylofsatwit)
Sofija Popovska is a poet, translator, and editor-at-large at Asymptote Journal. Her other work can be found in mercuryfirs, Circumference Magazine, Grotto Journal, and Poetry Daily, among others. Her poetry collection, Thaumatropes, which she co-authored with Jonah Howell, was published in 2023 by Newcomer Press.
Rich Boucher resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Rich’s poems have appeared in The Nervous Breakdown, Eighteen Seventy and The Rye Whiskey Review, among others, and he has work forthcoming in The Literary Underground and Cul-de-sac-Of-Blood. He is the author of All Of This Candy Belongs To Me. Interestingly, he can’t stop looking at the sky.
Uchechukwu Onyedikam is a Nigerian Poet/Photographer based in Lagos, Nigeria. BOTN, Pushcart Prize nominee. His poetry has appeared in Amsterdam Quarterly, Brittle Paper, Poetic Africa, Poetry Catalog, Sky Island Journal, Unlikely Stories Mark V, Spillwords, among other publications. He and Christina Chin has co-written and published two poetry chapbooks. He’s a contributor at Mad Swirl.
Last night I broke a rib kicking a balloon. I went flying like Home Alone, Marv and Harry, landed on my side and damn it hurt.
Sometime around sunset the following day I was at Miriam’s 80th birthday party, sat mostly alone at an oblong table, lacking the power to laugh.
The backroom of the restaurant overlooked the turnpike. Half her family stared out an endless window at an endless peel of traffic. The other half took turns briefly holding whoever’s baby.
The sprite-like server asked if I was all right.
In my own way I signaled, Not at all.
He brought more table wine.
I sipped non-dominant, explaining how I’d been wounded in battle the previous midnight, but neglecting to mention my opponent: a rubber bladder full of breath, color of bubble-gum, hovering low along the hardwood floor of the upstairs guest room.
How the house had shook and woken two sisters, two nieces, all the tetra, even the cherry barb.
The server left. The baby echoed all around.
Unable to dance or mingle, I watched Giada loom over an elderly man at table five. I saw how she was disguising her hatred, making what appeared to be pleasant small talk, though he was a known-enemy, a pink-faced gentleman-fuck in a baby blue suit and teal tie. She was nodding. Was smiling cool even.
We’d been married eleven-and-a-quarter years. I’d studied and was fluent in her many gifts.
I, in fact, was one of her gifts.
Another of her gifts was ‘forever-patience.’
Another was ‘resting angel face.’
Then there was her ability to conceal absolute repulsion.
Who could ever guess, during the car ride over, Giada had instructed me to slowly choke the life from this bloviating man.
His exact relation was unclear.
Her father’s first cousin? Second cousin? Third cousin? Forth cousin? No cousin at all? Luca. Former dean of colleges, retired fifteen years but the way he bragged about campus, you’d never know.
Maybe she would snap, fetch up the potted tiger lily centerpiece, and brain him.
A silver mylar balloon struck the ceiling fan but my table mate bopped it away with an unconcerned backhand.
Gold foil on the balloon read “80?!”
And Miriam? Perhaps Miriam was a great aunt?
I had no clue, except I loved Miriam, wanted her cloned two thousand times. A moment before I had seen the bartender letting the baby pull ice cubes from the bucket. But Miriam had objected. Now Miriam was rocking the mystery baby. Giada’s family had conquered this backroom with toasts, and gossip, and four courses of food already. Espresso was brewing. I limped to the remainder cocktail shrimp.
Not two minutes later, someone tapped my shoulder. I turned, expecting to be offered a pig in a blanket—not so—another server bestowed upon me the baby.
“I’m hurt,” I said, indicating my side.
Big Nico saved me, took the young one and spoke in his low baritone, “Who’s your daddy? Who’s your daddy?” Our world was built of questions, posed to those who lacked the ability to speak. “No, really. Who’s your daddy?” He gently shook this baby over his head. “Is there a daddy in the house?” Big Nico asked like someone might say, ‘Is there a doctor in the house,’ just a moment before an emergency tracheotomy.
I studied a poster board full of photos of Miriam as a child in Passaic and Miriam as a teenager in Passaic and then Miriam as an adult after she’d gotten herself waylaid in Salt Lake City.
The photos on the poster board I liked best, twenty or so, captured a gnawed-away time when she was young, in New Jersey, just after WWII, when everything was sepia dew and sepia roses.
One of those sepia photos on that pasteboard was of this building I stood in now, which Giada’s family used to own. For six years they’d owned it, I think.
First the building contained a hat store that also sold shoes. Then it was a shoe store that had some hats. Then they sold no hats. Briefly after the family lost the building, imitation diamonds were sold here. After that, it became a pawn shop. Then there was white flight and nearly it was demolished. Yet here we all were, knee-deep in bruschetta, faux bouquets, and Dean Martin—the place now called Friar Anthony’s.
Two of the other twenty photos were especially striking, bloomed with life, belonged on a gallery wall.
One of these special photos was labeled “1964 M” She was twenty-four and wearing a white dress, stood in front of a plaster wall painted evergreen. She was wearing a halo. Either it was Halloween or Noel.
In the other photo, everything had an orange tint and she was getting a haircut from a much older man with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. The collar on his flannel shirt popped. She had on a tight sweater, navy blue, with gold zigzags.
“That’s me,” Miriam said over my shoulder. I turned and introduced myself. Said ‘Happy Birthday’ again. She reached for my hand. I gave her a shake against my better judgement and nearly cried. She’d come all the way from the other side of America—Utah—to be exact, as if on a farewell tour.
“These two photos are really good.”
She didn’t get me. “A swell camera.”
“Who is the man?”
“My father, Little Nico. He used to hide money all over the house. When he died, my brother Nico—Big Nico—got the house. When he finally sold, well you know, they tore down that house.”
“No I didn’t know.” I was upset to hear this but not surprised. I’d loved that house.
“They tear down everything. They’ve got to keep the bulldozers busy. But with all that junk Nico had put in there, I can understand. We had to clean it out in a hurry just so they could level it.”
“That was some good junk though.”
“Sure it was. We’d be giving away an old dresser and hoping it didn’t have money hidden in it.”
“I lived in that house for a month.”
“When was this?”
“Ten years ago.”
“I loved that house. You lived there? I’d say a hundred people lived there. Open door policy. At one point the mailman lived there.”
“I’m Giada’s husband,” I said. I pointed to one of the photos of the house, trashed to the max. “Is that 2012?”
“Maybe I met you. You were thinner?”
“For sure.”
“What a lightning rod for garbage. And we’d have to worry there is money hidden in everything. That’s how our dad was. There were all these pill bottles. The other day I opened a bottle of nickels.”
“When did he die?”
“1992. No. 1993.”
I glanced down at Miriam’s feet. She had on neon running shoes under, maybe, her fanciest dress.
“1994. June the ninth. Dad played the lottery every day. When he died we filled up the coffin with empty cigarette packs and losing lottery tickets. Everyone saw that and smiled. Buried him with two Marlboros, a red, and a lite, one in each corner of his mouth.”
I gave Giada a wave she didn’t see.
The servers in their purple vests and purple shoes, handsome parts in slicked hair, wheeled out dessert. The sun was at the perfect angle to blind us all.
Some hero shut the curtain. The room dimmed into comfortable shadow. There wasn’t a single light on. I leaned in closer to the poster board, looking again at those two, specifically striking photos. I realized all my pain had gone poof.
I pointed to the angel and the haircut.
“Who snapped these?”
“Oh, that would have had to be our older brother. Luca.” She pointed out the man my wife wanted me to strangle. The man Giada was still talking to, still being civil to.
“He carried that Nikon everywhere.”
“I really love those two photos of you,” I said.
Miriam hugged me and gave my neck a little peck.
I went back to my table and sat down with espresso and tiramisu. Giada had floated over to her mother and father and now, to the baby’s delight, her father sang a novelty folk song urging Christopher Columbus to turn the boat around.
The Marine across from me consumed candy crush. His red-headed daughter poked him in the gut, spoke more about a carnival soon happening on the cliffs. The seat where the mother had been was vacant.
I looked back at Luca sat all alone. I thought again about his photos. He looked so lonely. Where was his camera now? I didn’t want to kill him anymore.
If his sister was 80 and he was the older brother, that would have made him at least 82. I’d met him fifteen years earlier. At a different reunion barbecue.
He was always saying evil things at barbecues. At one legendary bicentennial barbecue, he may have told Giada’s mother she needed plastic surgery.
The barbecue I’d been to, he said something nasty to Giada even, but what?
Oh I couldn’t recall even that.
Can you be irrationally mad at something not worth remembering? Let’s see. I picked up my plate and cup and sat down at the table across from Luca.
“Hello,” he said.
“Luca, you don’t know me.”
He was barely looking. “I know all about you.”
“I just wanted to tell you—”
“Save your breath. I used to believe in radical honesty at your age. It’s a waste.”
He ate some of his cake. I ate some of mine.
“What should I apologize for?” he asked.
I looked across the restaurant, Giada was talking to a woman in a skyblue gown. The missing mother?
“You’re right, forget it. I heard you took those two photos that I like over there. So I forgive you, as an artist.”
He smiled. “Good. You’ve seen the light. And so have I. Isn’t that photo of Miriam and my father so funny? Who ever saw a father cut his daughter’s hair? But that’s the kind of man he was. He would take apart the TV set just to see how it worked and he would put it back together. No formal training. No education. But he’d wear a tie, hovering over the open hood of a car, changing spark plugs, pulling on wires. He’d guess and he’d be right. Me, and you, we’d be hopeless.”
“Your father had innate talent.”
“When the priest would drop by he would be lying on the couch reading the paper and Miriam would let him in the house but Dad wouldn’t even get up. He didn’t make a big deal of ceremony and he thought a lot of people were terrible kissasses. Anyway, I was a nerd. I had a camera. That priest gave it to me. I took lots of photos.”
The restaurant was louder now. The drunks had had their rocket fuel. Voices swelled. Faces grew younger. And there was Miriam sat under her throne of balloons, shoulder-to-shoulder with Nico. He was red-faced and blockheaded, and whispering something that doubled Miriam over in laughter. I guessed, at this pace, she’d live another eighty years.
One thing I remembered about Nico was that he put newspaper down and let his three-year-old-totally-healthy dog, shit in his house. Never once did I see or hear him yell at that dog. Though there was a doggie door, the dog preferred to shit in the house. And in the mornings before work, I’d step out of that dog-shit-reeking house, to my car and see Nico had hundreds of pounds of bulk garbage tied with twine to the roof of his Ford Taurus, which he’d gathered in the dark. So I’d untie it all and put it there amongst all his other nightly winnings. Every year he used to have a yard sale in the summer and sell the town back its trash.
But as you already know, the house is gone, and so is the dog, not to mention, nearly everything else.
I heard a balloon pop under the table.
I bent down in terrible agony.
The baby was crying but nobody else noticed. He’d curled up in a little ball, his mouth full of silver mylar.
I reached out my good arm but the baby scurried away. Now was sucking his thumb amid all this clatter and chatter. He pulled his thumb out and the string of the popped balloon was wrapped around his thumb.
The baby drooled loose the rest of the choking hazard and smiled.
“Whose kid is this under the table?”
Up above, Luca was summarizing an important commencement speech he’d heard given every Spring for the entirety of his adult life.
I called for help again.
Nobody seemed to hear.
I held out my plate. The baby crawled over and began to scoop handfuls of cake into his brand new mouth.
Bud Smith is the author of the novel, Teenager, among others. He lives in Jersey City.
I went on a gameshow but didn’t win. Instead, spectacularly lost. They said I sucked. That I should never have been born. They’re probably right. I went home and found my wife having sex with the gameshow host. Somehow, she had beat me home. The gameshow host you’ll remember as the beautiful model of the late 90s, Brooke Teal. This makes sense, I thought. My wife said leave. Brooke Teal laughed. I closed the door behind me, carrying with me my old-fashioned lamp handed down from my Polish grandfather. It’s of a boozy-sad hobo who looks suspiciously like Charlie Chaplin. Above him, where the lamp’s bulb burns dim, it says, “GENIUS AT WORK.”
To Nobody
I was dead for five hundred years and came back at the wrong possible time. My postman came through the yard, with a letter which, when opened in private, told me I had missed everything. “Missed what?” I said out loud, to nobody. Everybody I had known had long since died. My beloved dog, Hamstring; my mother who knew every knot in the book; my grandfather—but he had been dead since before I was born. Then one day I was shaken from the seduction of an afternoon nap by a phone call. “Hello, but there’s been a big mistake,” said the voice on the other end. “Mistake? What mistake?” I said. But then I could hear the neighbors outside, doing their marches in the yard. They were practicing for a reckoning. I couldn’t relate it to anything. There was no precedent. The only thing I remember from my previous life is what Debussy said. He said to the singers in his opera, “First of all, ladies and gentlemen, you must forget that you are singers.”
Class Clown At Our Lady Of Perpetual Sorrow
I was unfairly punished many times as a student at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow.
It was usually because I was pranking someone. Usually because I was pranking Old Garf. Garf was the runt of his prestigious, sprawling family. Anchored by everything you could be anchored by at twelve years old. Horrible youth for Poor Old Garf.
I’d call him up numerous times, pretending to be a doctor or police officer and having to inform him of his parents’ demise, usually in some ill-fated excursion or random chance encounter of morbid violence. I was excellent at making them up! My imagination was like a knife. Everything around me, the butter.
And poor Old Garf, every time, on the other end of the phone, sobbing like an alley cat with nobody to push away. Old Garf, always believing me.
So, you see what I mean? Unfairly punished. Unjustly! Garf believing the same story (or variation of the story). Imbecilic! Dunce! Old Garf… I can’t stay mad at him. After all these years… You’ve heard about him no doubt, very recently, in the news. Having achieved the highest status in some acronymed company that has great influence over public policy.
Shane Kowalski lives in Pennsylvania, where he teaches creative writing at Ursinus College. He’s the author of Small Moods (Future Tense Books).
On Friday night, I drove out to the Wickens family farm to listen to my wife’s hardcore band play a show inside the barn at the edge of the woods. The barn stood sheathed in a thick crust of shimmering obsidian paint. A common nighthawk wearing a tiny leather jacket perched on a post just outside the door. It was April. I had quit my job at Wal-Mart over a year ago. My wife said she was fine with this, but I wasn’t sure. She had never been very good at expressing her true emotions.
Inside, the barn was empty of animals and people and fences and hay. A carpet of soft dirt covered the cool floor. My wife slammed on her drum set in a rapturous thrall. The sound of her drumming was deafening. The concussive force of her kick drum rammed into my ribs like a right hook. Runnels of gleaming sweat forked down my wife’s luxurious neck. She wore nothing but the expensive purple lingerie I had purchased for her thirty-sixth birthday last month. Stepping into her line of sight, I held up my hand and waved to her in adoration. She stared at my shins for thirty-one seconds. She did not smile at me or acknowledge my presence. She played her 9/8 drum patterns and stared at the lead singer’s ass for the next hour. So I peeled off my clothes and lay on my back in the nude. I grabbed fistfuls of loose dirt and smeared brown streaks of mud across my thighs. I stared at the mossy cobwebs clinging to the corners of the gambrel roof. I pushed my pinkies into my ears until forks of sticky blood began to flow.
Steve Gergley is the author of four books. His most recent novel, Episode 3328: Ian Sharp, was published in January of 2025 by Translucent Eyes Press. His short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Wigleaf, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Maudlin House, Passages North, Always Crashing, and others. He tweets @GergleySteve. His fiction can be found at: https://stevegergleyauthor.wordpress.com/. In addition to his own writing, he is also the editor of scaffold literary magazine.
In the end there was nothing worth staying for. I left LA on bad terms. I’d burnt bridges, accrued social debts, and alienated myself from whoever tried to comfort me whilst grieving. I was a drunken arsonist, scorning those once dear to me when six feet deep in liquor. I had some girls for comfort. None of them knew about each other, until they did. I had some friends, until I told them to fuck off. All this accumulated into LA becoming one big hell after Laruen died.
I lived in a small apartment. It was in the old spanish style and decorated with movie posters from a lost Hollywood. I moved there after college to be a screenwriter. I did that. Or, I tried that. I wrote a screenplay about an all female death metal band struggling to make a decision about whether to sell out or not when offered a record deal that mandated them a makeover. Lauren was cast as the lead singer.
The movie did okay. It led to other conversations about other scripts that I’d promised to make. Scripts I tried to write and failed to finish. Meanwhile, Lauren auditioned for overdubbed car commercials and background gigs for b-rate reality shows. She was cast as ASIAN WOMAN ON CELL PHONE 1. Implying there was another Asian woman talking on a cell phone in the background as some spray-tanned wop monologues about his troubled dating life.
It was at an afterparty for the show where Lauren’s heart stopped. Bad blow. A Grand Mal seizure. There are videos readily accessible on behalf of the audience’s presumption she was faking it for attention. Apparently there were a handful of celebrities at the party. A-grades like Bradley Cooper who were featured briefly on the show making sardonic commentary upon the stars’ attempts to find love in an admittedly disembodied LA. I have only watched one once. That was more than enough. And so came the months of grief, and thus passed my life as I’d known it. No longer did I think about movies, writing, art.
I sold off most of my possessions. I booked a plane ticket to New York without plans of where to go upon arrival. I knew nothing of how I’d live. All I knew was I wanted out.
This brings me to now, the morning of my move. In LAX with a backpack filled with nearly meaningless memorabilia of my 20’s, and a suitcase filled with clothes, unseasonably light, considering my wintery destination.
In front of me there’s a family of four arguing about who’s gonna sit in the aisle seats, who’s gonna be in the middle, who’s gonna be the ‘pariah’ left to share a coupled row with a stranger. The kids argue with severity. The father looks indifferent, the mother too. The son and daughter force their way to agreement that they will both sit in the aisle seats. I feel vaguely relieved that at least some people get what they want in this world. Or at least know where they belong.
For a moment I have direction. The tall security guard rushes me forward in line and tells me to have my passport ready. I pull it from my pocket, hold it in my hand as I move up. My ticket is scanned and I file forward in a bureaucratic and soulless fashion.
On the plane I sit alone. Normally I would be happy about this, but today it fills me with a particular dread. The prospect of leg room does not particularly suffice for the comfort another soul could bring right now
I consider the superficiality of my being. I have nothing: no great work to show for my thirty odd years on earth. No deep connection with family. No friends. No depth. I have managed to live lightly. Skimming seconds until they turn to days. I watch LA grow distant below me. The morning sun is sepia. The interiority of my plane is gray.
I unlock my phone to put on music. The plane drops violently in altitude. A baby starts crying. I drop my phone on the ground and it slides to the row behind me. The drop feels like getting punched in the gut. I stare down at my shoes as our bird takes its thrashing. I’m wearing black monk straps. I suddenly realize how unfashionable, ugly, and untimely my choice in footwear is.The plane shakes. I feel a tap on my shoulder, the man in row behind me speaks in a calm, high voice, says “this yours?” and hands me my phone.
The plane begins to drop in steps as if drunkenly stumbling down a flight of stairs. I attempt prayer. I yearn for the grace of stable religiosity. My bladder threatens to scream and my stomach hums baritone. I yelp at the sound of a huge tin trash can getting kicked. A dip in elevation. A flicker in light. A lack of control. I feel the closing of an imminent future. My bladder folds. Passengers scream. The overhead compartments throw up Rimowa. Film photos of me on a seesaw. The feeling of saltwater in my eyes. The smell of spring rain. The innocent nausea of a merry-go-round. The first memory of a hand tucked in mine. The blackness of sleep.
Everything grew alright by seconds spent away from daylight. It was silent, not like sleep but rather the soft erosion of sense following shock. It was the feeling of being weightlessly held. A gentle suggestion of guided continuance. Something like hope.
“Are you alright?” the man says to me as I come to, opening my eyes and staring at his face. It’s pale. Bearded thickly. He has a long, thin nose, and rimless glasses. Two long curls spurting out of his temples.
“I think I might be dead,” I say to him. He is standing in the aisle, leaning in to eye level. He smells of a faint menthol.
“My boy, you only fainted, you are alive and well.” His w possesses a slight v. “vwell,” he says. I stare into the faint blue of his eyes, and ask as a child appeals to anything above him “will you sit next to me . . . I am scared . . . I am scared I am going to die . . .I am scared I am going to die and I have nothing.”
He laughs, I scooch over and he slides into the seat beside me. Takes my hand and looks me in the eye. “You are wrong, you have everything. You have me. You have your hands, you have your eyes, your ears, your nose and your hair. Tell me—do you believe in God?”
“I don’t know.” I say grabbing his hand back. “I don’t ever think about it.”
He looks deeper. “Wvell, do you think about yourself?”
“Yes. Almost exclusively.”
“Well then you think about God.It’s banal. Everyone says it. But In Judaism, God is Ein Sof. Infinite. Meaning you, that that, is you too. Meaning God makes up all that surrounds us— given the belief that God is the origin of all existence. To really think about anything, to not only think about God, but to know him as well as man can, to be close to him.”
“I have no clue what that means. I’m not smart anymore. And I think I pissed my pants.”
“Tzimtzum. The contraction of God’s infinite light to allow the creation of the universe. It left space for God to be everywhere. The withdrawal of God leaves space for your mind. For all of us to be, and to be singular. Thus we take his place as the embodied gods of everything around us.”
“Everything around us?”
He smiles big “Everything. Everything like the clouds. Everything like grass. Everything like ants. God went far away to somewhere we can’t understand to allow everything to be its own divinity.”
“I have God too?”
“You couldn’t not have God if you tried.”
“I’ve tried.”
The Flight mellows. The stewardess serves drinks. We both take gin. I tell him my mother was Jewish. He says he could tell. I ask how and he says it’s something you just come to know. I take another Gin and fall asleep on Levi’s shoulder. In my dream I wear converse and a big felt hat. I’m dancing with men in long black coats singing in a language I don’t know. I have children. They aren’t there but I know I have them. A wife too. Her face is a feeling I have in my heart and not an image.
I awake upon dissension, carrying the dream like a lungful of breath. Heart pounding. Perspiring, right there beside Levi. Our declination is smooth, the bright city below draws close like clouds. Wind. Inside me Levi claims is everything: Lauren is alive. My friends are a part of it too, my family, my everything.
As the plane touches down, people begin to cheer. I feel second-hand embarrassment. I am them too. They are me. I follow Levi down the aisle. Out of the plane and into the airport. JFK is busy. I begin to lose him in the crowd. I follow the tail of his greatcoat through peripheral glances split between traveling bodies. I stay on him, into baggage claim, where he is received by a group of men dressed just like him. They take him warmly.
I think of yelling his name. And then I don’t. I watch him exit the building. He minimizes into a black fleck as he draws deeper into the mouthlike opening of the short term parking lot. I know he doesn’t look back because what he wanted has already happened. I want what he wants. To bring me close to something real. Something we will continue to share foreverlong. This empty space God once breathed life into, the freedom of blank paper. White walls, Fluorescent light. Freedom to be the same but entirely different.
A young woman comes up to me and asks “do you know which carousell has the bags from LAX?”
“I don’t.” And as I say that, they start to fall from the shoot onto the black conveyor belt.
“It’s alright.” she says, “I see it, it’s just starting to begin.”
And as I watch the bags circle around, I think to myself, it’s just starting to begin.
Maxfield Francis Goldman is a 22-year-old author from Upstate New York.
Bill Whitten is a husband and father of two wonderful boys in St Louis where he spends 15 minutes at a time recording entire albums all by himself. He also finds the time to write and send it to us to publish. Go find his music and buy it; from St Johnny to Grand Mal to William Carlos Whitten. He also makes youtube videos. An amazing talent. Black Mystic Speed by WIlliam Carlos Whitten
I first saw the name Max Hipp in 2019 when I read his story THE LEAST FUCKED UP PEOPLE in Smokelong Quarterly. I enjoyed it very much so I was pleased to cross paths with him in a Bud Smith writing workshop during the winter of 2020-21. This was right around the time the first COVID vaccines were rolling out to the most vulnerable and politicians. Every Wednesday night I’d go down to my wood-paneled basement, tap a link, and stare at a panel of eight tired faces that would keep me somewhat sane for three hours.
AT: Do you remember in Bud’s workshop, how we’d have to write those little letters at the end of each person’s piece to sum up our thoughts? I was one of three to be workshopped that first week. I’d sent everyone two or three chapters of a children’s detective novel. When I read through the letters afterward, most were complementary and mentioned how the story reminded them of stuff they read as kids. But when I got to your feedback, you hadn’t written anything. I was like, WTF? Does Max not understand the rules? Did he hate my shit so much he didn’t think it was worth a note? Was his opinion so brutal he didn’t have the heart to tell me? And what the hell kind of pseudonym is Max Hipp, anyway? Fine, whatever. I could take it. Besides, it was your turn to sub the following week. Maybe I wouldn’t feel the urge to write you a note either. I’m no clairvoyant, I can’t see the future. But that didn’t happen. When I received your offering and opened the doc I saw the title CLIFF BURTON RULES and thought, Oh shit. Growing up, Cliff era Metallica was my favorite. Not only did you use my favorite musician in a story, but the story itself spoke to my upbringing and the upbringing of many kids who got into thrash metal in the ‘80s. You made me a solid fan of your work with that story, and I’m really happy to see it in a published collection.
MH: First off, let me apologize for being such a thoughtless jerk about your chapters! You’re right that I literally didn’t understand the rules in that workshop, or knew there were rules. I’ve noticed that if someone gives me directions on how to do something, anything, I will immediately misunderstand those directions. Also those chapters were flawless and great and I didn’t have anything to add and was thinking I could praise your flawless chapters “in person” over Zoom with my face and ridiculous pseudonym and all.
With that story, I wanted to get the feel of what The Satanic Panic in the 1980s (and early ‘90s in Mississippi; southern lag time) felt like, and how dangerous and wild and fun Metallica seemed back before they became a corporation. In the story, it’s 1994 and Sammy, the main character who’s born too late, wants to start his own band and be like Metallica. He feels like those guys are his brothers, which was common back then, when all you knew about a thrash band came from magazines and liner notes. They were the most beloved metal band on Earth because their tapes were traded one dubbed cassette at a time, through snail mail and across the seas to every continent. They took over the world that way. Anybody who saw them live in the 1980s on any of those stadium tours knew they were special, even peers like Slayer and Anthrax. A lot of that specialness was Cliff Burton. I’m glad some of that was hitting for you. It’s one of my favorites in the collection.
How were you introduced to ‘80s thrash metal and what was the first band/album you remember getting into?
It was Metallica. I hadn’t heard anything by them until around 1989 when I got a dubbed copy of …And Justice for All from my cousin. I’d never heard anything like it. I was still stuck in the literal with lyrics, so when Hetfield sang “See our mother put to death,” I was envisioning my own mother, which scared me. I didn’t have cool older brothers to show me punk rock or anything edgy and I was pretty isolated other than whatever I gleaned from MTV and middle school. Metallica famously didn’t make videos until the “One” video, but I didn’t see it until we rented it from the video store. After that, the floodgates opened. I realized the people I knew who wore those black t-shirts already listened to this band religiously, and pretty soon all the Testament and Megadeth patches on all the denim jackets made sense.
I was similarly affected by the “See our mother put to death” lyric. Justice is a heavy album, even by comparison to the previous three. Of course, everyone mentions the lack of bass on that album, the first without Cliff. Do you have any particular feelings regarding the bass being nearly inaudible in the mix?
I used to have more feelings about the lack of bass. Clearly, the sound of the record didn’t hurt Metallica whatsoever. They just got bigger. As someone who actually listens for bass guitar, though, it makes the album not hold up as well for me, but the sound of that album, that freeze-dried tightness, changed the way thrash sounded for the next few years.
I’m okay with the low bass on Justice now. I think of its absence as a sort of tribute to Cliff. But if I was Newsted I’d be fucking pissed. Since Justice was your first Metallica album, what was your introduction to Cliff Burton?
Probably listening to Ride the Lightning on the school bus with friends. And then watching Cliff ‘Em All on the VCR.
I don’t know if you’re aware your book came out forty-one years to the day of Dave Mustaine’s final gig with Metallica on April 9, 1983. Ultimately, I think the personnel change was positive because we got Megadeth as a result, and an entertaining decades-long rivalry. As a guitar player yourself, do you have a preference between Dave and his replacement, Kirk Hammet? And how do you feel about wah pedals?
Ha! I had no idea when Mustaine’s last gig with them was, but I’m glad it was the book’s pub date. I like both of those guitar players. To me, choosing one would be like preferring a Phillips-head screwdriver to a flathead–depends on what you need it for. I like wah pedals for weird noise and tone purposes. It’s hard to make that effect sound new, or make it serve the song, so I have a lot of respect for folks who don’t just wacka-wacka with it. Sometimes you just have to put the wah away, step away from the wah.
You mentioned The Satanic Panic of the ‘80s. For me, growing up in the northeast, listening to metal and adopting the image drew some stares and occasional comments about devil worship. What was it like in Mississippi during that time? In my mind, your area is a lot more conservative, religious, and generally up in everyone else’s business. You’re not far from Arkansas where, in 1994 (the same year CLIFF BURTON RULES takes place) the West Memphis Three were convicted of murdering three little kids in a satanic ritual, the only evidence against them being the heavy metal they listened to.
Yes, the West Memphis Three stuff happened about an hour-and-a-half from me. My friends and I could’ve been those three metal kids who were wrongly convicted, the victims of satanic panic mixed with shoddy police work. Down here, wearing the metal shirts and growing out your hair made people scared of you, a kind of protection against bullying. It also made you a target for police, though, since they assumed you had drugs.
Did you have drugs?
Me? No sir, officer.
Have you watched season 4 of Stranger Things? The Satanic Panic played a big part in the plot (I read that the character of Eddie Munson was based on Damien Echols of the WM3), not only with metal but Dungeons & Dragons, which has also made its way into your stories. Did you play a lot of D&D as a kid?
Yes, I’ve seen all the Stranger Things episodes. I didn’t know anyone that played D&D until I was fifteen or so. When I was young, I thought I was too cool for it, like D&D players were nerds and I wasn’t, but I got into it during the 2020-21 leg of the COVID pandemic, playing on Zoom with old friends. We played every week, sometimes twice a week, for over a year.
Have you ever played a record backwards?
As much as I’ve always wanted to, no. Is there still time? Any particular ones I should try first?
It’s never too late to get possessed by the devil.
What was the first guitar and amp you owned? What do you use now?
The guitar and amp were both Peaveys, made in Mississippi. Now I’ve got a Fender Vibrolux as a main amp, and too many guitars. But I use them all, so it’s not an addiction, right?
Do you remember the first metal riff you learned?
It was probably “Seek and Destroy.”
Do you recall the name of your first band?
High Voltage. We liked AC/DC but couldn’t figure out a way to sound like them. We would write songs and record them live on a jambox, with whoever was singing standing close to the built-in mic so we could hear the lyrics.
Did you have a favorite band t-shirt growing up?
I always loved those Pushead Metallica shirts but sadly never owned one. My mom and stepdad wouldn’t have let me wear something like that and would’ve freaked out, exactly why I wanted one.
So your mom and stepdad weren’t supportive of your evil musical tastes. Did they forbid you from going to concerts or buying certain albums? Did they send you to a de-metaling program like in The Decline of Western Civilization II: The Metal Years? Have you seen that doc?
I definitely rented that movie from the video store back in the day. No one put me through a de-metaling program, but those scams were widely available where I lived. And talking about childhood, let me put it this way: it was clear that things would go more smoothly if I listened to the heavier cassette tapes only on my Walkman.
Seeing as you avoided t-shirts, would I be correct to assume you didn’t hang posters of metal bands in your room? What did teenage Max’s room look like?
Correct. Posters and thumbtacks weren’t allowed. My room looked like the waiting room for a doctor’s office.
What was your first concert?
Metallica – June 16, 1992 at the Mississippi Coliseum in Jackson, MS. We were all fifteen. We had brainwashed ourselves for years leading up to that moment, with Cliff ‘Em All and the first four albums, so there was no way for the show to disappoint us. But I didn’t love the Black Album. They opened with “Enter Sandman,” their huge hit, and got it out of the way, which seemed like a middle finger to the new fans, the bandwagoners, and a nod to us real fans. It said to them, “Okay, you lames can leave now.” I’m pretty sure they play that one later in the set these days.
I saw them on that tour as well. I think they opened with “Creeping Death” that night, but I’m not 100% sure. I’ve spent thirty-plus years trying to ignore “Sandman.” It really is a most awful song, by any standard. They’ve certainly managed to top its horribleness with each new release, but nothing else has become so virulent. “Sandman” has become a “Smoke on the Water” type song. It’s decent fodder only if you’re just starting to learn guitar.
Not including the first four, what was the last Metallica album you listened to, or tried to? If any. And if so, were there any tracks you thought were okay enough?
I listened to the one that had “Hardwired” on it. That song was decent because it was three minutes long. By my count, that album had four decent songs on it, but I remember most of them were too long. Their ’80s songs were long too but never felt like it, you know?
Being a Cliff fan, what are your thoughts on Robert Trujillo occupying his spot for the last twenty years? Is he a good fit? Does it even matter at this point?
It all matters! I always think of him replacing Newsted not Cliff, but I can see how people might not accept him playing Cliff’s songs the same way they probably didn’t accept Newsted. Trujillo was on those thrashy Suicidal Tendencies albums and I discovered them when I saw the “You Can’t Bring Me Down” video on Headbanger’s Ball. I watched him play live with Ozzy’s band at an Ozzfest in 1998 (with Mike Bordin from Faith No More on drums!) and loved it. In Some Kind of Monster, when they’re auditioning bass players, he’s the best one by far. I’m sure he’ll be ecstatic to know that, yes, I accept him.
I met Trujillo a long time ago. One of my bands was recording at a studio in California and on the second or third day the engineer goes, “You guys know Rob Trujillo?” Of course I’m like, Fuck yeah, I know who he is, and the engineer all nonchalantly tells me he’s recording some solo stuff in the next room. So I kept sticking my head out into the hall and eventually got to talk with him a bit and hear what he was doing. I want to say it was Mass Mental stuff but I’m not sure. I think he was also still playing for Ozzy at that point. About a year later he joined Metallica. I’m not leading into a question with this. Actually, yes, I am. While on the subject of Rob, are you aware he and Mike Bordin (Faith No More) re-recorded bass and drum tracks on the first two Ozzy albums? I think it was because Sharon Osbourne no longer wanted to pay royalties to Bob Daisley, who I believe wrote many of those songs with Randy Rhodes and Lee Kerslake. Rob and Mike have stated they were not aware of what the session was for until they arrived, and that since they were employed by Sharon and Ozzy they did what they were told. How do you feel about musicians doing that sort of thing?
That’s a cool Trujillo story–I’ve never met any metal guys. I’m aware of the shenanigans with the Randy Rhodes records. I’ve got no moral objection to it, I guess, though I’d rather hear the originals. I hope they’ve come to their senses and restored them back to the first version by now.
How old were you when you heard about Ozzy biting the head off of a bat during a concert in 1982? What was your take on it at the time?
My sister probably told me about that when he was touring in the 1980s. To me, this made him clearly evil, somebody who struck fear and awe and was outside of the norm. I think it’s hard to express how news of that event (dove or bat) spread throughout popular culture, via word of mouth, for years. Even if it wasn’t true, everybody spread the legend because it was a good story.
What was the last metal concert you went to? Not including one you played.
Last metal concert was Mr. Bungle at the Tabernacle in Atlanta in May 2024. This is wildly appropriate for our interview because Dave Lombardo (Slayer) was playing drums and Scott Ian (Anthrax) was playing second guitar for them.
I did catch wind of that lineup on social media. Lombardo was in Dead Cross with Mike Patton, so I wasn’t as surprised to see him as I was Ian. Good show? Did they throw in any Slayer or Anthrax covers?
They played the intro to “Hell Awaits” and reworked an S.O.D. song into “Speak Spanish or Die.” They also covered some pop hits like “I’m Not in Love,” “True,” and “Hopelessly Devoted to You” to break up the fast and heavy onslaught. Mike Patton can sing anything.
Do you like Faith No More? They’re a band Metallica introduced me to, simply because Hetfield wore one of their t-shirts in some pics. It wasn’t until later that I learned Jim Martin and Cliff Burton had been in EZ-Street together.
Never heard EZ-Street, but I think I remember that either Kirk Hammet or Les Claypool, or both, went to high school with Jim Martin (I refuse to google this). I definitely like the Jim Martin Faith No More albums. Nobody sounds like that guy, the way he layers the guitar parts until it sounds enormous. That’s a heavy picking hand downstroking the crap out of everything, and he really shines on The Real Thing. “Woodpecker from Mars” and “Zombie Eaters” and “Surprise! You’re Dead!” I mean, c’mon.
I know Kirk asked Les to audition for Metallica when Cliff died. It’s hard to imagine that lineup now, but he might have been a good fit considering his work with Blind Illusion. I believe Hetfield thought he was too weird.
It’s hard to imagine him taking a backseat in another band. He strikes me as a guy with a lot of musical ideas and opinions that would probably go unheard in twenty-first century Metallica.
Care to give us a Top 10 list of metal bands? Or metal albums, since a lot of those bands have sucked for decades?
This list is somewhat arbitrary and will probably change tomorrow, but if I were to pick ten favorite metal albums today:
Metallica – Ride the Lightning, Motörhead – Overkill, Judas Priest – Sad Wings of Destiny, Deep Purple – In Rock, Iron Maiden – Killers, Melvins – Bullhead, Slayer – Reign in Blood, dead horse – Peaceful Death and Pretty Flowers, Saint Vitus – Saint Vitus, Black Sabbath – Black Sabbath.
The newest album on this list is from 1991. Wow. But I think that has more to do with the way metal albums are recorded today, everything too upfront in the mix.
I wouldn’t have expected to see Bullhead on a list of favorite metal albums, but it makes sense. I think my brain automatically places Melvins in the “alternative” category, which is unfortunate, in a way. This makes me think of something Sammy says in CLIFF BURTON RULES, about Nirvana, or, more specifically, Cobain–that he’s lame. Is that purely for the story, or does Sammy’s opinion reflect your personal feelings?
Melvins are weird and punk rock but also metal, I’d say. They have so many albums (they’ve been going for forty years now) that my brain only vaguely associates them with Cobain or “grunge” or “alternative” anymore. I actually like Nirvana. Sammy is a zealot who craves metal purity. You might say he’s a metal supremacist.
But I thought Nirvana was great when they came out. They exploded in the media about the same time Metallica did and suddenly you had all these aggressive guitar sounds on MTV and the radio. Because Cobain name-dropped a bunch of punk and noise bands in his interviews, I was able to find a bunch of bands I still love. He did a lot of good for the musicians who shaped him.
Are there any bands from that “alternative” era you didn’t like, and have since found an appreciation for?
Melvins, Mudhoney, and Screaming Trees sound even better to me now than they did back then. They’re much more interesting than some of the more popular bands of the era.
You mention Maiden’s Killers in your Top 10. Does that mean you prefer Paul Di’Anno’s vocals to Bruce Dickenson’s?
Even though Di’Anno died just before I could answer this question, I prefer Bruce. I think I like the weird, jerky arrangements on the early Iron Maiden records.
Have you heard the song “Bruce, Eddie and Paul” by NOFX?
I’ve never heard the song. I’m not generally a fan of NOFX, but I’m glad they like Iron Maiden.
Do you care to rank the “Big 4”: Metallica, Slayer, Anthrax, and Megadeth? Is there a band you would personally swap out for another?
1. Slayer, 2. Metallica, 3. Anthrax, 4. Megadeth. No, I’ll keep the Big Four like they are. Slayer is the only one that’s made a listenable album in the last ten years, which is why I rank them first even though they’re officially retired now.
I think Slayer is back. I saw something on social media about it. That the reunion was a big secret. Kerry King even kept it from his new band. Which Slayer album are you referring to?
Repentless is the Slayer album I’m talking about, the only one they’ve put out since Jeff Henneman died. It has some of his last riffs on it, so they say. Gary Holt is on that album too, so that’s very cool.
Speaking of Kerry King, his new album is fast and aggressive in a different way than Slayer. Some of the songs feel closer to punk/hardcore. I’ve only listened once, but I liked it.
When we talk about Metallica’s best albums we refer to them as the “first four” but I just remembered how much I love The $5.98 E.P. – Garage Days Re-Revisited. I love those covers. That album introduced me to some classic bands I was unaware of until then. Idk if there’s a question here. I guess I’m wondering how that album ranks with you.
It ranks pretty high with me too. Metallica is the reason I knew anything about those bands and I loved those songs as much as I loved the ’80s Metallica songs. They made those songs their own, didn’t just try to make a faithful version, that’s why it’s so great. I bet that E.P. helped Killing Joke, Diamond Head, The Misfits, Holocaust, and Budgie stay afloat. They’re another band who helped out the artists they drew from.
How did you feel about softer metal bands like Poison, Mötley Crüe, and Ratt? I recall something someone from Slayer said, maybe Kerry King (or maybe someone from Exodus), about how, back in the day, they’d make fun of anyone they saw wearing a Ratt shirt but secretly geeked out over Warren DiMartini’s guitar skills.
I’m not going to pretend I was cool in any way about music. Nobody’s older brother lent me his cool record collection and my only way to find out about these things in the ’80s was the radio and MTV, and they seemed completely taken over by hair metal. When I was a kid, I loved those bands. Mötley Crüe’s “Looks That Kill” video on MTV really sucked me in. Mick Mars’ guitar tone got me, and how they looked like extras from Road Warrior, a movie I loved. And of course the flaming pentagram.
Crüe is just one of a few metal bands I have seen criticized for using pre-recorded tracks during concerts in recent years. Do you have feelings on that practice in metal?
It’s pretty lame, but I’m not too worked up about it.
What metal bands could you never get into?
I could never get into Ghost or Slipknot. Other metal people seem to love them.
I’m with you on Ghost and Slipknot. Mastodon is the only “new” metal band that comes to mind that I’ve enjoyed in my old age. But I can only take so much.
Yes! It feels like I’ve reached capacity for heavy bands I can care about. Or maybe to put it another way, I’ll never love the new bands like I loved the ones I was listening to when I was fifteen, meaning I won’t sit with a new band’s lyric sheet and listen on headphones and memorize things. I don’t know if giving bands that kind of attention is a universal experience, or what.
Are you aware of all the different products ‘80s thrash bands have been putting their names on these days? Hot sauce, beer, and coffee seem to be favorites. Charlie Benante and Dave Ellefson had their own brand of coffee. Chuck Billy sells weed or weed paraphernalia. Even Metallica lent their name to BLACKENED whiskey, which seemed a little odd considering Hetfield’s well-documented alcoholism.
I missed all that. The merch table must look like a CVS.
What are you listening to these days? What’s currently in your Spotify mix, CD player or whatever you use? And how do you prefer listening to music? Do you miss the days of physical copies and album artwork?
Oh man, my listening habits are scattershot. Most of the new things I’ve been listening to I’ve bought from bands I’ve seen live recently, like Bark, Chat Pile, Hartle Road, The Drip Edges, Future Fix, The Guiding Light, MSSV. Then there’s the old stuff that never gets old for me. I’ve got too many LPs, CDs, and cassettes. I create playlists on Spotify and then don’t listen to them, like the act of creating playlists soothes me somehow.
I think you talked about this in another interview, but do you care to tell what you’re doing musically now? I know you’ve got several projects going. I love the E-Meters, by the way.
Thanks for digging E-meters. We’re recording a second album right now, slowly, and we’ve got basic drum tracks and are adding things. Tyler Keith & The Apostles released an album two years ago that I’m still proud of. I play guitar with friends pretty regularly. At this point, playing music feels like a spiritual practice. There’s no end goal for it–just making the thing. If you don’t make things, nothing new happens.
Did you recently tour with Tyler, or have a string of shows? How did you end up playing with him?
Not super recent. We did a string of midwestern dates in summer of ’23, and we regularly play Memphis. My band opened for his band back in 2010. I said, “I want to sit in on a song with you guys.” He said, “Why don’t you just sit in on the whole set?” and I’ve been sitting in on the whole set ever since. He’s a great friend and also a fine writer who has a novel out on the same “book label” as my story collection. He’s written more great rock and roll songs than anyone I know.
Who are your major influences when it comes to playing guitar? Are there any current players you’re into?
I wish I could say the influences were really obscure and cool, but they’re the most basic ones. Jimi Hendrix, Tony Iommi, Angus Young. They’re the foundation and they still sound great to me. Then, of course, Hetfield. Some other layers I’ve added would include Link Wray, Neil Young, Lou Reed, Greg Ginn, Bob Mould, Greg Sage, Robert Quine, Fast Eddie Clarke, Wayne Kramer, and Ron Asheton. This may sound weird, but I don’t really care about guitar players apart from how they serve the songs. If the songs are crappy, not even the best guitar player can save them.
If you could catch a golden era show of any metal band, who would it be?
This may come as a shock to anyone who has read this entire interview, but it would be Metallica on the Master of Puppets tour, early 1986.
If you could punch one musician, living or dead, in the face, who would it be?
Hmm…maybe Kid Rock? P. Diddy? There are probably others who need punching more than they do. I’ll keep thinking about it, though I’d probably be the last guy to punch musicians.
Which Anthrax singer do you prefer?
Joey Belladonna, no contest. The guy on the first album ain’t bad either.
John Bush doesn’t do it for you? What about his main band, Armored Saint? Did you know Bush was asked to sing for Metallica before Hetfield officially took on lead vocals?
I’d heard that about Bush and Metallica. Armored Saint never did much for me and I notice that Anthrax doesn’t play anything from his era live now, which I think is a good call.
Do you have a favorite Anthrax album?
My answer is probably the same as everyone else’s: Among the Living. It’s got so many great ones, it’s undeniable. I dare you to come up with one you like better.
I cannot. Among the Living is the correct answer. 1986 was a great year for thrash.
During the course of this interview, original Anthrax bassist, Dan Lilker (Nuclear Assault, S.O.D., Brutal Truth, Venomous Concept) began filling in for Frank Bello on the band’s South American tour. I read an interview where Lilker stated, “When we parted ways back in 1984, they told me to stick around because they might need me in 40 years.”
Hahaha! That guy is great.
Does Overkill rank for you? I’m from Jersey so they were a big deal for me. Anthrax too, as they were just across the river. And of course Dan Spitz was in both bands.
I missed out on Overkill when I was a kid because none of my friends were listening to them. Maybe it’s because they weren’t on a big label at first and didn’t have as wide of a distribution as Elektra, Capital, etc.? I still haven’t listened to them much. Is it too late? Where should I start?
It’s probably too late. But I think Years of Decay is their Master of Puppets, so to speak. There are arguably better songs on other albums, but I think the lineup and production on that one puts it up there for me. D.D. Verni has a good bass sound and Bobby Gustafson’s riffs and solos seem underrated to me. I don’t think Gustafson stuck around much longer after that album.
Well, through the magic of the internet, I’ve just checked that one out and have to agree with you on all counts. They are swinging for the fences, trying to push the genre forward the same way Justice and South of Heaven did just ahead of this album. They’ve got peaks and valleys and they’ve got speed but also a few Sabbathian jams, like “Playing with Spiders/Skullkrusher.” I’m a sucker for any song called Skullkrusher.
Did you get to see Overkill live a bunch? I can imagine some intense mosh pits. Seems like Prong should’ve opened for them.
I did see Overkill. They played this small club in Newark called Studio One in the ‘90’s a couple times. Studio One was a great place to have. It was about thirty minutes from where I lived and a lot metal bands played there: Mercyful Fate, Nuclear Assault, Brutal Truth, Testament, Machine Head, Obituary, Napalm Death, Cannibal Corpse, Sepultura, Voivod, Type O Negative, GWAR, Newsted’s pre-Metallica band, Flotsam and Jetsam, and yes, Prong too, though I can’t recall if they were on the Overkill shows. Overkill was a great live band. I know they’re still kicking around but I haven’t listened to anything new in about a decade. I understand the lineup has gone through a lot of changes.
Favorite Megadeth album?
It’s hard to decide between Peace Sells and Rust in Peace. For the purposes of this interview, I’ll say Rust in Peace because the video for “Holy Wars” hooked me. That’s the first album I heard by them. There’s something about the first album you hear by a band when you’re thirteen–somehow it sticks with you.
What is the most metal animal?
A crow. Or a sloth.
Would you tell us about your cat?
My black cat is named Brutus and she’s almost eighteen. When I got her, she was the meanest cat I’d ever met and would attack people even though she weighed six pounds. I’ve seen her punch babies and small children when cornered. She makes so much eye contact it’s uncomfortable. She pukes more than she used to, so that’s pretty metal.
So, you have a book out. It seems like the response to WHAT DOESN’T KILL YOU OPENS YOUR HEART has been good. I’ve seen it pop up in my social media quite a bit, always with complimentary words. Are you working on anything now? Anything we can expect in the near future?
I have a long W.I.P. document of short stories that needs attention, and I’ve started sending stuff out again. Also, there’s a short, mean novel that I’ll use to antagonize agents very soon. And I’ve started a second novel.
Thank you for taking the time to talk with me for Farewell Transmission. Is there anything you’d like to add before ending this?
I appreciate it! Nothing much to add besides long live all the great readers and listeners out there. Shout out to the good people everywhere. Drop me a line: @maxissippi on IG and bluesky
Max Hipp is a teacher, writer, and musician from Mississippi. His work has appeared in, among others, Southern Humanities Review, Cheap Pop, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Black Warrior Review. He teaches literature and creative writing. He’s currently doing some book touring with help from the Mississippi Arts Commission.
From Cool Dog Sound: The characters in Max Hipp’s debut story collection howl with loneliness. They’ve reached the ends of their coping mechanisms and bank accounts and are making terrible life choices and trying to recover in the wake of them. We’ve got folks who can’t let go of the past, folks obsessed with sex and music, lovers stuck in dismal relationships, and clueless romantics who probably need their asses whipped. Heartbreak piles up like car crashes in the fog, and everybody just has to carry on like everything’s fine. These stories keep hitting the funny/sad notes, and with his scalpel-tip sentences, Hipp marches readers through the wringer, with great compassion for the lost and searching.
Damon Hubbs is a poet from New England. He’s the author of three chapbooks and a full-length collection, Venus at the Arms Fair (Alien Buddha Press, 2024). Recent publications include Spectra, World Hunger Mag, Horror Sleaze Trash, Don’t Submit!, and BRUISER. His poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Twitter @damon_hubbs
They closed the pisser in the park, so I had nowhere left to go. I used to love hanging out in that pisser, the acoustics in there were incredible, I’d sit in a cubicle all day listening to the guys going at it. It was a real social scene, a true community, you really got to know the regulars – the guys who stopped in during their lunch hour, the guys who hung around all afternoon trying to pluck up the nerve, the guys who liked it in the dark. I really started to root for the guys, I wanted them to get everything their hearts yearned for. When I saw that the door had been boarded up by the local authorities, I was totally distraught, I stayed in bed for three whole days. An entire world had been closed off for me. I started missing the guys, so I went looking for other places where they might have gone. I thought the guys might be hanging out in the woods, so I started going there. But all that happened was a guy kept trying to sell me some orange pills, and I’m not into that stuff.
2. My Own Pisser
The idea came when a guy knocked on my door asking if he could use my bathroom. He was going door to door trying to sell people a new kind of leaf blower and he’d drunk three cans of Barrel Bomb to get himself going that morning. As I stood in the spare bedroom and listened to him having a piss, I thought we’ve all got these toilets in our homes, just for ourselves, and wouldn’t it be nice if we shared them with people who could bring joy and variety into our lives. The next day I put up a sign outside my house that said: ‘Free toilet here!’ At first no one came, I waited in every day just in case, then there was a knock on the door that woke me up. It was 03:26 am. I usually took the sign down before I went to bed, but I forgot that night. We stood looking at each other for a minute, he was hugging himself and hopping on the spot to keep the cold out, then he said: ‘Toilet?’ He pointed over his shoulder at the sign. I showed him up and went into the spare bedroom. I couldn’t hear him doing anything in there, then the lock on the bathroom door unclicked, he went quickly down the stairs and the front door slammed. There were spots of blood on the bathroom floor and in the sink. I got out my chemicals and scrubbed until there was daylight in the window.
3. I Only Wanted to Hear
My friend Raincoat – not his real name – was a surveillance whiz. He told me he’d worked for intelligence in a semi-official capacity, there wasn’t a space he couldn’t penetrate. He once played me a tape of a well-known public figure – I can’t legally say who – using multiple slurs that would destroy them if they ever went public. That was his insurance policy, the masters were in a safety deposit box. He told me he could install a new system he’d been working on, giving me total audiovisual access, but I only wanted to hear, so the bathroom was wired up. I put up flyers in the park. The Flyer said: ‘Clean & Free, Open 24 Hrs’ with my address and a picture I drew of a sparkling toilet.
4. Building a Client Base
My first regulars came at night. I adjusted my sleep pattern for them. They didn’t make a lot of noise, but they left a lot of mess. I didn’t feel any connection to them. I needed to reconnect with my guys. Raincoat told me: ‘If you want to find them, you’ve got to get on the hookup apps. That’s what they use to keep tabs on the homos now.’ He gave me one of his old phones and showed me how to ‘spam’ on it. After a few days, guys started hanging around in my front garden. When I heard them come in and follow the directions, I ran up into the spare bedroom. It was so good to hear those familiar sounds again – the recordings I made were catalogued and stored on a separate drive. I emptied the spare bedroom to try and give it an echo, I kept the window open to make it as cold as possible, I scattered used tissues to create an aroma. As soon as the guys had vacated the bathroom, I hurried in and got on my knees in front of the toilet. I lowered my head into the bowl, reached up for the handle, and cranked the flush.
5. The One-Flush Policy
When I was a kid, my dad instituted a one-flush policy – he got concerned about water preservation after he read a sci-fi novel where Earth in 2037 gets turned into a desiccated launchpad by space travel conglomerates competing to settle Jupiter. He couldn’t park his car in the garage anymore because it was filled with bottled water – I think some of it was his own piss – and he got into three fistfights with people on our street when they used lawn sprinklers. He told us all the time that in the future whoever controlled the water supply would rule the world, and our decadence would come back to haunt us. Dad closely monitored our bathroom habits – if we flushed wastefully, we got a spanking and had to go to the woods to do our mess ‘like a lowly beast’. It only got better when Uncle Vic visited, he showed up every Christmas Eve, even though he was never invited. One year – I must have been about seven – Uncle Vic went to the bathroom, then a couple of minutes later he shouted from the top of the staircase: ‘It didn’t go down in one go, bro. Do I have your permission to give it another go, or should I just let it sit there?’ Everyone at the dining table froze. Dad hesitated, then said: ‘Yes, but just this once.’ Uncle Vic shouted to me: ‘Would you like a bonus flush, Kiddo?’ I looked at Dad, but his face didn’t tell me anything. I slid back my seat and tried not to move too fast. When I got to the bathroom, Uncle Vic was standing next to the toilet. He lifted the seat and signaled for me to look down. The bowl was empty. I looked at Uncle Vic, he smiled and said: ‘What are you waiting for, Kiddo? Crank on that flush!’
6. Expanding the Client Base
I woke up on the sofa with a woman looking down at me. The woman was holding a crying child. The woman said: ‘I’m so sorry, he’s made such a mess. I’ll happily clean it up–’ I cut her off and said: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll deal with it.’ She said: ‘This is such a godsend! He picked up a bug at creche and he’s been shitting uncontrollably for days now. I can’t believe they shut the public bathroom. The perverts ruin it for everyone! I’ll recommend you to the other parents I see in the park. It was spotless when we went in. Honestly, I’ve stayed in hotels that don’t match up.’
7. Handling the Externalities
Baby shit was streaked everywhere, I took a bottle out of my cleaning caddy and set about spraying every surface with the most powerful chemical I had – I bought it from a shop down the road run by a guy who claimed to have fought for the Mujaheddin. I scrubbed until I got dizzy and went for some fresh air on the landing. The front door opened. Two guys came in. They stood in the hallway, talking low so I couldn’t make anything out. Then they started shoving and collapsed onto each other. They rolled out of view. I could hear them bumping into the furniture. I took a bottle from my caddy and went down. They were grappling on the kitchen floor, their skeletal arms wrapped together and grasping. I leaned in and sprayed them in the face. I stepped back and held out the bottle as they separated – screaming, coughing, gagging, rubbing their eyes. I retreated to the foot of the staircase and locked the door when they’d staggered out.
8. The Most Picturesque Pisser
I carried the bottle with me everywhere, but they weren’t the ones I should have been sweating. The parents from the park started showing up, they turned my living room into an outreach centre, they took over my kitchen to bake treats, there were toys everywhere, and they commandeered my cleaning caddy – that’s when I really blew my top. I stood in the middle of the living room and told them: ‘This isn’t what I wanted when I started this thing, and I’m not doing this anymore!’ The house went quiet, then a baby started bawling. I dropped my bottle and left the house. I kept running until I was in the woods. I gave the guy selling the orange pills everything in my wallet and he handed me a bag. The guy tried to stop me when I opened the bag and directed it at my open mouth, but I shoved him to the ground. He got up and ran away, shouting: ‘It’s your funeral, pal! I tried, man, I tried!’ I forced them all down, I knew the only place left for me was underground, a special place where I could be with the blind and spineless creatures. I got on my knees and started digging with my hands, tossing dirt over my shoulders. When the hole got deep enough, I rolled inside and kept going until there was no more daylight. The hole started to pulsate. I was thrown upward by an eruption of foul air. The pale sky filled my eyes. Then a face. It was Uncle Vic! I hadn’t seen him since that Christmas. He never came back after the flush party. Dad said he was sick. I asked him where he’d been, he said: ‘I’ve been hanging out with the guys, Kiddo. Let’s go see them!’ Uncle Vic carried me to a clearing, where there was the most picturesque pisser I’d ever seen! I tried to imagine what chemical could make it sparkle like it did. We went inside and Uncle Vic deposited me in a gorgeous cubicle. The water in the bowl was crystal clear, I scooped up a handful and washed the dirt from my face. Footsteps echoed off the tiles, the lock clicked on the neighbouring cubicle and there was the jangle of a belt being unfastened, I could hear everything with perfect clarity, like the entire place was wired up. The guys had come!
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the flavor of the dying vape i found on Leya’s kitchen table. burnt watermelon. microplastics. bruised apples, green bananas. i hate that my I is all knotted up in your You. codependency. entanglement. enmeshment. i hate my eyes glued on You, ascending the steps at 145th St. Station. all my books and my clothes in crates in your room. i hate being a Capricorn. talking to CPS on the phone. poorly affixed coffee cup lids. so many stains. the sunny Sunday after tragedy befalls you. inappropriately wonderful weather, the shrill cries of blue jays, telling lies. bad cover bands. cryptic tonsils swollen like fat grapes occluding my vocal tract. wheezing out an aria. smokers lung. wasting time trying to understand its passage. the insidious oblivion of Youtube shorts. mukbangs. your big sneezes, smearing snot on my leg in the absence of tissues. the absence of You, taking all of my Me. i fucking hate Tuesdays.
dear Madi
i can’t help but think daylight wasn’t meant to be saved. the road is a void, i stop at a red. the tire pressure light is on. you helped me fill the tires on Luke’s Subaru in New Paltz last February. he snapped a b&w photo of us doing it on a disposable Fujifilm. i’ve got a copy somewhere, must’ve misplaced it.
we’re both city slickers now, downtown degenerates. the scene subsumed us, didn’t it. and as it were, i don’t remember how to put air in the tires. checking the Honda booklet while the red still burns… dashboard. cd player. airbag warnings. moonroof, mirrors. the sun is too often the main character. the moon is almost always a symbol of itself, yet i feel its tug the strongest. we got thrown out of orbit, didn’t we? long island is but a quagmire, my dad texted. i drove him home last week from the hospital in Oceanside, avoided every pot hole on New York Avenue. i thought of you, and your dad. how’s Bryon doing? how are the dogs? how’s Mooney and her thumbs?
it’s only 5:49 and it’s so dark i can’t read the manual. a flash of green. i’m accelerating. kale mushroom egg bites on the steps of St. Nicholas park. reading Luke’s poem. we touched grass. i’m so happy we’re in love. i’m so happy—i could cry and pull out all my hair, stuff it in the Nicorette box we kept on the table at Tompkins, beside the ceramic mallard.
i swear you were there when i saw the green ray in Saint-Jean-de-Luz. like the click of a laser beamed into my corneas. irrevocable instant. the waves broke immediately after it passed. i ate tomatoes doused in olive oil at a tiny bar by the beach, and thought of the storm we were caught in two years ago, on another coast, clutching you as ozone flooded our olfactory, clay oozed from the cliffs, and lightning smote the sand.
it’s impossible not to see God in your eyes since then.
at Sunoco it’s $2 per vend, for four minutes of air. counting change, i open the moon roof for some circulation. jamming quarters into the slit, i fill my tires with thoughts of you.
home, sick
choppy sea of carpeting, L-shaped couch, Led Zeppelin poster. my high school boyfriend was a painter. he had a knife on him, always stowed in the pockets of his cargos. when i’d sing he’d cry. he sold a 6×6 foot canvas to the drummer, the guitarist didn’t know what to think of him, and the bassist was always barefoot.
i don’t know what made me stop singing, when the pitches bent, and i got lost in some ceaseless caesura. all i know is that when i’m home, in Long Island, i hide under leaf piles, poking my head out only to watch herds of deer dash down the hill in my parents’ backyard.
my ex-boyfriend was in a car accident and walks with a cane now. the Mustang was speeding, and spun out— it was nobody’s fault. with his disability checks he balls out on Grailed.
i just happened to crash out. it was nobody’s fault, but my own. i moved to Brooklyn for fucks sake. it was bound to be a blight, at any rate.
that band? they’re still playing. the guitarist sings now. i’m happy for them, truly. but all melody becomes mist. sound moves at a rate of 340 meters per second, until it becomes intractable, immaterial, barely an echo.
sound is the ephemeral incarnate. only light never decays.
Chloe Wheeler writes poems. Her writing has appeared in Expat Press, Hobart Pulp, Don’t Submit, Bullshit Lit, among others. Twitter @sardine_enjoyer
