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Across The Wire Vol. 6

Magnolia from The Heartbreakers

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By Dan Duffy  

Her cheekbones sat sharp—right up under her water colored eyes. Her cheeks pooled into loose hounddog jowls. Her skin, the rough and tanned leather typical of smokers late in the game.  

painting courtesy of Red Danielson (2025)

She wore pink scrubs and an old pair of white tennis shoes. She drank black coffee from a mug printed over with an image of a steamboat chugging up the Mississippi. White steam clouds floated over the boat against a baby blue sky. Her hand was steady as she lowered the cup back to the table.  

Folger’s is shit, she thought.  

Her legs crossed like stilts at the knees. She sighed and crossed her hands in her lap. She looked across the blank yard. The veinlike limbs of varied hardwoods thicketed grey and tan beyond the tall black iron fence at the bottom of the hill. Them trees are pitiful, she thought. 

She checked her black Casio and saw it was 7:07. She pushed into the thin cushions of the plastic lawn love seat. She picked up her cigarettes and lighter from the glass table. The smoke felt dry in her lungs and she wretched wetly before her chest settled into regular albeit ragged breaths.  

She reflected back on her thoughts beginning before she crawled out of her bunk into the darkness. She thought about how they started before her spirit had time to orient itself in the black morning room. She hated the thoughts. She thought they were a total nuisance. Thoughts no one normal would ever think. 

She drew from the deep background of her mind the knowledge none of these things were true. Yet she found herself unable to let go of this new copy of the old story. Every morning was like starting over in this way. She breathed in through her nose. An old trick learned in the Midwest recovery scene. 

Here I am, she thought.

I am alive. I have my Kamels and the lawn is alive and them trees are alive and the Folger’s is shit but it is still black and warm and warmin me and givin me one of the two remainin buzzes. Folger’s and Kamels and the trees and the cardinal just landed there on the feeder. Barnfire’s soul come to see me in the morning. 

She slurped her coffee and let her breath out after an eight count. She accepted her and her suicidal brain would dance this dance of breath and neurosis until the end of days. She laughed at them. She imagined their voice was a wooly faced man in a suit in the fetal position sucking his thumb on the membranelike bottom floor of her brain. She imagined brushing his hair and cooing him as he trembled and wept. An old ego vision from the early days. 

A breeze washed up from the south across her nose, her crowsfeet, the lines around her mouth as she smoked. A clump of ash fell to the concrete patio as she lowered her hand. Lightbeams played through the leaves. The sky smoky blue. 

It all reminded her of the morning in Dixie, Alabama when she’d stolen Deddy’s cigarettes off the Formica counter. She’d stared at them under the yellow light overhead of the stove, where they sat next to his gold keys, for a long minute, before she snatched them up and walked out the back sliding glass door. She’d busted six matches before she got one to stay lit on the front end of the Winston. She’d remained proud for years on account she hadn’t coughed on the first one.  

She thought the house they’d grown up in a poor one. All shingles and no roof. The backyard full of beer cans and spent propane tanks—cigarette butts, dog shit and ashes. She still cringed at the thought of it. She thought she’d tried to talk straighter, clearer, whiter—more like some person from New York would talk—on account of the house. The clapboard painted a dark emerald. She always thought the guy who painted it must’ve been drunk or high as hell as the coats were as swirled and thick as Van Gogh’s buttermilk impastos over olive trees. 

They lived after a few empty lots at the end of a road at the edge of Dixie. The city came in and turned it from dirt to oystershell in ’68. The houses up the street were mildly better than theirs insofar as their paint jobs were cleaner and their boards were straighter, and their yards were free of the trash so dominant in hers.     

She was halfway through the first Winston as she felt hands bury into and grip her shoulders and skin touch cool against her cheek as she smelled a rosy waft from the sweet olive bush near the door. 

“Hey!” said a voice like a bell.  

A smile wrapped her head. She turned and looked up into the pale diamond eyes, the suddenly strong jaw, the round nose, the dirty blonde hair in loose curls draped around the face of Barnfire. Her warm breath on her breath. 

“The hell you doin smokin a cigarette?” 

“Bein a man,” Chastity said. 

“You a man now?” 

“I am today.”   

Chastity felt a darkness in the center of the morning as she watched the cardinal hop up on the powerline. She slurped her coffee. Her bestfriend Rebecca Barnfire had come to see her from up the road.  

They’d run the town with boys in trucks till they were old enough to leave. The big trees’d all been logged out before they were born. The Service-planted-pines were just starting to grow back once they got older.  

Chastity’s father drank Bud heavies and smoked dope on the back porch when he was home in the mornings and nights. He slaughtered cows down at the slaughterhouse. The oystershell ran out by the time the road got to their house and there were big washed out holes in it and he refused to pay for the dirt work.  

He, her daddy, Charles Lee, liked to sit with his shirt off and stare at the moon. The FM band was set on 98.5 and the presence of the eternal darkness beckoned across the yard and into the fields which stretched out to the baby pines at the edge of Monroe County. He was not without the loving thoughts any man may have of his child and the universe from which she emerged. His tears ran silent down his crooked face in the moonlight and Charley Pride played on the radio. 

Chastity and Rebecca played with the dirt clods and cigarettes until they were old enough to pick up whiskey and pills. Once they’d found those—in Doctor Mellingham’s offices, in the plasticwood cabinetry, in the fields—they relied upon them the way they saw the girls growing up across the street rely on Jesus. The headlights of the old Fords lit the path to the beer joint on Friday nights down at Bill Bleaker’s Creekbed Jamboree.  

Rebecca wolfwhistled at the Southern rock four piece from Montgomery. She made her face sparkle and lowered her eyes and picked up her rose patterned cotton dress and spun once she felt the shaggyheaded frontman’s eyes. 

Chastity bit the aluminum bar at Bleaker’s with a fury her ancestors would understand. She heard stories of her grandaddy drinking the county dry through the wars—too drunk to report for duty. Back then her face was sharp and clear: like a mirror on fire. Light freckles covered the high cheekbone, the hard jaw and the hawknose. Her eyes the color of some mystic sea water. The boys from the schools the county over didn’t know what to make of her and she and Barnfire bit their heads off at their leisure.  

Once they drove west for Orange Beach under the cover of more moonlight. They watched the world turn from pure pine wood to saltwater and sand. The beach was eternal on either side and the sea went on forever in front of them and the beach disappeared into the pines at their backs. Gas lanterns burned from where they hung under the eaves of the fishing huts out on stilts at the end of long and winding piers over the water. They got naked and swum out in the saltwater. They kissed and fell asleep that way in the wet sand under the moon.

There was no evilness between them on the drive back and the air was as clear as Alabama itself. There was a silence between them which was longer and greater than the world. They stopped at bait shop for burgers and made love in the parking lot after running their hands across the neon rainbow of plastic lures, under a canopy of nylon lines. They put more ice in the Playmate and bought another sixer of Miller once they’d toweled down. The beach highway burned under the truck and the sea oats stubbled the sand on the sides of the road.  

They left everything behind and moved to Pensacola and lived in the beach bars up and down the coast. Barnfire’s folks wondered where she was. They shot bottles like skeet with twelve gauges on the beach with roughnecks in from the rigs one night. The road hummed under them wherever they went and they gave no care for trouble. Barnfire’s face grew rounder and they got jobs in the kitchens and rented a bungalow. They spent their money on beer and cigarettes and lived for the sight of the beach and night unoccluded by condos or casinos.  

Crank broke up the scene in ’78 and she remembered the feeling of the morning she left for the north with no idea where she would stop next. She saw Rebecca crying with her top off on the teal motel comforter—her palms upturned to the ceiling and her blonde hair a darkstreaked beautiful mess of waves. She’d kissed her on the forehead and put the bag in the back of the truck as Magnolia from the Heartbreakers debuted on the radio.  

Chicago was a mean city and she’d found a new side of herself called heroin  which she hated. It was a total loss of confidence which forced her into the denizened Midwestern nights like black steel burning on the highway. She fought with several men and lost and her face took on a crushed bruisedness in the silver mirrors. You could see the outline of her bones in her arms, and the thin cotton dresses from home she’d once  been loved in went grey and ragged. 

She flew a sign on the interstate. The mega highway wind would blow her hair back and she remembered crying without tears more than once as she waited for the dollars of strangers.  

One night she found herself with enough money to enter under the Christmas lighted ceiling of Robichaux’s in the old Polish part of town. Past a row of clapboard houses not unlike the ones from the street she grew up on. There was a warm brownness to the night air. She’d seen a father and son throw a ball back and forth with a dog in one of the dozens of chainlinked backyards on the walk to the bar. She’d heard about it  through her new friend Henry James who was a night thief and a busker in the central city.  

She ordered a shift beer and looked up at the lights. A ball game played in the crook of the ceiling and she let her eyes drift past it. She flexed her jaw and felt like she’d been kicked in the mouth. She felt the cold come in from the door and turned to see a man in a black leather jacket and blue jeans brush powder from his shoulders and take off his beanie. She was overcome with the sensation of life having eclipsed her entirely. It was as if the last breath of her childhood self had blown out the door with the man’s entrance. She felt slurried as she nodded her head toward him. He was brickjawed and grey stubbled and he walked past her to the other end of the bar.  

She watched him finish his one beer. Magnolia leaves in sunlight against a blue sky blurred in the back of her head as she was overcome with the old desire for Alabama. The depression was a deep navy. There was no one to call in the homestate any longer. There might as well have been no Alabama.  

She covered her pint glass with a coaster and put her hat on and walked out to the sound of Bocephus singing notes on fishing from the jukebox. She sat on the cold black iron bench out front and felt nothing as she smoked. A boxtruck pushed through the slush and cast golden beams on the wet black road. She wanted to go to the mission and sleep. She wanted to never have another drink. She cursed the old man with his shirt off in the backyard in the moonlight.  

I got what he got. And it’s all I got.  

The truck pushed back by going the other direction and she thought of flagging it down for a ride to the mission.  

She blew her hands and looked up to the clear black sky. She began to walk toward the mission with the vision of the field beyond the trash of her youth in her mind like a warm spirit guiding her feet in the direction of the sense of a sound mind. Her pulse quickened and her body warmed. She was all of a sudden sure of what was going to happen next. She would walk all the way to the mission: the clear five miles. She would pay the dollar fifty for the bed and ask to borrow one of their towels. She’d get on her knees and pray next to the bunk, her elbows at rest on the baby blue waffle blanket, like she did as a baby in Dixie. 

She’d wake up the next morning at six to beat the crowd. She’d pray again, and have another shower, and see if she could get a comb for her hair. If she could, she’d comb it out slow and easy like the rain which then fell on her as she walked. She’d hit the eight o’clock meeting at Southland. She’d make the ten block walk there from the mission. She’d hope to see one of the women she knew there with some time. One of  those pure women in the golden light of God—their steely hair healthy, well brushed down to their shoulders and secured by expensive clips.  

She’d ask the one which called to her to guide her and she’d call her everyday and do what she said. She’d find a way to get the dollar fifty for the mission and live there the rest of her life if she had to until she found somewhere better. If she never found anywhere better it would be okay as long as she didn’t drink whiskey or get high ever again. She’d fly a sign for an hour or two a day and look for a job the rest of the time. If she had to she’d fly a sign for the rest of her life. She’d try and buy a better shirt as soon as she got the chance.  

And it all went as close to this as one could imagine. She stayed at the mission for three months and got a job in one. She sold coffee off a street cart at less than minimum wage and saved up enough in three months to move into an Oxford House further north. She worked the cart for another three months before getting on at the Donton Square McDonald’s where she made manager in two years. She kept her hair pinned back and her hands clean at work. She watched the odd reflective grey towers of the city in the mornings on the train on the way to work. The sun hit the sides of the towers and she felt alive through her muscles and face. Lightbeams fell through the shadows and crossed her face in diagonal lines those mornings on the train.  

One morning five years in she was cleaning the windows in the front of the restaurant when her pocket buzzed and she answered her phone.  

Her sister’s voice on the other end of the black line asked if she’d “heard the  news” about their father.  

“No,” she’d said.  

“He killed himself this morning with a knife in his bedroom. Stabbed himself in the heart three times and fell back on the bed and died. Dixie police found him stomach up.” 

Chastity watched a shirtless man, with a dirty blonde beard, in swimtrunks, cross the street. He knelt on one knee. She heard him cry out like a hurt bear through the plateglass over her sister’s static voice on the line. 

She met her sister three days later, down in Dixie, at a grey hotel on Highway Eight. It was a small, sad service. There were only a few Presbyterians the old bastard had long since abandoned. Chastity thought his head was bloated to unreasonably red and wide proportions even for an alcoholic. His hands folded on top of one another like a schoolboy’s on his football field of a chest. His shoulders met the white padding interior of the casket on either side. His mouth drawn in a thin anti-smile and the black holes of his nose erupted in pubic-like hair. She crossed herself at the sight of him and kneeled by his casket. She said the old prayers under her breath and the new ones she’d learned in Chicago.  

She couldn’t bring herself to kiss his forehead; the specter of this failure would haunt her for decades. They closed the box and drove him out on Highway Eight to the Dixie Historic Cemetery. She rode with her sister in her silver sedan behind the hearse. The church people only made one more carload. Highway Eight emptied out into the fields past the Sonic and the Advanced Autoparts. The fields were bright green; to  Chastity, they looked more alive than all of Chicago combined. Her sister’s car windows were oilstreaked and the clear coat on her hood had come off in two big boils of rust and sunbaked metal.  

The cemetery backed up to a soy field. It was encircled by a couple scraggly pines and a half dead cedar in which a couple turkey vultures’d made their roost. The two Hall brothers from Hall Funeral Home brought out the riser cart and set it up for their father. They wore matching auburn and navy check sportscoats, navy slacks, shiny black loafers and salt and pepper hair trimmed down to a neat half inch. 

The older brother, James, opened the back of the hearse. “Awlright Miss Chastity, now, let’s gone head and get yah daddy home baby.”      

The younger brother, Beau, pulled the casket out of the back and slid it onto the riser, in one precise pull, as James held the riser steady.  Chastity turned and watched the two Presbyterians pile out of a big white pickup.  The young, skinny one—with his thick brown hair combed over in a quaff—pushed his checkered shirt deeper into the belted waist of his khakis and curled his lip as he squinted. A bald man who drove strowed right up to the casket and patted it like a dog with a pale hand. 

“We’re gonna miss ol Charles Lee down at the chewch,” he said. “He was a helluva card, but I believe the man had a good heart. People are gonna say what they say about anybody, but I believe Charles Lee had a good heart.”  

Chastity brushed some hair away from her mouth where it’d been caught. A breeze blew through and kicked up dust in their faces. Her sister threw her hand up and guarded her eyes.  

They found themselves over by the hole in the ground the Halls dug before dawn. James Hall held his slim, leatherbound copy of the Gospel against his chest with his dark and shining hands. He wore a forlorn look of patronage as he looked over the small crowd with his back to the field. He looked as though he was prepared to deliver a life sentence to a man of equal nobility. He opened his mouth to speak but it was so dry he mashed his tongue against the roof of his mouth before he opened it again and spoke.  

“The ribbon of life is cut in the dyin days of a dyin land.”  

His tongue felt thick and pasty against the dry roof of his mouth. He gulped what spit he had left down before he spoke again. 

“It is through this ribbon we walk, and cross this ribbon we mus live. It is in the mornins, alone fields such as this, where we mus pray and say, ‘I too am a man in this land. I too will cast my seed across the clean of the earth, and ass Gawd to provide whatever providence he may deem suitable to my existence.’”  

He took a small step forward. He rocked back on his heels as he lifted his toes and then tapped them down against the dirt.  

“’Jesus was a cross maker’ it has been sung. ‘Jesus was a cross maker.’ A man amongst men. A fishermen of men amongst fishermen. The Leaven carryin the secret of the Leaven to the unleaven flock of the world. Charles Lee was one of the other. He was in one of these two camps, and only Christ knows the difference, and  Charles Lee of course was made of Christ as we all are. The Brother is at rest now. He has found his heavenly home. He is in the sky of diamonds. He is in the teal pull of the universe. For us, here on earth, there are only the two commandments to remember and  practice daily. There is no truth outside of those truths.”  

James looked over at Beau where he stood, arms crossed, at the corner of the grave plot, under one of the sickly cedars.  

“Amen?” 

“Amen,” the small gathering said in broken pieces.  

On the car ride home, her sister asked her to come and live with her after the funeral and she was struck by the clarity in which she felt the conviction to agree. She hugged her and flew back. She sold most of her things, swept the floor and bought a car to drive down to Fairhope. She went to the mission and served a meal and thanked the staff there. She visited the grave of the steelhaired woman who helped her and left a gold coin on her headstone. 

Her windshield and rear window were clean and clear as she headed south out of the Midwest. A twenty year career in the Fairhope public schools, a turn of the century cottage in a quiet neighborhood drowned in green oaks, a life in the church, her sister’s eventual release in the arms of cancer in hospice care—this was much of all which stood between her and that long drive she made out of Chicago. 

The cardinal hopped down from the feeder into the grass. It was preening itself. It twitched its head. It reminded Chastity of a smile. It spread its wings and paused. It flew blackeyed across the yard and into the sky. She touched the coffee. It had gone cold. The birds in the trees had gone quiet. There was no sound but the wind. It was 1976, no 1978. It was her, it was Rebecca Barnfire, it was her sister. All of them in the car. All of them turning the radio up to the right level. The trees burning way to give rise to the rest of the country. She coughed her wet cough and lit her last Kamel. She took three drags and a smile crossed her face in the reverie of the morning. She coughed and she  coughed and she laughed as she fell from the chair—arms wide open to all the women of the universe. To Alabama herself. 

Dan Duffy is a writer from Gautier, Mississippi. A graduate of Ole Miss and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he lives in Gautier. 

Red Danielson, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is a poet, screenwriter, and painter. His work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Haiku Journal, CERASUS, Three Lines Poetry, and Subterranean Quarterly, among other publications. This piece, an earlier version of which appeared in Little Village magazine, was adapted from an ongoing project pairing his prose with portraits of poets, writers, and artists.

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Across The Wire Vol. 6

Pure Life Journey

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by Tom Ianelli

AJ looked at the pile of soiled food and felt bad for it. The bread had worked okay. Microwaved bologna too. But the mayo was a mess, and he had cut his penis on the rotisserie chicken.

He crossed off “food play” from the list in his journal and thought of his failed attempts. Feet, tickling, blood, hot wax, ASMR, men. None of them turned him on. But there was hope. Group play, findom, claustrophilia, clowns. One of those had to get him going. 

He dialed Genevieve. “Humiliation” was next. He shared his thoughts with her and she said she would google some stuff and come over the next night. 

AJ was thankful for Genevieve. She worked at his gym and was as naïve about kinks as he was. He could tell she didn’t like him much as a person, but she agreed to help him because he paid her a couple hundred dollars per session, which he could more than afford. 

“But, like, I only do stuff to you, okay?” she had said when they first started. 

Since then she had choked him and pegged him. She had popped a balloon on his balls and sat on a cake in front of him. 

When she came over the next night there was no preamble. She slapped him in the face and made him put on women’s lingerie. She wore a leather jumpsuit and as she swatted him with what looked like a small leather fly swatter, he felt the first inklings of pleasure come over him. She pushed him onto the couch and he laughed.

“No laughing,” she said.

She grabbed on to the front of his hair and yanked so hard some came out.

“Ow, don’t do that!” He had told her that losing his hair was his biggest fear. 

“Oh, poor baby,” she said and yanked out some more.

“Genevieve, stop, please.”

“Say anything other than ‘yes ma’am’ and I’ll rip every hair out of your head.” She took a water bottle, pulled his head back and sprayed it in his mouth. He coughed and spit it out. 

“What is that?”

“My piss.”

“Oh my god.”

“You love it.” She grabbed the front of his hair. 

“Yes ma’am!”  

“Get up!” 

He did as he was told.

She made him try to twerk. She made him do the worm and laughed at his flailing. She made him smoosh his privates against the glass so the whole city could, as she put it, “see how weird it looked.”

While he obliged her, he tried to understand how anyone could find this sexy or enjoyable. Still, he didn’t use the safe word. Perhaps the pleasure came later.  

She made him bend over and be her furniture. 

“Where do you work again?” she asked, sitting on him, cleaning her nails. 

He didn’t respond.

“Answer me.” She slapped him.

“I’m a project manager at Chewy,” he said.

She laughed for a full minute. “AJ, do you realize how pathetic your life is?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“And now you think that if you can find some kink it will make you interesting?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You think a sexual depravity will shield you from the fact of your complete uselessness?” 

“Yes ma’am.”

She got up. “Lay down,” she commanded.

“Yes ma’am.”

She tied his hands behind his back and then tied his feet to them. “Even your parents hate you,” she said. 

“Genevieve—”

“Shut up.” She pulled out a gag. “I’m sick of your whining.” She shoved the ball into his mouth and strapped it tight. “Now you’re in time out.”

He realized he didn’t know how he would say the safe word with a gag in his mouth. His eyes bugged.

Just then, Genevieve’s phone buzzed on the counter. She glanced at the screen, frowned, and snatched it up.

“Hello? What? Wait, what happened?” She began pacing, ropes creaking as AJ strained to follow her with his eyes. “No, no, no, don’t hang up. Fuck. Okay. I’m coming.”

She swept her things into her bag with shaking hands, yanked on her coat.

“Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god,” she kept muttering as she bolted for the door, never once looking back at AJ.

The door slammed. The latch clicked. Then silence.

–

Three years later, AJ was standing behind the podium at the Pure Life Journey meeting with 100 expectant faces staring up at him. 

“Genevieve forgot about me there,” he said. “I laid on the floor of my apartment, bound and gagged in women’s underwear for 72 hours, soiling myself over and over. If I hadn’t hired my cleaner that week, I might have died. But in the end, it was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

The crowd looked up at him proudly.

“The day after being freed, I was driving to the doctor and I saw a billboard that read:

I’M COMING—JESUS

and I realized that the answer had been there all along. I went online, found Pure Life Journey, and once I reclaimed my virginity, all my anxieties floated away.”

His own words made him blush. He felt their truth, their purity. 

“Celibacy became my purpose,” he went on. “I dedicated myself to it, and after a year, I was leading the program.”

When AJ finished speaking, he shook hands and smiled at the followers. 

“I’ll be having office hours until 6,” he said, and went to his office. He shut the door behind him and went behind his standing desk. The desk was customized, four and a half feet tall with walls that went to the floor so that visitors could only see the top half of his torso.

He stood there for a moment, sighed and then pulled down his pants and underwear in a practiced motion, letting the cool air hit him. This was his favorite part of the day. He cupped his bare ass, fingers spreading, and closed his eyes. 

There was a knock at the door. 

“One minute,” he called. 

He opened the laptop on his desk and there was a still image of a porn video there, a woman hunched over, aggressively climaxing. He pulled his shoulders back, straightened his shirt and, pants still down, he called, “come in.”

A young man entered. Early thirties, nervous red face. AJ welcomed him warmly and gestured to the chair on the other side of the desk. The man sat and divulged his problems. 

He had a porn addiction and his wife recently found his browser history. “I can’t help it,” he said. “The more I hate myself, the more I turn to these sites, to these women.” 

It was the same shame and panic AJ had seen countless times.

“You’re in the right place, my friend,” he said with a smile. “Porn addiction is simple. Once you can understand, really understand, that it takes so much more than it could ever give, you’ll find that you’ll want to give it up.”

The man smiled, flushed and grateful, and said he would come back next week. When he left, AJ shook his hand, and then used the hand that had touched the man’s to cup his balls. 

The secret nudity had started by accident, a year earlier. It was ten minutes before his office hours started. His fly was unbuttoned and he was checking a mole on the top part of his thigh, when a new member burst in without knocking. AJ was so caught off guard he dropped his pants and stammered a greeting to the new member. Mortified, he didn’t know how to pick up his trousers without getting caught, but after a minute, he saw that the member had no idea that his pants were down. His bare legs were a total secret. Something about this excited him, so he stood like that for the entire meeting. The member never caught him, so he left his pants down for the next meeting, and the one after that, and then the rest of his meetings that day, and soon he was doing it every day. 

After a few months, however, AJ found the thrill of his secret was wearing off. He wanted higher stakes. AJ didn’t use porn. He didn’t masturbate. He was as sexually pure as he purported himself to be. But he reasoned that to use porn for this purpose wasn’t related to his own sexual gratification, and that made it okay. So, he began to have images and videos of various sex acts on his laptop, their depravity projecting secretly out to him as he nodded along to what his visitors divulged.

There was another knock.

“Come in.”

This time a woman in her late fifties. She wore a modest blouse and she kept laughing uncomfortably, her hands trembling. 

“I just want to feel clean. To feel innocent. I call sex hotlines in the middle of the night and talk for hours, I don’t even know why.”

He gave her his whole speech. Recovery, devotion, realignment. He used the words she wanted. Words he knew were helpful and true. She left with tears in her eyes.

AJ exhaled and looked down at his naked lower half. There was no arousal. It didn’t turn him on in the moment or later. It wasn’t about that. He hardly knew why he was doing it, other than that it was a secret. That it was something no one could know he was doing. 

He often felt bad about it later in the evening. He knew it was a sin. He wrote about it in his diary, repented in his prayers and vowed to stop. But the next day, when he got back to his office, his pants came off, the porn came on, and he took in his visitors. 

A third knock. 

“Come in.”

It was Katherine Meyer, his biggest fan. An avid soul saver, she showed up to every meeting.

“Mr. Donald, my nephew is addicted to video games and needs your help,” she said. She stayed standing. 

“Please call me AJ,” he said for the 100th time. “Tell me about your nephew.”

She did. She went on about his sinful teenage behavior. AJ’s eyes glossed over and dropped to the porn on his screen. He angled the laptop towards him and Mrs. Meyer didn’t seem to notice, so he scrolled and clicked some other videos, pressing play, checking first to make sure the volume was off. 

“These video games, they’re soiling our youth,” Mrs. Meyer was saying. 

“Mhmm,” AJ said. 

“I saw a music video my nephew was watching and it was just butts. Not a single face.”

“It’s terrible,” AJ said. He pulled his shirt up around his waist and stroked his hips. 

He glanced up and saw Mrs. Meyer looking at the framed poster behind him. It showed Jesus dunking a basketball and said, “HE IS RIZZIN,” underneath.

“What do you think? I just hung it up.” he said, smiling.

She looked closer and her face contorted. She looked confused.

“Rizzin’ is a slang term, Mrs. Meyer,” he said.

“Dear Lord,” she said.

He laughed, “What, you don’t like it?” He turned around and he saw what she had seen. The way the poster hung from the nail the angle of the glass reflected back a perfect frame of his naked ass, the porn. The others hadn’t seen it because they had been sitting.

“Dear Lord Jesus.” Mrs. Meyer approached the desk.

“Mrs. Meyer, it’s not what it seems,” he said, shutting the laptop quickly.

“Pervert!” She screamed.

He tried to reach down and pull up his pants but she was quickly around to his side of the desk.

“Pervert!” she screamed again. 

She pulled out her phone. The first flash of the camera came and he reached up to try and stop it but this made him stumble and he fell over as the flash went off. As he lay there, pants at his knees, she took another one and then she opened his laptop and took a picture of that too.

–

AJ’s parent’s house upstate had a massive lawn in the back that spread beautifully down to the lake. There was a boat house for their power boat, pontoon, schooner, and the various small sailboats and skiffs. 

At the top of the lawn, Mr. Donald was sitting on a cushioned lawn chair reading. He was tanned and healthy, with a nicely graying head of quaffed hair. He wore tortoiseshell sunglasses and his white linen shirt was opened a few buttons. He reclined with such a simple, elegant calm it was almost impressive.

Mrs. Donald came out with an equivalent air of tranquility. She wore white linen pants and a loose blue blouse and carried two drinks in cut crystal glasses. The ice in the glasses caught the sun as it shone through the brown liquid of the Arnold Palmers, each with the red dot of a cherry floating on top. 

“Here you go,” she said, handing him the drink.

“Thank you, my dear,” he said, smiling up at her.

“Who was that on the phone?” Mr. Donald asked. 

“AJ.”

“Mm,” Mr. Donald let out and kept reading.

“The team pulled the story from our outlets. It’s on some smaller channels but it won’t matter,” Mrs. Donald said. “The Chewy people said they will take him back.”

“Mm,” Mr. Donald said again, then laughed at something he read and turned the page. 

She sat down in the lawn chair next to him. They were silent together for a moment. Dense trees hemmed in the lawn. The grass was all one length, nature’s immaculately manicured carpet. The late afternoon sun was creeping down slowly, still warm and radiant. It was a gorgeous day. Mrs. Donald took a sip of her drink, the ice tinkling, and Mr. Donald looked over at her, smiled and took a sip of his. 

They basked in the sun, enjoying the day, until Mr. Donald sighed. “The fuck do you think is wrong with him?” he asked, his voice lilting and disinterested. 

Mrs. Donald sighed, also disinterested, “Who knows,” she said. She opened a magazine and scanned it. 

After a while Mr. Donald lowered his book. He turned to his wife and looked at her over the top of his sun glasses. 

“Hey,” he said. 

She lowered her magazine. He stared at her for a moment and then smiled. “Do you have any of those edibles?” 

She laughed like a schoolgirl. “Yes, of course.”

He laughed too. 

“You know you could just buy some for yourself,” she said.

”I know. But I like pretending you’re my drug dealer.”

She giggled again. “I like it too.”

“You want to take them and watch Love on the Spectrum?”

“It’ll just make me cry,” she said. 

“Come on.” 

“Fine.”

They clinked their glasses, took big sips, and turned down to the lawn in front of them. The sun was soft and gold and bathed everything in warmth. It seemed to enter and emanate both Mr. and Mrs. Donald, who were both in their 50’s but looked decades younger. 

“Look,” Mr. Donald said, nodding his head down the lawn. 

Mrs. Donald followed his gaze and gasped, “They’re back!” she said. 

Three deer, a mommy, daddy and baby, walked through their yard. The baby was still small and stumbled awkwardly. 

“Oh, isn’t it lovely?” she asked.

Mr. Donald looked out at the sun setting on his beautiful property. He saw in his mind the house in Aspen, the apartment in Chelsea, the Hamptons house, the house in Hawaii that his wife knew nothing about. He thought of Chewy and the various other subsidiaries he owned through RH investments.

He laughed to himself. “It’s fuckin’ beautiful all right. Fuckin’ goddamn beautiful.”

Tom Ianelli is a fiction writer and street bookseller in Brooklyn. He asks the questions for the Lit Chat series at @peterbooksnyc. He has written for The Panacea Review, Quartersnacks and Bruiser Mag. 

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Across The Wire Vol. 6

Dear LORD

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by Colin Gee

Pester’s lawn was overgrown with chest-high grasses and vines and scrubby little trees, except you could sometimes make out the little nests in there where he would roll with his bottles of Schnapps. The sharp grasses were punctuated like Moby Dick every hundred pages with what you suspect is a joke with a hideous towering thorned weed like a praying mantis, with veined and baubled pods and gooey leering fissures, that hung in the grasses.

The barf-green carpets in Pester’s house, long flattened by his hairy flat feet, his bigfoot feet, reeked sourly of Vacation Bible School in the 1970s: frantic onanism, candy corn, and TV dinner. Pea/carrot medley with beef stroganoff, turkey with cornbread stuffing, buttered sweet potatoes and gravy, tender fried chicken pieces with butter-basted veggie platters, Yukon gold potatoes mashed with real milk by real milkmaids, thought Pester, in virginal Swiss hose and bonnets that they always take off. Now for a limited time only with mom’s blueberry muffin or apple pie, jammed into the top of the tin. But Pester’s mom had been dead for thirty years, gone dead.

Mr. Rufus lived on the same block with his partner Timothy in the immaculate three-story Queen Anne Victorian mansion with the Rapunzel tower on the corner. Leaded glass windows, parquet floors, and the gorgeously sculpted, meticulously trimmed lawn with tidy paired flower and vegetable gardens and the famous twin oaks. One time Pester puked all over their topiary and it was chunky mushroom tomato sauce and green beans, we speculated. Everyone saw it happen and went to look at the mess. Timothy came out on the porch, made it to the planters, and rushed back inside.

Later on I hooked up their hose and sprayed the chunks off the bush, across the sidewalk and into the gutter, but that was not enough. I had to get a pushbroom and nudge the chunks down the gutter to the drain, and run a lot of water until everything was shipshape.

How did Pester get into heaven? Who let him in here? And how can we get rid of him?

Colin Gee (@ColinMGee on X) is founder and editor of The Gorko Gazette. 

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Issue 5 Issue 5 Fiction

THE FIREMAN

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By Walker Rutter-Bowman

My wife has become a more suspicious person. I tell her we can trust the babysitter. Her references check out, she’s first-aid certified. She’s a nice young woman, but my wife thinks she’s in it for the wrong reasons. It’s all right to have an agenda, which is hard for my wife to accept. My wife’s success as a painter didn’t come from plotting and scheming, only because she’s not good at those things. The thing she’s good at is painting. The thing she leans on is her talent. I point out that she admires some artists of known agendas. When my wife and I wed under the dying elm next to the reservoir, her brother said we had to reason with each other, and we agreed. But she won’t let me be the devil’s advocate, let alone the babysitter’s. The babysitter’s not in it for the baby, though she likes the baby well enough. She’s in it for the money, because that’s our transactional society, simple economics. She stands at the door, slipping her feet into her shoes, arms into coat, and we hand her cash. Cash, the king. The baby sleeps. My wife says the babysitter is an art student looking for a recommendation, which is true. My wife hasn’t uncovered some great secret. My wife found her in one of the studio classes she teaches. The babysitter’s been honest with us since the beginning. She represents the frankness of a generation. My wife is eating dozens of daily grams of protein but her blood sugar seems low, her energy has cratered, she looks in the freezer for frozen meatballs and reasons to distrust her fellow woman and man. I make sure to be present when she interacts with the babysitter. My wife says I always take the side of the less fortunate. “The babysitter comes from wealth,” I say. “Where?” she asks. Wealth, I say, like it’s a place I know.

My wife wants an old woman to babysit. She thinks the lack of old women in our lives is a failure of character. And the old women we do have in our lives are not the right kind of old women. They say the wrong things. They make me carry their carts. When the baby was just born, they said it looked unwell. The baby’s eyes were different sizes, and she hadn’t grown into her skin. When I hurt my knee, one of the old women said, I guess your running days are over. We don’t believe in hitting old women, though sometimes a neighbor shakes our faith. When my wife married me under the dying elm by the reservoir, my brother said I would take care of her when she was old because I loved my elders. Maybe I did, once, but it’s hard to remember. When I help the old women in our building, a mutual feeling of animus lingers. Our eyes lock and narrow. When we wed under the dying elm on the shore of the recreational reservoir, we agreed to celebrate one another’s known associations, but perhaps we didn’t use those exact terms. My wife doesn’t approve of several old men in my life. She says I want to be like them, the old and lonely men, a sour smell clinging to my clothes and neck. She says they are the kind of old men who don’t listen to women, as if there are many kinds. But I keep my neck clean. When I hold the baby, she puts her face right into my neck, and she enjoys it. She loves my neck. She puts her mouth on it. I don’t want to be lonely, but there’s nothing wrong with a little time alone. No one wants an old man to babysit. Only an old woman. I’m not sure why, but this is how it’s done. We won’t be making any changes. Everyone’s a pioneer before the baby comes along, then they remember that convention has its merits.

The day before the opening the babysitter calls to cancel. She ate a bad salad. No one is thoroughly washing their vegetables and greens. My wife, for instance. It could have been you, I do not say. You could have killed the babysitter by accidentally feeding her the feces of livestock. Wash your stuff, I do not say. Restraint in such situations is even more valuable and punishing. I hold myself back with an outmoded form of tolerance. This infuriates my wife, who has read much about the lives of saints but has the wrong temperament to follow in their footsteps. She knew what the silence said. It drives her to wash a carrot with such uncommon vigor that it slips from her grasp and shoots out of her hands and into her eye, the orange point striking the white ball. “Are you happy now?” she screams. When we wed under the dying elm on the shore of the polluted reservoir, her aunt had told us to laugh at one another, and we agreed, so I am laughing. But of course I’m not happy, not even glad.

We get her squared away with a nice eyepatch. She lets me put it on for her, kiss her hair. It looks good on her because that’s the kind of person she is. Turning her head slightly to let me know she is being regal in her pain and humility, and that the kissing, if it continues, will not be on the lips. She is still trying to be a saint. I kiss her hair again. She doesn’t need an apology, just my sadness. Like a sexy saint she walks through the house, floating, touching things gently, with only her fingertips. She’s at her best in the aftermath of conflict. I knew my wife would secretly enjoy wearing the eyepatch. We decide to bring the baby to the opening. It’ll be easy. She is a good baby and well liked. She has never attended an opening, and maybe it’s about time we bring her along as a part of the family. My wife believes in one integrated life, not an artistic practice siloed from the rest of it, and I agree, I guess. The baby is a part of our lives.

When my wife was awarded a prestigious and lucrative prize that made us temporarily rich, we lost our minds a little. We got into wine. We did some research and bought a wine fridge. Anyone can win a prize just as anyone can have a baby. It was a lot of remunerative validation, but not enough. It went away quickly, and as it did, she asked herself, Why me?, which seemed like a natural question after the windfall of validation. Why me and not the others? But she asked it with such regularity, such force, that it began to drive me insane. Why me, why me, why me? I started hearing it in the squeal of breaks, the tinkle of a windchime, the creak of a rusted gate. Why me? Why me? When we wed under the dying orange elm we agreed to be as one, the reservoir was crowded with birds and the civic dreams of park architects and the promises we made to one another. My father told us to be grateful, and we tried. When we wed by a dead tree, we did so to condone one another’s worth through words of repetition, though perhaps not in those exact terms, and I’d like the option to veto a few repeated phrases. Why me, why me, why me? When we wed a tree was falling and a manmade lake was rotting and her mother told me she had never really considered her daughter the artistic type. When we wed, the wind ruffled the water on the reservoir, blowing the stagnant both toward and away, representing the chafing of nature against man, or vice versa. The wind is bad, the wind is good. At no point did the wind sound like Why me, why me, why me? There are questions I don’t ask myself, and in this way I hope to be a model for those I have agreed to share a life with.

I believe in my wife’s paintings. I believe in the baby. And yet, one of my goals in fatherhood has been to avoid comparing our daughter to my wife’s paintings. I have failed at many things but at this I have mainly succeeded. 

There is wine at the opening, the paintings hang on the walls. The wine comes out of glass bottles and goes into plastic cups, it comes out of the cups and goes into mouths, onto tongues and lips, onto shirts and the concrete floor, onto pants and shoes. The beautiful people are wearing beautiful clothes, except for those who are trying something else. The people move in a circle around the room and then clump in the middle, their hands touch and then peel apart. I can tell my wife is disappointed, doing her fake smile. She pulls back her upper lip to show her pink gums. She is doing everything right, and she will have to keep doing it. We have not been temporarily rich for a long time. She wants to scream but the longer you go without screaming, the harder it becomes. Our friends have a wine fridge I find very sleek and unassuming. I am trying to drink less, sleep better, dream more. I can tell from her one eye that she’s tired. She’s not used to the eyepatch, and she keeps peeling it up and wedging her fingers under it to rub her socket with a back-and-forth squeak like a cloth or squeegee on a pane. Her paintings are excellent, and it’s unclear if they mean anything to anyone. It’s likely her eye is infected or getting there. The baby is being shy with her head on my shoulder, and then the baby stops being shy and wants to walk. The baby starts to cry, and my wife comes over to comfort her. The baby is not really a baby. Please understand that when I say baby I mean philosophically. She knows the difference between her mother coming over to comfort her and her mother coming over to shut her up. She can say a few words like hop and bob and money. I go outside to get some air. A fire truck crawls down the next street over and sirens drown out the sound of the baby screaming at the paintings. Someone is burning tonight. I hate to think of babies stuck in buildings, but I love the thought of firefighters carrying babies in their arms. They deserve a lot of credit for being so gentle in their huge fireproof suits, and I think the babies like to look into those firm faces under black and yellow helmets. From where I’m standing, I can see the baby facing the canvases and opening her mouth as wide as she can, as if to devour each work of art. I had the same instinct when I saw my wife’s paintings for the first time—the urge to engulf them, wrap them up, take them inside myself. Something about them makes you want to open yourself up, which not a single critic has noted. The baby is screaming, and people are looking at her with sympathy, but also moving away from her, putting some distance between them. From a young man I acquire a cigarette, which I begin to smoke. The baby screams with all her might and I use my whole chest to tug in every bit of smoke from this cigarette, a scream in reverse, as if I can flip it inside out with the force of my inhalations. 

“What do you think?” says the man who gave me the cigarette. “She’s too young for an opening,” I say. “I mean the paintings,” he says. I mention that not a single critic has noted the thing about opening yourself up to a work of art. He writes it down on a little notepad.

The sirens keep pealing. The lights from the fire truck dance across the buildings, smudge across the windows. A few improbable stars poke out, and a plane rises or falls across the purple-black sky. The sky is like a reservoir. I am like a dying elm. My wife picks up the baby, and the baby kicks her as hard as she can in the stomach. But then she decides the violence must end. She gets snuggly. She securely clutches a clump of my wife’s hair, which means peace. My wife sees me and waves and tells the baby to look outside, pointing, and the baby doesn’t see me, but she waves all the same. She will be lucky if she grows up to have hair as beautiful and strong as her mother’s, able to withstand all this tugging. The baby is muscular, in her way. She wears tunics. She lifts objects above her head like boulders and then releases them. The paintings are mostly of trees that look terrified to be so well-lit and stuck, as the artist has stuck them, in the middle of grim fields. My wife likes the work of a group of French artists who called themselves prophets. They painted bright but soft interiors and trees that look terrified. One of them died in a river, one of them died of disease, and one of them—I don’t know, I don’t know. They were artists of a known agenda, and they said so. Usually in my wife’s paintings there are two trees but sometimes there are three. The trees don’t look like people, despite what some critics have said. Some critics have said that the trees are people, or the absence of people, the hatred of people. They have not said that the trees are trees, or the absence of trees, the hatred of trees. My wife believes her critics are trying to work their way into her. They bite her, they chew a hole, they burrow in, and from that vantage hope to see and say something of worth. The baby did the opposite: she was too close to the paintings. She had no perspective. She had to get out of there, look around, get her footing. She is my wife’s greatest critic because she gave up the privilege of proximity. She exited the body of the artist and, with a few exceptions, never looked back. My wife is like anyone else, hating people, loving trees, and vice versa. When we wed under the approximation of wood and by the facsimile of water we held hands and said we would share it all, but it turns out we could have been more specific. 

The baby runs at the paintings and, whereas I would’ve stopped the baby before she reached them, something holds my wife back. The baby reaches the paintings and clutches at them with her small, strong hands. In some spots she pulls off the paint. If she puts it in her mouth there might be an issue. My wife holds her by the wrist to prevent it. The baby trembles with effort, and so does my wife. I think of a movie where a man tries to stab another man with a knife. One lies on top of the other, they tremble with effort, and the knife descends. The knife goes into one man’s heart, but the paint doesn’t go into the baby’s mouth. A clump falls to the floor, smacking softly. The good thing about paintings as creations is that they never destroy each other. They can glare at each other from across a room for years without ever rising to violence. Of course, the baby’s actions ultimately unlocked a new phase of my wife’s artistic career. She would never display paintings so wet and fresh again. In this way one creation can improve another. But I decided I couldn’t watch the epiphany happen. Or wonder how my wife would balance the discovery of a new direction with the need to discipline the baby. We don’t touch paintings. We don’t hurt art. So I walked around the block because, as a father, there’s nothing like it for the mind and spirit.

Before we ever had a child, we wondered what we would do when it misbehaved. Our first thought was to improve upon the past. We believed we’d turned out well, but was it because or in spite of the methods of our mothers and fathers? For a number of reasons, we didn’t want to strike the child. For one, we could still recall feeling so small and helpless before the power of our parents, who struggled in their positions of authority. My wife’s father was an alcoholic whose work significantly contributed to the microchip industry. He spanked her only once, under orders from her mother, and when his daughter started crying, so did he, and she was so shocked to see him crying she stopped, wiped her eyes. But he went on sobbing because self-pity was how he expressed himself. It came over him like a storm. They could speak to each other if they were watching a game. Televised grass made them feel calm. When I misbehaved, my mother, a classicist who won some acclaim from her book on plumbing in the ancient world, shook me by the shoulders and said, Why, why? and my father walked out to the backyard to check on his birdfeeders. He won very little acclaim for checking on his birdfeeders, despite his great passion and skill for it. Our goal was to be better, more logical. We wanted consequence for all parties involved, especially the child. It should make sense. Now we had to wonder what to do when a child unlocks a new phase of an artistic career by breaking the rules. And good art is all about breaking rules. It’s tricky. I buy and eat a hot dog. With caution the vendor watches me eat it as if expecting some complaint. No complaints. It’s a delicious hot dog.

Back at the gallery the lights are stronger and more colorful. The blues and reds and their whirling strobe belong to a firetruck. The sidewalk is full of the people who were once inside and are now confused. They had not planned to be huddled together on a sidewalk. They had not dressed for this. They are impressed by the truck but don’t want to show it. Now I hear the gallery alarm, a bell hitting itself like a penitent. I search the crowd outside for my wife and the baby until two figures catch my eye: my wife and the baby, alone in the gallery. Not alone for long, though, as the firemen march in. My wife speaks with one of them, and I can read confusion in her gestures as she struggles to process what the baby has unlocked in her artistic practice. We know there is no real danger of fire. I think we’re all feeling sheepish about our involvement in the art world when there are firemen about—even though firemen can be artists, and artists firemen. It’s easiest to be neither, and I recommend it. Some people are looking at me, wondering if I’ll run in, wondering if I’ll just stand there. I just stand there, and that earns some approval. It allows them to judge me, and once that is complete—it only takes a moment—to extend their tendrils of sympathy. I can tell the fireman is being kind to my wife. I can tell my wife is thinking about him in an intimate sense. I can tell my wife would like to take one painting off the wall and bring it outside with her. She hands the baby to the fireman. The fireman has never been in this situation. We see him through the windows of the gallery. The baby nestles into his arms. She is too old to be held like that, but the fireman is so big. He could hold anyone like that. He looks down at her. She will never remember this, the lights splashing across the buildings and streets and faces, her mother carefully unhanging from the huge wall a painting with a fresh divot. We will hold the memory for her, forever. The fireman cradling her with a gentleness he won not by training or study. He is special. The baby reaches up and touches his helmet. Her hand unlocked a new phase of a major painter’s career, and who knows what it could do for him. Her hand tells him, You’re doing good work, you bring something natural to all of this. The fireman touches her cheek with his large and gloved hand. That hand saves lives. It’s a moment I’ll never forget. She won’t remember it, but we’ll remind her for the rest of her life, the rest of our lives. Was I in danger? she’ll ask, trying to understand, and we’ll have to answer, No, not really. It wasn’t about that. It will be tricky for the fireman too. So you saved the baby, his family says, from fire, from death? No, he says, not exactly. It wasn’t about that. But for a moment, we were two people who understood one another. She unlocked a new phase of my firefighting career. But everyone has left the room. They miss his stories of melting metal, of noise and smoke. They don’t care what he found in the face of a child. So the fireman sits alone with his thoughts.

Walker Rutter-Bowman is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn.

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Issue 5 Issue 5 Fiction

MOST OF THE WORDS WE USE ARE WASTED

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By Alex Rost

Chuck misses three days of work then comes in with swollen eyes and through choked words tells me his wife is gone, that after seven years of marriage and two daughters, he found pictures on her phone, iPhone live photos with devastatingly fellatious clarity.

“Two guys,” he says. “Same time.”

She’d been coming home later than usual from her bartending job and Chuck found a sandwich bag in her purse an inch deep with Adderall she claimed the cook gave her.

“Yeah, she said she didn’t pay or nothin. He just gave it to her.”

She’d said the cook was ‘really cool.’

“I should’ve known then,” he says, then sulks back to his car and drives away.

***

Chuck finds out his wife has been coaching his kids to say, “Daddy’s a piece of shit.” They were reluctant at first but came around when she cheered, like they’d scored a goal in a game they didn’t know they were playing.

***

Numbers he doesn’t recognize keep sending Chuck photos of naked men. He blocks the first few but eventually engages.

“The guy tells me he got my number online, sends me this.” He hands me his phone.

It’s a picture of his face on Grindr, his number spelled out. It describes him as a power bottom. Ready now, is the tagline. Bigger IS better, written underneath.

No,” he says when I point out his wife might’ve made it. “She wouldn’t do that.”

***

Which of course, he finds out she did. Her and the cook. Who ends up, she’s been fucking regularly.

***

There’s pep in Chuck’s step, and he’s all smiles while telling me that he and his wife are going to try to work things out, that she came over while the kids were at his mom’s and cried while he held her.

Using words like— 

“Miss you,” 

and 

“Just need time,”

and 

“Of course I still love you.” 

He’s so full of hope that I don’t have the heart to tell him that I’d just now seen her on a dating website wearing a tiny skirt and low-cut shirt.

Using words like—

“Divorced,” 

and 

“Single mom,”

and 

“Looking for love.”

***

Chuck isn’t doing too well. He’s blasting screamcore again.

The boss comes out of his office and says, “I don’t know about you, but this music makes me want to murder a baby.”

I start to agree with him, then I’m like, “Wait. Murder a baby?”

***

Chuck explains his hazy state of mind through an episode where he started to cut a zucchini only to realize he meant to buy a cucumber.

I try to relate, say about my ex—

“There’s still cans she bought in the cupboard—artichoke hearts, black beans—and sometimes I pick one up, think about the food inside sitting in its juices. The dates on the cans, they’ll last longer than our relationship did. I’d eat it, but I don’t like artichokes, the black beans were for a recipe she made. I thought about tossing them, but when I look at them, there’s like, this moment. I don’t know. I figure when the cans are about to go bad I’ll say fuck it, make a casserole or some shit.” 

I look at Chuck’s glossed over expression and think about how most of the words we use are wasted.

And just like him, I long to be more than a memory.

***

Chuck’s press is already running when I come in through the back and give him a passing, “What’s up, Chuck?”

“Living the dream,” he says.

And what he really means is—

This is just another day. Today is yesterday, yesterday is tomorrow, and I regret nearly every choice I’ve made.

“Living a dream,” I say back, smiling.

And what I really mean is—

I feel exactly the same way.

***

I go to leave at the end of the day and see Chuck sitting at the picnic table despite the muddy cold, staring off across the lawn at nothing.

I sit next to him, neither of us speaking for like three, four minutes, until I finally ask how he’s doing.

And in this long winded way, he explains how there is nothing left to say when the words from our hearts have lost their meaning.

“She told me that she’d tried to make me happy when I was unhappy,” he says. “But when I finally wanted to make her happy, she was done trying to be happy with me.”

And I think of my ex, telling me she just wanted to be happy without shedding all her pride.

After a moment, Chuck smiles, says, “Ahh, who cares about women anyway?”

“We do,” I say. “We don’t have anything else to care about.”

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

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Issue 5 Issue 5 Fiction

BEEFS

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By Sal Difalco

1

“Empty your pockets,” the officer says. His thick black moustache distracts me. Stalinesque, in a word. I could never grow such a moustache. He repeats his command. I empty my pockets. What do I have in those pockets? Forty dollars—one twenty, one ten, two fives—in a silver billfold I received as a groom’s gift for Sam Perri’s wedding. That was twenty years ago. I still see Sam on occasion, but everything else has changed since then. It’s a different world, I’m a different man. Some loose silver: quarters, dimes, nickels. We got rid of pennies long ago. A red lighter. The red leans toward orange and yet is not orange. What is that colour precisely? I don’t know. A receipt from Shoppers Drug Mart for toiletries and a bag of russet potato chips. Another receipt from Phipp’s Bakery for a blueberry scone. A ginger lozenge free from its wrapper and collecting a beard of lint. A small steel cylinder containing one gram of Afghani-adjacent hashish. “What’s this?” the officer asks, holding the cylinder up to the caged lightbulb of the interrogation room. “Hashish,” I say. “You know,” he says, “just a few years ago I could have busted your ass for this.” I want to say, “The law is a bitch, my friend,” but think better of it. Legalizing cannabis may have been the greatest thing my country has ever done. “You think you’re smart, eh?” the officer says. “No smarter than average,” I reply, speaking the truth as I know it. “Well, you’re in big trouble now,” he says. “How so?” I ask. “I think you know,” he says. But I have no clue.

2

As a matter of fact, I’m held overnight without explanation. I share a cell with two interchangeable long-haired thugs who boast of robbing a convenience store. “Ever robbed a convenience store, bro?” one asks. I don’t answer him. Not to be rude, but to show how honestly indifferent I am to his reality. “What are you in for, bro?” he asks. I look at him and look at my hands. “He’s a mute,” says his cohort, reclining on the dented aluminum bench. Both chuckle. The yellow cinderblocks of the cell anger me for some reason. Is yellow a triggering color? I thought red was the winner of that contest. Show a bull a red cape and what happens? But I’m not a bull. The first fellow eyeballs me. “You look like you want to beef,” he says. “He looks like he wants to beef,” he repeats to his friend. I don’t quite know what he means. I don’t have a beef with him, if that’s what he’s implying, at least not for the time being, though I suspect that within a minute or two I will have a beef with both him and his amigo. “He has mean eyes,” says the amigo, sitting up. I know I have mean eyes. I’ve been told that many times during the course of my life. Even as a young lad I was told I had an unfriendly look about me. This often led to fisticuffs or beatings from older people. But I am mean. I am a mean man, and I own that shit. And I like myself just fine. You want me to list a few real monsters? No need, huh. We all know who they are and how we compare to them. “Hey,” I say, “you want me to show you how mean I really am?” Both say nothing. Good for them. A little dust up would have been gratifying, but they saved me the clean-up and potential further charges. “You guys are lucky,” I say.

3

Luck has nothing to do with it, some might argue. Who the some are remains unknown. If we maintain the thread and not break from the dream, perhaps we will end on a satisfying note. Otherwise, preserve the wanking for the lads at the pub over pints of flat Guinness. The pending charges fell away after further investigation. Without looking back at parts one and two, and with a memory scored by pinholes caused by drug abuse and congenital cognitive issues, I suspect the officers were lovers mid-spat who decided to make sport with me for a while as a diversion from their own supper of eels. Later they stripped nude and wrestled on a mat they kept for such moments. I state that with no judgment save an aesthetic one. I have no beef with cops. It is impossible to know what goes on in the minds of others, what gears and wheels crank and spin in their braincases. My friend Malvolio, who recently self-published a collection of poetry, tells me that the key to life is not trying to figure out what everyone is thinking, or attempting to determine the motivations of people. “People are idiots,” Malvolio says. “We have barely evolved, emotionally speaking, since the cave man.” Malvolio’s poetry leaves me cold, I must say, as does most poetry written these days. This is not the fault of the poets. It is the fault of social media and politicians and systemic bias. I had to pause for a moment to wipe a speck from my eye. I’m sorry. It’s easy to blame the world for our mediocrity. As mentioned earlier, I am a mean man. I feel mean and say mean things. I’ve been told that enough times and am self-aware enough to realize the validity of this assessment. I’m not violent, just mean. But if there is room in this world for mediocre poets is there not room in it for a mean man? As a matter of fact, most people get away with meanness every day—look around you—but none would admit to being mean. I admit it. Why should I be shunned by the world for being true to myself when everyone else thinks they merit a parade just for being?

Sal Difalco writes from Toronto, Canada.

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Issue 5 Issue 5 Fiction

THE QUEST

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By Jimmy Cajoleas

I needed to talk to the redhead at the bar. The signs were clear. She had a nose ring and a tattoo of California. A roach perched on a bottle stared directly at her. I dropped some change on the counter, and it was a nickel and two pennies. That equals seven, the number of completion. I shredded a napkin and it spelled out my name. You ignore the natural world at your peril.

I came to Dutch Bar every night at exactly the same time in hopes of getting served. Otherwise I didn’t have a chance. When I was twelve I was hexed by my neighbor after I squished his pet bullfrog who had wandered into the street. I was on my bike. It was an accident, but the frog didn’t care. He said “Ribbet!” three times and no one has noticed me since. 

I tapped Greg the bartender on the shoulder. 

“Sorry, didn’t see you there.”

I’d heard that signs might lead somewhere terrible but you should follow them anyway. But tonight didn’t feel right. Maybe it was because I hadn’t had a successful conversation with anyone but my mother in nearly a month. Or maybe it was the mild and constant nausea I felt since my father disappeared. 

At that moment the jukebox played the song “Turning Japanese” by the Vapors, a song of great spiritual power, so I decided to follow the signs. 

I said hello to the redhead but of course she didn’t notice. Finally I tapped her on the shoulder. 

“I’m sorry,” she said, “ are you talking to me?”

Her name was Jo Anna. She smoked Kools and offered me one, said she liked my hairdo. 

“My mother curls my hair once a month.”      

“You shouldn’t tell people things like that.” Jo Anna pulled out a picture of a smiling woman in a short yellow dress. “Have you seen this girl?” 

“Are you a bounty hunter or something?”

“No. This is my sister Marilyn. She ran away two years ago and I’ve been searching for her ever since. Got a lead she was down this way. Think you could help me find her?”

That felt like a quest. Quests are how curses are broken. I was getting pretty desperate out here.

“Well? Can you help me?” Her eyes were soft brown, the color of a newborn deer.

“I think I know a place where we could look.”

Jo Anna called a cab and I took her to the Slops.

The Slops were an old neighborhood where millionaires lived in the forties. A development company bought the Slops a decade ago and gutted all the buildings and then went bankrupt. Cops didn’t come to the Slops, but broke and lonely people did. Late at night, the Slops were overflowing with them. 

A woman in a leopard-print leotard set up a snare drum on a street corner. A man beside her played the saxophone. I hate the saxophone.

I tapped Byron Knight on the shoulder. Byron ran the cee-lo game. He was a popular guy, knew everybody in the Slops, even the ones with the knives and missing fingers. 

“What are you doing down here?” He slapped me on the back because I’d saved his pet albino rat from a dog once. 

“We’re looking for this girl. Her name’s Marilyn.”

I handed him the picture of Jo Anna’s sister. 

“It’s a couple of years old,” Jo Anna said. “I doubt she’s changed much.”

He took the photo and studied it. 

“I know her. That’s Lord Chaney’s girl. Works at the Double Time.”

Jo Anna hugged me. She said to take her to Lord Chaney right now. 

I told her it wasn’t that simple.

Lord Chaney was a wrathful man. He owned a bar called the Double Time near the outskirts of the Slops. They said he could read crow bones and lit black candles at midnight. They said he had concubines. They said he had killed so many men their ghosts lined up outside his door, weeping and wailing and waiting on their turn to haunt him. 

I was scared, but this was a quest. You have to be scared for a quest, otherwise it’s impossible to be brave. 

The Double Time was the last bar in the farthest reaches of the Slops, where men with guns rode slow down neighborhood streets and everyone was afraid. It was housed in an old clothing shop from the thirties. Half the mannequins were still there, defaced and painted up. Some looked like clowns and some looked like little girls. 

There was a pool table with a blood spot in the middle of it. One guy didn’t have any hands. He held the cue between two nubs. A girl with a scar on her lip winked at Jo Anna. She had a tattoo on her shoulder of a broken heart. The mannequins stood among the people like quiet angels.

“This place doesn’t feel right,” said Jo Anna.

“That’s because it isn’t.” 

Jo Anna spotted her sister first. She had long pigtails down to her waist. Her arms were covered in illustrations, redbirds and stars and a dead tree with roots that spread down into her shirt. She had a hunting knife in her back pocket and was pregnant, a tray of beers balanced on the top of her belly.  

“Marilyn?” said Jo Anna. 

Her sister’s eyes squinted then got real big. She dropped her tray and drinks went everywhere and I tried to clean up the mess. The sisters embraced. 

Marilyn bent down, her face crinkled up all angry and whispered at me, “Get her out of here!”

“We’re not leaving without you. We’re on a quest.”

“Meet me out back,” said Marilyn, and ran behind a curtain to the back of the bar.

I took Jo Anna by the arm. She was trembling.

  “We got to save her.”

Jo Anna and I went outside and waited. I thought Marilyn wasn’t going to come. I thought she’d bring Lord Chaney and bad men with guns. I thought we’d get carved up and dragged a mile down the blacktop.

But when Marilyn came out the back of the Double Time, she came alone. Marilyn and Jo Anna hugged each other. They cried. There was good in the world and I was a part of it.  

I grabbed Jo Anna by the hand. 

“Let’s hustle.” 

It was slow-going with Marilyn’s belly and all. I kept looking around for Lord Chaney. A crow flew right by my head, perhaps a sign. Everywhere was a dark alley for someone to jump out of. All the lonesome people with their blankets watched us from behind dark windows. But we got back among the people. I thought we’d be safe there. I listened to Jo Anna and Marilyn become sisters again. I bought us corn dogs from 7-11. 

Then I felt a pair of eyes on me. My left elbow hurt. 

Up walked a stray orange cat. I knew what that meant. The music quieted down and everyone perked their ears. A man stepped into the light. He had long curly hair down to his shoulders. He had an earring made out of a finger. It was Lord Chaney. He grinned, four teeth left in his mouth. 

“Marilyn, honey? I think you better be coming back with me.”

“She ain’t yours,” I said. 

“That a fact?” Lord Chaney said to her. “You ain’t happy with me, here in the Slops? Living like a queen?” 

“Feel more like a slave,” said Marilyn. 

Lord Chaney doubled over laughing. “Oh Lord, she feels like a slave. I could’ve made her my slave but I didn’t. Hell no. I made her my wife. And she can’t leave me. You hear that?” He grabbed Marilyn by a pigtail. “You can’t leave me.” He bit her on the ear.

“It’s true.” Marilyn pulled up her pants leg and showed us the tattoo. It was a fishhook with a circle around it and an Egyptian eye in the middle. Done with a knife. It meant she was his. Those were the rules.

“Plus you got our son in your belly there. You got a piece of me living inside you for always. Only thing that can set you free is death,” said Lord Chaney. “I know you’re brave, but you ain’t brave enough for that.”

I wasn’t afraid of dying, only worried about my mother and her fish back in our apartment. I felt my pocketknife. It was green. I won it by throwing rings around a bottle at the fair. 

“Fuck it,” I said. 

I jumped at Lord Chaney. But Lord Chaney had the Twitchy Eye, and he noticed everything. Also he was quick, and his knife was bigger. He stuck it right in my belly.

“Too slow,” said Lord Chaney, while I bled on his shoes. It was like we had signed a contract. Byron Knight and an old man were watching us. They were witnesses. Byron bowed his head. Lord Chaney walked away, jingling the change in his pocket. Jo Anna cried. 

“I’m sorry,” she said. 

“Am I going to die?”

“I didn’t mean for you to.”

“When I’m gone, take me home to my mother.”

The band struck up a song. An old woman prayed to Jesus. I thought of my mom making grilled tilapia and talking to my dad’s empty chair. People gathered around me, shaking tambourines, singing. Looking right at me. The curse was broken. I was so happy. The blood was all over the pavement. Jo Anna cried and her tears fell in my mouth. 

It was all for me.

Jimmy Cajoleas is from Jackson, Mississippi. He lives in New York.

Categories
Issue 5 Issue 5 Fiction

OLD FRIENDS

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By Craig Rodgers

The postcard comes first. Basic cardstock, a tourist find. Photo of a beach somewhere. Old, coverall swimsuits decades out of fashion. A single boat sails in the distance.

Bertrum holds it up. He holds it out. Maybe the image will bring a memory but it does not. He turns the card over. Writing. A neat, precise hand.

Hi Bert. It’s been too long.

– Perry

He turns it back again. The swimmers scattered there. Girls in their wraps. Some vague familiarity, like a still from a movie. The fog memory of a dream. 

He lays the card down on the counter. He thinks back, back. Reaching. Perry. Perry?

***

It’s an outdoor place. Tables strewn in the road. Wait staff prowl among, pouring drinks, bringing sides. A hundred kinds of salad.

His drink comes, her drink comes. A local beer for him, a milky booze for her. They each take sips and nod. Small talk now, the bullshit of friends. More sipping, more talking. Then.

“Something weird came. Can I show you?”

“I love weird.”

He lays the card between them on the table. She puts out a hand and nudges. The beach girls tolerate. Then she turns it over and reads. She looks up.

“Okay.”

“Okay what?”
“Okay what’s weird?”

“What do you mean?”

“What do YOU mean?”

“Perry. Who is Perry?”

She snorts and sits back.

“What? Perry. From school.”

“What school?”

“High school. All school. Perry.”

“Jen, I don’t remember any Perry. I mean. Ever.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m not kidding.”

“Bert, come on. Perry.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Well clearly he remembers you.”

She taps the card with a finger.

“You really don’t remember?”

He shakes his head no. She slides the card away.

***

He looks it up everywhere. Social media. High school pages. There’s no Perry. The reunion, those attending. Invites. Nothing. He pours himself a drink. He goes to the local paper. Searching, scrolling. There is no Perry. He pours himself a drink. He searches births, he searches deaths. There is no Perry. He pours himself a drink.

***

The committee meets each Wednesday in the weeks leading up. Planning and the like. Catering, decorations. What kind of banner will go where. They’re renting a ferry out on the lake. One of those big numbers. The whole class will fit. Room for more still.

Bertrum sits in the back. Just like the old days. Spacing out, nodding when he must. Their talk circles and some accord is reached and people begin standing and he stands too. He shakes hands, he smiles. Small talk. We’re all well. Then the crowd filters out, then only stragglers remain. 

The committee chair is there at the table. She flips through pages in a phone. Leslie something. Bertrum steps near.

“Oh. Oh hello.”

Her face is blank and then a glow. Filled again with spirit. She puts out a hand and he shakes it and she pats his. Then.

“I’m sorry to bother you. I have a question about the reunion.”

“That’s fine.”

“It’s an odd one.”

“Okay.”

“Was there someone named Perry who got invited?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Anyone. Anyone named Perry.”

She touches the papers in front of her but her eyes never leave Bertrum.

“Hey. Don’t you worry. Of course Perry will be there.”

***

The lot is vast and full. Stars shine above like a mirror shattered in the black. Bertrum sits parked and watching. The boat tied bobbing to the pier. Faces come and go. He tugs at a flask and still watches.

The passenger door pops open. A bell is pinging. She slides in beside.

“Is there more of that?”

“Whole bottle behind the seat.”

She laughs in great whooping sounds. He reaches back, he hands the bottle over. She unscrews the top and sniffs and wrinkles her nose. She gives him a look and she takes a drink. Cheap but smooth. She takes another.

“You gonna go in?”

“It feels like another life.”

“Yeah,” she says. “It is.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Are you going in?”

“Bert. I’m here now. What choice do I have?”

***

The line trails. Down the ramp and around. How could there ever have been so many. They make their slow way up. 

Music thumps ahead. A song familiar. Something old now, something from all the way back. People chat in line. This way, that way. The vaguest familiarities from another life. Inching on. Up. The song ends, another starts. Louder now. A memory of a song. He turns in place. The noise everywhere. The line moves on. Nearing. Another song now. He knows this one too but it’s wrong somehow. Off key maybe. Jarring. Louder still. The line moves. The door is close. A foyer, tables. The ballroom beyond. The line moves. 

“Hi.”

He says hi too. She asks for his name and he says Bertrum and she scans a table of names. She looks up again as if he might be mistaken.

“Bert.”

She nods and looks again. She looks for so long. He puts a hand down and he says okay but still she looks. He says it’s okay but she goes on looking.

***

At the edge of the pier the land drops. Stairs lead down carved into the cliff. He swings the bottle as he walks. One hand pressed against wet rock. Ground now. Each step sinks into soft beach sand. He walks along and he stops to push off shoes one and then the other and he moves on. Soon he finds himself sitting. Drinking pulls from the bottle. The water right there. Shore’s gentle lapping. The ferry’s lights trail off as the long distance swallows the boat away. He goes on drinking. Toes squeeze the wet sand. Hot night air runs along skin. He drinks again. Somewhere laughter comes. Gentle tittering. He turns and watches. Friends in the sand down the way. Just in the reach of lake’s wash. They play. A few and a few more. Pushing, running around. The sound of their laughter carries. Bertrum watches. He admires. He takes a drink and remembers. What it was like. He smiles and they play in the sand, their swimsuits of a sort decades out of fashion.

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

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Issue 5 Issue 5 Fiction

BIG DEAL

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By Claire Hopple

Brandy is a fine girl. She does not, however, make a good wife.

And then she dies. She suffers. She doesn’t go quickly. It cannot be helped. 

She’d been married to a drug lord for a number of years, which everybody made a big deal out of. But it was same-as-usual for Brandy. 

She divorced him until he agreed to host a pool party, remarried him at the pool party, and then divorced him again that afternoon when he acted like a hotshot with a pool noodle.

There were times when they only lived on the moonlight and their mutual determination to build the perfect sandwich. They were responsible for the highly regarded sandwich determination quotient, or SDQ.

The drug lord––we’ll call him Rob now––hosted a metal plate in his head. Some claimed he was torpedoed. Others insisted it was due to a hunting accident. And then there were a select handful who stated he had the plate for no reason other than he wanted one. Regardless, Brandy was once entranced by it. This was back when they were inventing aliases for themselves in the wilderness. And it was truly all it was cracked up to be. Until it wasn’t.

Rob started saying things Brandy thought he really meant, being fully honest with her, and it seemed uncalled for, unsavory even. She set his glockenspiel on fire in response. It had the desired dramatic effect.

Oh. Now everyone is staring at him. The town is holding an assembly. There’s a projector and everything, just like grade school.

Rob wedges into the crowd until it froths up, spilling over into an outcry. Then he distances himself, holds a rolled-up flyer to his ear to check whether he can hear the ocean. Echoes of the pool noodle return, so he stops.

Crying doesn’t matter at an assembly. Who’s he kidding? He’s pure embarrassment smashed into the earth by gravity.

Rob scans the room to decipher which one of these citizens he’s so cleverly avoided up until this moment deserves to be bribed. Perhaps any citizen will do.

There’s a college kid draping himself over a chair just to get noticed. Rob approaches, but the kid speaks first.

“What brings you here?”

“Business transactions,” Rob says.

“I will tell you everything I told––” the kid starts.

“Nah. Whatever you’re about to say isn’t what I’m after. I’m trying to find myself,” Rob says.

“That’s nice.”

“I mean I made a voodoo doll of myself. And I lost it. Now I’m trying to find it.”

Rob had already faked his own death before. If the worst happens he’s already warmed up. 

“Why, uh, why…I’ll keep my eye out for it, chief,” the kid says, saluting him.

He tries his luck with the snack vendor. But they fall into an argument surrounding mathematics. Rob doesn’t believe her when she says she can do her times tables. Rob briefly considers assigning her a times test so he can observe her claims. She falls asleep at the snack table while he’s deciding. What can he do but dwell on all her unguessable thoughts. This is what happens when you talk to people at regular intervals, expelling the determination typically reserved for sandwiches.

He leans over and whispers to the sleeping vendor, “Brandy always listened to me.”

He washes his hands of the search. Someone will find the doll version of him under a rose bush, and she’ll have the privilege of deciding which version is the dummy. 

There’s nothing wrong with vanishing from society, even if it doesn’t amount to much. Which is exactly what Rob does, never to be seen again and feeling the same way he always had, now and forever. At least his metal plate is there for him. The metal plate has been there all along.

Claire Hopple is the author of six books. Her stories have appeared in Southwest Review, Forever Mag, Wigleaf, Cleveland Review of Books, and others. More at clairehopple.com.

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Issue 4 Issue 4 Fiction

THE SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS OF GAY DATING WHEN YOU’RE NOT EVEN GAY: A FRAGMENT

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By Jesse Hilson

Women are enemies, and men are enemies in a different shape, but the same distasteful antagonism. You see them in public where you rarely go, in excursions out of your mousehole. You do go out sometimes, to Tony Larry’s hangouts, the farm stand he maintains with his boyfriend Brian, the farmers’ markets you go out of your way to visit. Otherwise you stay away. Everybody is an opponent to be melted down with contemptuous eyes. Does it disguise desire, does it hide a potential love-charge? Those false dates with Tony Larry, he never suspected were dates, but you half-feared them to be before they happened, wondered at while they were happening, and drove away from them afterwards in confusion.

What do you know about that? You know nothing about that. You were thinking just this morning, about how you were that gay kid, that kid with the gay vibe in high school who nonetheless escaped all the allegations and went on to fuck women, double digit body count, never touching male ass or having your own ass be taken by sodomites, but still the contradictions remain, potent after many decades of a benighted lifetime. The womanly compartments within you resonated nevertheless, the “feminine side” others may detect but they were cruelly (perhaps mercifully) disguised from you, like many other things. Until you crossed paths with Tony Larry.

At lunch with Tony Larry’s boyfriend Brian, eating tomato sandwiches at the café, glasses glowing with sparkling water in the sun. Brian’s clothes were dirty from the farm, as if by self-conscious design, to be seen as a “farmer.” Brian was going on and on: “I wouldn’t actually want my AI to have the voice of an upwardly mobile Black man. I just wouldn’t. Call me a reactionary backwards bigot, or whatever. It’s truer to say if AIs must have Black voices they should sound more like stand-up comics on Def Comedy Jam, or rappers. That’s the history I want evoked when I interact with the tech regimes of the future, if I must do so. The whole question of deciding your AI’s voice ahead of time is crazy to begin with. I’m not sure why exactly but it feels wrong in the same way tailoring your Zoom background with bookcases and designer lamps feels wrong with a capital ‘R.’ Be natural, be true. Be racist if need be. Be authentic. Don’t kowtow to the neoliberal agenda.”

You filed all this commentary away in your internal dossier on Brian. He was too trusting, too open with his opinions over lunch. You were surprised he was telling you all this, with no monitor, no checking of your signals, none of the paranoia another person might have shown. Tony Larry’s affections had made him too secure, too complacent. They gave Brian a protective shield you scan for cracks, even though you are not in competition with him. You notice whenever they say goodbye to each other they exchange “I love yous” in a quick, monotone voice, identical to each other from long repetition, like androids running through a tired subroutine. This privately infuriates you. It feels dead. It doesn’t seem organic enough for Tony Larry, to your mind. Then, also privately, you whip yourself for thinking so as you drive alone around the countryside.

Who was Brian to you, and you to Brian? Was he trying to gag you and shock you with extreme politics, was it a defensive maneuver somehow, to protect his relationship? Tony Larry told you about Brian’s hobby as a writer. It seemed like a false, dangerous surface just like the farmer persona. He wrote stories about BDSM. It was beyond him, though, to seek a truly Dostoevskian moral confrontation, you sensed. Besides, you don’t wear BDSM like an accessory, an outward fashion statement. At least you thought so. Later you worried that you didn’t know the correct thing to do either, you didn’t have the savoir faire, either. Brian was an idiot, but what were you going to do, tell Tony Larry that his boyfriend was a corny faker, with falsely acquired attitudes and that you were realer than he was, because you were older? You had allowed these attitudes to come to you more naturally over time, and it was a generation gap. Tony Larry being a millennial should have been able to see that. But you could barely see that, or see anything, you know that now. You tend to see more, as time goes by. You have more info to add to the hopper and you can judge from a place of higher visibility.

“Not necessarily true,” Tony Larry told you when you shared just a fragment of this with him, editing out all explicit reference to Brian and hoping he’d gather from your half-hearted hints that older was superior. “Not if you’re shoving it all down over time, Noah. People sometimes get more blind as time goes by.” You thought you were suggesting you were smarter about life, the soul, whatever, than Brian was. To displace Brian from his position even though they ostensibly loved each other. What room for displacement was there, though, what foothold for jealousy existed that would avoid being spotted on its face? Like did you think Tony Larry wouldn’t see the emotional angle? Were they laughing at your attempts? Tony Larry seemed to humor you, to your face: millennials were wise that way, you discovered to your envy and disgust. Somehow these counseling sessions were conducted in a gel-like environment created by Aubrey’s wake after she left. She was a millennial too. You’d told Tony Larry about the spanking and rough sex Aubrey had goaded you into. You call it goading, you suspect you aren’t truly curious enough to take possession of the actions in the bedroom, ownership of the pain you caused Aubrey’s body to make her cum. You wanted to distance yourself from that, even as you told Tony Larry with hetero pride how you’d made Aubrey have an orgasm without ever taking your clothes off. This dom role felt aligned with the fact that you were eight years older than Aubrey and Tony Larry, you were Gen X. You were on the demographic outskirts of a sexual territory only the young, the queer could occupy safely, solidly. You were not a member of the group somehow, even though Aubrey used you to perform those rituals with her, rituals that extended beyond sex and into conversations, sour niceties, pain silently inflicted. 

What were you doing telling Tony Larry any of this? You couldn’t say, especially since, as the visibility and awareness of your age grew, you developed unbidden feelings for Tony Larry, dreamt about him. Dreams that seemed non-sexual in nature, or you hoped so, after awakening and taking your first thoughts of the day, the way ignorant people hoped for certain outcomes in the news, political developments, tragedies scrolled over on the iPhone with a vague prayer for forgetfulness. Feelings had a surface area laser-mapped onto an unseen plane, a zone of men when the beams had heretofore only fallen on women’s physical bodies. And the male surfaces were not embodied, it wasn’t carnal with men, in a way you could point to or perhaps admit in your imperfect epistemic understanding of yourself and your own desires. Maybe you were a sexual cripple because you could only lust after women as you had seen them for decades, and never conceptualize anything else, any other tools ill-fitted for the hand. Some bisexual conscience hectored you, teased at you, from dream-angles, dream-ventriloquisms your waking mind couldn’t own up to puppeteering. A disillusionment never acquired such profundity that it would shake the faggot machinery within into awful automaton life, sending down cascades of magnetic dust and debris, the golem in motion. The inner android drew on a lifetime of observations that the straight, hetero self made, the storage of data for mysterious usage. This scientific knowledge might have positive value to the android’s purposes, if they could even be isolated themselves. To think of yourself as a machine made it all seem like something dark and less than human even though it was the automatized search for love and meaning. How could that ever be inhumanly colored. Why dust, falling, why not the ice that seizes life, breaking off in a shower of tinkling fragments and freeing an imprisoned organic being? You do not want to be the robot, do not want the machine-model of mind to apply, whether in disability or sexual confusion. You would rather this inner self be an isotope or inherent version of your mentally ill outer self, a hidden iteration from whom all consequence has been removed. You no more want to own an unconscious that produces dreams of Tony Larry than you would want to own a weapon that, by its very existence, potentially threatens the peaceful life of the household.

Jesse Hilson lives in the Catskills in New York State. His work as a writer and cartoonist has appeared in X-R-A-Y, Hobart Pulp, Expat Press, Maudlin House, Exacting Clam, and other venues. He has written two novels, Blood Trip and The Tattletales; a poetry collection Handcuffing the Venus De Milo; and a short story collection The Calendar Factory.