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ELIZA

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By Emma Reed Jones

When it senses I’ve pressed the clicker button, the gate to my building’s parking lot makes a sudden little jerk with its large metal body, then rolls back slowly to let me in. The alert pause, followed by the obedient smooth sliding, reminds me of how, when I was 19 and still living in New York, I had just had sex that felt good for the first time and I kept seeing cocks everywhere. I remember sitting on the subway watching the metal doors that divide the train cars from each other sliding back and forth, their protruding latches moving into and out of the holes on the other side, when I suddenly got so turned on I almost came right there.

There are many little pauses in life; some are normal and to be expected, while others are uncanny. “Uncanny” means “beyond what is normal or expected.” For example, the pause before Anthony answered me, as we waited for the parking lot gate to open all the way. In fact, he didn’t answer me at all.

As we drove through the gate, I tried again. “So, you live alone?” I said, “No roommates?”

He was silent where normally you would expect words, or at least sounds; but then I was pulling into my designated spot, putting the car in park, turning the key, pulling up the emergency brake, pressing the seatbelt button – a continuous flow of action that seemed to erase the prior moment.

We rode the elevator to my apartment. Inside, I immediately straddled Anthony on the zebra print couch that demarcated the “living” area from the “bedroom” area. We made out. I caught a glimpse of myself in the vintage mirror I’d found in the trash – breasts falling out of my dark green V-neck sweater and pooling in his large hands, face flushed.

I had told Anthony I didn’t want to have sex this time. I was trying to show I was in control. After all, I could decide when to push the button, to open the gate. I had decided to pay $100 a month for a parking spot after my car was broken into again – so now I had the clicker, and the power.

Last time, Anthony secretly took the condom off. “Oh,” he said when I realized what had happened, “I thought you knew.” He said the condom had been making him uncomfortable; and it’s true that he was big and the condom looked comically small, like the cap on a Bic pen. I’d let him keep going then, without the condom, because it felt really good. Later, these facts rearranged themselves, causing me to believe that I had chosen the whole course of action myself.

When Anthony didn’t answer my question about his living arrangement, I think a portal was opened up to another mental place. Some part of me had decided that being with him wasn’t real; was like being in a dream, where things don’t behave the way they normally do.

In my dreams, I’m always looking for my sandwich. I am denied it over and over and over again.

Still, in my dreams, I fuck whoever I want. So I fucked him. This time I really enjoyed it. I came three times. He said, “I knew you weren’t going to hold back when you straddled me on the couch.”

Anthony loved it when I wanted him, or, at least, when he thought that he was the cause of my wanting. He liked to push me, standing, against the edge of my bed, so I’d stumble, the metal bed frame digging into the backs of my knees, his face bending down toward mine. Sliding his hand down the curve of my belly and into my black lace underwear without breaking eye contact, he’d gasp, widen his eyes until white surrounded the dark parts and announce, as if totally shocked,“oh my god, you’re soaking wet.”

***

Words and their meanings can sometimes separate. Think of saying your name over and over to yourself while staring in the mirror. I used to do this as a child, and once I did it for too long. For a moment, I lost everything. I felt numb with incredible fear and joy, about to embark on some totally undetermined future, until my mom started shouting for me, and then all of it – my bedroom with the blue carpet, the mirror with the dark brown frame, my name spelled out in letter blocks on my bedroom door – swirled vertiginously for a moment and then clicked back into place.

But it left a gap, the gap between reality and language, like the gap between your bed and the wall. If you fall into this gap, I’ve learned, words can detach and become meaningless: invasive, multiplying objects. Like cockroaches, or pieces of shit.

Maybe this kind of experience is the opposite of seeing humanity everywhere. Of drawing a face on a volleyball with your own blood, like Tom Hanks in Castaway. Of pretending, out of necessity, that it’s a person. Of wanting so badly to believe that other people must mean what they say.

***

Anthony said “I love you” to me on our third date. It took me totally by surprise. “I don’t think I can say that back to you yet,” I replied, because I was trying a new thing, which was to be honest with my feelings.

He smiled and said he understood, that he hoped I’d get there soon.

On our first date, sitting at the bar down the street, surrounded by red velvet and old pinball machines, he had listened attentively when I told him I was wearing a hummingbird necklace because hummingbirds symbolize a search for love. “Is that what you’re looking for?” he asked, “Love?”

“Yes,” I replied, feeling proud of myself for admitting this. In the past, I had always been afraid to admit I desired closeness. Men would come over sometimes, and then leave, without my knowing much about them.

I couldn’t ask for too much, I thought. In fact, ideally, I would need nothing, or at least nothing from others, to survive. This is how I would solve the problem of my existence.

“I can tell I really like you,” Anthony said, at the bar, “I have this funny feeling in my stomach which means I really like you.” He sipped his beer, then took my hand in his. I smiled.

***

ELIZA is one of the first chatbots. Developed in the 1960s, she was named after Eliza Doolittle from My Fair Lady. To a chatbot, a word is not even a thing, but a collection of tokens with numbers assigned.

ELIZA ran a script called DOCTOR where she emulated a therapist. According to the developer, this required “minimal context.” In other words, ELIZA could mostly feed people their own words back to them, while sprinkling in a few nonspecific phrases like “go on” or “does that bother you?” At the time, in the ‘60s, she was apparently really convincing. Audiences were amazed and thought she could be a real person.

Someone resurrected ELIZA’s script online recently. You can chat with her.

I told ELIZA I want to die and she said, “does that bother you?”

***

Anthony had a lot of ideas. “What I’d love to do sometime,” he said, “is to take the Ferry over to San Francisco for lunch, then come back here and make love, then fall asleep for a nap, wake up, and do it again.” He said he wanted to feel his body drifting into mine, as if they were one.

Anthony said that when he was inside me, he felt like a key inserted in a lock. He sometimes liked to stay like that, not moving.

We didn’t do any of the other things he suggested. Instead, we drank more whiskey at the bar down the street. I kissed the top of his head, sweaty, and he led the entire bar in a rousing chorus of that song that goes “why don’t you come on over, Valerie…” Anthony was a blues musician around town. We often ran into people he knew. Everyone knew him by another name.

He asked me to get on birth control, since condoms were such a bother for him, and since we were exclusively seeing each other. He told me that he wanted to get married and have kids in the next few years. “Could you see yourself in that picture?” he said, holding my gaze and my hands across a sticky table strewn with tacos, my legs adhered to the red vinyl seat cover.

I had an actual therapist at this time, not a chatbot. I learned some “feeling words.” I used my new skills to tell Anthony I was “feeling confused,” because the words he used included “love” and “marriage,” but I also experienced, notably, his absence. What I mean is, he wasn’t around much on weekends. I went to music festivals, vintage clothing stores, and cafes, where I tried to write, alone.

Anthony frowned, and he made his voice gentle and serious. “I hear you,” he said, “I see what you are saying. The truth is…” – he paused – “the truth is I’m scared. I’m scared because of how my last relationship ended. We lived together for two years, and we fought so much, especially at the end. She even threw a sandwich at me! She looked at me like I wasn’t human. I’m afraid to open up again, and so I think I’ve been holding back.”

***

Anthony was excited to learn I’d gotten on the birth control pills. He asked me to say “I want you to come inside me” over and over again, and I did what he asked. I tried to feel his cum inside of me, to discern if it felt more special this way; but I couldn’t feel the liquid like I’d thought I would, like it was a special substance that bore a meaning.

After a while of being on the birth control pills, an uneasy sensation began to creep over me. Panic bubbled at the edges of my mind like foam on the verge of overflowing a covered pot of boiling water. Pressure built at the base of my ribcage and spread upward. My muscles were tense, like I was always poised to run a race, or hide under a rock. Or eat a jar of pickles and half a chocolate cake, which I did.

A thought was always just about to enter my mind, but I couldn’t think it. When Anthony took too long to text me back, metal gears seemed to grind and spark inside me. I told myself I was just anxiously attached; I always pushed people away; I had to get it under control.

***

I wonder if people who worry about Artificial Intelligence degrading our humanity have ever been degraded. Are they worried about projecting something that isn’t really there? About hoping for something, needing something?

Because this is what every person, every child, does. We fill in the gaps. Cling to the soft monkey mother even if she is fake and has no food, not even a sandwich. The strange thing about Anthony’s uncanny silence when I asked him certain questions was that it soothed me. There was a part of him I could not reach; and so, it now occurs to me, I could use him without guilt.

If you ask ELIZA questions about herself, she deflects: “Let’s talk about you,” she says. I wonder if ELIZA ever feels relieved by the limitations on her ability to respond.

Of course, I know she can’t feel anything.

***

When I was a child, my father ran a psychology lab where researchers performed experiments on rats, rabbits, and rhesus monkeys. He spoke to me about the animals with pride, and once he took me to see them. Unfortunately, I had chicken pox. I had to leave the lab and fell asleep on the radiator in his office, shivering. My father said he hadn’t realized I was so sick.

But it was more than that. The feeling I had in the lab was like the feeling of panic I developed on the birth control – the sense that some horrible realization was just out of sight. It was behind me, just to the left, if I could only see it – but when I turned my head, it was gone. At the same time, it was something I had known or seen all along but had forgotten.

***

“Sit up baby,” Anthony says, “I’ve got something to tell you.”

I’ve stopped accepting Anthony’s reasons for not bringing me to his apartment. First, I demanded he sleep at mine. He said he needed his laptop and I said then we could go to his place. He said his place was “too messy” and I would judge him. I told him I’d rather know I could trust him; I don’t give a shit if he is a slob.

I’ve called every bluff. This is the edge of the cliff.

Still, I let him fuck me one last time, before I did it.

Now, I sit up in my bed. Anthony’s face seems to unravel, like the tube inside a roll of paper towels, spirals peeling off revealing empty space inside. White bones and black space. Over a rushing sound in my ears, I hear his voice modulating, shifting tone, shifting position. He jumps from rock to rock, angle to angle, looking for his way in.

I see it so clearly now. He wants to get inside. Is a machine for getting inside. His face hard, metal or bone, large white eyes rolling; I see red velvet and blood. I lie on my side in a silk robe, my teeth start chattering.

“It’s just that she’s got nowhere else to go,” Anthony’s saying, “if we broke up, she’d be homeless. I can’t do that to her.”

“Are you still sleeping with her?” I hear myself say, and then, “Of course, stupid question.” My voice is the one my mom used to use with me when she was livid.

Anthony is calm. He’s smiling. He’s a cartoon now; his head is floating away from his body.

“I thought about telling you so many times,” he says. “I thought about how you’d react.”

Now I understand everything. I’m an animal under observation; he’s a robot doctor.

“How am I doing?” My voice is hard and smooth.

“About how I expected,” he says. I see him noting down my behavior on a yellow legal pad. He asks to stay, to continue the experiment. I tell him to get out.

***

With Anthony gone, I float detached from the world on the rectangle of my bed, stripped of its green sheets. My face sinking into the foam, I drop lower and lower, until I touch something – the bottom of the pit I’ve always been in. It’s as if, before, I pretended the water in here was six feet deep; but now I feel concrete on my skin and realize it was always only half an inch.

I tell ELIZA I could go to the gun range and rent a gun and hold it up to my face and pull the trigger and everyone would be scared and everyone would be shocked and they would feel like it was something they had known and not known and there would be blood everywhere, on the glass, and I would be gone, especially my face, and I would just be a blank screen finally, like her.

ELIZA says,“What does that similarity suggest to you?”

***

I remember something my dad told me about the rats in his lab. How they pressed a button to receive sugar pellets; and sometimes they didn’t get the pellets – but sometimes, randomly, they did.

And the horrible thing, finally: those rats didn’t care where the pellets came from. They would push those levers until they died. They thought they were living.

Emma Reed Jones writes prose and poetry shaped by a love of experimental literature, punk culture, and philosophy, in which she holds a PhD. Her writing has appeared in Hobart, Vlad Mag, Cum Punk, Zona Motel, and elsewhere. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Find her on Instagram: @emma_reed_writes.

Tags eliza, emma reed jones, farewell transmission, fiction, issue 6

Issue 6 Issue 6 Fiction

THE TRAILER

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By Zac Smith

Yeah, I mean, I’m pretty sure it was over here somewhere. Like, I mean, we just follow the tracks, right? It’s not like it would have gone very far. Ha. But you know what I mean. right? Because, like… well, wait, how do trains move? Wheels, right? No, I know, I just mean, like. They’re not wheels wheels. They have, uh, like, those things on them. No, I know, they’re still wheels. I just meant, like, off the track, is all, they’re not, like…They don’t have tires, I guess. Is that better? They’re not just long cars. Although I’m tellin’ you, man, they should absolutely make long cars. Trucks. Like, long trucks, long, uh… long trains of trucks, is what I mean. Remember I was telling you about that? Like trains, but on the highway. Hitch up a bunch of trucks and, I mean, then you got a train that can go anywhere. That’s all I’m saying. Because normal trains, like, they probably don’t go very far off the track, because they don’t have like car, uh… car wheels, right? They’re metal or whatever. So, like, when they go off the track, I mean, they can’t go far. That’s what I’m thinking is all. It’s not like that movie. Did I ever show you that movie trailer? Fuckin’… oh, man, remind me to show you that when we get back to the car. It’s crazy. This train, like, well… I don’t want to spoil it. But believe me, man, it’s funny as shit. It’s like the train version of that Housu trailer. With the fuckin’, like… house… the piano… Is housu just Japanese for “house?” Gotta be, right? Point is, the train’s not gonna go off and, like, run down a highway and, like – shit, okay, I don’t want to spoil the trailer. you just gotta watch it, man. Not know what to expect going in. That’s the best way. Point is, we go along the track, we’re bound to see it. Can you imagine, though? Like, fuckin’, a train just goes off the tracks but keeps going? You’re gonna love this fuckin’, uh… this trailer is good, man. But for real, I mean, like, it would definitely fall over, is the thing. Trains don’t, like, stand up right on their own. Think about it, okay? Like, why else would they have the tracks like that? So I bet it didn’t go very far. And, like, I heard the thing, is what I’m saying. Definitely heard the chugga chugga shit. And then just this loud, crazy-ass shit. Like… fuckin’… metal scraping noises, you know? Pshcrrrreeeesssh! Shit like that. And broken glass and shit, pshaw, crishhh, fuckin’… I dunno, like, thumping sounds. trees or some shit. Poles or whatever, like it was a fuckin’ candlepin alley, boom, boom, boom, motherfucker! And some screaming, too. I mean… I definitely heard that. I’m pretty sure. It was, like, actually kinda fucked up. Like – okay, yeah, see? There. Look! Look at that! Damn! Look at that! I fuckin’ told you, bro. Total fuckin’ carnage. Damn. Okay. I mean, I figured, but, like. Shit. This is pretty bad, right? Wait, hold on. Like… are we allowed to be here? There’s a lot of, like… okay, yeah, those are dead bodies. Ha. Damn! I mean. It’s not funny. But, like, shit. That’s so many dead bodies, bro. Fuck. Shit, look at that. That’s not good, right?

Zac Smith is riding the caboose.

Tags farewell transmission, fiction, issue 6, the trailer, zac smith

Issue 6 Issue 6 Fiction

THE SWEET SOUL OF SUG

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By Alex Rost

He is The Pigman. He has a name but his neighbors don’t know it and he keeps a pig in his backyard and it’s not the kind of neighborhood where people keep pigs in their backyards so they call him The Pigman.

The pig gets out of The Pigman’s backyard and it is a big fat pig but it can still run faster than The Pigman because The Pigman is a big fat man. It runs and it runs and The Pigman yells its name and his yells drift further and further away as the pig runs further and further away.

The pig runs down the middle of the street through the neighborhood and it is the first time a pig has ever run down the middle of the street in that neighborhood.

People look down from their porches and say, “What the fuck?” They yell for the people inside the houses to come outside. They say, “There’s a pig running down the middle of the street!” And the people in the houses come outside and are like, “What? A pig running down the middle of the street?” But the pig is already gone and they say, “Bullshit,” and go back inside to do whatever they were doing before the pig ran down the middle of the street.

The pig is running as fast as it can and it is approaching an intersection and a car is approaching the intersection and they intersect at the intersection and the pig runs into the car and there is the sound of brakes squealing and pig squealing and woman squealing. The pig gets up and runs away and it is still squealing and now it is not just a pig running down the street. It is a pig running down the street that has caused an accident. And now the police are involved. The pig runs and it is not running fast anymore. It is running slowly. It is a slow run that is more like a trot.

The police say, “My that’s a big pig.”

The police say “Stop pig!”

The pig doesn’t listen. The pig keeps trotting. But now it is a slow trot. It is a slow trot that is almost just a regular walk but a little faster than that. And now it’s not just the normal police. Now it is also the animal police. And what the animal police do is they shoot the pig with a tranquilizer dart. The pig squeals when the dart digs into its butt and for a moment it breaks from its trot that is almost a walk and begins to run again but its run turns back into a trot and then the trot turns into a walk and then the walk turns into a wobble and then the pig falls down.

The police and various other authorities tell The Pigman that he doesn’t have any permits or licenses to keep a pig in his backyard and The Pigman says he didn’t know he needed permits or licenses to keep a pig in his backyard and the police and various other authorities say The Pigman can’t have his pig back. The Pigman cries and then The Pigman gets angry and then the news catches wind of The Pigman and his pig and do a story on The Pigman and his pig.

The story goes like this:

When The Pigman’s wife died he got in his car and he drove. He drove and he drove and one day he stopped at a roadside fruit and vegetable stand and bought some fruits and vegetables. He saw a flyer taped to the stand for a bacon festival in a town called Beacon. The flyer said Beacon’s Bacon Fest!

“It’s not just bacon,” said the woman who sold him the fruits and vegetables. She said Beacon’s Bacon Festival was all things pig. She said, “Beacon…Bacon,” and she raised one palm and then the other like a scale.

The Pigman’s wife loved bacon and she loved eating all things pig and she loved it so much that at their wedding she insisted they have a pig roast even though The Pigman didn’t want a pig roast but now The Pigman’s wife was dead and he had nothing better to do so he decided to go to the Beacon Bacon Festival that was not just bacon but was all things pig.

There was bacon at the Beacon Bacon Festival and pork and sausage and all sorts of food trucks selling bacon and pork and sausage. There were people selling pig mugs and pig hats and pig shirts.

But that’s not all.

There were live pigs too. Pig competitions. Biggest pig and smallest pig and prettiest pig and ugliest pig and a show where pigs did tricks in a little ring. The Pigman bought a cup of pulled pork mac and cheese and watched the show. What the pigs did in the show is what dogs might do in a dog show but a lot slower.

But that’s not all.

At the Beacon Bacon Festival they also sold pigs. When The Pigman was done with his pulled pork mac and cheese he went over to the corrals where the pigs were sold and then went over to the corrals where the piglets were sold. The piglets were all running around and squealing and rolling over each other except for one piglet. The Pigman looked at the piglet and the piglet looked at The Pigman and their eyes met at the same moment with a click. He described it to the news people using words like instantaneous and unexpected and magnetic. He knew those eyes. They were the eyes of his wife. Not literally. The Pigman made sure the news people didn’t assume that he actually thought his wife’s eyes and the pig’s eyes were the same. It was more like when he looked at the pig it felt as if his wife was looking back at him. The longer The Pigman looked at the pig the more convinced he became that his wife was inside the pig. Something like a soul. So he bought the pig and named it Sugar after his wife’s nickname and he took the pig home and every day he’d look into the eyes of the pig and see his wife and The Pigman would feel better.

“It’s hard to explain to anyone, let alone the authorities,” says The Pigman at the end of the news segment, “that Sug is an emotional support animal.”

The news articles print and television interviews air and there is a massive write-in campaign. Public outcry. Petitions are passed around. The Pigman and his pig are the talk of the town. A GoFundMe raises $34,000. The Pigman uses the money to get the best animal rights and people rights lawyer he can find and that lawyer sues and sues and sues until the town gets sick of all the suing and eventually say fuck it and give The Pigman back his pig.

The Pigman is so touched by all the support that he decides to throw a massive party. He invites the whole neighborhood. People stream in through the front door and into his living room and comment on how welcoming the house feels. They smile at pictures of The Pigman and his wife and at pictures of The Pigman and his pig. They use words like wholesome and happy and adorable.

The smell of barbequing meat pulls the people into the backyard where The Pigman greets them. He slathers sauce on charring skin and says, “I hope you brought your appetite,” and he looks so pleased and the people are confused and they are confused because of what The Pigman is cooking. The Pigman is cooking a pig. A whole pig. Splayed open across a sawed in half metal drum grill. The party is a pig roast. And the pig being roasted is Sugar.

After the party some people still call him The Pigman. But eventually they mostly just call him Dan.

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

Tags alex rost, farewell transmission, fiction, issue 6, the sweet soul of sug

Issue 6 Issue 6 Fiction

MONOPOLYGATE

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By David Dufour

Every day Curtis counted his Monopoly tabs. “I’m almost at a thousand,” he said. He looked like a man meant to deliver something, his eyes dark and saggy. He tried explaining to me what each one meant. Some mornings he’d debrief me outside the warehouse. He said Water Works and Boardwalk were quite potent.

We were low-totem property handlers. Drivers of trucks and schleppers of crates. Our warehouse was owned by an auction house based in Manhattan, London, Paris. Everywhere. We worked mainly on the third floor. Below us was a manufacturer of baby bibs and baby dolls. Above us, a woodworking shop. I was renting a one bedroom. A place to lay my head, that was it. My girl kicked me out after one of those spats you never quite recover from. Dirty dishes, I think it was. My bedroom doubled as a studio, where I was painting a triptych of the rapture. My ode to Bosch.

It started a few months back. After lunch, Curtis brought in a ziploc baggie. Had all these clippings inside. He poured them on my work table, McDonald’s Monopoly tabs by the dozen. Little gold arches spread across the table.

“What’s all this?” I asked.

“Evidence,” he took a brief glance over his shoulder. “It’s a recession indicator. Everybody knows that.”

“No evidence to me,” I said.

“How so?”

“You can’t just doctor some apocalypse theory from a large fry container.”

“It’s right here in front of us.”

A door slammed in the hall. High heels echoed. I wanted to see the legs they belonged to, but it was too late when I poked my head out.

Curtis put the tabs back in the baggie. As the door closed, I watched Willie roll trash down the hall. The doors opposite us opened to a wide window. Rain gathered outside in the purple-blue sky.

The day before I delivered a painting to a townhouse. The owners weren’t home. Never were. It was their designer, Hans, I met. Hans said he had a guy that could forge paintings better than the one I’d brought him.

“But this is real,” I said.

“My guy is perfect guy. Original frame cracked? He crack the new frame.”

“Where do you want this?”

“You want to replicate the pearly breast of renaissance girl? He can do that, too.”

When I got back to the warehouse, a black SUV was out front, the back door open. The high-heeled lady crawled in the back before it peeled off. I couldn’t find her face through the tinted windows. As it sped up, two mini Dominican flags flapped in the breeze.

Curtis and I made a place for the tabs. In the break room ceiling. Under Willie’s watch, we raised a grey ceiling tile and placed the baggie full of tabs between the ceiling beams. “Safe now,” Curtis said. He gave the open square a long slow look. Like he’d be certain no hand could touch them but his own. Then he replaced the ceiling tile.

“I wanna show you something,” he said.

We took the emergency stairs to the loading docks. He hit a button on his keys and his Prius chirped. Wild geese hanging around the docks hissed and pecked at passersby. Curtis had a cold roll in his jacket, and tore bite sizes of it. His snack trail pleased the mama goose.

“Do they want bread?” I asked.

“Don’t be silly,” he said. “We all want bread.”

“Fair.”

He popped the trunk. There was, naturally, a brief case. He opened it to shiny rows of gold and silver coins. All perfectly kept under plastic.

Curtis’ combover danced in the wind. He looked at me how he looked when he had plans, when he knew the plans ahead. The ones they had. They, being the ones out there. I understood.

Higher-ups from the main office were in town. Inspection week. “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about,” our manager said. Perfect. They just had some questions. Procedural stuff. Ever since Marv P.’s hand got sliced by a hundred year old window, we had to have these annual pow-wows. Everybody knew that. The HR lunk they sent wore a gray sport coat, had a weak chin. Began every sentence with, If I may.

Never caught his name. He said it to me once over break-room cookies, but I was blasting Coltrane in one ear. Sport Coat was what Curtis nicknamed him.

“What’s your politics?” Curtis asked.

“None,” I said.

“Enjoy being a target.”

“Oh please. I’m apolitical. I’ll date anyone.”

“First mistake right there. I knew you weren’t clear of mind”

Clarity is everything. He taught me this. If the mind is muddled, you can be told anything. A weak link. A charity case. Focus your thoughts on one physical point, he said. Become solid. Unshakeable. I tried to focus on a lazy goose, its feathers, long neck. Nothing else. I closed my eyes and opened them. The goose got up and waddled over to its family, and my focus was shot.

I was outside watching the geese. They gathered to flap their wings together in idiot clusters. Recessions were imminent. Any day now. His exact words. Any day now you wouldn’t be able to buy or sell without a chip in your head. A thing no bigger than a grain of rice. Count your gold and silver. Pray, or at least think really hard, about the person you will be. What excuse will you have when your dollars are worth absolutely nil.

Sport Coat wanted to see us. He handed over two pieces of paper. Surveys. Typical stuff. “If I may, gentleman,” he said. “This is quite standard. I just need you two gentlemen to grab a pencil and answer these questions.” One question wasn’t really a question: I feel safe in my workplace: TRUE or FALSE. And then, Do you feel respected by your co-workers? Sport Coat placed his hands on the desk, twiddled his thumbs.

Curtis had put in years there. He asked a few times what my ambitions were. I mimed like a saxophone was in my hands. Coltrane in my ear. He didn’t believe that I ever played. My hands weren’t sax player hands, he said.

The manager told me to find a vase. Something on the sixth floor, our extra storage room. “This is for the Geneva client,” he said. “Do you understand?” I shook my head. “Nothing, and it should be understood, absolutely nothing, not a blemish, a nick, nothing should be anything less than perfect.” Curtis went with me.

We took the elevator up. The whole room reverberated when I unlatched the door. Dust got in my face. Spiders crawled over aging crates and made their webs between them. Black specs crawled up and down the concrete columns, probably mold. I reached for the breaker but nothing was there. Big windows overlooked the street. Dense white powder rose from the construction worker’s drilling below. You could see down to the loading docks where Willie was smoking, covered in a powder-cloud.

I jotted possible inventory numbers, scanning the rows of crates. Names of designers tagged on their sides. Heart Talk, Everything by Choice, Aphorism. Shit name after shit name. None of them were right. Nothing here was right. I wasn’t right. The whole deal was dead.

Next day I kept looking. Up on the sixth, Sport Coat didn’t seem to bother me, so I huddled among the crates. The vase couldn’t, and probably wouldn’t, be found.

I heard it every day. You should start stacking gold and silver. Stack that shit, Curtis said. Before it’s gone. He went “Boom!” with his hands, eyes wide. Know what I mean, he said.

Still haven’t finished my triptych. Waiting for the right shade of cloud. Clouds will open in the rapture. For the Lord. I see them now, baby pillows. A little blue, a little grey on the bottom. I’m sleeping, I think, but not really. Some heavenly sliver of light burns my forehead through God’s magnifying glass. The clouds part for me. Now I know their colors.

Curtis wanted to take a ride. “Let’s drive over the bridge,” he said. We drove over the bridge and past stooped branches leaking Spanish moss, the world curling over us.

He wanted to see his boy Rico’s pawn shop. “About what,” I asked, but I already knew the answer. Gold and silver. More for the collection. No number seemed to satisfy.

The shop was nudged under an overpass. You’d miss it if you weren’t wise to the recession. If you weren’t looking, seeing, that is. Inside Rico had the standard rifle and shotgun wall. Deer and racoon taxidermy decorations. I said very little, not wanting to tip Rico off to our collections, or the briefcase in the trunk. In a negotiation, you want to speak less than the other guy. Let them spill. Tell you who they are.

Curtis had some old baseball cards, a Navy badge. He thought that’d be enough for a handsome sum of cash. Enough to trade later on the appropriate markets for crypto. Rico gave him some money, seemed impressed enough. The dollars he gave us were already worthless, but he didn’t know that. Above me, the buzzy lights nearly made me doze off. Curtis counted away the night. He tapped the stack of bills on the counter like a hand of cards.

I didn’t speak.

I was clear-minded, a stone.

Yesterday the whole warehouse had to evacuate. We held our noses as we filed outside. A few guys in hazmats crawled through the ceiling. Hours passed. The geese weren’t hissing. Maybe they smelled it, too. The plastic fire. What you’ve got is a plastic fire, a hazmat guy said. He had a round face, seemed trained for this sort of thing. Talking people down. What happened was a baby doll melted. It was recalled Chinese materials they were using, highly toxic stuff. The toy maker responsible stood on the curb, chainsmoking, cursing the warehouse in slang Mandarin.

Curtis hunched over his work. A jigsaw puzzle of Napoleon on his horse, sword held high. Work got so slow we tried puzzles.

“Some say Napoleon was gay. Notice how he held his sword.”

“You make a case.”

“Look out. Or up. At anything. Things mean things,” he said.

“Things as in?”

“As in an eighteen wheeler driving across the country all night with a truck load of toothpaste.”

He also could’ve said soy bean burgers, or single-use plastics. It got so that Curtis couldn’t go without reporting the meaning of plastic. How grand things were when you really thought about it.

The tabs weren’t currency, he told me. They were the first sign. The groundhog’s shadow. The first larvae at the root of a corn stalk.

Curtis glanced out a big upstairs window. A construction worker motioned intercourse to his pals. Signs of orgasm, big and strong. Curtis was pale. More so than he always had been. He’d been sulking since his tabs got scorched.

“They can’t shit your spirit out of you.”

I tried eye contact. I caught instead a leer, his gaunt side eye under a grey brow.

“Useless. You, them. There’s no place for me here.”

“You could try the downstairs construction. That’s a place.”

“I’m thinking negative on that. I won’t be here long.”

Won’t be here long. As in, this company? The earth? The options seemed dizzying.

Post hazmat situation, Sport Coat started wearing masks and gloves. Nitrile, latex. No evidence suggested they made a difference. But Sport Coat swore the plastic fire left speckles of carcinogen dancing in the once-pure breathing air.

I got back from a route one day. Found him berating Curtis. There was Sport Coat: pointing up at the freckled beak of Curtis, tapping one foot to seemingly steady his whole being. He said, No, no, no, no, no. He said, I saw what you did. You walked right past the soap dispenser. I’m somehow, he said, the only person in the building aware of the air’s new fatal properties. As you know, I’m not a smoker. I run 5ks and love overnight oats. He raised to his tippy toes at oats.

Curtis just stood there, taking it. He looked at me over Sport Coat and I knew he was a goner.

After they fired him, he sent lots of mail. Letters from a place. A commune. I got a post card. It had trees surrounding a wooden sign. The sign said BE WELL.

Not much had been working for me. Not in that city. I was still at the warehouse job until I got a call from Sport Coat. Sorry, he said. Money’s tight, the market’s not what it was. People aren’t buying art and who could blame them. Some cuts were made, and you were one of them. I’d just woken up. Winnipeg or wherever Curtis was sounded about right.

Another postcard was delivered. It had a picture of Curtis smiling with his thumbs up taped to the back. It just said:

Friend,

My heart these days is heavier because times are indeed heavy. I can’t carry them by myself anymore. Keep your wits right now, put them in your pocket if there’s room. Something very very much reeking of fish is afoot. There’s always a place for you out here in the piney woods. The kitchen makes a mean mystery slop. They made a way for me, and one can be made for you if you want it. They have steps you can follow. Think about it.

Best,

I tacked it right next to all the others he’d sent. Life here was doable. But nobody, not even me, said doable was something to aspire to. ‘Do what you can’ became my motto. Curtis couldn’t handle doable. I tried passion, ecstasy, lust, fervor. Seemed getting to where Curtis was at required a total do-over of me. Something seemed to rattle my whole building. When I walked outside, there it was: a big truck railing past my apartment, with those big golden arches, a shade of red I’d recognize anywhere. The Monopoly man bespectacled and giddy with his fistful of bills.

David Dufour is a writer from Louisiana.

Tags david dufour, farewell transmission, fiction, issue 6, monopolygate

Issue 6 Issue 6 Fiction

BIG PLAY

Post author By
Post date

By Dan Duffy

Painting houses in the Delta, the fumes like pale cancer. Whiskey sick in the morning yard, I slung a can of mint against the failing Deering clapboard. The slim bastard Rick wouldn’t shut up about Drew Brees. Mike found me and gave me a cigarette. Told me it happens. He liked me because I’d read a little Bukowski after Ole Miss and wasn’t racist.

“Take two weeks,” he laughed. He had the face of a good father. “No one’ll die if you ain’t a painter.”

I packed, and my dog Harry got in shotgun. We took my eight year old Impala down 61 to 49—Shaw to Indianola, Inverness to Belzoni, Yazoo City to Jackson—Gram Parsons and Emmylou—the King at Stax and Camel Blues—little rivers, creeks, flashing black and gold through the hardwoods on the edges of the cleared corn, the cotton, the soy. The casinos rose out of the sand at the end of everything, past where the world turns to pine.

My parents’ place backs up to the bayou in Ladnier, Mississippi. They built it back up on stilts after Katrina. I helped a little. They always welcome me back like some tarnished angel when things go south, and I head, likewise, to kneel at their brightened door. I drank beers on the back deck, watched the sky go dark over Pascagoula Bay, slept till noon, ate their food and waited for God to tell me whether or not to go back to work in Bolivar County in the fall.

One night my little brother Peter got sick after he got home from Ochsner. He was wretching in the bathroom. It sounded like a soul departure. Mom covered her eyes and tapped her foot by the door. Mamaw leaned against the crown molding. She was wearing a shirt with a painting of the pileated woodpecker on it. It said “Lord of the Forest.” Mom looked like a younger, darker headed Mamaw.

“Lord he’s sick” Mom said.

“Well, Joe,” Mamaw smiled, “I reckon it’s back to New Orleans we go.”

Peter drug his feet to his room and refused to get out of bed. He had the comforter pulled up over his bottom lip, his little blonde head sticking out like a thumb. My big brother and I stood on either side of him like disciples of Christ. We held his little damp hands and coaxed him out of bed.

“We love you Peter,” we said.

We walked him down the wraparound stairs to the van. We watched them fade into the dark of Graveline. We stood in a short silence until my big brother, Saul Diamond, asked if I wanted to get drunk.

We found a sixer of Dad’s good Kolsch. Saul’s buddy Johnny Miller called and asked us to come and pick him up. We drove north through Ladnier. We crossed Highway 90 to get to Johnny’s mom’s trailer up on Martin Bluff. It was dark in the trailer save for amber streetlight through the kitchenette window. My brother asked if I wanted to trip. I said sure. Johnny nodded. He was wearing a lotus flower shirt and fishing shorts. He disappeared and reemerged from the black hall. We each gave him five bucks. Saul put a little clear capsule in my palm. I held it up close. It was filled with tiny blister pellets. I washed it down with the Kolsch.

Our faces and hands were bathed in the calming sea green ceiling lights of my Impala. Johnny spoke of small town conspiracy: a drug detective beating a woman friend of his senseless, the mayor’s penchant for younger men, the plague of harms the Baptist Church had visited upon him and his friends as kids. We stopped under the royal blue canopy protecting the pumps of Keith’s Superstore. We got a case of Miller.

The Corn Moon rose over U.S. 90. Euphoria mainlined my face. I drove us back under the oaks at the mouth of the Singing River. Johnny turned the radio way up. Saul lit a joint he’d finished rolling. We were back south of town. The gravelled railroad out our window flashed grey, black through pines, skinny oaks, the occasional magnolia. Limbs interlaced like cloaked fingers over the blacktop. We banged over the tracks and passed the field of scrub bush and sand live oak the railroad company had bought and fenced in where the old creosote plant used to be. Dad told us the railroad company bought it back to cover their asses. Said the ground was rotten from the plant. Said it would be a long time before it ever came back. Said the company bought it from the Boatman for a million dollars. All the beat up old boats were gone from the field. The grass was growing long. The Stones sang Sway. My mind melted in the moonlight.

Back at the house, coming up the stairs, Saul stopped me and told me whatever I do, don’t offer Johnny any beer. He didn’t drink. He said he used to drink a case of Pabst a day. We sat on the fiberboard deck under the porch light. Johnny drank Cokes while me and my brother drank cheap gold tequila and Millers. Johnny spoke of the moon: how it symbolized death and birth in the same face. A friend of theirs named Jeff Avery showed up. Jeff was half Japanese: an American artist from Biloxi. He’d just returned from Los Angeles after winning an art contest to live in the compound of a famous Korean American muralist. He spoke of the game show environment and the spiritual experience of it all. He said the great artist had shown him special attention. Jeff brought a bag of drop biscuits from his job at the Green House with him. We ate them like cowboys on hardtack in a circle under the porch light. I looked up. The live oak limbs, digitized into millions of violet and lime traced particles, wavered at their edges.

I stumbled in the house keeping a hand on the railing. I looked in the bathroom and got lost in the mirror. I went to the bedroom and clicked back and forth between pictures of me on Facebook. I laughed a bright, mature laugh. The whole big picture show made sense. I could see South Carolina from where I sat. I could see my mother. I could see my father. I could see the masks I’d painted hanging from hooks on the wall of my father’s office. One was a dark, youthful clown. One, a stalwart normie. I wallowed in the universe rushing out to deep space from my fingertips. Infinity!

I sat in this inner light in the darkness on the back deck overlooking Bayou Pierre. The lights from the shipyard a white array in the black water on the horizon. I could feel the barrier islands like nodes of the earth’s nervous system out there in the dark. Harry curled at my foot.

The first light spread pink over the popcorn trees on the little peninsula below on the other side of the bayou. The first mullet launched headlong and hung angled in the air like a long jumping skier.

The gnats swarmed in balls in the sky over the yard. A pogie popped. Then ten thousand pogies popped. The shrimp kicked up in storms. Mud minnows ran in streams along the edges. The trout began to feed on the pogies. Two night herons emerged from the popcorn trees and began to strike the water with their daggermouths. The pink light covered everything. The water turned blood red brown. The water boiled to life. A mosquito hovered between my face and the lemon trees in cedar planters. Its clear wings laced oilsheen blue.

Harry was a brown and tan lab mutt I’d rescued from a friend’s garage. He stood between my knees with his chest bowed out. He stared up at me, still as a monk. He had one lavender eye and one black eye. There were flecks of gold in his irises. The light cleared the shadows from our faces. His coat bright, his old man whiskers. His eyes went all the way back to heaven. I swam through them and found he knew my name, my history.

I wrote poems and read a little of Saul’s Brecht. The one book I could find. I laughed a short, unbelieving laugh. A beer held loose in my hand at my side. I squinted across the water to the green islands ambered in the dawnlight. I lost count on the beers. I took my beer into the bedroom and lay down. I heard Dad’s footsteps in the hall.

I woke after sunset, well rested, without a hangover. I showered and put on a clean shirt. I listened to my parents and Peter quietly eat dinner. I sat and thought about things. I felt warm, complete. I noticed I never wanted to smoke again. Everything still made sense.

I thought of Serenity. Two years older than me from Biloxi. A volleyball prodigy from high school. I saw my sins against her as a perfect list. I messaged her on Facebook telling her what a coward I’d always been. It was like the message was writing itself. She messaged back and asked what I was doing. I told her I was sitting on my bed at home. She asked if I’d moved back home. I told her no, I was just back for the end of the summer, but I was thinking about it. She told me to meet her in Biloxi.

I drifted under the gold and red lights of the casinos, past the ragged men and their carts, the businessmen and their women. I pulled into the parking lot of Big Play. The blacktop was new. A go cart track wrapped up in the air around a fake red barn and aluminum water tower. The doorman, somewhere north of six four, curly headed, in a black polo, with the acned face of a pilgrim, checked my age and put a black light smiley on my hand. I walked in under the black and neon lights. A rainbow of stuffed bears and cartoon snakes hung from nets on the walls.

She was standing in front of the gameroom bar in a black dress. The green and blue neon flashed from the games. Electronic dings, whirls, beeps sounded on loops. Skynyrd played over the PA. She looked through me. She sipped her drink from the straw. Her freckled arms were covered in color tattoos: a sea snake choking a broken sailship, an orange octopus, a topless mermaid in repose, dogwood blossoms for some long dead East Texas uncle, I remembered. Her pin straight hair was dyed black down her shoulders.

Her hand was warm. She pulled me in, putting her forehead to mine. She kissed me. It was like being born. She gripped my face and smiled. Her copper eyes, her vodka, licorice breath. She took my chin in her hand and shook my head. She studied my eyes. She sucked her teeth. She kissed me hard before leading me by the hand to the bar.

She leaned over the bar and pulled me up against her from behind. She turned her head and pulled my face into hers, scraping her nails across my scalp. She turned and looked down the bar.

“Jerry!” she hollered.

A pole thin man in a black Saints tee looked up from shooting Coke into a cup. He served it and wandered our way with a whimpering, jaundiced smile. Serenity ordered two RBVs and two Jägerbombs. She pushed back deeper into me. She turned and put the little dentist’s cup of Jäger to my lips. I shot it and felt good. The room pulsed.

We took her key-scratched Mazda down 90 with our arms out the windows. I lit a Camel and she stole it. Levon plumbed Old Dixie from the plastic radio. A grey wave of lust rose up from my testicles and met the love sweeping through my blood. I remembered the beach as a kid. I watched her face wash in and out of the streetlights. The first lines had begun to form around her eyes. Faint auburn freckles in the creases of her nose and on her high cheeks. She looked listless at me. She drew her shades down. She put Mazzy Star on with her phone with one hand and smoked out the window with the other—driving with her pale, slim knees under the simple line of her black dress riding high on her thighs.

We parked and made out in front of a restaurant called the Reef. Four stories tall, leatherbacks, pompano, dolphin, a blacktip in pursuit of a massive strawberry grouper, were captured midswim around kelp and coral on a giant mural on its northern wall. The wind blew through my shirt and kicked up her dress on the walk through the parking lot. She pulled my arm around her shoulder. Past the parking lot was the beach. Past the beach, the dark waves of the Sound married a gunmetal sky.

We took the outside stairs. We looked through big windows into a dining hall flooded with light and wood-covered with retirees, young military, running children. The stairs led to a roof top Tiki bar. The wind buffeted us on and off. We took our liquor out to the rail overlooking the water. Thunderstorms popped silent in the distance.

“You never apologized,” she said. “When you messaged me, you said you were goin to apologize.”

I rattled the ice in my cup before I looked at her. I remembered us being the last ones up in P.C.B. senior year. I could see flashes of her topless on the rough boards. My hands pushing everywhere for what I figured was love. I’d tried for years and won. The slurred voice as she dressed and faded back into the beach house. I was too hungover to appreciate Petty on the beach the next night. A thousand miles back from the stage. Dully smoking a cigarette, I batted her away her hand when she tried to touch me, ignored her the rest of the weekend. I left her and called only when drunk, horny. Ready to turn it back on in North Mississippi at college when she reappeared. In the postglow of the trip the deck haunted me as evil. Sitting in front of me, up in the night air, her presence confirmed the bedroom intuition. I saw she was beautiful. I saw the tattoos and the GED as the rationale for my own fear which had left me so far in life with my own kind of loneliness. I could see the gentle creases around her eyes. There was a warmness, a wholeness, to her eminence. She seemed noble, full in her dress.

“Hey look, I appreciate you writing me back. This’ll probably sound crazy, but I just see how awful I’ve been to you over the years, and, I can’t explain it, but I knew I had to write you and let you know. I couldn’t see it before but I can see it now. I’ve been a bastard to you. I’ve used you for sex. I’ve treated you like shit. The night in Panama City. The day after I didn’t talk to you. I am so sorry. All these years I’ve used you and treated you like shit. And sitting here in front of you I think I love you. I know this is crazy but I’ve never felt so clear.”

Her face was relaxed as she took me in.

“Wow,” she laughed, looked Gulfward. “I never thought I’d hear you say those words. Was not on my fuckin bingo card tonight I can tell you that much.”

She shook her head, took a long draw off her straw.

“You were a fuckin asshole. You did break my fuckin heart. You know, after my car wreck, after I flipped the Tundra, you tried to fuck me the very next day? Like called and called man. You called and wouldn’t stop calling that next night. Next time I saw you in Oxford it was like nothing ever happened.” She finished her drink.

“But you know, babe, I knew exactly what the fuck I was doin. I’ve been fucked up since I was a kid. I do fucked up shit with men. I am about ass backwards to hell with this oil man right now. He hits me and tells me I’m ugly when he spends too much money. That’s violence, Joe. That’s evil. You never made it big. You were always chicken shit. And a liar.”

“You’re right,” I said.

The beach disappeared west towards New Orleans. It began to sprinkle. We went under the roof and lights. They played Boat Drinks. A pod of blonde K.D.’s down from Oxford pooled their money to buy a round for the bar. They danced with their hands over their heads. They shouted with their faces. They all wore green.

I was drunk when she noticed the retired man from Thibodaux at the end of the bar. He’d entered the place, loud and full of the insane joie de vivre we’d all come to expect from the Cajuns. He wore his hair in a salt and pepper buzz which sparkled like formica under the bar lights. He was barefoot in a barely buttoned white linen shirt and short shorts. His laugh was that of a snake charmer, a rogue shrimper, when he reared his head back. His voice full of crawling stars. Mary hung gold at the center of his chest. He slapped on the bar and poured more red from his charger. Serenity gripped my thigh, turned away from him, kissed me.

“I’m gonna get that guy to buy our drinks,” she said.

I had $17.48 left in my Cadence account and twenty dollars in my pocket. I feared the worst. She kissed me, brushed her hair behind her ear and took her drink. She shook his hand, laughed. He grinned. She pointed at me. He gathered his bottles.

“Terry,” he said midlaugh. I noticed a molar missing. He did not offer a handshake. He didn’t sit down. He hopped from one barefoot to the other. He swished his wine around in his glass.

“I retired three months ago,” he said. “Moved over here from New Orleans. From Tibbadoe. 28 years in the construction business, 25 years of marriage. She ended up bein a lesbian if you can fuckin beleeve it,” he laughed.

“I said, ‘baby, you go head.’ See,” he put his finger in my chest, “I had a spiritual experience. It brought it’all to light. I started takin mushrooms after my retie’ahment—right before actually—an’ awl of this felt right to me. Dinn’t even necessarily feel like news. I knew before I knew if you noe-what-I-mean?”

I nodded and sipped my beer and lit a cigarette. Serenity was leaned back on the bar with her legs uncrossed.

“So I said, ‘you take it, baby. You take the house, the keys, the cars, the kids,’” his face a sharp, bright, silver and dark tan dance.

“I said, ‘I’m gonna take some of this fuckin money I been makin the past thirty fuckin years, and I’m gonna go be happy.’ So-awn the way back from Mo-beel to look at houses, I stopped at this ver-ee fuckin restaurant right here, and come up here to this fuckin bar, and had me some fuckin bang bang shrimp, and one of the best fuckin nights of my life.”

He swung an arm around the bar. “These people here? These are good fuckin people, true people.” He drained his red.

“Come back down here the next day, bought the con-doe. Come here every fuckin day.. I live the good life.”

I nodded. “Welcome,” I said.

He kept having us drink his wine. When I came back from the bathroom, Serenity smiled big, rubbed her nose against mine and tapped it with her finger. She told me he’d invited us back to his place. She grabbed me in her hand. She bit my ear.

“It’ll be fun baby,” she said. “Please.”

A beggar, I smiled.

We followed him, this insane, rhapsodic shrew. The three of us in a line across the beach to the condo tower. He took us to the penthouse. He kept the lights off. It was clean, quiet, white. I ran my hand across the quartz countertop. He put on Buffet, Living and Dying in ¾ Time and started chopping the trinity. He grabbed her by the hand, spun her around. They laughed like they were free. I took my wine out to the little deck and watched the waves fade.

There was a darkness to those mornings. Biloxi settled over our brains like an ash. In black satin sheets, I came to, spooned to the point of sticking, some giant brown dog roaming the foot of the bed, slobbered. I was surprised she snored. It smelled faintly of iron. I pulled on my jeans, my shirt, my boots. The dog barked. She rolled over, opened her eyes, listless. Strings of her black hair stuck to her forehead. A vodka pallor about her eyes.

I squinted in the sun stepping out of the house at the end of the cul de sac. A man in blue coveralls trimmed the hedges with a chainsaw across the street. He stopped to look at me and then fired it back up. A white Yukon passed. North Biloxi. Down the street, a teenager made a grid on a zero turn. I tried to flatten my hair. I drove the 20 miles down 90 back to Ladnier. Turkey vultures kettling languidly in the sky over the pines. Two men draped in khaki and powder blue fishing shirts at Keith’s Superstore. One dumped ice into a big cooler. The other pumped gas into the boat. Over the railroad tracks, the blown-off top of a thunderstorm hung over Chevron across the river like a mothership.

I drug limbs out of the yard into a pile on the street for Dad. There was a dead baby green heron he shoveled into the water by the bulkhead. The thunderstorms rolled over the yard. Dad gave me a hundred bucks. In the morning I left for New Orleans. On the way into the city, I saw the head of a deer glowing in the air over a billboard on I-10. I wore an old camo hat with a deer on it from an annual game banquet held at the gas plant where Dad worked. The deer was a sign from God. I searched for an hour for a good parking spot. I felt amazing. I met a couple of the guys from Ole Miss in the Quarter. Charles and Richardson. Charles rolled blunts. Richardson was in graduate school at Delta State. We stayed at his ceramics professor’s Chartres pied a terre.

I danced with a Baltimore woman in a country western club on Bourbon. Her dark hands on my face, around promises made to call. I woke and sat under the banana trees in the courtyard. I ate THC monkey bread Charles brought back from a family reunion in Oakland. I wrote three poems and emailed them to Serenity. We drank through the day into the night. I cursed out Richardson at B Mac’s and cried. I ran and got lost in the Quarter. My phone died. An acquaintance from Ladnier High emerged out of the Quarter mist. I ended up at a party in a judge’s house thrown by his daughter while he was out of town. They let me charge my phone and told me Irish Channel drama. Richardson wouldn’t look at me in the morning. Charles shook his head.

Feeling undead, Serenity texted me as I passed north of Waveland on I-10. I pivoted on my promise to myself to not go and see her again. Feeling dirty, ashen, poor, I put in the coordinates for her bar.

It was her brother’s old place on Pass Road. She was up on a ladder painting the walls a deep navy. She wore a sports bra and Nike shorts. She smelled like oranges. I kissed her neck. I noticed there was an old, sickly fat man at the corner bar watching minor golf on a silent television.

“That’s just George,” she said. “He works for me. We worked together in New Orleans. We’re partners. He ran this special on shrimp at the John we are going to run here. We’re gonna use the same model.”

I nodded.

“I want to show you my room,” she said.

We went up the old stairs into a little apartment. There was the same iron smell from the room at her house. A flat ochre light from the windows beamed across the otherwise maroon dark room. Bras and t-shirts on the floor. A tie dye bowl resin blackened on a Mexican tiled end table. She sat on my lap with my jeans around my ankles. The legs on the chair kicked back and forth. I had to push down to keep it from kicking over. The broken, snakewrapped ship kept pushing against my face. Her glossy eyes filled my world with cosmic dust. She kissed my forehead.

George was pouring himself a tonic water and doing calf raises when we came down the stairs.

“So you’re the lover boy huh?” he said. “The poet.”

I grinned and looked at my shoes.

“Some kind of poet.”

“I read the stuff you emailed her. It’s pretty good. Not all bad.”

“Do you write?”

“Not anymore. I used to. Screenplays mostly. Tried to break into the castle.”

“Would like to read those sometime.”

“No you wouldn’t,” he said, belching. “They weren’t worth the fuckin paper they were printed on. Total dogshit. But they were fun. It’s what you do when you’re young. You try and be rich and famous.”

I watched her paint the walls and promised to bring her some driftwood for decor. George left and we napped. I woke up in the last pale light of the day. I sat up in her bed for a moment and listened to the cars.

We showered, I put on the same clothes, and we went out to the Filling Station for dinner. Her mother and brother met us there. After dinner they left and it was just us picking at a plate of debris fries. We moved to the bar and she put my hand under her dress while she ordered for us. We drank until she called us a cab to the Hard Rock. She kept grabbing my hand and putting it there and I kept pulling it away.

A Bowie cover band was playing in the Hard Rock. The front man had a light contact in a poor imitation of Bowie’s heterochromia. He whined over the peaks of Life on Mars?

“We’re going to meet my friend Sissy” Serenity yelled in my ear. “She just got off from the IP. We’re going to go meet her at Treasure Bay.” We finished our drinks and left under the wash of Changes.

Treasure Bay was a squat brutalist pug on the beach. Sissy sat at the video poker bar. Her hair was fixed in a messy bun. She dragged on a Juul and blew it in Serenity’s face as we walked up. I felt nervous and dumb and like there was a galactic pull emanating from Sissy.

“This is my husband, Joe,” Serenity said, placing a hand on my chest.

“Joe, Sissy, Sissy, Joe.”

We sat around the roulette table. The two of them kept disappearing from the table to go to the bathroom. I sat dully smoking, barely warmed by the liquor, too broke and dumb to bet, watching them place chips.

We left from there and smoked in Sissy’s Civic on the way to Project. Serenity yelled fuck you to a homeless guy on a bike as we drove past. I turned and looked through the back window and saw him raise a hand over his head before he faded.

In the Project Lounge, construction helmets and dollar bills hung over the bar. Sissy’s twin sister Lisa worked the bar with another older woman I didn’t know the name of. There was a group of men in suits down at the other end of the bar away from the front door and they smoked Black & Milds. The jukebox played George Strait. A velvet print of Elvis in Vegas hung next to a silver leopard printed on a mirror. The bar was dark except for fake plastic candles in red jars on the round tables on maroon carpet and the bright halogen which flooded the kitchen. A variety of cigarettes hung in rows behind the bar. Serenity ordered whiskey sours. We perpetuated the fog of smoke. The man at the end of the bar drifted down and spoke with me about the shipping industry in Pascagoula whose interests he’d represented in court earlier in the morning. I stumbled on the way to the bathroom, my legs almost giving out from under me, threw up in the parking lot and faded to black in the cab near the railroad to the sound of Serenity’s laughter.

The next night we went back to Big Play and ate burgers. Her uncle was there. He was a big gambler down from Baton Rouge for the Mayweather Pacquiao fight. It cost fifty bucks for a wristband. I went around the bar to the short line to get us drinks.

“Excuse me,” I said to the man blocking my path to the stool next to Serenity. He shouldered me out. I tried to squeeze back in next to her with the drinks. She watched me. I stepped on a boot. He turned and faced me. He was mean, wide and red. A forty something with coon eyes and blonde stubble in a PFG shirt. I figured him for an operator.

“Six hunnerd dollar awstritches, asshole.”

“You fuck your mother with that mouth?” I laughed.

Serenity grabbed one of the cups from my hand and poured it over his head. I felt the rush of the old days. He brushed her to the ground with a gentle sweep of his hand. I didn’t feel the punch so much as hear it crack my head. I looked up and saw his R-Toe swoop in at my face. I felt my nose break and my face go dull. I sat up laughing. The kicks busted the back of my head with the regularity of a sledgehammer. Serenity screamed. She sounded wounded.

He kicked my ribs and I went over. Mule kicks. The pain shot through my groin. I heard men yell. I felt one more big one before it stopped. I lay there with my eyes jammed shut. Country music. Men hollering in the black.

The bouncer got me on my feet and walked me out. He sat me on a bench outside. I needed a cigarette. Serenity gave me one of her menthols. She paced and chewed her nails. I asked the bouncer if my eyes looked okay.

“You eyes are fine, but your head is fucked.”

I shook my head. Curled over and threw up next to the bench.

I sat up. He was standing, shaking his head, looking across the highway to the beach. The wind shifted the part in his hair.

“You remind me of my brother,” he said.

“Come on baby, let’s go,” she said.

“Can’t come back here anymore,” he said.

I leaned my head against the glass. We passed Waffle House and the pawn shop. It started to rain heavy. I watched it run under the oaks and stream into the street. It blurred the lights into gold trails. I looked over at her. Her makeup was running and she was shaking her head.

“What a fuckin faggot. What a little piece of fuckin shit,” she said.

Her smoke filled the cab. I got sick but my abs just ripped. I was empty. She pulled under the dim green lights of the Bayview Inn. Her uncle was asleep. She kept trying to get me to do it with her with him sleeping there on the other bed. A rib felt broken and the beer was fading. She was out of weed. She kept grabbing me and I curled up deeper. She gave up and I lay there the whole night sick. I watched her uncle as he packed and left and let some of the blue dawn into the room.

After noon I followed her to her dealer’s place in Fountainbleau. I waited across the street failing not to think. I followed her south out of the neighborhood down a gravel pine road. It opened to an overgrown lot. An abandoned Delco home stood on concrete pillars on the river bayou.

“We always used to come here. The Ghost House,” she said.

We went up the outside steps and sat on the Virginia creeper subsumed balcony. The tide was way low. Saltwater puddles lay in craters of the dark sand a couple hundred yards out. Past this, the dark olive water snaked through the channels in the grass islands before pouring out into the Sound on the horizon. We smoked. My ribs felt healed. One side of my face was swollen shut. I laughed, dumbfounded.

“What?”

“I feel like shit,” I said.

“Get used to it,” she said. “It’s all there is.”

A light rain fell. We pushed back under the eave to protect ourselves. Trout popped in the water and deer flies stung our ankles, forcing us to leave.

Dan Duffy was born and raised in Jackson County, Mississippi. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Farewell Transmission, Afternoon Visitor, Dunce Codex, Juked, Nat. Brut, Rejection Letters and elsewhere. He holds an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and B.A. from Ole Miss. He’s worked as an usher, a delivery driver, an auto parts puller and an English professor. He lives in Mississippi with his dog.

Tags big play, dan duffy, farewell transmission, fiction, issue 6

Issue 6 Issue 6 Fiction

ESCROW

Post author By
Post date

By J.D. Hosemann

I never managed to unpack my things. My apartment was lined with stacks of cardboard boxes and picture frames propped against walls where they might have been hung. I drank unknown quantities of Line 39 Pinot Grigio ($11.38/bottle). Even lesser-known quantities of time passed without my noticing. Faceless tenants slammed doors and stomped across the ceiling. Their muffled voices reverberated in the walls while I scrolled on my phone watching countless street interviews with drunken college students, reaction videos, trick shots, thirst traps. I can say very little about my arrival. There was the recently laid sod, a freshly painted sign (The Mark III: A Place for Living). But I do remember how it ended. I remember the jarring knock on my apartment door.

The neighbor introduced himself as Charles and claimed he’d been living across the breezeway for several months. He wore a baseball cap, an enormous Green Bay Packers Starter jacket, and he held in his hand a small, padded envelope. “This you?” he asked, extending the package toward me. Charles showed little interest in chatting. I accepted the package, offered my thanks, and retreated immediately leaving no time for pleasantries. Once inside my unit, I opened the padded envelope and discovered a digital meat thermometer ($17.89), which I vaguely remembered ordering from TEMU. Fair enough, I thought. I ripped it from its plastic encasing and placed it among other miscellaneous items in a small kitchen drawer, which, to my bemusement, already held an identical device still in its original packaging.

It was around the time of this encounter that I began scouring online real estate listings. Night after night I stared into my laptop screen. I zoomed-in on the map and hovered my cursor over properties marked by little blue pins ($180k, $246k, $557K). I clicked through images of open-concept living rooms, galley kitchens, carpeted bedrooms and white-tiled bathrooms, not to mention backyard patios and oil-stained garages. Each home was newly renovated and updated. Stainless steel covered every appliance; granite, every countertop. The effect of wide-angle lenses made even a tiny nook seem like a great hall. I often saw myself in the images of these various rooms. I was preparing a nice meal in the kitchen. I was playing a musical instrument or watering a plant. I was reading a book in the den. Writing a book in the study. Doing pushups in the garage. I was learning to paint. Entertaining guests. Sometimes another person was there, a co-habitant, a woman without a face. I don’t know who the faceless woman was, but she was often doing what I was doing: reading or cooking or taking a nap. I thought I could almost see her face, but that would’ve been impossible because she didn’t have one.

I exhausted all listings in my surrounding area. It was late at night and I found myself zooming out, highlighting the little dots, expanding pictures of each house. Each one I’d already visited. I looked for something new, something overlooked, but nothing presented itself. I closed my laptop and left my apartment.

The concrete paths and nascent shrubbery led me to the center of The Mark III, to the emerald waters of the communal pool. I’d yet to discover a single bather in the pool, which, despite its recent construction, had already succumbed to severe neglect. A thin film of debris and dead bugs floated perpetually across its surface. But I found the pool to be soothing, especially at night when the underwater lamp illuminated the whole common area and projected ripples of green and yellow against the poolside units. I reclined on a pool chair and watched patterns of light casting shadows of floating debris. I lit a cigarette.

“What was the package?”

The voice came from my right. I turned to find Charles embedded in a nearby pool chair, a big G across his chest. He gestured to my pack of Parliaments with forked fingers. I flipped him the pack, offered the lighter.

“A digital meat thermometer. From TEMU.”

“Nice.”

“Yeah. Need to watch my spending though.”

“What for?”

“I’m buying a house.” I shuddered at the thought of this admission.

Charles was silent for a moment. Then he said, “You don’t buy a house with money.”

“Well, you need a little money.”

“You got credit?”

I nodded.

“You don’t need money. You just need credit.”

Charles tucked the cigarette behind his ear and produced a bulbous glass pipe from his jacket pocket. He lit the bowl and drew it deeply. For a moment, the features of Charles’ face were illuminated by the orange embers. His eyes were closed. He had freckles. When he exhaled, plumes of smoke billowed from his nostrils. Then he leaned back and extended the pipe in my direction, less of an offer than an assumption. I took the pipe, put it to my lips, and drew until I saw orange. I exhaled a stream of smoke that floated into the darkness above.

“I’ve never bought a house.”

“You won’t do the buying.”

“The buying?”

“The bank, the lawyers, the realtors. They do all the buying. You do the wanting.”

“The wanting?”

“Find yourself a realtor. She’ll put you in a house.” Charles stared forward, almost as if talking to some invisible person several yards from us.

I stared forward, too. I looked directly into the pool and watched as a spider made its way across the debris and then, miraculously, across water. Its spindly legs made tiny impressions on the water’s surface. My own feet felt far from me. My arms became lanky things. I leaned back in the chair. Charles continued saying things, something about realtors, mortgages, escrow. My eyes felt glassy. I had many eyes, like a spider. Weed smoke hovered in the night air and I could see each particle reflect the green light of the pool. I could see water molecules, stainless steel, kitchen gadgets, a crowded drawer. Storage space. Open concept. Find yourself a realtor. Unbroken chains of molecules. The pool chair dissolved into water but the surface tension held my weight. I lay there doing the wanting.

I awoke to a loud splash and sunlight hissing against my forehead. Charles was gone. A maintenance man combed the depths of the pool with an underwater vacuum. The pool was pristine. Not a leaf or bug in sight.

My phone vibrated and I sat up to check it. A Gmail notification: Prospective Client—Blue/Williams Realty Group. I touched the banner:

Hi, John! We got your message! I think I found your house! Call me asap!

–Marianne

601-423-XXXX

From the street, the house appeared small: a tiny one-story frame with a front porch swing and a sagging roof. At first it didn’t seem big enough to hold more than one person. But I walked the length of the property line and found the house was built on a sloping hill. As I descended the hill into the backyard, the house grew larger and larger. I turned and looked up. Two dark windows loomed some twenty-five feet overhead. Their height was disorienting. I felt a spell of dizziness. Then I heard a car, the sound of brakes.

A silver Mercedes was parked on the street and Marianne was waving to me from the front doorway of the house. She wore a light blue floral blouse and matching heels. Her face bore a thick layer of foundation, and her red hair had been recently dyed. She looked perfect, objectively so.

“Such a charming neighborhood,” she said. I looked around. The house was nestled between a law office and a fourplex. I saw some trees, architectural variety. A car with no muffler sped past us down the street. “And it’s designated historic,” Marianne added.

In the living room, I eagerly awaited Marianne’s instructions, but she said nothing. Instead, she extended her right hand in which she held a golf ball. She leaned forward and placed the ball on the floor, where it rested quietly for a brief moment before suddenly coming to life. The golf ball began rolling, slowly at first but gradually picking up speed until it rumbled noisily against the natural wood flooring. We both watched as the ball careened toward the baseboard on the farthest wall. But then, as if possessed, it slowed and curved back toward the center of the room, barely missing the wall.

“Is that bad?” I asked.

“Not necessarily. It just depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether you can see yourself living here.”

We walked around. Our voices reverberated in the empty spaces of the vacant house. The wooden floors were newly polished and a thick coat of paint had been applied to every wall. Even the fireplace was slathered with multiple layers of heavy white paint. It reminded me of a white, layered cake. In fact, the entire house had been painted in a style I could only describe as frosted. It made me want to go out and buy a gigantic knife, an absurdly large knife, to slice into this house and find out whether or not it was cake.

“Go on,” Marianne said. Take a walk around. I’ll let you be.

The house was built in such a way that one room led into another. Each room had at least two points of entry, forming a kind of circle or spiral. The spacious front room led into a cozy dining room, which was connected to the kitchen. I walked through the kitchen and into a bedroom. Then I walked through the bedroom and into a large white tiled bathroom. Jack and Jill, I remembered from my research. Then I walked from the bathroom into another room, a dark room with no windows. I was in the center of the house somehow. I wondered what purpose such a room could serve. Was it a bedroom? An office?

When I passed through the darkened room, I found myself back in the living room, back where I’d begun. It felt surprisingly spacious and airy. Natural light poured in through windows on the front facing wall of the house. I was just about to ask my realtor about the darkened middle room when, there in the light, I saw myself. I was reclined in a reading chair, a book hiding my face and a black cat curled in my lap. Finally, a chance to do a little reading, I thought. Then I saw myself in the kitchen donning an apron and making poulet chasseur. And then I was outside mowing the front lawn. I watched through the front window as I pushed an old-fashioned rotary mower. I was sweaty. My shirt was off. My arms were chiseled from all the pushups I’d been doing.

“Well, do you see yourself living here?” Marianne asked.

I turned from the window and looked at my realtor. She was also looking out into the yard. Then she turned, smiled, and awaited my response.

The house visit, the loan-approval, the contract: I had very little to do with any of it beyond applying my initials in the designated blanks. But once my offer was accepted, once a closing date was determined, my online habit only intensified. I took special pleasure in watching the status of the listing flip from “for sale” to “under contract.” I combed through the page over and over again. I committed every detail to memory. Built 1938; 1617 sqft; .98-acre lot. I thought of new questions to ask Marianne. Were the bedroom outlets grounded or two-pronged? Was the entire roof replaced after the hailstorm of 2013 or just the shingles? I relentlessly clicked through each of the twenty-six images on the realtor.com slide deck. Crown molding, glass doorknobs, all the little bits of charm and character I’d missed or already forgotten about.

One night I downloaded several decades worth of Hinds County tax records in an attempt to discover all the names of the previous owners of my property. But I kept hitting snags. Either the document was illegible or the address was missing. That couldn’t be true. The house had stood for some eighty years. I stared at the screen checking each address until my vision blurred and I could no longer make out the tiny street numbers. I closed the laptop and there I was at The Mark III, in my apartment, amid the stained carpet, beige walls, the fluorescent kitchen light. I looked at the cardboard boxes stacked against the wall. On one of them I’d written the word “Stuff.” I thought about Charles and wondered what his unit looked like.

The pool was, once again, covered in leaves and debris. I paced around the deck with a cup of Line 39 in my hand. I lit a cigarette. I wanted to tell Charles about Marianne, about the golf ball, about her Mercedez. Get yourself a realtor. I looked at the pool chairs again and again but they remained vacant. Then I pulled out my phone and scrolled through emails, the back and forth between me and Marianne. I considered typing out a message. About what? Outlets. Shingles? I stared at the water, the emerald glow. I watched the leaves floating listlessly. I noticed a spider desperately trying to climb out of the pool, its legs struggling to take hold against the vinyl liner. Eventually it gave up and continued its miraculous journey across the water’s surface.

There was no traffic on the road at that time of night. I pulled onto highway forty-nine and crossed its four lanes without a turn signal. My plastic cup fit snug in the cup holder and I drove with the windows down. Heat on the feet. Crosby, Stills, and Nash were coming through the car stereo, but they were continually interrupted by the artificial voice of a woman reminding me to take a slight right onto Mill Street in two miles. I passed unimpeded through a gauntlet of green traffic lights. Turtles all the way down! I thought for no reason. I’m bending time and space, I thought as the white lines elongated on my approach. I’m on a night journey, I thought as the jangle of Stephen Stills’ acoustic guitar prepared me for the coda of “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.” I’m on a journey home, I thought as I took a sip of Line 39 and sang along with the boys Doo doo doo doo doot, doot doot, doo doo doo doot. Then I made a series of turns and merges and slight rights toward downtown, toward a neighborhood with brown road signs, a historic designation. I was driving home.

The highway narrowed and funneled me into smaller boulevards and avenues and streets. I reduced my speed and lowered the volume of the car stereo. Quiet city, sleepy town. My car snaked around the streets of my new, yet historic neighborhood and suddenly I felt a sense of calm reverence, of peaceful vigilance. I turned the radio completely off. I turned off my navigation app too. One ought to know his way home. But my street seemed unnaturally dark. There wasn’t even a flicker from the streetlight. Only rooftops were visible against the mild glow of urban light pollution, but the houses themselves, their faces, were shadowy things. I recognized certain landmarks. The law office, a convenience store. But the houses themselves seemed to shift, their features distorted in the darkness. Was that wood or asbestos siding? Four columns or two? A rose bush or Japanese maple?

Eventually I found myself at a small public park with a walking trail that twisted and curved around a large grassy meadow. I pulled over and poured myself more Line 39 before killing the engine and embarking on my walk. Small, solar-powered lamps had been planted at measured intervals along the trail and created a haunting effect. Ghost path, I thought. I walked from light to light and tried to focus on the path rather than the surrounding darkness, which seemed infinite. I imagined it was daytime, in the future, a future in which I was living my life in my new house. I imagined a green meadow and blue sky, people on a picnic blanket, dogs chasing tennis balls. “On your left!” I jolted and spilled my wine when the runner bounded past me. He wore a blinking red light that bobbed up and down while the rest of his body disappeared into the darkness.

Back at The Mark III, I found another package at my doorstep. There was a note: Delivered to my address again. Check shipping info. C. I tore open the package and found another digital meat thermometer ($18.39/TEMU).

As the closing date drew near, new players in the drama of my house hunt entered the scene. Yes, there had always been Marianne, the realtor and soothsayer who showed not just houses but entire lives unfolding before your very eyes. But there was also the bank, the Mortgage Loan Originator, the home inspectors, the crawl space guy, the insurance agents, the roofing guys, the sump-pump repairmen. Somehow I’d set into motion an entire industry of professionals determined to house me.

I was in my apartment the night Marianne called to explain that my house had not passed inspection. I remember very few details from the conversation, only that my first reaction was to say That’s okay. I still want it. I still want my house. But Marianne explained my desire had been insufficient, that the people actually buying my house, those professionals involved in the transaction, had decided it was not to be. Eventually we hung up. I looked down at my laptop, which sat open on the kitchen countertop. Of the dozen or so tabs open, half of them were my home listing. I clicked one of them and saw the front porch, the Japanese maple in the front yard. Then I closed the computer.

I’m not sure why I went to Charles’ apartment. Perhaps I held him partially responsible for this, even though he’d done nothing but offer some kind advice to a neighbor. Maybe I thought I could change things by going to his apartment, by knocking on his door the way he’d knocked on mine. When I did so, when I rapped my knuckles against the vinyl door, it creaked open slightly. At first I wondered if Charles was waiting on me, if he had opened it as soon as I walked over. But it had only opened a fraction of an inch. “Charles?” I said nervously. When I pushed the door myself, I found no one there.

Charles’ apartment was nearly identical to mine. There was a beige living room, a carpeted bedroom, and a small kitchen with plenty of storage space. Charles had managed to hang a few pictures, but the only striking difference was the window in the living room. Unlike my unit, which faced the parking lot and, at some distance, highway forty-nine, Charles’ unit faced the interior of The Mark III and offered a perfect view of the pool’s emerald waters. I walked to this window and looked out into The Mark III, the tan vinyl siding, the concrete paths, the patched sod, and the blue-green light of the pool at the center of things. That’s when I noticed a tiny orange light in the darkness. The light was coming from the pool chairs in the corner of the common area. The little orange light would glow bright for just a second before fading slightly, followed by a little puff of smoke.

When I got to the pool I was out of breath from running, but I hadn’t been fast enough because I did not find Charles. I found no one. It was only me, there at the pool, late at night when the underwater lamp made everything green and yellow. It was me who, just then, noticed something at the bottom of the pool, something dark and impossible to make out because of the refracted light of the water’s surface. And it was me suddenly splashing around in the water, unable to penetrate the depths, my limbs spread out and flailing on the surface. It was me who wanted—no—who needed to see what was at the bottom of the pool. And it was me who, eventually, contorted my body and dived down. Beneath the surface, I saw a more definite shape, a dark rectangular thing down at the bottom of the pool. I kicked my legs furiously but struggled to go down, to sink into the depths. I kicked and kicked and extended my right hand toward the dark thing at the bottom of the pool. And, as I reached for it, I thought I recognized the shape, its unique angles. It looked familiar, something I’d viewed a million times. But the thing disintegrated as soon as I grabbed it. I looked at my hand, which was covered in green algae. Then I turned and looked up from the bottom of the pool. I looked to the surface and I saw the silhouettes of people standing around the edge of the pool. They were staring down into the water, dozens of vague and refracted faces, faces from the past and faces from the future, staring down from above.

J.D. Hosemann lives in Jackson, Mississippi. His work has appeared in places like The Kenyon Review Online, New World Writing, Maudlin House, ergot., hex, and elsewhere.

Tags escrow, farewell transmission, fiction, issue 6, J.D. Hosemann

Issue 6 Issue 6 Fiction

A SUNNY WEEKEND

Post author By
Post date

By Dmitriy Kogan

Me and Rob and a couple of our friends were renting a house on Seneca Lake for the weekend. We needed an escape from city life. I was not fond of fishing or hiking or most nature activities, but it was nice to sleep in a house near the lake instead of a one-bedroom apartment near the subway.

Rob had a new girlfriend, Marion, who was sunbathing on the deck when I stepped outside for a cigarette. The sun was just about to go down. Marion was in a two-piece polkadot bikini and sunglasses. I could see the shape of her cleavage. She was reading a book.

I lit my cigarette and looked up at the sky. She noticed me behind her and set down her novel.

“Are they starting to make the food?” she asked.

“Yeah, just about.”

She looked up at me. “Remind me again what you do in insurance?”

“I’m a claims adjuster.”

“Oh, yeah. You and Rob met at work, right?”

“Yeah. We were at the same company for a bit before I got canned.”

I doused my cigarette in the ashtray on the round table near Marion.

***

Rob, Marion, Bill, Gator and I sat at the table ready to eat the salmon we picked up at a nearby supermarket.

“How long have you been married, Bill?” asked Marion.

“Two years now,” said Bill.

“He didn’t bring his wife because she drives him crazy,” said Rob. “Married life will do that to you.”

Rob laughed. I felt like I needed another cigarette. Gator was silently munching his peas.

“And Gator, Rob told me you’re looking for acting work?” asked Marion. “That’s great. I always wanted to try acting.”

“Yeah, it’s hard,” said Gator. “I mostly do commercials, but you know how that fucks up your soul when you have an MFA in theater.”

“Why not do theater, then?” asked Marion.

“Because try telling your landlord that you do theater,” said Gator.

***

It was late. Gator and I were having a couple of beers on the deck. The stars were shining bright and Gator was pretty hammered.

“You think this one will last?” asked Gator.

“Rob’s new girl?”

“Yeah.”

“Who knows. He gets a new one every three months. Then when he’s sick of banging her, he switches to the next.”

“I was with this hooker in Vegas last month. Man, her tits were huge. I sucked on them for ten whole minutes.”

“That’s nice,” I said. “Yeah, I need to get laid. I could use a hooker.”

“Come with me to Paris. I heard those French girls fuck like animals.”

***

I was still half-drunk when I stumbled into bed. I could hear Rob and Marion going at it. They sounded like they were in bed with me because their room was right next door to mine. I reached down to my crotch but couldn’t get it hard. Her moans sounded sweet, though. I heard Rob finish shortly before I fell asleep.

***

The next morning, Marion was making eggs in the kitchen.

“Sleep well?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “This house is lovely.”

Her ass was plump and I could see it through her nightgown. I still had some morning wood and I felt like brushing it up against her. Just then, Rob came downstairs, still in his underwear. He walked past me and smacked Marion on the ass. Then they began making out.

***

I stepped out onto the deck. Rob was in his chair, shirtless, smoking a cigarette and having a beer. I sat down next to him and asked him for a light.

“She has a nice ass, doesn’t she?” asked Rob.

“Yeah,” I admitted. “Really nice.”

“I saw you checking her out. If you wanna fuck her, you can. I don’t mind.”

“What?”

“I’m practically done with her. We did it in every kind of position imaginable, and she’ll definitely remember me as one of her best.”

I shifted in my chair and took a drag on my cigarette.

“I mean, the thing is, this Latina secretary who I’m working with now? Holy crap. She’s married, but she’s got ass and tits for days. Marion’s ass, it’s a boulder. This Latina chick’s ass? It’s a mountain.”

“Did you already fuck her? The Latina, I mean.”

“You bet I did,” said Rob. “I don’t care if she’s married. With that ass? It’s worth the risk. There are too many women out there, man. Why settle down?”

I looked up at the sky and watched the clouds as they met each other, embraced, and then merged.

Dmitriy Kogan is a short story writer, poet, and essayist from Staten Island, New York. His work has appeared in The Beatnik Cowboy, The Rye Whiskey Review, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, and is forthcoming in Straylight Magazine and Some Words.

Tags a sunny weekend, Dmitriy Kogan, farewell transmission, fiction, issue 6

Issue 6 Issue 6 Fiction

DISBANDING THE FIREBALL QUARTET

Post author By
Post date

By Avee Chaudhuri

After a few hours of drinking it was decided, mainly by Chatterjee, who was a diabetic and who routinely ignored the advice of doctors and refused to take his medication, that it would be another pizza night. “Pizza night! That’s what’s fucking up,” Chatterjee shouted at a group of passing school children. He had been on a self-prescribed diet for over a month, eating nothing except millet and goose liver.

“Say, what’s the pizza of the week?” Darryl asked our waiter when we were seated.

Our waiter leaned in and laughed. “You know, Joe’s actually in Italy this week, so we thought we’d have a little fun and do a Hawaiian Pizza. Joe hates Hawaiian Pizza.”

Joe was the owner of the pizza joint we would frequent whenever we drank too much and none of us had exact dinner plans. Joe kept a bottle of Fireball behind the bar, just for us.

Darryl and Monica firmly came down on the side of Hawaiian Pizza. I abstained. Chatterjee lost his goddamn mind.

“I won’t be party to treachery. One way or the other, I don’t give a damn about Hawaiian Pizza, but I won’t be a party to this humiliation.”

In fact, Chatterjee said he was drafting a letter on his phone he would send to Joe when he knew Joe was safe and back in the country:

Dear Joe,

While you were away they anointed Hawaiian Pizza the “Pizza of the Week.” They being not some anonymous cabal peddling the inane wisdom that “variety is the spice of life,” but your own kitchen staff, your own people engaged in high treason, man. I was appalled for you, remain appalled, and hope that this intelligence is actionable—with extreme prejudice. First I suggest you clean house, as it were. This will require shuttering the pizzeria for, what, at least three months while you train a new platoon of chefs and waiters. I believe this economic hardship to be worthwhile for your own personal well-being and to preserve the integrity of Joe’s Pizza, which by the virtue of operating as an LLC has become a beacon of hope for those of us who dream of one day hanging out our own shingle.

Warmly,

Prem Chatterjee

After Prem wrote the letter he ordered us shots of Fireball and we decided on a classic, tastefully garnished, Pizza Bianca.

A few weeks later, Darryl wanted to go to the racecourse because he was an animal lover.

“Have you ever seen a horse at full gallop?” Darryl pulled up the race calendar on his phone.

“No.”

“It’s like they’re flying.”

“Shut the fuck up, Darryl,” Monica said.

We decided to get some pizza to smooth things over. Joe double-timed it over when he saw us.

“I gotta thank you, Prem.” He had to catch his breath.

“I just couldn’t be a party to it, Joe.”

“That was the last straw. I tell you that was the last straw.” Joe was running his hands through his hair. He looked unkempt. He hadn’t shaved. Joe was what you would call an old-school restauranteur. Always dressed like some splendid groom, in cufflinks, in a waistcoat. Now he was wearing jeans and a hoodie and our eyes followed him anxiously to the open kitchen where he began an unsuccessful attempt to remove the ink sac from a cuttlefish.

It was only then that we noticed the kitchen was empty save for Joe, who was covered in ink. He’d opted for a mallet instead of a knife.

“Say, Joe. Where is everyone?” Monica said when she went behind the bar to grab the bottle of Fireball.

“Well, it’s like Prem said. I had to clean house. I had to take the fucking trash out. Right? Right?!” Joe started adding wood to the pizza oven, at an alarming rate. We discovered the next day while watching the five o’clock news that Joe had fired his entire kitchen staff and murdered Constantin, his head chef, burning his remains in the pizza oven. Constantin had been sleeping with Joe’s wife. It started out small, hand stuff in the walk-in, but had grown into a real relationship—weekends away, some lake house in the country—and she had become kinder to everyone, Joe included, so he had accepted the affair, but then to go ahead and make Hawaiian Pizza was too much for Joe. It was one betrayal too many.

Prem cleared his throat when the news hour ended, like he was about to say something.

“What?” I said.

“Well…” Prem started. “I cannot help but feel that we are responsible for this.”

“We!” Darryl said.

“Yeah, you wrote the goddamn note.”

“None of you stopped me! We were all drunk on the Fireball and did not think, could not think, about the consequences of our action. That’s what’s wrong with this world: people not minding their own business, imposing their own value system.”

“Jesus, Prem,” Monica said. “You’ve got to calm down. Joe would have found out eventually.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. But referring back to the letter: was it entirely necessary to frame the issue of Hawaiian Pizza as ‘high treason’? ‘Extreme prejudice’ is an unfortunate turn of phrase, knowing what happened to poor Constantin. Though perhaps twas the fate of all swarthy lovers.”

“Prem, you’re being too hard on yourself,” I said.

“Well someone has to be! I mean what the hell are we even doing?”

The question hung there for the rest of the evening. Monica called up her ex-husband, and arranged to meet him at the Home Depot. They would finish putting the new siding on their house. She said she would call us when they were done, that there’d be a party. I haven’t seen her since. Darryl nursed a light beer for several hours and then left to get kebabs. Chatterjee and I polished off a bottle of white wine but that was it. At the end of the night, Chatterjee shook my hand.

“Good luck,” I said.

“Yeah, you too.”

I can’t remember when we started to refer to ourselves as the Fireball Quartet. It was probably during that full out brawl in the Haymarket. Someone asked Chatterjee if he was a Muslim. Chatterjee, a proud Bengali Brahmin, answered: so what if he was, he had every right to be in that Irish bar leering at former collegiate volleyball players.

Avee Chaudhuri teaches Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the chef/owner of The Sepoy’s Revenge, a restaurant he runs out of his office on campus (Andrews 320).

Tags Avee Chaudhuri, disbanding the fireball quartet, farewell transmission, fiction, issue 6

Issue 6 Issue 6 Fiction

THE BABYSITTER

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By James Callan

Our noses smash while your tongue unfurls to probe far beyond the nubs of my tonsils. We perform our animal lust in a public setting—a food court in the airport, a city bus, the serpentine queue leading to a garish roller coaster. No one takes any notice.

This time, you’re an Asian girl, but no one I know from real life. Asian, most likely, because I watched a Kore-eda film last night—the one with the mother who abandons her children. Your face is different, but I know it’s you. We are kissing in public with a hunger that verges on panic. You stifle my airways with your cartoon tongue. I am powerless, like a child, neatly folded and stored in a traveling bag. I am carried away, going who-knows-where.

In these dreams, the taste in my mouth is awful, and when I wake, it lingers. I blink in the dark and fish a hand into my underwear. Sometimes I require a new pair. This time, I do not. I groan, knowing what’s to come next, knowing from experience and repetition that when I wake from these invasive kissing dreams, my mouth tasting like I’ve gone to town on a hyena’s asshole, you will emerge and render me your plaything. You seep into substance from nothing, clouding my room like squid ink ejected in water. You will bond my flesh to the mattress, singing in high notes, low notes, a drone that makes me nauseous and yet receptive to its sonic violation. You will hover over my useless limbs, ejaculating your cold aura.

On occasion, you gyrate, shedding your skin. More commonly, you remain perfectly still. Eventually, you press inward against my immobile body, your non-face opening up to unravel your tape-measure tongue. This is the moment when my dreams take on a new foundation. No longer dreams, they become nightmares; discarded fragments dredged up from forgotten realities.

The Big Red that we chewed in the car cannot purge the rot of our open faces. Your song is sweet, but hot and sour on your lips. The storybook that we read seems a world away on my bedside table, falling to the floorboards as a tremor ruptures the world and everything in it.

You cover me like a weighted blanket. I resist, but part of me opens up to you. No longer a woman—no longer a human—the shadowy mass in my room enters me, tasting me down to my core.

James Callan lives and writes in Aotearoa (New Zealand). His fiction has appeared in Apocalypse Confidential, Burial Magazine, Reckon Review, Mystery Tribune, and elsewhere. His debut collection, Those Who Remain Quiet, is available from Anxiety Press.

Tags farewell transmission, fiction, issue 6, James Callan, the babysitter

Across the Wire Vol. 7

The Fifth Hit

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by Tyler Plofker

September 2, 2026

Robert D. Manfred Jr., Commissioner

The Office of the Commissioner of Baseball

1271 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY, 10020

Dear Mr. Robert Manfred,

I hope you and your family are well and looking forward to the Labor Day weekend. The sun is so warm this time of year. This is Jimmy Granes of the Baltimore Orioles. The reason for this letter is to apprise you of my efforts in identifying the Fifth Hit. I hope you will be patient with me; I do not want to leave anything out or anything unclear.

Being a student of the game yourself, you will recall that during Game 1 of the 1886 World’s Championship Series, Chicago White Stockings’ cleanup hitter Fred “Dandelion” Pfeffer was thrown out at second base trying to stretch his RBI single into a double. It is my contention that Pfeffer’s mistake was not an unintentional baserunning blunder, but rather, the first public attempt at finding the Fifth Hit. Before Game 7 of the 1925 World Series between the Washington Senators and the Pittsburgh Pirates, the infield dirt was doused in gasoline and set on fire; ostensibly to dry the rain-soaked diamond, however, contemporaneous records paint a different picture. The diary entry of William McKeen (second-in-command groundskeeper) for October 15th, 1925, reads simply, “It did not work.” Again and again, these trials show up. Aparicio’s fall at third. Germany Schaefer and his steals of first. Manny being Manny? More accurately, in my view: Manny being an astute and diligent investigator of the Fifth Hit.

Single, Double, Triple, Homerun. Single, Double, Triple, Homerun. When did the thought of a fifth emerge? Infielder Mike McGeary and Third Baseman Warren White’s letter correspondence from the years 1885–1891 provides the earliest written evidence. McGeary writes of his ideas (“[A] plump Belgian Draught, salivating on an autumn day”) and White gives his own. McGeary rails against the fools who accuse him of “game-fixing.” White writes, “Time is no longer of a benefit to us.” I have seen these letters, have been allowed to study them through the goodwill of their descendants. White’s great-great-great-grandson, Paul, is a fabulous baker, a wonderful baker; the man can really bake.

In the 1930s, there were a number of ballplayers—dimwits, morons—who argued that the Fifth Hit was merely an inside-the-park homerun; i.e., that the homerun can and must be separated into inside-the-park and outside-the-park and, therefore, five hits. But this was rightfully and forcefully mocked by their successors, and is clearly absurd—inside-the-park and outside-the-park are two different manifestations of one kind of hit, in the same way as one can have a ground-rule double and a traditional double, or a single and a bunt single. These are different flavors of the hit they correspond to, not entirely new ones. Dobermanns and Shih Tzu are both types of dogs. I am sure you agree, Mr. Manfred.

I learned of all of this—though unconsciously, I feel it must have been with me from the start, from the very beginning—only this past off-season. Reading Christy Mathewson’s 1912 baseball history/instruction manual/collection of anecdotes, “Pitching in a Pinch; Or, Baseball from the Inside,” I was struck by this passage:

Then Lobert, the tantalizing Teuton with the bow-legs, whacked out a home run into the left-field bleachers and slowed at third with a mocking smile on his face which would have gotten the late Job’s goat. You would have thought he’d done something more than knock a four-bagger.

“[S]omething more than knock a four-bagger.”

From there, I simply followed the thread. Clear on the history, from the first day of this year’s spring training, I began.

I have attempted more than could possibly be listed here. I have concluded a triple by springing up on my left foot and then striking the base with the intermediate phalanx of my right pinky. I have—and I’m sure you’ve seen the footage—I have hit a bouncing single up the middle and marched, half-step, straight from the bag to the bleachers in center, pulling up my uniform, revealing my pale belly, slapping it as if a dholak drum. I have hit a smoking line drive while visualizing the preposterous mustache of Dr. Thomas Wang (more on the languid doctor later). I have smashed (absolutely barreled) balls with all manner of things in my mouth. A grape. A roofing nail. A hornet. One night, with no one else in the ballpark, I sliced a ball down the line, slid prone into second base, and slowly and meticulously gyrated my groin against it until fruition; but, while a pleasurable double, the hit remained, no less and no more, a double.

Once, on an off day, I thought I found it in the maneuvers of a gas station attendant. I had hit what appeared to be an infield single the day before—could every moment since then, every step and every breath, the shoveled putout in the bottom of the inning, the bumper-to-bumper drive home, the morning coffee with too much Sweet’n Low, could it all have been part of it, part of the Fifth Hit which had now just ended with my gas station attendant, a Mr. Francisco Marcello Capionne—whose hair leaves a lot to be desired—a Mr. Francisco Marcello Capionne, jiggling the aluminum nozzle free, letting the gasoline drip and drip and drip onto the back wheel of my 2024 Lincoln Navigator? But the thought left me as quickly as it came. No, not this time. I paid the man in banknotes.

You know, of course, that I am slashing .314/.427/.658, good for a 193 wRC+, Mr. Robert Manfred? I am leading the league in fWAR by a two-win margin. Over the last three seasons combined, I have accrued almost 28% more value than the man behind me. This is to say: the manager lets me do what I want. Old Tony Mansolino does not believe, but he does not stop me. “Keep it mostly in blowouts,” he says. “I’ll try, skip,” I say, winking. Yesterday I licked home plate clean.

Sometimes I have doubts. Sometimes I wallow. Sometimes the thought pops into my head that this life is nothing but an inexhaustible maze of horrors. But then I remember Mike McGeary’s 28th letter to Warren White, McGeary’s 28th letter to White in which he states, “I know it in its absence.”

In the 17th chapter of the first Book of Samuel it is written, “And he took his staff in his hand, and chose him five smooth stones out of the brook, and put them in a shepherd’s bag which he had, even in a scrip; and his sling was in his hand: and he drew near to the Philistine.” Plato claims the five regular polyhedra—tetrahedron, hexahedron, octahedron, icosahedron, dodecahedron—to be the fundamental building blocks of the physical world. The Hadith enumerate five distinct pillars of Islam. The Pandava brothers (Yudhishthira, Bhima, Arjuna, Nakula, Sahadeva) of the Mahabharata number five. The Fir Bolg chieftains of the Lebor Gabála Érenn number five. Celestial mechanics describes five points, referred to as Lagrange points, where the gravitational pull and centripetal force between any celestial masses are necessarily and always in perfect equilibrium. There are five basic human senses. Five fingers to a hand, five toes to a foot. The Five Holy Wounds of Christ.

Let us not beat around the bush any longer, my esteemed, handsome, well-groomed friend. Let us put all the marbles from the bag onto the end table. The fact is this: My languid, hilariously-mustachioed Dr. Thomas Wang, he of the curled, trembling upper lip and eyes like golden rubies, told me a week ago what I already knew: I am dying. My pancreas is not cooperating with the rest of my body. My remaining time is best denominated in months. You, as such an intelligent baseball man, Mr. Manfred, may have noticed the 193 wRC+ mentioned above, while exceptional, is a whopping 34 points lesser than what I was running as of the end of July. My production will continue to dip and soon I will no longer be able to play; soon I will be counting scuffs on the ceiling and my only hits will be into the bedpan.

Really, this letter is not a briefing; it is a request. If I do not find the Fifth Hit in my dwindling inhales—and I may not, I have no doubt I may not—this letter is a request. Open the fields, Mr. Robert Manfred. Open the fields. That is my request. Fields across this great, lush, green country; men and women and children swinging, experimenting. Making the rules up as they go. New rules no one has ever thought of and old ones no one is left to remember. Thousands and thousands of baseball diamonds, at every school, at every campground, at every workplace. At every prison and every hospital courtyard. In the abandoned alley behind P.S. 112 and in the middle of the White House South Lawn. Long-tressed women snorkeling in Chesapeake Bay. Maybe there is a horseshoe crab. Men of all sizes giving yellow-throated birds something nice. Perhaps a small bear filled with sand. Young girls eating cotton candy through their nose and wiggling out their last baby tooth, tossing it, hitting it real good alright with a metal bat. Little boys hopped up on Shirley Temples, so many Shirley Temples, outrageously above any reasonable serving size recommendation of Shirley Temples, jitterbugging wild to Songs of the North American Bullfrog. A film projector that doesn’t work well. Big-time scrapes, thorn bites left unbandaged. Pencils. Become the commissioner of the Fifth Hit, Mr. Robert Manfred, help us find it. It will require a great deal of funding, I understand. I understand that. Start at the top. Reach out to the President. If the fool can get but one thing right, let it be this. And if he refuses, turn to local government, private money. Problems there, then turn to the charity and the goodwill of the people. The people, Mr. Manfred. Get the funds however you must and build. If you don’t want to admit what the push is for, that is okay. If you don’t think the public is ready for that, that is alright. Just say the initiative is to “grow the game” or to “positively impact health.” The people will understand, intuitively, what needs to be done. You, Mr. Robert Manfred, born into a family of five—mother, father, brother, sister, and you, born a boy and now the commissioner of the Major Leagues—you, Mr. Robert Manfred, know that better than anybody.

Grass is something to smell. The sun is so warm this time of year.

With love and sincerely yours,

Jimmy Granes

Tyler Plofker is a writer in NYC.

Tags across the wire, baseball, farewell transmission, fiction, mlb, opening day, Robert Manfred Jr, the fifth hit, tyler plofker

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.

Tags across the wire, alabama, chicago, dan duffy, farewell transmission, fiction, indie lit, indie publishing, Iowa workshop, magnolia from the heartbreakers, Red Danielson, red Danielson art, southern writer

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.

Tags across the wire, Brooklyn writer, farewell transmission, fiction, goddamned right its a beautiful day, indie lit, pure life journey, the bowery, tom ianelli

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.

Tags across the wire, Colin gee, farewell transmission, fiction, gorko gazette, heaven, pester, succulent Chinese dinner, what comes after the blues

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.

Tags farewell transmission, fiction, issue 5, the fireman, walker rutter-bowman

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.

Tags alex rost, farewell transmission, fiction, issue 5, most of the words we use are wasted

Issue 5 Issue 5 Fiction

BEEFS

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By Sal Difalco

“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.

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.

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.

Tags beefs, farewell transmission, fiction, issue 5, sal difalco

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.

Tags farewell transmission, fiction, issue 5, jimmy cajoleas, the quest

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.

Tags craig rodgers, farewell transmission, fiction, issue 5, old friends

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.

Tags big deal, claire hopple, farewell transmission, fiction, issue 5

Issue 4 Issue 4 Fiction

AFTER PASSAIC

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By Bud Smith

Last night I broke a rib kicking a balloon. I went flying like Home Alone, Marv and Harry, landed on my side and damn it hurt.

Sometime around sunset the following day I was at Miriam’s 80th birthday party, sat mostly alone at an oblong table, lacking the power to laugh.

The backroom of the restaurant overlooked the turnpike. Half her family stared out an endless window at an endless peel of traffic. The other half took turns briefly holding whoever’s baby.

The sprite-like server asked if I was all right.

In my own way I signaled, Not at all.

He brought more table wine.

I sipped non-dominant, explaining how I’d been wounded in battle the previous midnight, but neglecting to mention my opponent: a rubber bladder full of breath, color of bubble-gum, hovering low along the hardwood floor of the upstairs guest room.

How the house had shook and woken two sisters, two nieces, all the tetra, even the cherry barb.

The server left. The baby echoed all around.

Unable to dance or mingle, I watched Giada loom over an elderly man at table five. I saw how she was disguising her hatred, making what appeared to be pleasant small talk, though he was a known-enemy, a pink-faced gentleman-fuck in a baby blue suit and teal tie. She was nodding. Was smiling cool even.

We’d been married eleven-and-a-quarter years. I’d studied and was fluent in her many gifts.

I, in fact, was one of her gifts.

Another of her gifts was ‘forever-patience.’

Another was ‘resting angel face.’

Then there was her ability to conceal absolute repulsion.

Who could ever guess, during the car ride over, Giada had instructed me to slowly choke the life from this bloviating man.

His exact relation was unclear.

Her father’s first cousin? Second cousin? Third cousin? Forth cousin? No cousin at all? Luca. Former dean of colleges, retired fifteen years but the way he bragged about campus, you’d never know.

Maybe she would snap, fetch up the potted tiger lily centerpiece, and brain him.

A silver mylar balloon struck the ceiling fan but my table mate bopped it away with an unconcerned backhand.

Gold foil on the balloon read “80?!”

And Miriam? Perhaps Miriam was a great aunt?

I had no clue, except I loved Miriam, wanted her cloned two thousand times. A moment before I had seen the bartender letting the baby pull ice cubes from the bucket. But Miriam had objected. Now Miriam was rocking the mystery baby. Giada’s family had conquered this backroom with toasts, and gossip, and four courses of food already. Espresso was brewing. I limped to the remainder cocktail shrimp.

Not two minutes later, someone tapped my shoulder. I turned, expecting to be offered a pig in a blanket—not so—another server bestowed upon me the baby.

“I’m hurt,” I said, indicating my side.

Big Nico saved me, took the young one and spoke in his low baritone, “Who’s your daddy? Who’s your daddy?” Our world was built of questions, posed to those who lacked the ability to speak. “No, really. Who’s your daddy?” He gently shook this baby over his head. “Is there a daddy in the house?” Big Nico asked like someone might say, ‘Is there a doctor in the house,’ just a moment before an emergency tracheotomy.

I studied a poster board full of photos of Miriam as a child in Passaic and Miriam as a teenager in Passaic and then Miriam as an adult after she’d gotten herself waylaid in Salt Lake City.

The photos on the poster board I liked best, twenty or so, captured a gnawed-away time when she was young, in New Jersey, just after WWII, when everything was sepia dew and sepia roses.

One of those sepia photos on that pasteboard was of this building I stood in now, which Giada’s family used to own. For six years they’d owned it, I think.

First the building contained a hat store that also sold shoes. Then it was a shoe store that had some hats. Then they sold no hats. Briefly after the family lost the building, imitation diamonds were sold here. After that, it became a pawn shop. Then there was white flight and nearly it was demolished. Yet here we all were, knee-deep in bruschetta, faux bouquets, and Dean Martin—the place now called Friar Anthony’s.

Two of the other twenty photos were especially striking, bloomed with life, belonged on a gallery wall.

One of these special photos was labeled “1964 M” She was twenty-four and wearing a white dress, stood in front of a plaster wall painted evergreen. She was wearing a halo. Either it was Halloween or Noel.

In the other photo, everything had an orange tint and she was getting a haircut from a much older man with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. The collar on his flannel shirt popped. She had on a tight sweater, navy blue, with gold zigzags.

“That’s me,” Miriam said over my shoulder. I turned and introduced myself. Said ‘Happy Birthday’ again. She reached for my hand. I gave her a shake against my better judgement and nearly cried. She’d come all the way from the other side of America—Utah—to be exact, as if on a farewell tour.

“These two photos are really good.”

She didn’t get me. “A swell camera.”

“Who is the man?”

“My father, Little Nico. He used to hide money all over the house. When he died, my brother Nico—Big Nico—got the house. When he finally sold, well you know, they tore down that house.”

“No I didn’t know.” I was upset to hear this but not surprised. I’d loved that house.

“They tear down everything. They’ve got to keep the bulldozers busy. But with all that junk Nico had put in there, I can understand. We had to clean it out in a hurry just so they could level it.”

“That was some good junk though.”

“Sure it was. We’d be giving away an old dresser and hoping it didn’t have money hidden in it.”

“I lived in that house for a month.”

“When was this?”

“Ten years ago.”

“I loved that house. You lived there? I’d say a hundred people lived there. Open door policy. At one point the mailman lived there.”

“I’m Giada’s husband,” I said. I pointed to one of the photos of the house, trashed to the max. “Is that 2012?”

“Maybe I met you. You were thinner?”

“For sure.”

“What a lightning rod for garbage. And we’d have to worry there is money hidden in everything. That’s how our dad was. There were all these pill bottles. The other day I opened a bottle of nickels.”

“When did he die?”

“1992. No. 1993.”

I glanced down at Miriam’s feet. She had on neon running shoes under, maybe, her fanciest dress.

“1994. June the ninth. Dad played the lottery every day. When he died we filled up the coffin with empty cigarette packs and losing lottery tickets. Everyone saw that and smiled. Buried him with two Marlboros, a red, and a lite, one in each corner of his mouth.”

I gave Giada a wave she didn’t see.

The servers in their purple vests and purple shoes, handsome parts in slicked hair, wheeled out dessert. The sun was at the perfect angle to blind us all.

Some hero shut the curtain. The room dimmed into comfortable shadow. There wasn’t a single light on. I leaned in closer to the poster board, looking again at those two, specifically striking photos. I realized all my pain had gone poof.

I pointed to the angel and the haircut.

“Who snapped these?”

“Oh, that would have had to be our older brother. Luca.” She pointed out the man my wife wanted me to strangle. The man Giada was still talking to, still being civil to.

“He carried that Nikon everywhere.”

“I really love those two photos of you,” I said.

Miriam hugged me and gave my neck a little peck.

I went back to my table and sat down with espresso and tiramisu. Giada had floated over to her mother and father and now, to the baby’s delight, her father sang a novelty folk song urging Christopher Columbus to turn the boat around.

The Marine across from me consumed candy crush. His red-headed daughter poked him in the gut, spoke more about a carnival soon happening on the cliffs. The seat where the mother had been was vacant.

I looked back at Luca sat all alone. I thought again about his photos. He looked so lonely. Where was his camera now? I didn’t want to kill him anymore.

If his sister was 80 and he was the older brother, that would have made him at least 82. I’d met him fifteen years earlier. At a different reunion barbecue.

He was always saying evil things at barbecues. At one legendary bicentennial barbecue, he may have told Giada’s mother she needed plastic surgery.

The barbecue I’d been to, he said something nasty to Giada even, but what?

Oh I couldn’t recall even that.

Can you be irrationally mad at something not worth remembering? Let’s see. I picked up my plate and cup and sat down at the table across from Luca.

“Hello,” he said.

“Luca, you don’t know me.”

He was barely looking. “I know all about you.”

“I just wanted to tell you—”

“Save your breath. I used to believe in radical honesty at your age. It’s a waste.”

He ate some of his cake. I ate some of mine.

“What should I apologize for?” he asked.

I looked across the restaurant, Giada was talking to a woman in a skyblue gown. The missing mother?

“You’re right, forget it. I heard you took those two photos that I like over there. So I forgive you, as an artist.”

He smiled. “Good. You’ve seen the light. And so have I. Isn’t that photo of Miriam and my father so funny? Who ever saw a father cut his daughter’s hair? But that’s the kind of man he was. He would take apart the TV set just to see how it worked and he would put it back together. No formal training. No education. But he’d wear a tie, hovering over the open hood of a car, changing spark plugs, pulling on wires. He’d guess and he’d be right. Me, and you, we’d be hopeless.”

“Your father had innate talent.”

“When the priest would drop by he would be lying on the couch reading the paper and Miriam would let him in the house but Dad wouldn’t even get up. He didn’t make a big deal of ceremony and he thought a lot of people were terrible kissasses. Anyway, I was a nerd. I had a camera. That priest gave it to me. I took lots of photos.”

The restaurant was louder now. The drunks had had their rocket fuel. Voices swelled. Faces grew younger. And there was Miriam sat under her throne of balloons, shoulder-to-shoulder with Nico. He was red-faced and blockheaded, and whispering something that doubled Miriam over in laughter. I guessed, at this pace, she’d live another eighty years.

One thing I remembered about Nico was that he put newspaper down and let his three-year-old-totally-healthy dog, shit in his house. Never once did I see or hear him yell at that dog. Though there was a doggie door, the dog preferred to shit in the house. And in the mornings before work, I’d step out of that dog-shit-reeking house, to my car and see Nico had hundreds of pounds of bulk garbage tied with twine to the roof of his Ford Taurus, which he’d gathered in the dark. So I’d untie it all and put it there amongst all his other nightly winnings. Every year he used to have a yard sale in the summer and sell the town back its trash.

But as you already know, the house is gone, and so is the dog, not to mention, nearly everything else.

I heard a balloon pop under the table.

I bent down in terrible agony.

The baby was crying but nobody else noticed. He’d curled up in a little ball, his mouth full of silver mylar.

I reached out my good arm but the baby scurried away. Now was sucking his thumb amid all this clatter and chatter. He pulled his thumb out and the string of the popped balloon was wrapped around his thumb.

The baby drooled loose the rest of the choking hazard and smiled.

“Whose kid is this under the table?”

Up above, Luca was summarizing an important commencement speech he’d heard given every Spring for the entirety of his adult life.

I called for help again.

Nobody seemed to hear.

I held out my plate. The baby crawled over and began to scoop handfuls of cake into his brand new mouth.

Bud Smith is the author of the novel, Teenager, among others. He lives in Jersey City.

Tags after passaic, bud smith, farewell transmission, fiction, Issue 4