Tag: indie lit

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Across the Wire Vol. 7

Holy Oral History

By Brooks Egerton

Last time I heard from God, he started reminiscing about the kinks of the early Franciscans. Hang tight, buddy, I said, hang tight, let me grab my recorder. By the time I got back to the phone with it, he was chuckling about a couple of characters named Hansel and Gertrud. Here’s the transcript of his monologue:

This was in January of 1299, or maybe 1300, in Vienna. A medieval backwater then. He was a monk — cute boy, wise beyond his years, but hormonally still very much a teenager. She lived near his church with other beguines — a supposedly celibate community of women, bundled up in ridiculous habits like nuns, but with no permanent vows, no obedience to anyone up the Catholic food chain. A pope soon tried to squash them, of course. She was in her mid-fifties. Gaunt and feisty. Old enough to be his grandmother.

Hansel wasn’t a priest yet, so he couldn’t hear confessions. Not that Gertrud was seeking to confess. What burdened her mind were visions, not sins. The older monks had grown awfully weary of her. Some questioned her sanity, especially when she reported seeing licentious clerics shrieking in a pit of brimstone. That sort of thing. Hansel, however, was intrigued. And an excellent listener. We should all be so fortunate as to know a Hansel.

Now, Gertrud didn’t just want a sympathetic ear. She wanted to leave a record of her sojourn upon the earth. But she couldn’t write. Most people couldn’t, women especially. So he became her scribe. They’d made significant progress toward completing a manuscript when her nerve seemed to fail. Then she sent word that she was ready to try again, which led to this scene:

Hansel is reaching into the embers of a fireplace, clutching a thick beeswax candle like his most beloved body part. He lights the wick, impales that meager cure for darkness on a pricket, puts it on the dank room’s one table. Now he adjusts his mud-brown robe and sinks to his knees. Dear Lord, he tells me, gazing at the crucifix on the wall as if it were more than an object, I know I am unworthy even to speak your name, but nonetheless I beg you, please, extend your mercy to the virgin Gertrud, give her strength to endure her weakness, weakness to temper her strength. And dear Lord, guide my hand today so that what I set down will be pleasing to you, and true to what the sister at last may tell me of your son. Amen. 

He’s crossing himself when there comes a rapping on the door. Who is it? he asks, although he knows. Without answering she glides in. And they carry on like this:

O Sister.

O Brother.

Thank you for returning.

Thank the Lord for giving me another hour of life.

My God and my all, Hansel says. He lays a log on the fire, motions to a chair, takes the one opposite. Their dark eyes meet. He opens an enormous book with his left hand, and with his right dips a goose feather into an inkwell. Silently she begins to weep. He offers no consolation, as he did at their last meeting. That had driven her away. Now he just starts writing about the tears.

Fear not! Gertrud almost shouts, raising her bony hands from beneath the table, squeezing them together and then wiping her cheeks. Fear not! That is what the Lord our God told me.

He spoke to you? the monk asks, looking up wide-eyed, even as his right hand races on across the page.

Yesterday, as I prayed. But he did not speak in words.

Is there some other way?

In love, she says, flashing a smile of pity that the kid doesn’t see. She waits for more questions, feeling freer to answer than to offer. He also waits, quill still moving. He already understands the power of silence, of discomfort.

A great rushing love, Gertrud says, the words fast and fierce and whispery. Rushing through every part of my body. Flooding me with heat and light, making me shudder. 

[Not transcribed here are a tasteless crack I made about the Big O, and God’s rather stern request not to be interrupted again.]

It is this love that frees me to speak to you, the sister says.

Again she halts, again he waits.

No, it doesn’t free me, she says. It compels me.

And Hansel asks, Have you experienced this rushing before?

No, she says, then takes a vast breath before continuing. But ever since I was a young girl, a lowly peasant’s daughter in a world of reeking muck, I have cried joyously and inconsolably as the feast of the circumcision approaches. I cannot eat, I cannot sleep. All these years. It never changes.

Another burst of weeping and wiping ensues. 

I’ve always pictured the blood, she says upon resuming, the blood our blessed savior spilled for us not during the Passion but on his eighth day outside the blessed womb. The blood, the blade, the screaming baby. A scarlet prophecy. Last week, though, when I went to mass on the feast day — here she closes her eyes and opens her mouth wide, as if to reenact the ritual. Then her hands cover her face.

Hansel catches up on his writing, taking his time. Finishes, fidgets, eventually feels unable to outwait her again. What happened, Sister? 

Gertrud drops her hands back to her lap and says, As I knelt before the priest and he brought the host toward my face, my mind’s eye beheld nothing but Christ’s severed flesh. Washed clean now. Anointed with oil. I closed my mouth and walked away, without receiving the bread. Questions fell upon me like hailstones. What did Mary do with that tiny hood? Did it ascend alone to wait for her son, or did it go with him thirty-three years later? Could it properly join with the fully grown member? Will our Jesus be whole when he returns?

Did any answers come to you? 

Not in words. Nor in thoughts.

In love, then?

This is what I was most afraid to tell you. 

Fear not, Sister!

Fear not, Brother! The answer that came to me, as soon as I reached my room, was the holy foreskin itself.

You think you saw the true relic? Not just the image?

I felt it. Here, she says, touching her pale lips.

Oh my.

[another tasteless crack from me, another stern request from God]

And I knew I had to taste it. So sweet! Sweetness that could turn honey bitter with envy. Sweetness that could tame a forest full of wolves.

Now she leans her head back and howls. Isn’t the human imagination glorious? One of my greatest creations? Ah, but I digress. Hansel steals a glance at Gertrud, goes right on writing. His hand begins to tremble a touch.

Then I swallowed it, she says.

O my my my.

But soon it came back into my mouth, as sweet as before.

[another tasteless crack, another stern request]

O heavenly angels, he says, and right then a big log collapses in the fireplace. Sparks shower the hearth. Both of them look over, diverted only briefly.

So I swallowed again, she says. 

He stifles another exclamation, struggles just to keep his shaky right hand moving. His left hand, which has been on the table, slips below. For hopeless suppression purposes of its own.  Poor boy.

It went on and on like that, she says, growing moist herself — but accepting it, even enjoying it. On and on and on, she says.

How many times, do you think?

A hundred? she replies. A thousand? A hundred thousand?

Holy Virgin. Holy Virgin.

And gradually it grew. So it could join properly, I feel sure.

[tasteless crack, stern request]

Yet you still could swallow?

With no trouble. When I tried to touch it, alas, I could not. It always moved down my throat, out of reach.

O Sister, where is it now?

O Brother, I do not know. But by the following morning, it had left me. I fell into the deepest emptiness I’ve ever known. I lay on the floor for days, denied myself the bed. Finally I rose and reached for my cherished tool.

Here she does exactly that: pulls a leather sheath from a hidden pocket, slides out a knife. Caresses the edge. Slides it across the palm of her other hand, drawing several drops of blood. The monk stops writing, transfixed. If I were anyone other than God, I might well have held my breath.

I began to clean my teeth with this, Gertrud says, beholding the implement. I scraped out all manner of dead insects — flies, locusts, moths — and an angel’s voice said, Just as they sicken you, so your sadness sickens the savior.

  Yes! Hansel cries, grateful for the erection-melting effect of her story’s twist. Yes!

That revelation is what inspired my last visit to you, she says, when I couldn’t quite find my voice. So yesterday I prayed some more, prayed for the foreskin’s return, and lo, there it was, for one perfect moment, on my tongue. And with it came a message, Brother: that the Lord will grant you special blessings for your service to me, as well as the power to vanquish the darkest temptations. 

Amen, they say in unison. He puts down the quill. She puts down the knife. They join hands, her blood smearing his skin.

Jesus H. Christ, I said. And right then my recorder ran out of juice. Gotta go buy some batteries now, I told the big guy. Call me back whenever. He let out another of his divine chuckles and said something like, Let’s talk about the Jesuits next time, OK?

Brooks Egerton is the organizer of Sewanee Spoken Word.

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Across the Wire Vol. 7

Blue Shines Through

By Sophia Krich-Brinton

I noticed it the night my first child was born. I was nursing her, in awe of her tiny hands, my stomach rumbling but no food in reach, when I realized I could see the blue hospital blanket right through my fingers. 

Turning my hand forward and back I could see bones, muscles, tendons, and beyond, the blue patterned blanket. 

It wasn’t clear like glass. More like an early morning mist, so thick you can only see rooftops, the hint of a window, but you know there’s a building there.

It got worse as my child grew. By the time she was six months old, both my hands were transparent. On her first birthday, my arms were completely see-through. I could still hold her, which was the oddest thing. I kept expecting her to fall through my embrace, but she didn’t. She gripped my arms with her tiny hands, chewing and sucking on my invisible fingers as if nothing was wrong. 

And maybe nothing was. Nobody else seemed to notice. When I held up my arms for my partner, he shrugged and said, “Everyone gets that way with the first kid.” No panic. Just a smile as he turned back to his computer. “Give it a few more months and you’ll feel better. Everyone says this part’s the hardest.” 

Maybe they did. I didn’t know a lot of people with kids. 

We had another soon after that. We’d always wanted two, as close in age as possible, and though I had second thoughts when the time came to push, it was too late to back out. Soon we had a son, a tiny, mewling creature as different from our first as he could be. She’d been quiet, an easy sleeper, but he came into this world screaming as if he knew his mother’s see-through arms weren’t right and he wanted everyone else to know it too.

Within a day, it spread to my waist, then into my chest. I felt constantly chilled, as if the foggy autumn air had pierced my skin and settled in my bones. 

When my jaw went clear, I woke my partner up. He was asleep in the living room now, otherwise the kids kept him up. We’d agreed that since I was staying home and didn’t need to be alert, I could deal with them at night.

And during the day, too, apparently, since he left before breakfast and came home after they were asleep.

He woke when I shook him, sitting up with a frown. “Who’s there?”

“It’s me. I’m really worried.” I held my arms out. “It’s way worse. All the way to my chin.” 

“Hello?” He looked around, his eyes moving through me. Then he lay back down and rolled over, pulling the blankets up.

I glanced at the mirror over the couch. Fear shivered through me. 

I was completely gone.

I rushed back into the bedroom and over to my son’s crib. He looked up at me with those huge eyes, not blinking. 

“Can you hear me?” I whispered. 

He cheeped.

Relief barreled through me so hard I had to sit down on my bed to catch my breath. “I don’t know what’s happening to me. I don’t know how to make it stop.”

My daughter sat up in her crib. “Mama sad?”

“Love, can you hear me too?”

“Hear Mama,” she said, nodding.

My son cheeped again. He raised a tiny arm, reaching for me. I bent down to kiss him and he grabbed my invisible chin and squeezed. 

In the morning, my partner woke up, made coffee, and packed his bag for work. He kissed each kid and left the apartment without a word. He didn’t feed them, or call a sitter.

I chased him down the stairs, shouting his name. He brushed his hand across his face as if he’d walked into a spider web, but didn’t seem to feel me grabbing his arm or beating on his back.

Life wasn’t much different after he stopped seeing me. 

He left for work early, came back late. I spent my days with the kids, as always. We couldn’t go out in public, but I took them into the small green space out back and we sat in the sun together. The heat felt amazing on my invisible body. I took my shirt off and lay back. Why not?

I watched the kids enjoy the bright, quiet day, and smiled. “I love you both so much.” 

They looked up at me with their large eyes, so like my own, almost as if they could see me.

Sophia Krich-Brinton (she/they) lives in Colorado with her partner, kids, and cats. They write weird stories at dawn when the world sleeps and the cats try to sit on their keyboard. Her work has appeared or is upcoming in HAD, The Argyle, Moss Puppy Mag, and more. When not writing, she boxes, plays the banjo, and goes backpacking. Find them at sophiakbrinton.com or on Twitter/Instagram at @sophiakb_writes

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Across the Wire Vol. 7

The Islands

by Walker Rutter-Bowman

At parties we stood around the newest statue. The host described intent, the extraction of stone, the weather of genesis. This time it was Charles. His pants were new and stiff. When he lost his train of thought, he defaulted to saying, “Galala marble.” Those were important words, and he clung to them. The statue was almost beautiful. We tried not to look at its bent genital, its implausible balls. Or we tried to look closer. When Charles lost the train again, he spoke, with feeling, of his adopted son’s agoraphobia. It had been diagnosed by a real doctor via a videoconferencing portal. The fear came to light as a nightmare: the boy pinned against a wall as people backed up, the backs of their heads growing as large as balloons, black hairs coming into focus. The reason the boy gave for not coming downstairs was the poor health of his lizard. The vet sipped champagne and said, “The lizard is fine.” He shook his head sadly. “The lizard has never been finer.”

These people wore watches and rings. Their shirts looked like normal shirts but more assured. To them and their methods, wealth meant island. My money was new, and so were these friends. I had never been an island man. I was from an interior state shaped like a muffin. Islands have sun and sand. They crawl with things that kill. They have grooves and protrusions, inlets and sides. They sneer.

One night, while everyone was discussing island life, some people pulled out their new passports to the islands they owned. These were official-looking documents with pictures and dates. While others looked and laughed at the photos, I shook my glass with a landlocked vigor, making the ice bang together. 

Why no island? they asked me. They knew my net worth. They had read the profile of me in the lifestyle magazine. You can still find the profile online. The writer called me a transit magnate, and it’s true I’m in bridges. That’s how I made my money. Why no island? they asked. They doubted my holdings. They lacked a fiscal literacy when it came to the great bridge. But I had funds. I’d adopted a daughter despite the towering cost. I could afford an estranged wife who sometimes sent me cards, and from the handwriting, by the angle of the stamp, I could tell she came by her loathing honestly, like a farmer. Adopting a daughter had to do with a single office where you went to fill out forms. And then the fenced-in area where you met your daughter. But having a daughter won’t protect you from island pressure. She’ll love it, they said. In good weather your adopted daughter will sail around the coast, they said. As the sun sets, you’ll sit on the terrace and watch her boat go by, and she’ll look up at you and wave, and the wave will mean something to both of you. She’ll sail all around and make you a worthless map, and you’ll attach it to the refrigerator with a magnet, and every time you go in for ice cubes, you’ll tap the map with your finger, and you’ll think, Here I am.

Sometimes this is your house, your new statue, your adopted daughter. Sometimes, despite what you’ve been told, Shauna is not agoraphobic, she just likes to read. Sometimes a lizard is not the perfect pet, and it ends up being you who feeds it and rubs its crested head. I liked the lizard but not my new statue, which had a small and sneaky face. He looks like you, the people said, and they mimed kissing it. That was their notion of a joke. I described to the guests how the artist was eager to disprove traditional metrics of abundance. The statue was small and ugly because the artist aimed to desexualize, or was it sexualize?, the height of men. Smoochie smoochie, the guests responded. I left doors open so they could poke around, find proof of my money, like pictures of Shauna in various stages of the latest orthodonture. They studied the photos to see if we had skipped steps. We had. But we had also doctored photos to hide the fact that we’d prioritized certain teeth over others. Half-satisfied, they put down the pictures and studied my clocks. I turned away to signal I didn’t care if they pocketed some of my clocks.

It’s not nothing, they said, roughly handling my timepieces, tossing them back and forth like baseballs. Meaning: a clock is not an island. Two clocks is not an island. Three? 

I knew it wasn’t. A clock is much more than nothing, but even the rarest clock in the world is no island. And if, one day, there’s an island that’s also a great big clock, it won’t come cheap. I was rich but I wasn’t clock-island rich.

But I could buy the average island if I wanted one, I said. But do I want one?

Their embarrassment rose up.

They looked deep into the faces of my very own clocks to hide how stupid they thought it was, a man holding himself apart from island desire. Money can buy a lot, but it can’t buy you the sense to keep things to yourself. It can buy you a clock that looks like a coconut with a hinge hidden by soft, brown fibers. It can even buy you the service of a man who stands in front of you to block your words with his broad body, a man named Jim who was a respected member of the team. For years my words struck him and fell to the ground, and for this he was, in my view, well compensated. But he couldn’t always be there. Jim needed a day off from time to time. Jim had a family.

So I bought the island. I had another party. I bought another sculpture. I was in the red. The bridge business was sputtering. Shauna wouldn’t come down because her book was getting good. The vet came in the door and said he heard the lizard was ill. I said the lizard was fine, and he said, That’s a relief, and helped himself to a flute of champagne and some canapes. He shook hands with the members of the group. His daughter’s teeth were straight but not as white as Shauna’s. His daughter had a lizard, but she would never have a lizard and an island, a lizard on an island. I helped him help himself to another flute or two.

I walked the guests around the statue and pointed to the contours. You see them there, the contours? They looked, but they took them for granted.

But of course, this location is temporary, I yawned. I could see Jim scrambling towards me. Soon we’ll move the statue to the island.

You bought an island?

I didn’t mention it?

Which one? they asked. Their maps were open.

That one.

That’s the one Kurt wanted. 

They were impressed. I knew because they went quiet and still, like certain birds in the presence of larger birds. While Jim was in the cellar getting more champagne, I took advantage of his absence to quote a poet who loved to fish.

But now they wondered what was left of my holdings. Any liquid? Was I hurting? Island-rich is one thing. Island-poor is another. They said I had the stink of it on me, the smell of a man over-leveraged by his land. So I bought one more. Jim said I was only doing it to shut them up. He was grilling for us because I’d never mastered the art. From time to time he’d complain that grilling was not really his job. I said maybe he should shut up and focus on the burgers. But he burned them anyway. His mind was elsewhere. He had been playing piano at Petit Chapeau Rouge for ten nights in a row, and it was starting to take its toll. The subject was sensitive. I’d told him he could do both until one of the jobs suffered, and now they both suffered. He wasn’t blocking comments at a satisfying rate, or grilling with the precision of former days, and word from Petit Chapeau Rouge was his playing was plodding and lacked dynamism. He was overworked. Jazz piano was teaching him vindictiveness, and he was leaving me unprotected. This burger is burned, I said. It’s flame-broiled, he said, hanging his head.

If I bought the second island close to the first one, they would criticize me for making decisions based on convenience. Accuse me of intending to build bridges between the two islands. Say, Oh, he made his fortune from building little bridges, now watch him try to connect his islands with two or three little bridges. I fooled them all by buying a second island quite far from the first. No bridge in the world could connect them, and I should know. Part of working in bridges is knowing when you’re ahead and when you’re not, and another part of working in bridges is proving your point.

Jim, who was helping me with motive, said it’s all right to prove your point. He was proving one himself with his sad piano playing and his burned burgers. Now I’m in a position where I can comfortably say upon reflection that the second island didn’t measure up to the first. It was covered in ants—one kind of ant, special for its aggression and orange thorax. A man lived on the island, a scientist, who had stretched his research grant longer than anyone thought possible. He called them Hofmann ants. His name was Hofmann. Either it was a tremendous coincidence, or he had named them after himself. He was covered in bites, and when you thought of all the pieces of Hofmann the ants had bitten off, the name began to make sense. He lived in a brown, single-flap tent. His papers declared he was allowed to study the ants for two more years, but I think he had changed the dates. He held his papers up as if someone might read them. He clutched the documentation like someone might take it away. When he talked about the ants, Hofmann could really get going. His face would grow red, his newer bites would begin to glow. The bites looked like little islands themselves, volcanic chains of red craters surrounded by ashen crusts. He was very skinny. Jim and I wondered what he ate. There were no fruit trees. Very few fish in the surrounding waters. But there were ants. And his tongue, when it showed itself, was short, thick, and coated in an orange gel. Maybe it was love, maybe it was revenge, maybe it was as simple as a dependable source of protein.

Two islands impressed my new friends. They had to rethink the sources of my wealth. Little bridges, sure, but maybe little tolls, too? That’s right, that’s right, many streams. Bridges was big. The people who had once asked, Is bridges really a living, is bridges really wealth?—they were now rethinking what they knew about the revenue of the load-bearing causeway. Plus I had invented a dongle that changed people’s lives, turning one port into another. Because a dongle is a bridge, too. A dongle is a bridge, too.

I hated playing favorites, but one island had ants and the other didn’t. One island had an unwashed and righteous scientist and the other didn’t. I built an airfield and a road going all the way around the antless island. Jim said we could call it Island I—that’s the kind of creative thinker he was. I built a house on the cliff overlooking the bay where the sun set, splashing down into the ocean in a fine display of leaking reds and oranges, like it was the first or last day on earth. I pointed to the bay to show Shauna where she could sail her boat, but she wasn’t there, she was upstairs, reading her book and picking her blisters. But nothing could kill the mood. Jim popped a bottle, and our thoughts turned to God, the color and loneliness at the start of all things. 

We must have brought an ant or two over on the plane. Shauna showed up at breakfast covered in bites. Jim set out traps that might’ve worked on your ordinary ant. Instead, they began to chew on some foundational elements of the new house.

I was hurting a bit financially. People knew I was island-rich, and, like the Hofmann ant, sensed opportunity. The vet began to call and ask when was the best time to visit. He asked, How’s the lizard? and, Are you liquid? Then Jim realized he might be undervalued. He must have got to talking to the other men and women who stood in front of their employers, operating their grills, blocking their words. I think there’s a group. Maybe his long nights of stale smoke at Petit Chapeau Rouge gave him a taste of independence. He brought me some charts showing how much money he had saved me by blocking certain words. He handed me a pamphlet about the dangers of eating uncooked meats. It was hard to believe they were accurate, but they were compelling and certainly colorful. Under each bright bar was one of the stupid things I had tried to say, or a type of raw meat, and then the bar extended upward to a point of potential fiscal damage. And then the last bar, the total, extended off the page and he had to fold out some sections of the graph to show how far it went, and like a tongue of orange flame the bar unrolled and kept going: that bar was the financial damage I would’ve incurred from eating uncooked meat and then speaking about it in an honest but fiscally ruinous manner. Jim knows better than the average man that the meat lobby is a powerful force, and bridges must work with meat to reach the state of synergy we all crave in business and the American meal.

The bars had words on them. These words had hit Jim’s chest and fallen to the ground. We were safe, thanks to Jim. But now the words had returned, printed on a color-coded graph Jim used to shake me down. The words had come back, after all. I signed some papers, and Jim was rich. He had always been good to me, but now? With his bad attitude? What if all those stupid things I said didn’t actually hit Jim and clatter to the ground, but became embedded in his skull, his soul? I’m not saying he became dumber, in body, mind, or spirit. But uglier? I’m saying he remembered the words I thought we’d agreed to forget.

“Let’s say, for the sake of conversation, some of the ants made it off Island II and onto Island I. What would you do?” I cut Hofmann’s steak for him but encouraged him to hold the fork. We were broadening and deepening his diet via imported goods.

“I would worry about the survival of the habitat, as the Hofmann ant is one of the most destructive organisms in the world.”

I knew my builders would agree. My new house was sliding down the cliff before it could even be finished. I watched the workers move about, welts covering their bodies, and I thought, Is it too late to be someone else?

When asked about indigenous self-determination, I said I was all for it, on paper. A truly rich man? the advocates said, with two islands such as yours? One of which has had people living on it for centuries? Wouldn’t the truly rich man concede that the land was more theirs than his? and that they should be allowed to govern it as they see fit? Not only do you not have the right to own the island? but you don’t really have the right to be there at all? The fake passport you wave about raises a notion of nationhood? that is not yours to raise or really even listen in on? Before responding I locked eyes with Jim, who was not going to stop me, though it would pain him to see me step forward and shoot off my mouth, which is what I did, and I quoted a poet with a passion for fishing but also for fascism, and I regretted saying those words then and then regretted them even more once I saw them punctuated in the last surviving publications of print.

Sometimes, island-rich means being able to give up Island I. Sometimes, island-rich is a feeling you once had, not a life you get to live. At least that’s how Jim put it. I saw the logic, but I didn’t like it. I agreed to meet with the indigenous, and I can’t say I liked them either. I didn’t dislike them because they were indigenous. I disliked them because they disliked me. And because they killed Jim. There was a misunderstanding with Jim and the manner in which he opened his arms in a gesture of welcome. I thought it was a nice gesture, but they shot him with a very long arrow. Jim’s wife and son said after all the shielding Jim had done for me through the years, that perhaps I, for once, could have shielded, etc. They said Jim’s threats of further litigation led to my hesitance to step in front of that arrow, but it had very little to do with that. It had much more to do with the arrow, and the fear that filled my heart when I saw it flying through the sky. Even if Jim had survived the puncture, the arrow was poisoned, and the fever brought out a burst of language I had never heard from the man who took great care with his words. With some gasping and an agitated frothing at the lips, Jim died. The last thing he said was, “Is it blue? Is the body really blue?” No one knows what he meant. But from time to time, I find it useful to ask myself the same thing.

After Jim, I stopped responding to others. I went a bit mute. If I had to say anything, I wrote it on a scrap of paper and kept it in my pocket until I could gather more information on what kind of thing it was. It slowed me down. Sometimes I dropped a scrap of paper, a thought, and it blew away, and after a few moments I didn’t miss it. 

Shauna says it’s interesting that islands are places of exile and objects of desire. Shauna says it’s interesting what wealth does to men of a certain susceptibility. Shauna says it’s interesting how expensive her school is, though not even she knows the real figure. She wants to want to help others, but she wants other things too.

We listen to old recordings of Jim from Petit Chapeau Rouge. I can detect things I said to him that influenced his playing, as though the words found their way into his fingers. The playing is plodding, it lacks dynamism—and that’s exactly how I want it. Sometimes the last thing you want is dynamism. His grave is on the island. The island has a bird with a very recognizable call. Somehow Hofmann never noticed it. The bird drowns out what I’m about to say. I want Jim to be that bird. Jim didn’t believe in bridges, and neither do birds. Shauna puts flowers on his grave, and I sprinkle it with scraps of paper. She questions if the scraps of paper are a good way to honor Jim. I believe he would’ve valued it for its human comedy: the scraps of paper carried away by the wind, the way I chase after them and trip over my own two feet, the way Shauna sighs, the way they blow into the water and drift into the distance, the way I wade into the shallows without even rolling my pantlegs. The papers soak up the sea, the ink bleeds into the water. Hofmann makes an orange stew. I open my mouth to speak, but the Jim of a bird screams again. A bird is a bridge, but to what? To more birds?

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

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Across the Wire Vol. 7

two poems

by Conor Hultman

#000000

logical heart

precious hoped gentle wind

me finger I my

#029CBC

parallel so not

return grace silly trunk

livid sang ran

Conor Hultman lives in New York, New York.

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Across the Wire Vol. 7

Nights That Don’t End

by Huina Zheng

At eleven p.m., the baby is still awake, squirming in her mother’s arms. The mother rocks her, pats her back, hums lullabies, but she refuses to sleep. Her eyelids droop, yet she keeps fussing. The father has long since gone to bed, his snores rising and falling. At one-thirty a.m., the baby cries again. She wants her mother, not her father. The mother reaches for the bedside lamp. The father rolls over, muttering in his sleep. The mother carries the baby to the living room. Mixes formula, tests the temperature, feeds her. Still she won’t sleep. She wants to play. She wants books. The mother leans back on the sofa, the baby curled against her chest. Page by page, line by line, she reads. The little bear wet the bed. The little bear is hungry. The little bear has a fever. Two a.m., still reading. Two-thirty, they play peekaboo. The mother hides her face behind the book, then reveals it. The baby giggles. By three-thirty, the baby finally yawns. The mother paces, murmuring Tang poems, singing nursery rhymes, patting her back. Four a.m., at last she sleeps. The mother lays her in the crib. The father has sprawled into the middle of the bed; she nudges him back to his side. The mother lies down. Exhausted, she cannot fall asleep. Seven a.m., the alarm goes off. The mother wakes groggy. The father gets up, too. At seven-thirty, the mother kisses the baby’s forehead and closes the door. Grandma is already awake. The mother leaves, squeezing onto the subway before eight. The car is packed, shoulder to shoulder. She could fall asleep standing, but her heart stays home, with the baby still sleeping. The father, refreshed, boards another train.

Huina Zheng either writes as an admission coach at work or writes for fun after work.

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Across the Wire Vol. 7

DEAF

by John Grey

staggering down 

the middle of Main Street

red-eyed

dress torn

one arm tattooed

the other bleeding

not holy 

not clean  

just another ghost  

from the dead side of town

in the courthouse square  

screaming out a name

and what he did to her

no stars out

moon hiding 

behind a cloud

and the whole damn town  

pretending not to hear

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Shift, River And South and Flights. Latest books, “Bittersweet”, “Subject Matters” and “Between Two Fires” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Rush, Writer’s Block and Trampoline.

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Across the Wire Vol. 7

This Is Not The Story Of The Hurricane

by Casey Jo Graham Welmers

I think it starts with Dylan, and it will probably end with Dylan. I have to turn back the clock a bit here, go back to when God and me were born. I have to let the song titles do most of the talking, because copyright laws around lyrics get murky. I can’t repeat quotations so you’ll just have to draw conclusions on the page. The words are still Dylan. Mine are still me. There’ve been other musicians along the way: a Rhodes scholar and a mailman and a kid from Asbury park. A Jamaican messiah, some shoegaze Stars and a Canadian brunette that once moonlit as God. A few kids from Seattle that reinvented the wheel and a skeleton crew from Haight-Asbury that claim this is all a dream we dreamed, but I’m in this dream, and Dylan is central to it, so here we are. This is my life according to Bob.

I have it on good cosmic authority that when my mom’s ’75 AMC Gremlin is smashed from behind “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue” is on the radio. She careens across the slick of Michigan’s winter roads like a hockey puck, her water breaking across the chilly driver’s seat. It is all over for me in that moment— my life in utero, anyways. I’m born blue, umbilical cord around my neck, face up. A stargazer. Yonder stands your infant with her strangled tongue. The doctor frees the umbilical cord without difficulty and I pull air, fill my tiny lungs, shriek to confirm my existence. I’m tiny and pink and premature, jolted into the world courtesy of ice and snow and the poor maintenance of rural roads.

*

I have a habit of playing with the carpet in our living room. I run my hands one way and then the other, against the grain, with the grain. This is my usual TV watching ritual, but one day in 1992 my hands sit frozen in my lap, the rug fibers momentarily undisturbed. I’m having a music related awakening. Richie Havens is covering “Just Like A Woman” for Bob Dylan’s 30th Anniversary special, performed at Madison Square Garden and aired on local PBS affiliate WCMU. My dad, seated nearby, just keeps saying oh my God, and in my mind Richie Havens is God—his voice is reaching inside me and his guitar is my heart, his fingers conjuring magic on the strings. I watch the entire concert, each and every performer. I don’t break like a little girl, but I do break—a visceral, ecstatic sort of cracking. The next day I ask my dad if we can watch it again. We watch so many times over the years that the VHS tape wears out and unravels from the cassette.

*

My mom has a vascular connective tissue disorder. We don’t know about the disorder until her carotid artery dissects, blood pools into her brain and she suffers a massive hemorrhagic stroke. I’m barely 20 and she’s 42. She tried to raise us Catholic, and because I feel like it’s what she would want, I pray nightly for her soul. I’m out of practice and winging the words, playing it fast and loose with ‘Hail Mary’s’ and ‘Our Fathers.’ I stuff her rosary under my pillow, squeeze my eyes shut, listen to “Knockin’ on Heavens Door” and “Tryin’ To Get To Heaven” back to back. Mama take this tragedy off of me. I have recurring dreams where she is trapped, some kind of ghost; dreams where we buried her alive in the backyard next to the family dog and she unearths herself, walks around the house covered in earthworms and dirt. I’m not clear on the specifics of purgatory, the status of Heaven’s doors. My mom once told me she wasn’t afraid to die, but I’m stuck on the terror of her in some kind of limbo. I don’t imagine she’d be okay having to knock or wait, caught between this life and the next.

*

I’m half asleep when my dad peeks his head into my bedroom, says an airplane just crashed into the World Trade Center. In my groggy state I assume it’s a tiny prop plane, spiraling, the pilot drunk. I picture it like a toy, something with a shiny red propeller. When the second plane hits he starts yelling in the living room. We spend the rest of the day lifeless, glued to Dan Rather. A month later my English professor assigns an essay on a song of our choice. I stay up all night listening to “Masters of War” and “License to Kill” worrying sour Skittles until my tongue is a shredded rainbow horror show. I write about death planes decapitating the Twin Towers and cowards hiding behind desks but mostly I write about this woman on my block who is homeless and mute; who I’m convinced is some kind of incarnation of the woman in the refrain to “License To Kill.”  She just sits there, and if she had a voice I imagine her fixing her cataract eyes on my own, asking me, who will take away their license to kill? She is so clearly collateral damage to man’s destruction that I can’t help but project this ‘blind seer’ trope on her. My classmates stick to our era: “Heart Shaped Box”, “Fade Into You,” “Last Goodbye,” all artists I admire but trace back though some convoluted family tree to Dylan. Kurt to Neil to Bob. Hope to the Paisley Underground to The Byrds to Bob. When I try to connect Jeff Buckley there are no meandering arrows, just a solid line that runs through his father, through Dylan, straight to the edge of God.

*

I’m sliding off the tattoo table, covered in sweat. My ribcage buzzes under the needle and I verge on the point of passing out. I’d heard this about rib tattoos, thought stupidly that my high pain tolerance would protect me. Fool me once. My husband is getting tattooed on the ribcage as well, a chunk of lyrics in old English from “Shelter From The Storm.” We’re 6 days into married life, still riding the high of our wedding. We referenced it in our vows and played it at our reception and now we’re cementing the song on our skin in blue-black ink. I’ve never worn flowers in my hair, but I have worn silver bracelets, paraded around like some kind of bohemian deity. My husband has likely sheltered me from more storms than I’ve sheltered him, it’s honestly hard to say. We promise always to do our best by each other. We give our word. We slather A+D ointment to our sides and steal constant peaks at our oozing, sacred pact.

*

I cover my palms in chalk and my arms in tacky goo, haul atlas stones onto platforms and carry heavy awkward objects specific distances. I ask the promoter of one particular Strongman contest if they can order a t-shirt for me in XS. They laugh and tell me that’s a first, but are happy to oblige. I deadlift a car but skip the squat event, knowing I can’t hit the weight. The following summer I honor my Scottish heritage, don a kilt with the family tartan and walk-on to compete in a farmer’s carry event at the local Highland Games. The audience titters, they think it’s a joke, like get a load of this chick, no way she can lift 100 pounds in each hand, let alone walk anywhere with it. In my head I hear “The Mighty Quinn.” 

 Yeah you ain’t seen nothing. 

I haul up the handles and gain distance and the laughter turns to screams. They’re on their feet, going wild for the scrawny underdog. This is, by far, my favorite party trick. 

*

I don’t want to work on the farm no more. I don’t really work on a farm, I work in a hospital. Patients throw prosthetic limbs at me and reach out to pet my hair after their hands have explored the warmth of their bare and unwashed nether regions. So I hum it, “Maggie’s Farm.” I don’t want to work for the physicians no more, the managers, the administrators in the C-suite that come to the floors in designer suits, looking starchy and crooked next to the staff in their scrubs. One executive wears heels that we can hear clicking down the hall well before she manifests at the nurses station, a spiky haired haint. She brings us pizza, would probably prefer that we sing while we slave. I don’t eat any but I stay at the farm. I transfer to the operating room. No one can hurl fake feet while propofol runs through their veins. 

*

I pull over my car because the sobs racking through my chest are uncontrollable, tears choking my vision. I’m a hazard to myself and others, collapsed on the steering wheel, “Forever Young” blaring through the speakers. My 40 year old sister is dying from cancer and I want her to stay forever growing older, with me, but she won’t be. Everything about her will remain arrested and unchanged, and I’m not sure how I’ll navigate my years ahead without her. I would build a ladder to the stars to reach her. I’d climb the rungs ‘til my hands failed, my fingers bled, a million splinters embedded in my desperate, tortured palms.

*

Is this Dylan? There’s no way, there’s no way this is Dylan! I’m sputtering in the passenger seat next to my dad, dialing up the knob on his car stereo to better hear the song coming through the public radio station. It is Dylan, singing “Death Is Not The End.” My sister has just died, not even a full day earlier. This is a Dylan song we have never heard. This is a Dylan song we will never hear again, at least not at random like this. I am shook at how literal this sign is, how crazy. My sister is spelling it out for us as easily as she can, knowing my dad, in his full blown atheism, will be the hardest to convince. She hits him over the head with the message. She hits hard. I’m agnostic, but there’s no way this isn’t her. I believe in synchronicity. I believe in this.

*

One day I will die, too. I don’t know where or when or how, but it’s inevitable. In between will be all the crushing and brilliant intricacies of life, hundreds of Dylan songs sung by Dylan and hundreds of other performers one hundred different ways. But when I am gone, and the people I leave behind are forced to pull themselves together and throw a banger of a death party, they will play “I Shall Be Released.” I want the Chrissie Hynde cover, the one she played in Madison Square garden at the concert with Richie Havens that pulled me into this whole world. 

I’ll see my light come shining.

It’s hard to say what direction it will come from—could be the east onto the west. I have no way of divining the particulars. I like to think that I’ll know who the light will be, who’s blinding spirit will be arcing toward my own.

Casey Jo Graham Welmers was named after a Grateful Dead song, so maybe this IS all a dream we dreamed. Find her most recent words in Stanchion, BULL and Pool Party, and more at https://caseyjo.carrd.co

X: @ca5eyj0

Categories
Across The Wire Vol. 6

Fast-Forward, Rewind, Fast-Forward, Static

By Caleb Bethea

Bruce Springsteen knows something about quantum physics. The way he sets up a dichotomy in a song, a divide between squalor and salvation. Then he hits the last chord before you ever hear the end of the story—the hero’s foot on the gas of his ‘54 but you have no way of knowing if he’ll really make it out of New Jersey or not. A Schrödinger’s Cat on the Boardwalk. 

One of the best examples is “I’m on Fire.” An earnestly horny track just two and half minutes long. The protagonist wants nothing more than to have this woman, but she’s married, and all we end the song with is that he’s up all night thinking about her. A dull knife cutting a valley through his skull.

I saw the music video the same year three of my grandparents died. I was seven-turning-eight, and we had a VHS of all his music videos that we watched at my great-grandmother’s house, rewinding, fast-forwarding to our favorite performances. Among my siblings, the segment of the tape most crystallized as an example of his cool, late-American demeanor was the video for “I’m on Fire.” It kicks off with a busy garage. Bruce’s legs are dangling out from under a car and he’s cranking something into place when the woman walks her heels over toward his boots to ask if he can fix her perfectly functional car and have it ready by tomorrow. 

He’s covered in grease. He smiles, a little timid, saying he can bring it by her place—but he sees the diamond on her finger and she explains they live way the hell out in the hills. 

He was so goddamn cool. A working-man rockstar in the face of death all around me. A cowboy sort of masculinity that had something to do with worker’s unions and gambling debts. So I kept rewinding, fast-forwarding to that video, believing that on the other side of all this death was me as a man who was so goddamn cool. Adulthood would find me behind the wheel of a ‘54 with an Atlantic City sign in the sky.

But now I’m thirty-two, and instead of grease on my hands, it’s seething under my skin and it slides the anxiety from one side of my body to the other, and someone along the way has knifed a valley between me and masculinity. I’m in there somewhere, just trying to keep a lid on the feral cat under the boardwalk. 

It’s fine. No one really thinks one thing or another about my masculinity, that I can tell, but I’m not real into the idea of being a man. Still, I tell myself I haven’t earned the non-binary title, not enough motor oil sliding through my veins instead of blood. And Jesus fucking Christ, I kinda hate that about myself. My looking less like Bruce and more like the person in the Iron Maiden shirt holding the boom over Bruce’s head behind the scenes for the “I’m on Fire” video shoot. But, I like that about myself, too. Still, I fast-forward, rewind, fast-forward, static.

It’s fine. 

As an adult, I watch YouTube videos about gender identity and then I watch the “I’m on Fire” video, and then I read the comments underneath. Half of them sound like “This song always makes me think of my first girlfriend, who became my wife of forty years, and died last week.” And it only takes three or four of these comments before you realize this song about a little sex is a lot about death. And not in a metaphorical way. There’s a gravity to work like this, bringing us back to the first time we wanted someone as we listen after losing them.

And gender might be something like that, a dense, rumbling fucking mystery, a space—or a lack of space—where we lose the shit that once made us who we were. All of us in our high heels rolling under the heavy machinery of a car with a supernova swirling above us. We don’t know whose car it is. We don’t care. We just want to feel so goddamn cool.

It’s fine. 

My grandfather, who was the last to go the year I turned eight, had hands strong as hell, his own pre-Springsteen brand of cool—of being a man. And I think of all my grandparents and all the pictures they took of me, the woodworking they gifted me, the souvenirs they brought me from their travels across the country, and I wonder what they would think about their grandkid’s gender confusion. I wonder how we view people from the other side of this death trap. If we get it. If it matters. 

I like to think we call our grandchildren non-binary after we die. I like to think it matters.

 

Caleb Bethea is a writer from the Southeast. They’re the author of DISCO MURDER CITY (Maudlin House ‘25). You can also find their work in HAD, X-R-A-Y, hex, Bruiser, ergot, Modern Alchemy, and elsewhere. But, mostly, they’re just a family ghoul with a wife and four goblins by the ocean. You can say hi on most platforms: @caleb_bethea_ 

Categories
Across The Wire Vol. 6

three poems

By Lana Valdez

Reminiscing on a Prosperous City You Once Ran Away to

You drank Bellinis at hardware stores with crystal chandeliers and 

tried not to get him in your photos, 

the gluttony on both your faces, 

marked. You had no predecessors, 

only ancestors laughing at you, 

at your silk scarves from the vintage store,

the cheap wallet, a prop. 

A prosperous city, a pseudonym for your socials, 

but he’ll find you anyway, you should never worry, he says.

By Cristal and candlelight 

you take your steaks medium rare, 

the ones that will be his ruin. 

You used to come here with your mother, now it’s a hideout. 

How did you come to own the shelter, you ask, 

the luxury homeless shelter for young girls? 

In the Middle of an Impossible Summer 

where your gums stick to the roof of your own mouth, 

you have a choice. 

Don’t tell me about poison

when all the lizards are hiding, when no one 

rises in the dark to feed the ocean, 

to clean the heaps of trash from her banks. 

There are rocking chairs in the swamp 

eaten up by the storm and this town was never small. 

A sleek slight of hand, our backyards up to our temples. 

Tell me this is true in your mind, 

tell me you understand, it was never your poison. 

Debating on Whether or Not I Should Buy Groceries 

on the first of the month when I still haven’t rewired my brain from last month, a spectacle of sleepless eyes like saucers, of oyster dinners on the bay and dry nosebleeds. When you’re living out of a suitcase you have nowhere, nowhere to put your vanity- tracing lipstick on perfect skin, searching for the perfect spot to sit with your shadow, the shades odd and drawn. If I was worried about buying eggs, I didn’t show it, busying my mind with my reflection, burying the rampant gray hairs down, down, down the drain, shards of glass and pulp gathering at the bottom.

LANA VALDEZ is a poetess and thought daughter currently living in New Jersey. Her debut collection, “I Rot,” is available via Filthy Loot, and her work also appears in Spectra, Expat, Dream Boy Book Club, and others. 

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Across The Wire Vol. 6

A Fixer Upper

by Craig Rodgers

It costs next to nothing. Who would believe, a little old thing. A cabin, some would call it. A fall down, others. This home cobbled so long ago.

He parks out front and just looks. Takes it in. The driveway is broken rock grown over. A reaching arc through the long yard. The once great paved expanse has succumbed to what may come. He steps out among the sprouts and cracks.

Beyond acres away. Farmland once. Now grains shift and lean after long generations. Remains sit somewhere out there. A chimney rising in the grass. Ancient bricks stacked. 

He calls the realtor, it rings and rings. He texts. Where are you, why aren’t you here. More of this. He tucks the phone away.

A dark waits. These first rooms. The walls are caved in places. Rotted all through. He touches, he knocks. Stepping deeper. He turns a knob and a flashlight pops and the dark falls back. He proceeds. Through rooms. On. Dust and flaking. In places falling. All these years.

He talks to himself. Little things, words. Wow or oh. Sometimes phrases. Oh wow. Touching these old walls. He runs a hand along. 

Stairs go down. A basement wide and deep, dug beyond the walls above. Old pillars brace against the weight of stone and the world. The floor goes off into the dark. Concrete in places, dirt in others. He pulls at his shirt. A deeper heat here. In the walls, in the ground. Nooks are packed with shelves now empty, dust caked along.

He walks with the phone shined around. Pale flash lens. A rug is green with mold. Old chairs sit rotting. He touches items as if to be assured they are there.

A pair of boards are nailed over damage. Planks warped by years of rain dripping. He gives one a tug and it groans and pulls loose. He yanks the other and it snaps and falls at his feet.

A void exists beyond. He squats and leans and he shines the light. A hole is dug into the earth. A black reaching down. The light won’t touch the bottom, its glow snatched up along the way. 

He stands on the basement stairs. He dials and calls and when it doesn’t connect he calls again. He climbs two steps and tries again but nothing changes. He curses aloud.

Down again. Past the stairs and on. He shines the light and he moves close and leans but he does not understand. The hole is still there but the boards are gone.

When he reaches in he feels a step. Some sort of rung. He dangles a foot and he turns and lowers himself in and another step matches the first. A crude ladder going down and down. He climbs hand over hand deep into the sunk shaft, phone light put away now, his being swallowed whole by the hot earth.

He doesn’t think to count. It doesn’t occur to him that it could be so far. When sweat runs into his eyes he wipes away its sting. When his arms begin to shake he tells himself it can’t be far now.

Still he’s shocked when the ground is there. He’d started to think the climb might go on forever. Now he stands flat on dirt floor. He turns and turns. There is a light. A trickle of gleam waving in the far off black. He goes that way, there is no other way to go.

At times he must stoop. Sometimes he touches walls for support. Making his way along. Sweating. More a cave than a hall. The light comes nearer as he moves along but it never seems to grow brighter. He calls out with a hollow want. Hello. Hello. He goes on. 

The way ends as it must. A room is there, carved into the ancient stone. A single candle sits on a table, its flicker of flame stirring in a touch of air faint and puzzling. Beyond this there is a man. Bearded and skeletal. Flesh pulls thin across bones with every movement. With long fingers he bends wood and he snaps a piece and this he tosses into a hearth and then he reaches to break apart another.

A step or maybe something more subtle. Maybe just a feeling. But now he is turning, this frail figure. He is straightening as he turns to face this man. His voice is a whisper.

“Oh there you are,” he says.

_____

The realtor steps through the house. Her suit is fine but reserved. No need for pomp in the sticks. She scrolls the phone and calls again. One foot kicks a bucket away.

It rings. Of course it rings. Forever it does. She tucks the phone away. Now she wanders. Through dark rooms and around. The stairs are there leading down. 

Her flashlight is military grade. It splashes the basement in daylight bright. Mud bugs curl into shadow. With a loafer she sifts among refuse. The leavings of a century of squatters. In one corner a molding rug has been dragged into a bunch. 

She climbs steps back into the light. Phone held high like a trophy. She steps out of the basement and then out of the remains of the structure and she scrolls and calls again, turning and turning still. The phone clicks and the signal connects and now it rings and rings and in time the call goes nowhere. She thinks she might call again but she does not. She puts away the phone and now only stands, eyes falling closed for seconds at a time, feeling the soft presence of air on skin. Not a breeze, something gentler, more slight. She breathes in. Abrasive morning air. She takes it in deep gulps. She smiles, eyes closed. Maybe she laughs, it’s such a morning. 

There is a faint air. Just a hint. In that morning freshness only the barest waft of something other does come. Smoke. She opens her eyes. She turns and turns and far off in a spread of open field there stands a chimney ancient and crumbling, some remnant of a once grand estate centuries lost, and from this relic there now trickles gray plume. She takes a step that way and then another, but she finds herself slowing, halting, and now she is sitting in the grass, now she is but an observer as the furnace is ignited once more. 

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

Categories
Across The Wire Vol. 6

Magnolia from The Heartbreakers

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.

Categories
Across The Wire Vol. 6

Pure Life Journey

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. 

Categories
Across The Wire Vol. 6

Wash Cycle

by dizzy turek

That was the note. The note from Faith to Art that got dropped and Dado got a glance at but didn’t ask anything further that got retrieved by Marina who had a huge crush on me but that’s not of interest and I was really happy at the time nothing happened to it other than hair and dust and a bit of wetness. 

That was the note that I speculated was a love note because everyone said Faith was in love with Art. I speculated that because I didn’t know anything about anything especially not love whatever that meant. When I told my first girlfriend I loved her, it was a total guessing game. I was guessing that whatever is supposed to happen will happen as it should so that meant when we were together all the time and we kissed and did stuff that meant something was happening between us and that something must have a name and love works well enough. She did not agree. Everyone speculated Faith was in love with Art because that’s what you guess is happening when people spend a ton of time with each other and you have nothing better to do then not ask them and speculate. Who knows? People send notes for all other reasons than love.

That was the note that I found forever ago going through jeans that don’t fit me. It made me think about how we live apart because pieces of paper can be the link between people not near each other or email but email is a skeuomorphic imitation. I took out the note at the time and put it in a drawer with other pieces of paper like cards from my grandma, grocery lists, plays, degrees, prayer books, scrap, playing cards, self help, fake suicide notes, bands I’m trying to not forget.

This note that was from Faith to Art is earthshatteringly embarrassing. I won’t be reading it. My grandma asked what it was when I found it in my jeans a few years ago. I didn’t lie, said it was an old note. She said she had a note from years ago that she always wondered where it went until one day she found it and then she lost it again and wondered where it went. I told her I was glad she found it and was sad she lost it. It was from my uncle. I see, I said and I played the rest of my hand and got shuffling. It was an apology, she said.

That was a note, to give this, from myself to myself. That this note is a fill-in-the-blank. This was a place to place what was between Faith and Art. Faith was Nate’s cousin. Art turned out to be gay. I never asked him what he meant by that. The note to myself was that the note was a fill-in-the-blank because I can’t speak for them. I’m the messenger which makes me responsible for the message not what’s in the message. The note I’m giving myself is watch out and give it room. After all, it’s a message I never wrote and as it so happens never delivered. 

With this note, I was like Pheidippides. I ran when I was young. I don’t run anymore. What for? Back then, it was a marathon everyday. Everybody had steam. They would go from one edge of the playground to the next. They’d race on the concrete. Nate would cheat. We would run to get it all out. We would run as far as we could to the edge where the houses started. We’d run back except Dado would stay out there and I knew Ms. Hartman was going to give him detention. Nate would be back already. Where’s Dado? I warned him but he just stayed out there getting smaller as I ran back.

That was the note and it reminds me when I saw Art last at his brother’s graduation party. I had been invited for some strange reason by his brother. His brother said hello which was strange because I don’t really know his brother. His brother was nice enough, pointing me to the catering and the dessert table. I saw Art. It had been years. We sank right back into something like it had been. Art did instruments. All kinds and when a person can do instruments, it’s a miracle. It’s another language. I wanted to hear him play at some point but we stopped talking because I had somewhere else to go that evening and my brother picked me up and that was the last time I saw Art.

That was the note Art played. A piano on a YouTube video. He made it in Australia on a fellowship. A simple note played on a piano. It sounds about right on the YouTube video. It makes me long for the real thing. Each note is similar to the last but different in a way that I don’t have the words to describe because I don’t know music at all. Similar yet different. Art the common denominator.

That was the note Faith gave to me, after galloping up from the big tree near the playground after looking at bugs. Faith was a gal who was a bug looker. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Bug lookers are as a part of society as any other person. Bug lookers have a distinct Pokémon quality to their pastime. Nothing wrong with being a person who watches the ground to find its tiny inhabitants to pick them up and pin them to styrofoam. My friend Harvey did that. He had a GameCube which I tried to play as much as I could to make friends with him. Faith was a bug looker of the highest order. A loner and a freak and a girl freak which is extra painful as boys are meant to be alone. Alone girls are too sad to be pitiable and when they have notes to send, most people read them and publicize the information. Faith was a friend or at least a friend of Art’s so I kept the secret. Faith trusted me with a note after looking at bugs and barely said where it was to go to. I found out by the “to Art” that it was for Art. 

This was the note that I held on to through middle school, lost in high school, found again in college, and found again here on the other side of college. 

That was the note that Dado got a glance at and I never asked nor was close to him enough to ask what was on the inside. Dado is out there, somewhere, living a full life. He knows something about my friends I don’t know and I hope he thinks about it from time to time. Then again, people forget things all the time.

This note is turning into a prayer. A message goes to heaven. When the soul of a message is lost it goes to heaven if it is good and hell if it is bad. If it goes to heaven, it’s read by God and any who were expecting it up there. In hell, it just is never read.

There was not a note as far as I was made aware. Someone sent me a text message which is like a note but slick and plastic. There were several posts, there was even a website for the funeral, emails. Notation, passing back and forth. There’s a grave, a mark, a note somewhere that I need to visit. One of the last things I wrote about Art was a note that I sent in an email with as many memories as I could pull from my mind. Even then, there are memories missing. Simply a fill-in-the blank. A space where you feel a memory used to be.

I’m just grateful no one will ever read this. It’s between them, Faith, Art. I just hope they got to say whatever it was they needed to say to each other without me getting in the way.

After all, that was the note and now it’s nothing but a bunch of washed up pieces of paper. Left it in my jeans, through the wash. Flat, weak, worn, and I just have to throw it away now after all this time.

dizzy turek writes in Chicago but is originally from Ohio. he also does theater. 

Categories
Saturday Cartoons

Northwest Connecticut Incidents, Illustrated

by Alan ten-Hoeve with illustrations from Adam Soldofsky

Torrington | Ledge Dr (Lakeridge Maintenance) | Boss states he terminated an employee, employee was refusing to leave, but did eventually leave | 3:57PM – 9/11/2025

Watertown | 380 block of Plungis Rd | EnCon dispatched for a bear that took a goat | 8:19PM – 6/7/2025

Woodbury | Route 6 just north of Big Daddy’s | Report of an injured goat under or near a guardrail | 6:07PM – 6/15/2025

Torrington | 70 block of Wolcott Ave | Caller reports a bear broke into the chicken coop and is currently laying down and devouring a chicken | 4:30PM – 9/6/2025

Torrington | THE GOOD OLD SOUTH END CUMBY’S YEEAAAHHH BUDDY!!! | Report of a male lying down, possibly intoxicated | 5:58PM – 9/5/2025

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Torrington | Concord Rd | Report of two sisters verbally arguing | 11:54AM – 9/2/2025

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Torrington | 29 Main St (Crossroads) | Caller reports a tent setup on the sidewalk, states the people manning the tent are not letting people use the sidewalk and are also mocking people as they walk by | 1:08PM – 6/15/2025

Alan ten-Hoeve is the managing editor of Farewell Transmission and the author of Notes From A Wood-Paneled Basement. He lives in Connecticut.

Adam Soldofsky is the author of the poetry collection Memory Foam, recipient of an American Book Award and Telepaphone, a novella. His latest collection, Three Short Novellas, is available here.

Categories
Saturday Cartoons

Magic 8snail

by Conor Demmett

Conor Demmett is a writer/filmmaker/educator from Long Island, NY.