And sunflowers and data centers painted a perfect pitch
Of white. I hear the vineyard sounds
I sing the song
Keep the old bills
Precious metals, communist playgrounds—
O android
The curse of the Dane isn’t real.
I left my pain under the porch where the dog died.
They get it so hard
My untidy heap of love.
Damon Hubbs is a poet from New England. Recent publications include Bullshit Lit, Version (9) Magazine, Virgo Venus Press, Revolution John, The Disappointed Housewife, Horror Sleaze Trash, and others. He is the author of the poetry collections Nighttime Logic and Venus at the Arms Fair. He serves as the editor of Ape House Magazine.
Tim Frank’s work has been published in Okay Donkey, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Maudlin House, Hobart, The Forge Literary Magazine, New World Writing and elsewhere. He has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and 4x Best of the Net.
Mama didn’t care what her boyfriends did to me as long as they weren’t throttling her. I was blonde, pretty, and compliant—the perfect chew toy for men who wanted a puppy instead of a dog. Easy to train, easier to break. I bounded right out of that cage with the first man who sugar-talked me into believing I was a precious child of God. He said I was like the woman at the well who’d been with many men: a whore that God desperately loved. He cried while slipping a zirconia ring onto my left hand, vowing to love me for eternity. I was eighteen and he was thirty-two, a young pastor just starting out.
“Baby,” he said the next morning, “I can’t wait to show my beautiful bride to the congregation. To protect you from gossip, I told everyone you’re twenty-five. Women are so jealous and petty, and I’d hate for them to treat you like you’re a conniving Lolita.”
He told me that God gave men wives to keep them from fornicating, since fornication was a sin. I wasn’t very smart. I didn’t know those big fancy Bible words or what forna-who meant. He patted my head.
“Baby, fornication is what you did with twelve different men. You spread your legs and said, ‘Come inside.’”
Tears stacked up in my eyes. I wiped ’em away real quick, as Jimmy hated whenever I cried. He claimed I manipulated him with feminine wiles to get my way.
“You’re wrong, baby. I’m crying because you’re acting like I’m a slut. I didn’t ask those men to do what they did to me. I—”
He roadblocked my face with his hand.
“You might not have asked them with your mouth, but you certainly did with your body. Probably sticking out those titties or shoving your hiney in their faces! You gave signals. Just like you did with me. But fortunately for you, I’m no animal. I waited for marriage, God’s covenant, before I came inside you. You were my first and you’ll be my last. I was your thirteenth, and God’s keeping watch to make certain I’ll be the only one.”
I whimpered like a puppy scared of thunder. “I’m sorry, Jimmy, for not being the bride you wanted. I promise to never look at another man as long as I live.”
He hugged me, explaining with my past, his trust needed to be earned. I had to be patient because there was a lot for him to accept about me. I tried my darndest: reading the Bible, listening only to Christian music, respecting him and not talking back, keeping the house sparkling clean, and having sex six days a week and twice on Sunday.
Jimmy joked, calling me a “dead dick defibrillator” when this nasty old man asked me to crawl into bed and suck his weenie for a spell. I didn’t laugh. That old coot smelled like three-day-old shit baking in the sun. I about ripped the whiskers clean off that warthog’s chin.
“Listen here, old man, I don’t want what you’ve got. You stick your pecker back in your pants, ask Jesus to forgive your sins, and I’ll play you a pretty hymn. If you don’t, I’ll chop it off and shove it down your throat.”
Jimmy’s eyes popped wide. I was forced against my will to “give back to the Lord,” which meant tinkling the ivories every Tuesday at Colonial Haven Nursing Home. I played the piano, accompanying Jimmy’s tone-deaf tenor. If I had a revolver in my hand when he screeched, “There’s power in the blood,” his brains and blood would go SPLAT all over the piss-stained walls, and I’d be halfway to Mexico with a bottle of tequila and a hairy hand on my knee. Instead, I smiled meekly and told the old coot I was sorry.
Jimmy gritted his teeth and added, “Yes, Pastor Stevens, I’m sorry for my wife’s outburst. She’s on her period and can be quite irrational at times.”
He raised the roof when we got in the car. “How dare you speak to an older man of God like that! I didn’t want to believe the Quilters for Christ when I overheard them whispering about your Jezebel spirit. I got in their faces, yelling, ‘Don’t you dare impugn my bride!’
“Sister Cindy wept, saying she spoke the truth in love and as an older woman of God, she didn’t think you gave her proper respect. She warned against running wild in tight yoga pants and snug crop tops. And then she saw you one week later, all glistened with sweat and shorts hiked clear up your butt. You got defensive, saying you’re not going to wear a prairie dress to satisfy her. Don’t you ever speak to her like that again! I’m cancelling your gym membership, and until it’s evident that you’ve repented, you’re not getting it back.”
Oh, I did a lot of repenting in that front seat. I repented for my weakness. For being too scared to flavor his morning coffee with ten drops of Visine until he dropped dead on the kitchen floor and I was a widowed woman weeping over his coffin—snot dripping from my nose while in reality I cried tears of joy, knowing I’d never have to feel his icy hands poking and prodding my body, ramming his penis into me dry and hard until I cried because I was the temple curtain ripped in two and he was Pontius Pilate hanging me on a cross.
Yup. I thought it. But I never said it.
On our fifth anniversary, we went to a fancy steakhouse. Jimmy ordered prime rib and I got filet mignon. Our waiter, Devon, presented a bottle of wine and “a red rose for the beautiful lady.” I blushed. He was around my age, with the prettiest green eyes I’d ever seen—a medical student busting his butt to pay off debt. I asked him what kind of doctor he wanted to be. His eyes crinkled, reminding me of paper roses and mood boards.
“Trauma surgeon. People have horrific accidents and I visualize myself cutting out their wounds, making them whole. I want to take the patients that everyone’s given up on, the ones who’ve been read their last rites by the priest, and heal them. Cheesy, but true.”
Devon and I locked eyes. Just a chaste moment of mutual admiration, nothing more.
Jimmy’s face flushed to medium-rare. “So, Dr. Devon. Know any fertility specialists? My wife can’t seem to get pregnant. I hate to ask a medical question, but could her excessive number of sexual partners prior to me have anything to do with that?”
Devon clenched his jaw. “Sir, I’m a third-year student. Obstetrics and gynecology isn’t a specialty I’ve delved into. But urology is right up my alley. Maybe you’ve got a low sperm count, some weak swimmers, or Low T. That seems more plausible than a high body count.”
As Devon walked away, Jimmy’s face flushed to rare. I stifled a laugh, my heart breaking simultaneously. I desperately wanted children, just not with Jimmy. It was okay for him to tear me down, but if he ever did the same to our child, I’d drug him with oxycodone and Ex-Lax, stuff him into frilly panties and a push-up bra, and shove his head under cold bathtub water until his eyes popped like a frog’s, his hands clawed at the air, his face flashed blue, and his bowels evacuated into floating brown soup, a dead, steaming pile of shit. And then I’d call the police, frantic and screaming that he was a cross-dressing, drug-using, suicidal pervert who lied through his teeth when he said I was twenty-five—that he was Jeffrey Epstein with a Bible and a ton cheaper.
Jimmy left a five-dollar tip and a Do You Know Where You’ll Spend Eternity? pamphlet. I wanted to crawl under the table, shave my head, and hightail it to a Buddhist monastery where I’d take a vow of silence and never lay eyes on Jimmy again. Fortunately, I had a hundred-dollar bill in my purse—something I’d been saving for a special occasion, and Devon was awfully special. I tossed the turn-or-burn pamphlet onto a table of Japanese businessmen and placed the hundred-dollar bill under the salt shaker.
The ride home felt like I was trapped inside a house on fire. Neither of us spoke. Jimmy’s hands coiled around the steering wheel like twin snakes: cold, hissing, and filled with poison. I dreaded the inevitable, obligatory anniversary sex and rehearsed the steps in my mind.
1. Change into a black push-up bra and matching panties. Try not to cry during.
2. While having the deed done to you, make lists: favorite songs, favorite TV shows, favorite death fantasies about your husband.
3. Fake it, scream like a banshee, call him Daddy, and yell that your lady parts are on fire, all while composing a shopping list in your mind.
4. When he asks for a glass of water after, smile real big. He never specifies where it comes from. Toilet bowl, undrained bathtub, dog dish—the possibilities are endless.
5. Last but most important, dig to the bottom of your jewelry box and pop a Loestrin in your mouth.
Jimmy humped and pumped, a pneumatic drill busting concrete. But this time I wasn’t fantasizing about his violent death or nearly biting my tongue off to keep from sobbing. The unforgiving, harsh light of our bedroom transformed into an operating theater. A set of kind green eyes behind a surgical mask peered down at me. The man held a scalpel, gently—so very gently—whispering, “I’m not taking anything from you; I’m taking things out of you.”
He made a clean incision along my frontal lobe, and with whispering hands, he lifted away the toxic labels stuck to my brain: whore, cheap slut, cum guzzler, worthless, piss-poor excuse for a human being. Black, gangrenous, and twisted, they barely put up a fight as he dropped the poisonous parts into a stainless steel tray for incineration. He washed my wounds with cool saline and stitched me together, clean and unblemished.
Jimmy grunted and rolled over. Me? I stared at the ceiling, and for once, the speed bump snoring to my left didn’t matter crap to me.
The next morning, Jimmy and I planted flowers in the garden. He was in an especially foul mood, bitching and moaning about runny eggs, burnt toast, and too much salt. He scream-quoted Proverbs 31 about a woman of noble character, and how I was a disgraceful rottenness in his bones.
I didn’t tremble or blink back tears. Why would I? He was nothing but a five-year-old bully screeching that I was a big giant poopy-head. I knew the truth now, and no amount of name-calling could ever wash it away.
He shouted against a brick wall, spit flying with every insult. The words never found a landing place, and poor Jimmy was oblivious to the army of hornets buzzing around his flapping jaw. Lowly privates carrying out a fragging, the hornets revolted against their superior officer. By the time he felt the first sting, his face was already turning blue. I had plenty of time to race into the house and grab a bottle of Benadryl. Instead, I stood there and watched his eyes bulge like those dead frogs in my dream. He collapsed, clutching his throat and foaming at the mouth. As he convulsed one last time, surrounded by a muddy river of his own waste, I knew he was dead. Dead at last.
Three months later, flush with insurance money, I sat at the mahogany bar of the marble-tiled steakhouse downtown, wearing a red dress and drinking a martini cold enough to freeze time.
I looked for Devon—not hoping for romance, but maybe a smile, or a conversation about current events. Just two friends chatting, nothing more than that. Jimmy was rotting six feet under and couldn’t do a damn thing about it. And for the first time in my life, the air tasted like freedom and medium-rare steak.
Jill Williams is a writer from Georgia. Her work explores the intersection of the profane and holy. Her stories have been published or are forthcoming in EXPAT PRESS, BULL, SOME WORDS, CITYWIDE LUNCH, REVOLUTION JOHN, URBAN PIGS, LITERARY GARAGE and elsewhere. Twitter @JillWillia85528
I have failed my editors, failed my speculative readers. No column last month. The deadline came, passed. October is here and I left my post in June. Farewell Transmission has been understanding, but I did block my editor’s number sometime mid-August. Speaking of August, this is when things really go off the rails. I was good, really, until August.
My notes for August and September are so sparse, most of them destroyed, there is no way I can stick to my signature, beloved style of reporting on the ground live as things happen. Filing my report on two months of war, mine and others, will test my abilities (and my editors). I have two months to recreate, two depressive, drug-addled months to remember where I spent two days at sea against my will, met an attache in Washington, D.C., returned to temporary office services work, and suffered several other indignities. The war beat on.
It was a hot, motionless summer.
August began with Dear Leader winning the Senior classic golf tournament at one of his country clubs. He shot 70. He also almost certainly shat in his adult diaper at Senator Graham’s funeral.
Our munitions law, and appetite for war waning, prices rising, Iran announced to the world it will not open the Strait of Hormuz until the American presidency changes hands.
In mid-August I wrote my ex-wife, “There is an army between us,” only to learn my number had been blocked. The United States attorney general declared Dead Leader never has and never will do something unethical. The law has spoken.
In late August my financial situation soured, my debts piling up, and I was forced to go see Carol, once again, at the temp agency. She placed me in Office Services for an engineering firm where I ate, slept, made copies, collated, jogged, bound, had xanax for lunch and coffee and pie for breakfast. I spoke to no one. My notebook for the rest of August was indecipherable:
The middle managers want to steal my salt! They are but an army of tongues! The reports are due by end of day! A new quarter upon us. Stretch goal: $100 gift card to The Cheesecake Factory, non-transferable.
September came, and nothing improved.
9.8.26
He shit his pants in the oval house, again, today.
9.11.26
Today, the Houthi rebels captured an island and are choking off the bab el-Mandeb strait. Chokepoints everywhere. Twenty-five years ago today I remember exactly where I was. Hunter S. Thompson, in his column for Page 2 at ESPN, understood it perfectly, right away. We are at war and will be for the rest of most of our lives, he said. The party was over, he said. Hunter S. Thompson was a fine carrier of the flame, one of our greatest, and he was, unfortunately, right right away. And who am I to cover a war never ending?
The Red Sea islands control the strait. Ten percent of global trade goes through the strait. The Houthi’s have control over the strait, and the entire western coast of Yemen.
New fronts open.
9.19.26
Common People by Pulp is playing, we are riding in black cars at unsafe speeds.
Saudi Arabia is under attack. Riyadh airport, pipelines, fuel storage tanks, infrastructure.
9.21.26
En route to DC by train to meet with the Ambassador. I am traveling under a cloud of conditions. The roomettes are all taken by mean Russians making their way (slowly) to Chicago. I haven’t the heart to explain to them American geography. So I am sat in coach. I brought Nutella biscuits for my fellow passengers, cough drops, several medications, Helen DeWitt, two plant-based smoothies.
9.22.26
All the signals are jammed in DC this rainy morning, first day of fall.
9.24.26
When I travel south I feel wild and free, reckless. When I travel north I feel anxious, jittery, constantly aware of my own skin. When I travel west I feel untethered, an orphan, consumed with possibility, lonely. When I travel east I walk into the Atlantic Ocean.
9.26.26
At my friend the financier’s wedding in Darien, Connecticut. I am clad head to toe in powder blue and on several conflicting drugs at once. The shuttle arrives any moment. Something the train conductor called a ‘nor’easter’ is apparently bearing down on the Tokeneke Club and the rest of the Connecticut coast. We are not far from Greenwich, someone said in line at Windsor Street Coffee. I don’t know what that means. But I am wide awake and investigating.
9.28.26
They were out of creamed spinach at the private equity steakhouse and Linda was disappointed, already in a mood.
And the rest of the month, including excuses
I began this assignment with Farewell Transmission with selfish intent. I suppose it’s true all writers take on every assignment with selfish intent. Finding no publisher for my 500-page novel beginning with the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, covering wars and failed literary movements, a grotesque sigh on our contemporary times, I set out to write a monthly war column with the idea a publisher (or agent, tastemaker, influencer, or critic) would stumble upon my project and immediately request the Wartime Author manuscript to take to auction. This did not happen.
A new war in Iran opened up, and my capacity to take on fresh horrors, while working with my editor polishing up the manuscript for my own war novel, began to seriously fade. I simply could not take on these two tasks at once. The choice was to continue following the wars and writing the column, or finishing my manuscript. I chose, sometime in August, perhaps foolishly, to turn my attention to the manuscript.
Here I sit and type a failed columnist, with a homeless novel. I survey my options. I could enter my manuscript sometime in October in Fiction Collective 2’s annual novel contest. Evan Dara was a past winner. This would be excellent company. I could submit to Rose Press, who published Scott McLanahan and Matthew Gasda, during their open reading period in November. I could bribe Cash4Gold with cocaine to publish my war novel. I could send it along to Hesse Press, a house I am increasingly impressed with. But each option seemed impossible. The manuscript would likely not be “contest-ready” by the end of October (my own fault). Rose Press is lovely but all of their covers follow the same visual lineage and I did not like the idea of Wartime Author written in cursive font, plus I doubted I was cool enough for a hip press. I am too terrified of parties, New York, and Los Angeles to get in bed with Cash4Gold. I am too scared to blindly submit to Hesse Press and do not know how besides. I could, and likely will, self-publish. What another headache! And for what and for whom? To sing my sign into the void, perhaps.
All of these things require my attention and an executive function I severely struggle with. And I am tired. Tired of writing a widening war, unceasing and stupid. Tired from my own poor choices, reckless lifestyle, and unpleasant personality. Afraid of my ex-wife, and Baltimore. I am, therefore, moving out of the King’s Motel at the edge of a faceless, motionless mid-Atlantic capital city and into a more suitable, responsible studio apartment. I am drying out for real this time, and I have deleted the phone numbers of all my drug dealers. If I am to give this novel a chance, I must be serious, sober.
And with that, I bid you adieu. With apologies, this will be my last dispatch for Farewell Transmission, who have been nothing but the kindest souls and have agreed to pay me for the remainder of the year (a blessing I did not deserve, but am nevertheless grateful for). All of my focus belongs to Wartime Author, and making it the novel it deserves to be, and finding a home and (hopefully) a few readers along the way.
With love,
D Money Maine
Derek Maine wrote about the war for Farewell Transmission.
Feeling low, a silverfish in life’s basement feeding on crumbs and the dander of the successful and anointed who pound the boards above in heritage footwear, low and sinking lower still, slumped in front of a snifter of Arrogant Bastard Ale at the Stone Brewing bar in the San Diego airport, watching the bustle and the hustle and the exhausted, bedraggled concourse shuffle while nursing the dwindling nostalgia I have for my twenties. Hopes aplenty I had then, along with every other hipster schmo in the thrall of Craft and Local and Artisanal. I was going to found a little brewery with my fellow beer bros laboring under the same malt and hop delusion, ready to ferment in the carboy known as the Great Recession and to pour forth triumphantly, when the time was right, with an ABV as high and intoxicating as our young hopes.
I work in sales now. I’m in San Diego on a beverage sales work trip, a work trip when you’re in the bottom percentile for sales this quarter and last quarter and the top distributors have blocked your number and the major retailers hang an “out to lunch” sign when they see you skulking around the corner and next quarter is a plummeting guillotine coming for your underperforming head and it’s 102 degrees and your wife back in Tempe hates you and herself for choosing to marry you and thus joining you as you descend the socioeconomic ladder rung by miserable rung and you wake up most mornings plotting in unsettlingly precise and actionable detail how to slaughter everyone who has ever wronged you—such a work trip is no holiday which is what I say to the man who’s probably my age—37—but could pass for 22 and looks like a cat burglar, a wiry white guy dressed head to toe in black—cap, shirt, slacks, shoes—and sidles up beside me on his stealthy cat feet, orders pulled pork nachos and whatever I’m having, and asks me: “On Holiday?”
No, I say. Work trip. He asks me what I do. I hate this question as much as the next failure but I tell him. He nods enthusiastically, sees me cheapskate-baby-sipping my beer and orders me another. I take this as advance payment for humoring him, the noblesse oblige of the well-to-do, extroverted traveler, so I ask him what he does.
“Department of Defense stuff. Security. I used to be in the military. Now I’m a contractor. Sort of. I wanted to be a lawyer growing up. I wanted to be Clarence Darrow.”
I tell him I wanted to be Ken Grossman. Wanted to make a fortune getting people drunk on well-made beer. People on first dates would see my logo on a tap handle, swig my brew, and let its bubbles tickle their noses as they tumbled gently into inebriated but no less enduring love.
“But I enlisted. I thought about law school, of course. Took the LSATs. Got a 178. But I really love my country, you know?” Here he taps my new full glass with his half empty own. The gargoyles etched on them kiss. “And I was in Afghanistan—this is off the record—and we were sweeping this village and this little kid came out with an AK so I opened fire and I’m a good shot, a lethal shot, the highest lethality in my platoon, you don’t get a 178 on the LSATs without having a precise mind, without being able to manage—hell, thrive—under pressure. Needless to say, the child was dead. The insurgent. But I checked his weapon and the clip was empty. I love my country but, in that moment—and the Moment is all there is, all these little moments chained together to make a Life—in those blood-drenched Silk Road mountains, I thought: what the hell am I doing? I kept thinking that for years. But I kept doing too. Dum spiro spero. Did what needed doing. Loading and firing. Plodding along. Then I met my guru.” He notices me raising my eyebrows and looking at my suddenly empty beer and orders me a refill. “And I’m not talking about some swami walking barefoot over coals or some Burning Man doofus with sloppy face tattoos of fake Chinese pictograms. My guru was a stout little Guatemalan guy dressed business casual who worked quality control for a big jelly and jam company. He traveled the country examining different jam factories, testing the flow of the jam, making sure the texture was consistent. And I said how do you do it? Find meaning in it? Year after year? And you know what he said?” I shake my head and spot the server bringing out the nachos. They look like hardened diarrhea. Little brown mounds of moss growing off a mountain of jagged tortilla chips. “He said I had to find my dharma. Had to find my capital W Way. He said Krishna told Arjun to fight. To kill. That quality control is his Way. Some Ways involve ensuring the jelly flows. Some involve bombs and suicide vests and bullets. Inveniam viam. So, there I was, sitting in the Atlanta airport after coming back from some particularly harrowing contract work in the Gulf dealing with those Houthi fuckers and really doubting myself despite all my success in the military and my even more lucrative career as a contractor saving American lives all across the world. Still weighed down by these doubts. By that little Afghani insurgent with his empty clip. Then, boom. This guy and his truth explode on to the scene of my life like an RPG of enlightenment. This random Guatemalan guy. Or not so random. Not random at all, really. Because he works with quality. Works to ensure things flow. Boom. Synchronicity. Boom, boom. It all explodes inside me, my doubts, my fears and useless pity. This is my Way, I realized. Ergo, I flow on over to Mali. I flow to Libya. To the Sudan. To Ukraine. Walking my Way, armed with my Truth, fortes in fide, doing my Work while God watches over me as I Fuck the World He Made for Us.” He pokes his middle finger into the largest pile of pork on the platter like he’s checking its temperature and sucks the sauce off his fingers with evident approval, with the tooth-licking relish of zealous faith.
“Like God is in the Cuck Chair,” I whisper.
He stares at me, into me. “God is in the Cuck Chair,” he says. “Exactly. He’s enjoying himself. Telling us to dig in.” He sucks his finger again. “It’s tangy,” he says. “It’s delicious.”
Tangee, tangeeeee, tangeeee—the last syllable reverberates in my mind. My Mind. Yes, I think. This state-sanctioned murderer, this Latin-squawking child-killer, might be off his rocker, Rocker, but he might be onto something too, Some Thing, because I’m Lost, in desperate need of a Way. I grab a handful of nachos and shove them in my mouth. A mouth which never took the LSATs or countered insurgents, never earned money or glory or infamy or even a second glance from anyone—except, perhaps, my wife in those early days of suggestive half-smiles across empty growlers and held hands where my whole world, World, turned on her second glance, in anticipation of that Glance—but a human mouth nonetheless. Human.
Above and behind this humanity, I feel the presence of the Divine, perched in His Chair, pleasuring Himself, watching.
The Prophet beside me nods watching me eat like he understands what I’m going through, this Conversion, knows it in his bones. We eat the nachos in silence, the sacred Nachos, shoveling them into our mouths by the messy handful like neither of us has eaten in weeks or months or ever. Baby wolves tearing into their first kill. Catholics at their First Communion. Devour the sumptuous, soul-nourishing airport bar Pulled Pork of Life.
The plate is empty. The beers too. He checks his watch, says “Got a date with some warlords in the Philippines. Where the Way leads, one must follow.” He hoists his black, tactical backpack on and rests his hand on my shoulder, conferring a blessing, performing a rite acknowledging me as an acolyte, pouring his energy into me to propel Me on my Way, before disappearing into the concourse throng.
My wife texts me about her steering wheel shuddering at high speeds and the mechanic telling her the rotors are shot. Brakes too. My boss texts a reminder to compile a full report tomorrow morning but I have no idea about what. I can’t walk their Ways for them. I google assault rifles. The Bhagavad Gita. The screen of the phone is slick, sticky. My fingers too, tangy. But how do you know your way, the way you’ve been shambling along your entire life or the new way forward, is in fact your Way? I forgot to ask the Prophet. My mind feels fuzzy from the high alcohol ales and the overstimulating buzz of the airport. I google migraines and nursing programs in Tempe and the average cost of new rotors and are MBAs worth it and the gun show loophole. Google whether 37-year-olds can enlist. How to keep your home after declaring bankruptcy. Are hollow point bullets legal in Arizona. Couples counseling in Tempe. Converting to Hinduism. Assisted suicide for people in sales.
New travelers descend on the bar. Soon, my flight will board. My phone feels heavy in my hand, so heavy I can barely lift it. God’s Eyes are on me. On us all. He’s waiting out there, up there, everywhere. Waiting and Watching. We’re just little specks of light dancing on His infinite retina, miniscule signals sent to His omniscient optic nerve.
I stand and look for my gate but the crowd refuses to part for me. No way presents itself. All I feel, ahead and above, without and within, is the engulfing presence of God’s Chair in the dark corner of the cosmos. The divinity of His rhythmic Stroke. The enormity of His Terrible, Terrible Smile.
Jon Doughboy is just one little scribbler dancing on Literature’s infinite retina @doughboywrites
Ronald was the first human to eat a ripe plum. Sixteen of his nineteen living siblings have no visible eyebrows. He lived in Weehawken, New Jersey for 337 and 8/9ths years. At 5:13 a.m. every morning, he does 445 pushups amid the sharp and chilly dust of the attic. On March 19th, 1983, Ronald told his great-great-great-great-granddaughter that the key to immortal life is lying awake in bed from four to one each day, and reciting from memory the totality of the New York City Subway System.
Steve Gergley is the author of a bunch of books and a lot of weird writings of an indeterminate nature. His new novel, Stone Cells, will be published by Translucent Eyes Press on August 28th, 2026. He tweets @GergleySteve. His fiction can be found at: https://stevegergleyauthor.wordpress.com/. He’s also the editor of scaffold literary magazine.
I got into an argument with an erudite priest over whether Socrates was Christian. I told him nah man Socrates was effing BC! And he was like anyone who communes w/ spirit at the level he did is in the Holy Spirit and is Christian by proxy. I told him that’s cool but also fuck you. He said so you agree? I said no that Christ is a sex symbol. He said fuck you sir. I said Walt Whitman said argue not concerning God. He said I’m not arguing I’m just spreading the gospel which is ultimately true so there really is no debate. I said OK that’s fine I love you bro. He said I love you bro. But also fuck you I said. He said fuck you as well. Neither of us said anything for a while. Then he and I and everything else began to dissolve into infinite mind. And I started vocalizing involuntary. He said I’m dead over and over again. He and I are one guy. All my shit ends like this because I don’t know how to write an ending. Really that was just an explanation of smoking 5-MeO-DMT. I make fun of writing MFAs but if any of yous want to teach me how to write a proper ending please click the little envelope button on my website. And we can belong to each other forever.
Spencer Eckart lives in the Great Smoky Mountains. His debut collection, Blue Heron Inn, is forthcoming.
My dog likes to curl up into a donut shape on the softest surface nearest me. His preferred surface is a human bed but a couch or rug will do. My at-home workspace has a guest bed next to my desk and this is often where the dog’s naps will take place. This guest bed is where he spends the most time as a donut.
My dog will occasionally kick his leg in a thumping motion while he sleeps. This causes his whole body to bounce up and down and up to a higher plane. For brief periods of time on this earth, my dog transforms into the bouncing donut.
I recently became immobile. Bad health and surgical wounds that won’t resolve. I’m a long distance runner, but now I’m not that. So I sit and watch my increasingly energetic dog hoping he can tire himself out. Knowing he can’t.
In the past, I tried taking my dog on runs with me but he gets bored too easily. He’ll seemingly enjoy the run for about 5 minutes and then want to do something else. He’s had a similar issue on walks as he doesn’t want to repeat any route in exactly the same way. In a city using a grid system, I can weave him through different blocks to explore more of the local neighborhood.
A run along a trail offers little variation. I relate to the boredom and desire for novelty. Unfortunately, his version of novelty sometimes means pulling down an alley with a strong trash bin scent.
In many ways, I respect his refusal to accept anything less. I often wonder where he’d go without me if I didn’t keep him on a leash. How far he would go. And if he’d return.
Pompeii has a famous mosaic of a dog in a building called the House of the Tragic Poet. The mosaic says, “CAVE CANEM,” or, essentially, “Beware of the Dog.”
As much as my dog would like to think differently, generations from now won’t beware of him. Not because he won’t live forever, but because he isn’t that ferocious.
He looks to me for protection from other dogs and takes quite a while to warm up in a new dog park. Half an hour can pass with him standing at my feet before he finally finds the courage to run around. With this found courage, he’ll quietly orbit the other dogs with as little interaction as possible.
Dog parks are fine, but my dog never looks happier than when he’s sprinting at top speed.
If he reaches top speed I’m a bit more confident he’s had a good day. My apartment is too small for top speed. He tries carpet to couch to carpet to couch. But we both know it’s not top speed.
I dream of making it up to him. I want to take him to a dog store in the city.
George, a local chain, stands out with its designer choices, setting out to bring artisanal aesthetics to the realm of dog toys, and Le Marcel Bakery has a giant windowed-counter of baked goods for dogs while the owners make the treats behind the display.
If we’re ever close to one of these locations, my dog will pull inside no matter how tired he is from his running.
In my bad health I’ve felt like a monster. In this shrinking I’ve overcompensated with adorning myself with new clothes. Perhaps with enough clothes people won’t tell I’m repulsive. I bought a new striped shirt, American-made chinos, a vintage herringbone sport jacket, a raglan overcoat, and a cashmere scarf in just the right blue.
With all of my layers I essentially became a better bed for my dog. He can now donut even closer.
I recently came across a hand-painted ceramic from the Isle of Man that features an aging shepherd in a tweed green outfit sitting with a walking stick resting against his shoulder and his black-and-white dog sitting in between his legs.
As my black-and-white dog is going to live forever, he will be there to sit with me in old age. As he does now.
Regardless of the years that pass, there’s something about taking a rest from all the running around out in the world, and just sitting together. We can guard each other… one sleeps while the other keeps an eye on things.
I know there may come a time when this dynamic will run its course. When he has to look out for himself. When he’ll be forced to go into the world and befriend other dogs to survive. Perhaps the dog stores he used to go to will take pity on him and slip him a bone but I know he won’t have the cash to make that an everyday thing. He’ll have to find himself in this new freedom. And this will be a new version of himself that doesn’t involve separation anxiety from me.
I imagine he’d remain a city dog instead of heading for the woods. He can only change so much.
There’s an interpretation of the CAVE CANEM mosaic that it was meant as a joke… the dog in the mosaic is featured in a play bow and doesn’t look all that ferocious itself. I’d like to commission a mosaic called Beware of the Bouncing Donut.
The runs may have been the happiest, but resting near each other brings us both to a higher plane.
Christopher Wral is a writer in San Francisco. His website is christopherwral.com.
The therapist I saw after the breakup with Lindsey fixated on my teen years, talking to me about them in present tense instead of past. I couldn’t tell if this was because she’s a shit therapist or if my development was so obviously arrested the therapist couldn’t imagine there was anything more to talk about then the things that happened to me before I was twenty years old.
Those years don’t do me any favors though. There’s a lot to talk about. Enough to fill a quarter of the pages in her yellow legal pad. There was the bulimia, which she seemed determined to blame on my mother’s habit of reading the nutrition labels on things like gum packets and toothpaste. The abortion I let Matty Parks pay for with money swiped from his dad’s nightstand that I haven’t thought about since it happened. And plenty of benzos in exchange for quickies behind the high school’s baseball dugout.
I think the therapist latched on to the worst stuff, the most obvious struggles, not understanding what I needed help with most was the mildly unpleasant. An empty pill bottle in the back of the bathroom drawer with Moonie, the name of Lindsey’s cat, written in faded black ink on the label. The street I have to pass on my way to work that she lived on when we first met. My roommate’s dirty dishes in the sink. Lately, anything small consumes me.
“How does it feel when your dad calls you a whore?”
We stared at each other in silence while she waited for my answer, which I knew was expected to be insightful. I shook my head, reminding her I needed to talk about Lindsey and my dad hasn’t called me a whore in years.
“Don’t you think your dad’s treatment of you will impact your relationships going forward?”
Greta asks why I’m still making appointments with the therapist. I think I’m too ashamed to admit it’s because the appointments are something to do. Somewhere to go. An air-conditioned room to sit in. Greta says she has something she’s been told not to tell me yet but that she can’t help but tell me anyway. I get my hopes up thinking it will be about Lindsey. That she’s dating someone we both know, whose social media presence I can hunt for glimpses of her. That she isn’t dating anyone because our relationship was so significant she needs to be single for a while to rid her system of me. That I can shop at Saltzman’s again because she’s moved to a different neighborhood. But no. None of that was said. Nothing was said. Greta touched her palms to her stomach and smiled wide enough I could see most of her teeth.
The baby shower was after a session where the bullshit therapist suggested I never got over the wound of my older sister leaving for college. I told the therapist my sister went to Sarah Lawerence so she didn’t exactly abandon me. At the shower, Greta assured me Lindsey wouldn’t be there. That the two of us were closer than the two of them. If only one of us could be invited, it was me. I did my best to hide my disappointment that the run-in I’d staged in my head was not happening. Her husband’s mother said the baby would be born with a full head of hair like her son, whose hairline hadn’t receded an inch all his life. She held up the sonogram and said a skull shaped like that is meant for thick hair. We ate cold cucumber sandwiches and were barred from wearing pink or blue or any kind of color that suggests gender. I went with a light green dress. Greta cried at her sister’s gift of a rattle engraved with their late brother’s initials under a small pair of angel wings. As much as I wanted the attention to be on Greta and the baby, all of mine was on Lindsey. I hadn’t found a way to casually bring her up in small talk I’d been making with the guests who knew her. It was my goal, to ask about her in a way that denoted I’d forgotten to until that moment. The hard part was picking the right friend to ask, someone close enough to have information but maybe not close enough to immediately message Lindsey to tell her I’d asked about her. Jess was out of the question as she and Lindsey saw each other almost every weekend and texted throughout the week. RJ couldn’t be trusted either as they did Lindsey’s hair, and from what I remember, she was due for a cut and color any day now. Liza would have to do. She liked to gossip but really only saw Lindsey a couple times a month. Although if one of those times should be the next day or sometime soon, if it was too close to the baby shower, one of the first things Lindsey would be told is that I wanted to know how she was doing. I took the risk.
“Lindsey’s alright, she’s getting another cat I think.” It was all I could manage to get.
It made me sad enough to spend the train ride back to the city crying. I’d begged Lindsey to add another cat to our mix, to give Moonie and I a friend, but she wouldn’t on account of our work schedules. What change had been made to her schedule that couldn’t have happened when we were together?
The second therapy session following the shower was spent assessing if the pass my science teacher made at me in the eleventh grade was the catalyst for my sorry attempt at college. At least we’d moved up in the timeline of my life.
At a dive bar I saw someone who looked like Lindsey walk out to the smoking patio with someone who didn’t look anything like me. When I had finally pushed my way through enough people to end up outside I didn’t see them but saw a girl who did look like me standing by herself, smoking the kind of cigarettes I’d just run out of. She let me bum one then took a book out of her purse to ask if I’d read it. It was her new thing, recommending it to strangers.
“It’s just that good,” she said.
A copy of a self-help book about dreams was in her right hand, the sticker promising a price that ended in ninety-nine cents was half picked off the front cover. She let me read the blurb before reading me a passage.
“Your past flies overhead in the shape of a vulture and your future is at the end of the pavement before you. Don’t get distracted by the sounds of the vulture’s wings that you fail to look at what’s waiting for you.”
She looked into my eyes like she was impressed to not see tears. I asked her what if the past isn’t a vulture flying above with the intent to maul you but a park pigeon whose begging for bread crumbs stresses you out so much you want to run as if it were a vulture?
“It hasn’t said anything like that yet. But I bet it will. At least something similar,” she said.
I put the cigarette out under the toe of my boot and thanked her. She said, “No need,” then went back to who I assumed, by the barely there brown eyeliner and the soft wave of her hair, was a date. I made a mental note that a book about dreams is a good thing to have on hand for a date in case the conversation dulls. Though I don’t know when I’ll be on a date next. After Lindsey, how little I am attracted to anyone else just makes me cry.
Staying up late, thinking of the cat I wanted that Lindsey probably now has, I decided to adopt my own. A cat I could name anything I wanted. Anything but the name I wanted to call the cat I wanted with Lindsey because she’s probably using it now. Before falling asleep I decided to come up with a new name once I had the thing in my hands and could see it. There wasn’t any particular breed on my mind, just that it had to be a girl because boy pets came with a dick and a pair of balls. She’d get arm & hammer litter and eat out of a ceramic bowl. If she could tolerate it she’d wear a purple collar.
The next morning I went to the shelter up the block and picked the only cat that didn’t come with a ‘but’ from the kid working.
“She’s really smart but… she sent two previous owners to the hospital with bites.”
“She’s sweet sometimes but… she swats at blondes.”
“She’s great but… she has chronic worms.”
We got to the cat I finally picked and I waited for the “but” for a long time. There wasn’t one. There wasn’t anything to say about her other than she’s smart, sweet, and great. Her gray fur had a patch missing on her leg from something that happened during her birth. It was the one part of her body she didn’t like touched. While wiping up her first shit I wondered if Lindsey was doing the same with her new cat that could’ve been ours and then wondered if, on the off chance that she was doing that, if she was thinking of me. Thinking about the little I asked for and when it became too much.
At the next therapy appointment I mentioned the new cat, who I thought made a good Margie, and how Lindsey’s cat was my idea. The therapist asked if Margie reminded me of Cookie, the cat I had in my teen years. I said no because Cookie was a slow stray I lurred into the house with cookie dough and kissing sounds.
“Cookie was with you after the abortion right? You said she laid on your stomach. Have you always felt connected to cats?”
I didn’t want to talk about the abortion again so I ignored that part.
“Always. Moonie, Lindsey’s first cat, was slow to warm up but she’d sleep on my chest sometimes.”
“Did Lindsey like that?”
It was the first time she’d asked me anything about Lindsey. Or spoke about the present.
“I think so.”
“Did she like you?”
“I hope.”
Katie Haley is a writer and gossip from California with honest work in/on Hobart, Vlad Mag, Somewords, and elsewhere.
My cat escaped in Colorado. We lived in three different states together, Kyle the cat and I. Colorado was the pit-stop between two other places that felt more like home. We stayed with my friend Larry, Kyle’s former owner. We had worked together at a grocery store back in Arizona. Larry and I, not the cat. Kyle was his cat in Arizona, but when he moved to Colorado six months ahead of me, Larry gave Kyle to me. He was going to stay with his mother, and she had a cat already. I was always falling in love with a friend’s cat, accepting other people’s strays.
I stayed Friday nights on Larry’s couch after my shift at the grocery store in Arizona because my roommate had a new girlfriend who had walked into my bedroom completely naked to ask to “borrow” lotion, then lubed up with her leg hiked on the side of my bed. Larry and I would get nachos from Aliberto’s drive-thru and watch movies with Kyle circling the periphery until I passed out. Kyle would wake me the next morning as desert sunshine seared my eyes through the miniblinds. He would jump off the window ledge above the couch and onto my head, and I would say good morning. It was the best sleep I got at the time even with Kyle’s greeting. I watched as the cat knocked Larry’s mugs off the kitchen counter to the linoleum floor.
“Since you like him so much,” Larry said, “do you want him?”
I moved into my own small apartment. This was still in Arizona. I did want the cat. He was a beautiful Siamese tabby mix with startling blue eyes the color of shallow tropical waters. Pizza delivery drivers commented on his attractiveness. Larry didn’t have a cat carrier, so I bought one at the pet store on my way to retrieve him, then drove across town to my new apartment while the cat screamed at a high pitch. I took backroads because I was afraid of driving on the highway, and of making left turns. I was living alone for the first time in my life. Kyle and I became roommates. I had no couch or cable to receive any TV channels as reception was blocked by proximity to a mountain, but we had a tidy quiet place, just a couple of single youths.
When Larry left Arizona, I felt adrift. I was from the place everyone else left, permanent when everyone else was passing through. Then I left too. I picked Colorado since Larry was already there and it wasn’t too many states away. That, and I was probably in love with him. I told myself that I would visit my family every month on the Greyhound, since my fear of driving had expanded into a fear of flying. Larry wanted to move out of his mother’s place, so we could be roommates and he’d be reunited with Kyle.
The morning in Colorado when Kyle escaped, I’d woken up early to go to a breast cancer walk. Did you know you have to pay to participate in those? I didn’t. In those days, Kyle didn’t always want to sleep with me because he wanted to hang out with Larry, his former owner, who always had a clique over, carrying on in a raucous manner late into the night. Kyle would cry to be let out of my room where I hid and watched The Office DVDs and ate curry takeout, which I’d picked up on my walk home from the college where I was a thirty-year-old undergrad. My closest friends during this time, my first time moving away from home, were the cat and Pam Beesly. That morning I opened my bedroom door and the quality of light in the hallway was wrong, too bright for the early hour. It felt surreal, like entering a portal.
I sleep-shuffled to the kitchen and poured cat kibble into a dish. It was drafty inside. I’d had trouble adjusting to the cold in Colorado, wearing the wrong type of coat and boots, soaked and slipping through that winter. As I went to grab a sweater, I saw that the front door was wide open to the landing outside our second-floor apartment.
Larry was asleep in his room with the door closed. Our front door had an unfortunate quirk where if you didn’t slam and lock it, it wouldn’t always latch. It slowly swung back open over time. I glanced in the bathroom to make sure there wasn’t anyone hiding in there. Since this was Boulder in 2008, no one was in the apartment while we slept with the door wide open, keys left on the kitchen counter for the taking. Kyle didn’t come running from his spot in the living room. The dish was untouched.
I started out the door without the sweater, without shoes, calling for Kyle. He’d never been outside before. He was an inside cat. I wasn’t even sure he’d encountered stairs before. I stood on the landing, frozen for a moment against my rising panic. I turned to run down the stairs and there was Kyle, light on his feet, jogging up and then past me right into the apartment, as if we were pals passing in the hallway. He let out a chirp as I hurried in behind him and slammed the door before he could change his mind. He purred loudly as he ate.
“Sorry I almost lost the cat,” Larry said when he came out of his room.
I felt lucky that Kyle was smart enough to return for food after a brief adventure. It horrified me that I came so close to losing him that day, that I had been asleep while he was running down the landing outside to frolic in the night or galloping down Arapahoe alongside cars in the dark. He’d been lost and found without my knowledge while I slept dumbly. I was young then and carried less anticipation of loss. I wouldn’t lose him for another 13 years, after we’d moved together one more time, to another state and finally to a house where he had more space to play, and he was my cat again. I let Larry know when the cat wasn’t doing well, gave him health updates along the way, until the final day.
After Kyle died, I wanted to find a piece of him previously unknown to me, a secret final message from the other realm he’d moved to. I’m not a religious person but I still looked to him for guidance as I did for years. We’d traveled through phases of life together. I picked up an old digital camera in hopes of finding forgotten photos of him but there were none I hadn’t seen before. I scoured the house for hidden memories and was frustrated to realize I couldn’t find the stuffed red monkey he’d once loved, the one that made a too-long shriek when its tummy was poked. I feared I’d given it away years earlier, before I fathomed losing him, when it was just an annoying monkey doll.
Now that grief has dulled, my aging mind and the passing of time occasionally provide memories new to me, a photo I’d forgotten or a memory like the time he got out. I hope he had fun that night. Now I tell the story to friends like one might share the tale of a lost night in youth, reminiscing about a cool friend who disappeared for hours only to return wearing nothing but a cape, embellishing the story with each telling. It’s part of his lore. Maybe there was snow on the ground into which he sunk his striped legs. Maybe he met the raccoon that lingered in the strip mall behind the apartment complex and they ran free together through the field. Like a close friend, some parts of him remained unknowable, unreachable, even after spending 15 years together. I’ll never know what he saw or did that night. Kyle, my old friend.
Suzy Eynon is the author of Terrestrial and the chapbook Being Seen. She lives near Seattle with 3 cats.
We’re still close, but she’s stopped talking, or responding at all. A whisper-quiet treatment. I look at her in the mornings, how she serenely sleeps, sometimes twitches in dreams. I get the urge to kiss, caress, hold her to my chest. On weekends I watch her walk beside me, or run ahead. I, of course, cannot help myself and call out her name, trying to say whatever remains. She acts as if she doesn’t hear and refuses to stay near. Maybe she really doesn’t hear, or my voice is no longer dear. I cannot know for sure, but perhaps it’s depression that mars us so. I see the way she lounges on the couch before the TV, her gaze downturned to some sad corner of the room, away from me. I’m sure anyone else, had they seen her, would tell me I’m simply overthinking, projecting, she just looks tired, looks peaceful to me, but trust me, I know what I see. And this depression—no mere seasonal thing or vague distaste. She feels abandoned by me, hurt immeasurably. Sometimes it’s as if she’s finally looking at me, but I know that cannot be, for her mind is elsewhere, far from me. It’s why even on sunny days when the weather is godly and the wind flutters against her face, her sweetly shut eyes—a sight the very picture of animal contentment—my heart remains pinched. I know those moments, to her, are alternative grace. There are, also, nights when I am struck by fear, that by now we are simply strangers to one another, in this new configuration, no longer near. How they wound me, these moments in which she seems wholly new, materially immaterial, as if never before have I laid eyes nor planted kisses nor palmed caresses unto her. Never before held close. Are we through? No recourse? I do still believe in her soft spot for me, somewhere in her distant heart—should luck do its part. And yes, memories of better days do keep me afloat, but as we drift further away, as on separate boats, what good are they? Yesterday I felt as if our eyes finally locked; she could see me; I her. I wished she’d see into my very core and I’d peer into her, praying we’d overcome whatever drives her secretly sorrowing, avoidant heart. But the moment was a far cry from cinema and its minute facial nuances, last-minute reconciliations. My face was frozen, matching hers, across all these photos and videos.
Alexei Raymond offers his heart, shaped by life and love in the Middle East. He chases visions of unspeakable loveliness. Find pieces of him in a variety of publications. https://x.com/enemyofcruelty
The two pets I want most are a fish or a rat but I live with two roommates and one has a cat and if I understand right, fish and rats are a cat’s favorite meals (though this particular cat is too old and fat to hunt but maybe orange enough to try) and our landlord used chatgpt to write the lease and she’d asked chatgpt to specify that the lease allows only one (1) cat, and though my hypothetical fish and my hypothetical rat would be contained (aquarium or cage respectively), I don’t know if she’d consider additional pets to be a violation of our chatgpt lease, and by the way our landlord apologized for using chatgpt to write our lease (she knows we’re all writers and it’s probably destroying our jobs but she still used it to write to the lease) and anyway, I don’t think I’m in a good place right now to be taking care of something living, something that needs my money for pellets and gravel and little calcium-fortified blueberry rat treats because I don’t have a lot of spare money right now and I don’t have a lot of spare space right now in this house I share with two roommates and a cat, and I don’t have a lot of spare space right now in this heart, because I’m used to hoarding all my love inside myself like a hamster bubbling its cheeks with grain because even though it (the hypothetical hamster) lives inside a cage inside a house with a human who has a paycheck to spend on grain for a hamster, the hamster doesn’t understand that it’s safe from starvation forever and so its survival instincts make it still hoard, but I’m slowly becoming less hamster and more human because you are so kind to me and my heart and maybe one day we’ll have enough money for our own house and we can fill our house with all the pets we want, and did I ever tell you that when I was little, I had a pet betta fish in a one gallon fish tank that I put on top of my bookshelf one day and just kinda forgot about until the fish slowly starved in its own slime, and also when I was little I begged my parents for a pink hairless rat, a rat hot dog creature that we took home in a petsmart cardboard box, and it died weeks later under my care because our house was kept so air-conditioned that my hairless rat got hypothermia, but you make me want to try again in the future to take care of something small and precious.
Mariya Kurbatova (she/her) is a fiction MFA candidate at the University of Arkansas. She’s the Book Reviews Editor for The Arkansas International literary magazine. Her work has previously appeared in HAD and the Tightwires Anthology. Please send her pictures of your dog via Instagram @dogenthusiast.
Driving Route 5 West Side I overheard a regular rider named Elena talking to another passenger about her cat. “Oh, Luna does this . . . Oh, Luna does that . . . It’s the cutest thing . . . Luna is theebest cat.”
Bus drivers are not supposed to talk to passengers. There’s a DOT safety poster in the break room stating “unnecessary conversation is not only distracting, it’s PROHIBITED.” But Elena had crossed a line.
“I think you’re exaggerating.”
Elena glared at me in the overhead mirror. “Excuse me?”
”There’s no way Luna can be theebest cat. Maybe a distant second. I know this because I have the best cat. Her name is Billy, Billy with a Y.”
We adopted Billy ten years ago. I’d been the one hold out in the family when it came to having a pet. The kids wanted a cat. My wife wanted a cat. “But cats puke everywhere, and I’d be the one cleaning the litter box,” I’d say.
When I finally did go to the shelter it was under duress. The wife drove. I had agreed to go only if it was while the kids were in school so they didn’t beg for every cat they saw and whine when we left empty-handed. I got out of the car with my mind made up but prepared to pretend. The miasma punched me as I walked through the door. A thick, dank, disrespectful concentration of both pre and post-processed animal chow, wet dog, cat piss, and disinfectant. Dozens of dogs incessantly barked in some back area I would not venture.
A lady with bloody scratches on her arms told us to look around. I followed my wife into an enclosure with scattered condos and scratching posts where cats could mingle and lounge, and hope to con their way out of an overcrowded nightmare of shared litter boxes and donated food and into a new home. Use their big eyes, head tilts, and rollover playfulness to prey on lonely, affection-starved saps looking to buy a friend because they didn’t have any.
I watched them all with a cold heart, arms close to my sides. I couldn’t be fooled. I didn’t need friends. And they all seemed to know it.
All except one.
A solid female Tabby came out of nowhere and jumped atop a cat condo I was standing next to. She stared into my eyes, ready and willing to be petted. When I didn’t give in, she leaned forward and rubbed against my sternum with her full body weight, as if we were old buds. Nice try.
But something was different about this one. She didn’t vibe like the other idiot cats shucking and jiving for an easier life. Maybe she was just a better con. Or maybe she felt the same way I did about this whole ridiculous process and saw that in me. They say animals can tell what’s inside a person. I reached up, paused, then scratched her head, stroked her back. Her spine arched and she purred, headbutting me. I hung out with her for a few more minutes. Just to make it look like I’d made an effort. She seemed nice and I wished her well. On the way out I found her picture and information on the wall. A four-year-old stray someone at the shelter had named Millie.
My wife was wearing a big ass grin as we turned out of the lot. “So? Did you see any cats you liked?”
I almost mentioned Millie. Instead I folded my arms, looked out the passenger window like a petulant child. “No.”
Within a week I was back at the shelter. Alone. I hadn’t told my wife I was going. Just in case I came to my senses and turned around before getting there. A different lady with deep scratches on her arms had me fill out a questionnaire, so they could determine if our home was safe for Millie.
“Will the cat have an emergency savings fund of at least $2,000?”
“What specific brand of organic, free-range, grain-free holistic food do you plan to feed?”
“If you move, break up with a partner, or have a baby, how will you prove the cat is still your primary priority?”
“Are you willing to surrender your entire couch set to structural compromise?”
“What is your philosophy on feline behavioral discipline?”
I didn’t have two-grand for myself, let alone for a cat, hadn’t considered pet food yet, and I was for sure, without a doubt, never getting a divorce. I adjusted the truth and was handed a clipboard with adoption paperwork.
As a staff member slipped away to do whatever they do with paperwork I called my wife, who was surprised to hear where I was. “The kids are gonna be so happy!” She didn’t like the name Millie because she’d had a dog named Millie and was against the idea of using it again. But I was reluctant to change an animal’s given name. She might hate it and decide to ignore us whenever we called her. When people claim their pet doesn’t know their own name I want to say maybe they just don’t like it. As a compromise, the wife suggested Billy, because it sounded similar. I looked into the enclosure and saw Millie, now Billy, sitting atop the same cat condo as when we first met, looking at me through the glass. I waved like an idiot. The staff member went in, grabbed her by the scruff, and stuffed her in a cardboard carrier with “I’M GOING HOME” printed on the side in big, red bubble letters. Billy yowled and yawped the whole ride.
When I got back to the house I brought the carrier down into the basement and opened the top, expecting Billy to leap out. But she just stayed there, looking up at me like What the fuck is happening? I tried to coax her out by going psss, psss, psss, and then with treats, but nothing worked. I considered turning the carrier over and shaking her out like pruned limbs from a trash can but decided that might be taken as a poor welcome by an already scared cat. I thought about how friendly she was during my first visit to the shelter and briefly wondered if I’d been given the wrong cat. I checked the time, saw I had to pick Holly up from preschool and bolted out the door. Holly burst with excitement when I told her about our new cat.
I figured Billy would have taken advantage of her alone time to explore. But she was still in the box. Staring up at us with that same look on her face. I told the kid we would just have to be patient. We set up a litter box, put out a bowl of water and a bowl of food, but several hours later Billy was still in the box. So I poured her out. She scrambled across the fake wood flooring, and found a place to hide. And that was the last any of us saw of her that day. My wife and Sam came home, looked everywhere and couldn’t find the cat. The following day, Sam caught a glimpse of green-yellow eyes reflecting light from under a piece of furniture. By the time anyone else got there they were gone. This is how it went for a couple months. It was almost like we didn’t have a cat. The only reason we knew she was there, somewhere, was because food and water would disappear, and there’d be something for me to scoop from the litter box.
I felt like a moron. Billy had conned me afterall, which I kind of respected. But my kids had wanted a cat and I managed to adopt one that didn’t want anything to do with us.
One night, Holly said, “What ever happened to the cat we had that day?”
I hate to admit it, but I considered seeing if I could take Billy back to the shelter and exchange her for a different cat. My wife had enough. She enacted a strict daily program of exposure therapy that became known as “Billy Time.” After dinner was cleaned up she’d drag the cat out by the scruff from whatever piece of furniture she was hiding under and bring her to the couch where we could all pet her. At first the forced integration sessions only lasted a minute or so before Billy dug her claws into someone’s lap and escaped to one of her hiding places. But the time she tolerated this gradually increased. A couple minutes became ten, ten became twenty. She stopped digging her claws into our laps. Her body relaxed. She began to purr with the attention we gave her. By six months Billy was voluntarily coming out to hang with us, appearing in the living room at “Billy Time” all on her own, pausing to look at us like, You forgot to drag me out from under the dresser. She even began begging for food. Loudly and insistently. She was still skittish with Holly because little kids are full of energy and like to dress cats up and carry them around like a baby, which Billy usually tolerated with nothing more than an indignant expression. And when she simply had enough of being forced to wear a tutu, Billy would lightly scratch H, who would then cry and claim to have done nothing to deserve it.
Over a short period of time even that changed. Holly and Billy were becoming best friends. Billy even seemed to enjoy being dressed up and smothered with hugs and carried like a baby. As Holly grew and calmed down they spent more and more time together. Holly became her favorite person in the house. Billy didn’t sleep in anyone else’s bed. She would perk up when Holly got home from school, lay across her math homework, and no longer bothered shaking off the hair ties Holly draped over her ears, wearing them with purring, slit-eyed regal satisfaction and pride. As if she’d been crowned.
Billy also became my writing companion. There was never a time she wouldn’t curl up next to me as I typed or scribbled in my notebooks.
The kids discovered the box containing Billy’s adoption papers and saw her name had been changed from Millie. It was a major scandal.
“Changing someone’s name is mean!”
“You should have asked us first!”
My wife explained the decision behind the name change. The kids weren’t swayed. They were angry we would do such a thing, angry we hadn’t consulted them. There was a revolt. In protest, they started calling her Millie. If I called her Billy, Sam would say, “You mean Millie.” But their attention spans were short. Millie became Billy once again. Peace returned to the valley. But only for a time.
In the divorce my ex-wife got the house. I got the cat. Billy didn’t appreciate being stuffed into a carrier and emerging into a strange new place with strange new sounds and smells. She expressed her displeasure the only way cats seem able to: puking. But, like she did with the family all those years ago, Billy warmed up to the new situation and even seemed to enjoy having a new home. My ex-wife had added a puppy to the mix, a development Billy and I did not care for. In no time she was strutting around as if my new apartment had been her territory forever. At this time, so early in the breakup of the family, there was no love lost between me and the ex, but I remained grateful to her for three things. Two of those things being our kids. The third was forcing me to go to the animal shelter the day I first met Billy.
Sharing custody of my kids, who I’d seen every day of their lives up until then, was the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through. Having Billy snuggled next to me as I read or watched tv in my sad, depressive state helped a lot. I suppose I did need a friend.
Time went on. Scar tissue covered old wounds. People adjusted. Billy got old. She was nearing eighty in cat years. Meds for a thyroid condition made her weight go up and down. Then only down. She went from twelve pounds to six, then four. She started to look like skin and bones. One weekend she began to have trouble breathing, then lost the ability to meow. Her not being able to meow was possibly the most heartbreaking part to me. She could no longer perform a cat’s sworn duty to annoy their owner with incessant cries for food. She didn’t ask for food at all.
The vet said it was heart failure. After having fluid drained from her lungs, Billy started eating and meowing again, but I was warned that is temporary. That she will get worse again. It lasted fifteen days.
Billy rode in the back of my car. I’d placed the towel containing her body inside a cardboard box. I thought about the cardboard cat carrier from the shelter with “I’M GOING HOME” printed on the side in big, red bubble letters. Billy was leaving us the way she had arrived.
The pet crematory was in a dark building atop a hill. In a reverse procession, I carried Billy to the door behind my ex-wife and kids. A man with a big mustache let us in. The main room had shelves and shelves of urns and keepsakes, such as necklaces and bracelets one could put their pet’s ashes in. The mustache directed us to a small room to lay Billy out on a cushioned counter. The little room had dark walls and was dimly lit. There was a bench to sit on while we said our goodbyes. On one side of Billy’s cushion there was a statue of a frog sitting in the lotus position. On the other side were a couple of children’s books about death. On the wall above, a framed image of Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet holding hands and walking away below the phrase “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.” And goddammit I cried even more. Sam wanted a hug, then didn’t want a hug. I don’t know how long we were there. We said a difficult final goodbye to our Billy, walked out of the room and then the building. It was the first time we had left her with someone who was not one of us.
At home, afterimages of Billy haunted my peripheral vision in the form of a couch cushion, a shadow, a hoodie left crumpled in a corner. I was careful to watch my step in places she had always been underfoot. Drying tears left a salty film on my glasses.
That day when I told Elena that her cat couldn’t possibly be the best cat in the world, that Luna could only be a distant second best cat at best, she took playful exception to this hard truth. From then on, whenever she got on my bus, Elena would greet me with, “How’s the second best cat doing?” And I would dutifully reply, “I don’t know, you tell me.”
The first time I saw Elena after Billy’s passing she was waiting at her usual stop in a downpour. I knew telling her what happened was going to require everything I had not to cry. And it still wouldn’t be enough. I briefly considered sailing past, pretending I didn’t see her.
But I hit the four-ways, eased to the curb, pulled the E-brake, and the bus kneeled down before her. I opened the door. Elen boarded, closing her umbrella, and looked at me with a mischievous smile. “How’s the second best cat in the world?”
It’s summer break from college. I’m living with my girlfriend, Anne, at her farm in Pocomoke City, Maryland instead of visiting my home in Pittsburgh because guys at her job kept trying to fuck her last summer.
She works as a waitress at a beach restaurant called Mr. Bello’s. That’s where it happened. Anne says it wasn’t her fault, and I mostly believe her.
I’m going to try to get a job there as a busboy. Until then, I will be helping out around here.
Anne’s dad, Ed, is a chicken farmer. We can’t stay at her real house while we’re here. We could, but I’d rather not stay in a house with Ed because he gets drunk a lot and starts swinging at people.
The only other option is staying with Ed’s cousin, Billy.
Billy lives in an old camper in the woods between Aunt Linda’s backyard and the township dumpsite.
No electricity. I don’t know how I’m going to charge my phone. What if Anne needs to text me while she’s at work?
Billy has three teeth. His voice is gravelly.
Me and Anne stand there. Billy has a twin bed, a hotplate, a pair of tall rubber boots, a coat hanging from a lamp. A few dishes. A toilet. A sink.
Kitchenette grease sits in the humidity. Billy’s BO.
“Gon’ need yer help in the chicken house tomorrow,” he says in front of my girlfriend. I say okay.
At 5:00 AM I meet Ed and Billy in front of the two long chicken houses. It’s dark, but you can see all the stars in Pocomoke. Anne’s still asleep.
“Too early for ya?” Billy says, steaming Styrofoam cup in hand.
I have to wear rubber boots that go all the way up to my knees.
Ed is hunched over, vomiting pink. He drank eighteen shots of Jose Cuerva last night. His pancreas pokes out like he’s pregnant.
Air blasts out vents of the sides of the building, spraying ammonia in my eyes.
When I squint, Billy laughs. He says his son, Little Billy, is my age, works at a Wal-Mart. Hasn’t seen him in years. Doesn’t care to, neither. He doesn’t like how Little Billy failed out of Air Force Basic Training and wears skinny jeans.
He smacks my shoulder. “Ya ready?”
“Yep!” I try my best.
He laughs again.
Ed opens the chicken house. He flips some switches on a control panel mounted to the wall. “Fuckin’ piece-a-shit.”
“Come here,” Billy says to me.
I follow him through another door.
They aren’t baby chicks. Definitely not full-grown either. Tens of thousands, clucking.
Billy hands me a bucket, raises his voice over the clucks. “Gotta walk through, pick up the dead. I’ll go do one house; you guys do this one.”
“Pick up the dead?”
“Yep.”
“Whattaya mean?”
“You just fuckin’ walk through, aisle-by-aisle. You see a fuckin’ dead chicken, pick it up, throw it in the bucket.”
I nod. “Alright.”
“You want gloves?”
Billy’s not wearing gloves.
“I’m good.”
Billy just stands there and watches.
I walk slowly, lifting my feet high, looking carefully before landing each step. The chickens scatter every time I step forward.
“Watcha don’t step on ’em,” Billy says, arms folded, leaning against a wall.
“Uh-huh.”
I make it all the way down the first aisle without a dead chicken. Maybe there are days with no dead chickens.
“What are you doin’ up this early?” I hear Billy yell as I turn down the next aisle.
I look up. Anne stands in the doorway. Short Soffe shorts and tank top.
“Morning, babe!” she says.
“Hey.”
Billy chuckles under his breath.
I see it. A dead one. I glance to see if Billy’s watching. Finally, he’s not. He’s lighting a cigarette.
I rush past the dead chicken. A few moments pass. I keep walking.
“Hold up! Wait a minute!”
“Huh?” I turn around.
“Missed one.”
“I did?”
“Yup.”
Fake chuckle. “Oh.” I stand there.
“You gone get it?”
“Where is it?”
Ed comes in. “Annie!”
“Boy missed a dead one, Ed,” says Billy as he walks toward the dead chicken. I finally catch a deep breath. He’s going to get it himself.
“Oh yeah? That’s alright. Just go back, pick it up, that’s all.” He looks at me seriously for several moments then laughs. “I’m just kidding. You don’t have to.”
I grin, but I can tell the rest of my face doesn’t match.
“I got it,” I say.
I get there before Billy, pick it up, toss it in the bucket. THUD.
I look at Anne. She’s watching. Everything in me tingles.
I keep walking.
There’s a chicken limping.
I walk past it.
“Gotta get ridda him, too!” Billy shouts over the roaring fans. Feathers swirl through the burning air.
“How?”
“Gotta kill it. Waste of feed.”
I laugh and keep walking.
“I’m serious.”
“Oh. What do I do?”
“Lemme show you.”
Billy drops his cigarette in the middle of the chicken house floor, stomps it out, walks over. He picks the limping chicken up by the neck, winds up, and slams the chicken against the nearest wall. He tosses it in my bucket. “That’s all. Just do that.”
“Okay.” I try to keep my voice steady.
I rush through the rest of the house, praying really hard that there are no more injured birds.
But there is. I figure it’s not worth hesitating. They’re all watching.
I pick it up by the neck, just like Billy showed me. Its neck squirms in my hand like a snake, and it squawks a lot. That’s how I know I’ll able to do it. To make the awful squawking stop.
Plus, they’re all just going to stare at me until I do it anyway. I slam it against the wall. The squawking doesn’t stop. I didn’t do it hard enough. I do it harder. The squawking stops.
I want to throw up, and I feel a tingling buzz at the same time. I look at Anne. Her smile makes the throw up part go away.
Ed looks at Billy. “See that?”
“Took a while,” Billy says.
“Now, he did good.”
I kill two more chickens by the time I’m done with that house.
Billy asks if I want to help him in the other house since Ed needs to lie down.
I say sure.
We walk through the second house, looking left and right, scanning for any limps or crooked wings.
Each time I have to do it, it gets easier. Still, I hate doing it. It makes me feel like I’m hurting God. It would be one thing if we were going to eat them. But they were never going to make it to the processing plants anyway. They would just get fat off feed and end up in the flesh glacier behind the two houses anyway, turkey buzzards picking at them.
“I’ve never killed one before,” Anne says, walking next to me and Billy.
“He’s never made you help?”
“Oh I help every year. I just can’t do that.”
“So, what do you do?”
“Just toss it in the bucket.”
“Isn’t that worse?”
“I figure they’re suffering on the dirt floor here, or they’re suffering in the bucket. What’s the difference? All I’m doing is moving them.”
“Who gives a shit?” chimes Billy, cackling, cigarette dangling.
We dump the buckets of dead or dying chickens into the back of an old pickup. Billy backs up to the compost pile.
It’s 93 degrees now. Humid. Chicken shit-ammonia air in every breath. It burns my lungs.
Me and Billy stand on each side of the bed and toss handfuls of chickens into the massive compost pile. The buzzards wait in the surrounding trees.
Anne stays in the AC. I don’t blame her.
Billy grabs three chickens at a time in each hand, by the talons. I try to keep up. I can manage one in each hand.
I look back at Anne. She’s texting. Probably her mom or her boss or something. I look at Billy. He never thinks about stuff like that. He’s probably thinking about taking a nap and sipping coffee and smoking by the fire later.
Watching her causes me to slow down.
“You alright?” growls Billy.
I pick up the pace. “Yep.” I toss a few more handfuls, look back at Anne. She’s still texting.
The buzzards lean forward.
Richard Pounder is a writer based in Philly. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Bending Genres, Maudlin House, Expat Press, BULL, Some Words, and elsewhere. You can follow him on X: RichPounder150
Austria and Algeria are playing in Kansas City in a strange World Cup game. If the game ends in a draw, both teams get through to the knockout stage. If one team wins then Iran takes the losing team’s spot in the knockout round. The game is 1-1 in the 48th minute. Iran is still alive in the wartime World Cup, but will Algeria or Austria push and attack for Iran on the pitch?
Austria scores in the 54th minute to take the lead. A clinical quick strike for Marcel Sabitzer. Algeria will have to attack for their World Cup lives, Austria defend for Iran’s.
Almost all of the viral social media videos of Europeans (and Australians) experiencing American excess are part of a CIA operation. The captain of Algeria, Riyad Mahrez, scores in the 60th minute. Tie game, thirty more minutes to either pass the ball around and both go through or attack and let Iran through to play in the wartime World Cup on enemy soil. A match break (necessary due to the extreme summer heat and humidity in much of North America) at the 69th minute.
The crowd is loud, storming through my scream. Chants I cannot understand. In languages I don’t know. Any single individual’s experience is so small, our perspectives so thin. The world is everything outside our periphery and we process all of it inside our narrow passage. The world is everything that is the case. The game has slowed to a crawl here in the 81st minute, both teams seemingly comfortable with the draw. Iran waits.
The scoreboard in the stadium switches to a live Messi goal. Roars and roars of roars. Players looked up and watched. The ball is staying in the midfield, passing and passing time.
Pattycake paddy cake out there. The crowd whistles its disgust at the pace of play.
In the 93rd minute Riyadh Mahrez breaks away and scores again for Algeria. Austria is shocked. Iran is alive.
June 28th 2026
In the last seconds of play Austria’s Sasa Kalajdzic on his first touch, with Austria on the brink of elimination puts a header in the back of the net. The game is called. Iran is eliminated in the wartime World Cup.
Russia threatens to blow up “half of Finland.”
July, War(s)
On this, the eve of the semiquincentennial of American independence, in this century of the empire falling, I take two Xanax before lunch, smoke half a joint, and head to the municipal pool. It is good to get out in the community to take the temperature of a thing. We are under a heat dome, the whole east coast. Highs are 103. It has not rained in weeks. I have heard from my people in DC. The city is under construction. Hazards everywhere, smothered in reds, whites, blues. The things a heat dome can do to a city is diabolical. The work of the devil, it is no wonder the defining feature of hell is the heat. There are no skyscrapers in DC, in our nation’s capital. Did you know this? Many people do not. There is an ordinance relating to height and the capitol dome. It’s a city on a marsh. Most people know this. It’s a city with no representation. Important to know this. I have elected to stay back, trust my eyes and ears to my team in DC (I have just this morning enlisted an audio visual documentarian), and, instead, report on the semiquincentennial from one of the nameless, supposedly charming small American towns which, I’m told, make up something called the ‘heart of America.’ There are so many Americas. We can only stand on one patch at a time, looking out. Perspectives limited, obscured by the sheer size of this nation of states.
I am reading Death in the Afternoon under designer Italian shades at the pool on account of the sun and wanting to be a better writer.
A settling high kicks in during adult swim.
I float on my back and study the clouds. The sun bores down.
Until I find the evening has once again gotten away from me.
July 4th 2026
On her big, beautiful birthday I went to one of her lakes, traded the rest of the courier’s hashish to one of her teenagers in exchange for thirty minutes on the jet ski. I sacrificed a touch of my high for water sports, and I did not regret it.
I would eat an ice cream if handed one, but am too stoned to initiate.
Suburban bombs in the air. Where was I this time last year? Somewhere stuck beneath the pages of Wartime Author and if I had any mettle about me (a little ‘get up and go,’ as they say) I could lug out the manuscript and check rather quickly but inertia sets in, as it often does, and I hear the fireworks, municipal and homegrown alike, and the dogs, hooting and hollering tonight. How long will it last? Is it truly celebratory? What with all these dark forces milling about?
Meanwhile Charles, next door, is blasting some television special. It sounds like Lawrence Welk with explosive diarrhea. I can hear him, through the thin motel wall, giggling. Chortling. The motherfucker is chortling. There’s nothing left but the ride down the mountain of empire, and Charles is chortling.
This July fourth is one of those swampy, endless summer nights. Imagine fireflies. Imagine a heat dome. Skittering children riding motorbikes on the lawn. The city is tensing up. Record heat today, up and down the coast. The night air is a heavy warm blanket. There is no relief, only atrition.
7.5.26
It was so hot the fire alarms went off this evening at the King’s Motel. The leftover fireworks sputtered out around nine, maybe ten. England defeated Mexico in the Azteca, 3-2. I have no reports from Mexico City (where I do keep a few attachés). The heat is making everything seem sinister. Likely I have said this before or made a similar point. This is the curse of the column. I cannot look back in the true spirit of currentivism. And I owe a debt to currentivism. This is me working it off. There are several things I have left out, only one or two on the advice of counsel, and my debts have thus far been spared the shame of being confused for literature. Suffice to say a semi-professional poker player and freelance writer living in a motel at a monthly rate has a few debts to pay. You don’t arrive here flush.
Thunderstorms interrupted the 250th birthday party in the capital city.
An image surfaces of Dear Leader watching himself watch himself on television. Images capture so much more than words and that’s their problem.
July 7th 2026
Iran is attacking ships in the Strait of Hormuz again, the birthday party is over. The United States tells the world it does not favor the rule of a player having to be suspended for the next game if he gets a red card and we have been nothing but gracious hosts, sooo……
And in this era it works.
Football, however, no stranger to controversy, political favors, bribes, is still settled on the pitch. Dear Leader made three phone calls to the FIFA President, his friend, and the suspension was lifted for America’s best player in this North American World Cup.
Then Belgium completely dominated the United States 3-1, and our goalie made a particularly humiliating, comical physical error. All of the host nations are eliminated. Iran resumed their attacks on the Strait of Hormuz. I shot 109 at the municipal par three in expensive Italian sunglasses and globs of white sunscreen glue stuck to my beard. It was an unattractive sight and I was walking and I was playing alone and there was no worse or slower player on the course and I let every one play through until the night manager had to shut the lights off so I gave myself a triple bogey on 18 to fill out my scorecard (I am working on my short game this week). I blame the quaaludes entirely. For all of it, and I apologize too. For all of it, I must apologize.
U.S. renews strikes against Iran, sanctions back on, peace off, war on.
July 10th, 2026
Overheard tonight, having drinks with the courier, a young pastel polo collared man with boat shoes announces to his table “Have fun with your fucking utopian bullshit. I watched Hotel Rwanda and bought a gun.” The courier needs Manny Machado to hit a home run tonight to hit his parlay.
July 11th, 2026
I wrote this during the war. I wrote in those days, my son. I wrote during the war. I was paid to cover it (am paid to cover it) and bring news home to the common people. I am active on several fronts. It was supposed to last ten days, maybe two weeks at most and I was going to grab my juiciest, nastiest byline yet: The Atlantic. I have dreamed, ever since seeing the photograph of the owner of The Atlantic widow and philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, on a sunny day in a bath suit looking radiant and sexy sitting on a couch laughing with Gishlaine Maxwell (her own gifts pouring through the lens) of finagling my way into their pages. Real writers write pieces for The Atlantic. The Paris Review. The New Yorker. The widow benefactor. The CIA. The Fleischmann Yeast Man’s winnings in a poker game. In other words, the holy trinity of literary superstardom. This is still a real thing. This is the thing that was supposed to happen for me but the war kept on, past ten days and past two weeks and The Atlantic wasn’t real (my ex-wife duped me, it’s a whole story), and the war kept on and I was looking for a missing writer and I had his manuscript and he was down to only writing by hand for fear of the machines stealing his work and the war kept on and the land use attorney cut a back room deal with The Estate and the war kept on and new fronts opened up and a solider set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy and the wars kept on and multiplied as my own wars, public and private, played out against a backdrop of an empire falling. Presently, the night sky. Everywhere I went, every room I went in, for ten whole years, I heard whispers. It was during the war, my son, I wrote these things. I covered it.
July 12th, 2026
I woke up this morning on the Crystal Coast, hiding from several things at once and still chasing shadows. First thing, a fistful of ice, black coffee. A morning smoke and stroll on the beach, beneath the pylons at the fishing pier. A death in the senate is the first news of the world. The oldest senate on record, I believe. Nothing reaches me here. The aromas of the day: salt air, marijuana smoke, tobacco smoke, aloe vera, Deet. I sit with Martin Amis on the beach for three hours, racing right past noon, while he tells me raunchy, hilarious stories of John Self (in the voice of). Every hour for fifteen minutes I close my eyes and leave Martin and instead join John Self in my dreams, clinking glasses and making a fortune, sleeping with everything. It’s a much nicer way when Martin tells it, but sometimes I like to sneak off.
July 13th, 2026
America attacks Iran for the second straight evening, striking in honor of their fallen senator, a committed war hawk.
The deck boards at my beach house are wobbly and I have gained ten pounds, most of it fried flounder doused in tartar sauce plus all the goddamn sugar in mojitos, and I am myself wobbly. I finish my last joint of the night in fear of falling through, to the deck below, warped wood, two days rain soaked, giving out.
July 15th, 2026
Smoke from the Canadian wildfires returns, and an explosive diarrhetic parasite is in the food, likely lettuces.
Argentina will play Spain in the World Cup Final. It is the summer of soccer. The summer of shit. The summer of smoke. I am taking my coffee hot and black here on the island. My meals are fried. I have gone surf-fishing every evening and surf-caught next to nothing. The mornings are afternoons instead, and I briefly consider taking up residence at the weekly rate motel in this town instead of the rotten capital city I currently shrivel in but after walking in to speak to the manager about a special writer’s rate and seeing the condition of the place (musty is fine, sour and musty is not; peeled paint and popcorn ceilings preferred but the parade of roaches and mosquito breeding grounds in the bathtub are beneath even my own shrinking dignity) I decided to keep my wits about me and not turn a vacation into a home. People make this mistake. Many do. Yes, it’s true, I am taking a vacation. If there are bombs and deaths outside these beach house walls they have not reached me. I am concerned with the tides and the chance of rain each hour, how, when, and where the yellow snapper are biting and little to nothing else, blessedly. I deserve it. After everything they’ve put me through. I’ve fulfilled half of my assignment: a column every month for Farewell Transmission on the war slash wars in twenty-twenty-six. The money men behind the magazine’s operation forced me to do promotion earlier this week. They asked me to arrive at a time and a place and they put their clothes on me and made me speak nonsense into their cameras. Everyone wants to know what a writer looks like. What a writer wears. The contours of his or her scowl. Etc. Etc. I oblige because I chose to be their jester. I take their dirty money and they take my dirty writing and a couple times a year someone from the New York Times calls to ask for me a quote about the “literary crisis in America,” and I sing for my supper.
I will blur every line there is and disintegrate distinction until you too see reality is negotiable. You can change in and out of them. Reality is not fixed. Reality is more like a menu of options. One of those old tv guides. I put up a shingle today in town. “Discrete Investigations 919-518-4242.”
July 16th, 2026
A second heat dome has hit my mid-Atlantic state and I leave the beach house to get back to work, stopping and playing 18 holes at a retirement town (shooting 116, cheating on several holes and giving up on one to sit under a tree and smoke). The highlight of my day. I thought seriously about why I got into this line of work. What keeps me clinging to the life raft of literature in this rotted out psychotic pornographic digital overlay overlaying everything serving you exactly what you ordered (and twelve things you didn’t know you needed)? It’s a fair question. Quite the navel gazing one, I’d caution. I could say I believe in a kind of transference of consciousness between writer and reader and further believing we are all one consciousness briefly separated here on earth and so reading is spiritual undertaking for me and I take it seriously as such, but to say this would not be fitting with the modern style, nor notions. None of us choose the times we live in. I certainly did not. Am I made for them instead? Absofuckinglutely. I removed the shingle this morning, returned the keys to the owner, took out the trash and put in the lock code and ran the dishwasher and headed West (east would deposit you in the Atlantic Ocean) back to the wars, and my existence as a noticing machine.
July 19th, 2026
Iran attacks a U.S. military base in Jordan. Two service members killed, one missing.
My Russian propagandist tells me, tonight, over several coffee mugs of Nolet’s Reserve, a coup may be fomenting in Kiev. He said language matters greatly and I agreed. I assured him I would let him keep his own language if he agreed to a sit-down interview (it has been brought to my attention, by readers and editors alike, in frequent messages, terse and exhibiting alarmingly high levels of executive function, that I ought to report on the war I started to report on and stop reporting on the wars I picked up along the way and especially, please Lord, the private war I started and so I am trying to please my few and faithful readers and my immaculate editors, all publishers past, present, and future, and get some proper journalism done) and he is mulling the offer over at present.
July 20th, 2026
The Tate Brothers are taken in custody in Miami, awaiting extradition to the United Kingdom for serious sex crimes. Dear Leader welcomed them here in February, 2025. Strange.
July 22th, 2026
The house approves Dear Leader’s request for an additional $95B to fight the war in Iran.
July 23rd, 2026
Trade routes. International shipping. Thirteenth night in a row of strikes on Iran. Houthi’s attacked two Saudi tankers in the Red Sea.
July 25th, 2026
I can hear my editor in my ear now. I can hear the ghost of my literary benefactor. “Get to work! Bring me news of the war! Our people are starving.”
I am fucking working here! I am ON THE GROUND! Days, weeks, and an occasional April may go by without much ink touching paper and it may LOOK like I am abdicating all responsibilities, letting down my legion of fans, stealing paychecks from Farewell Transmission, thumbing my nose at my editor, besmirching the good name of my dead benefactor but, like the poem on the wall in a beach house where you only see one set of footprints during the trials and tribulations, when I am not working I am actually working the hardest. And I am also hanging on for dear life. None of this is easy, and none of this felt like my choice. I wanted to get my ex-wife back. For good. I wanted to be a famous writer, and surprise literary conferences with the rare appearance to stunned crowds of literati, academics, and the press. Well, when I was five I probably wanted to be a fucking firefighter. Dreams are a nuisance. Dreams get you a room at the King’s Motel and bed fleas. Dreams get you a still unanswered letter from Baltimore. Dream long enough and you too can cover a war from a behavioral health center.
I worked plenty this month. I reject all of your claims and insinuations to the otherwise. The war raged on, I’m sure. Empty words, big bombs, a chokehold blockade stalemate prevents safe passage, elections, smoke from Canadian wildfires, the price of goods continues to go up while seven people are getting diabolically richer by the hour. More Iranian citizens were killed. More members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard were killed. More American servicemen were killed. We celebrated our 250th birthday. We proved we can cheat and still never make it out of the round of 16 in the World Cup. I sat around, dumbly, and waited. I laid on my bed in the King’s Motel drunk, high, destructive, sad, waiting. Waiting for something to happen, anything, other than what was already happening and the month came and went and circumstances did not improve. Morale remained low.
Derek Maine writes about the war for Farewell Transmission.
My father, the murderer, wants to play Settlers of Catan. He assembles the board, takes the dice from the plastic bag, passes out resources—brick, sheep, ore. “It’s all about the ports,” he tells us, divulging his strategy. His old army rucksack is by the door. He spent the entirety of his incarceration playing board games.
“How about a beer?” my wife asks.
“Or a glass of milk,” I say.
“Do you have soy?” my father asks.
My father can shoot a man between the eyes for $87 in small bills but he’s developed a slight dairy allergy.
The man he murdered was only nineteen. His name was Ronald Fisher. He had a daughter, five months old.
He calls my wife Little Lady, looks around the living room appraisingly, as though he’s casing the joint. He says the halfway house is always cold. The television is broken and the toaster doesn’t work. I wonder what my mother saw in him. I wonder what they talked about in those late-night phone calls and the monthly visits.
Soon I lose interest in the game, make bad trades, stop going for Victory Points.
“Will you be staying for dinner?” my wife asks when the game is over.
“Chow?” my father says.
I elbow her under the table.
My father eats his polenta in three bites, then asks what it was. After dinner it’s time for him to go back to the halfway house, except he can’t find his key.
My father can elude law enforcement for 37 days, but he can’t keep track of a door key. When we find it, my wife puts the key on a pink wrist coil, like the ones worn by teenage girls.
“But wait,” my father says. “One more game.”
Hearts—his favorite. The only time I visited him in prison, it wasn’t cigarettes, erotica, or fresh fruit he asked me to bring, but a new deck of Bicycle playing cards. My father deals. “Now remember, you have to follow suit.”
I have my father’s hands, the same jawline, the same blue eyes. Yesterday, on the way to work, a guy cut me off and I followed him for three blocks, got out, and pounded on the hood of his car. Quick to anger, my wife calls it.
The games are over. It’s almost midnight. I want to give him something, a gift to ensure he’ll never come back. I look around the room. A chair, a lamp—anything. “Know what, Dad? Why don’t you take that TV home with you.”
“You mean it?”
“Sure. I know what it’s like starting over.”
For me, starting over was moving to a new city for college, leaving the dorms when I was 19. It was learning to live without a father, breaking up with a first girlfriend. It wasn’t being released from prison after twenty-five years, into a world that doesn’t want you.
He hoists the rucksack over his shoulder, lifts the television. I watch him disappear, close the door, and lock the deadbolt.
The Closers
One night, Bruce Springsteen played at my band’s house party. We were about to be evicted. There were dirty dishes in the bathtub, the toilet handle was missing. Bruce Springsteen’s red bandana fell off in the foyer. It was a great party until someone left a hash knife in the daiquiri mix and turned on the blender. The girl lost her eye but she wouldn’t press charges.
When the party was over, Bruce Springsteen was able to reboard his tour bus only after being hermetically sealed in a germ-free plastic pouch. We all waved goodbye from the porch as his forty-five-foot tour bus pulled away.
The next day, our band hit the studio. Speck, the recording engineer, kept a bottle of bourbon under the console. Liquid courage, he said.
Speck was originally from Placerville, California. I’d never been to Placerville, but I imagined it was one of those sun-scorched towns where everyone worked at the Petco and lived next to a water treatment plant.
Speck said lots of bands are great live, but when you get them in the studio, they can’t produce. They weren’t closers. We wanted to be closers.
Back then, we all had day jobs. Our singer worked as a dog walker. Our drummer was in telephone marketing. I was a migrant farm worker. We were young and unambitious. We took all the latest drugs. But I was unhappy.
Ever since I was a boy back in Little Walnut, Iowa, I wanted to be famous. At family gatherings, I stood on an ottoman and sang hymns for my seven sisters. One year, I won the Little Walnut talent competition for my impersonation of Mrs. Teller, our school secretary.
Bruce Springsteen called, he was looking for his bandana. Were we hungry? He was meeting with Interscope Records CEO Jimmy Iovine to ink a thirty-two million dollar deal, but he could stop by a BBQ joint on the way back. He took our lunch orders. We were all vegan, but we couldn’t tell Bruce Springsteen that, so pork it was.
Bruce came with the sandwiches wrapped in waxy paper. We wanted to show off. Before noon, we recorded thirty-seven versions of House of the Rising Sun, which our guitar player thought he had written. Our singer was learning the saxophone. We discouraged it heartily.
I played hammered dulcimer. We were a punk band. It was a transitional period.
By 2pm, we were starving. Someone brought in a carrot cake from Safeway. I found a dirty fork next to a hotplate and washed it with powdered soap in the bathroom sink. Bruce slipped out the back door.
In the control room, there was a green chaise lounge. I laid down and stared at the posterson the ceiling. My favorite was the Whitesnake poster promoting their controversial sixth album, Slide It In. I hadn’t slid it in anyone in a long time.
Her name was Coco, like the Puffs. Coco was a dance major at a small liberal arts college. She was a very passionate woman, until a hash knife got stuck in her eye.
That night, at the studio, we took all of the drugs and drank all the whiskey. Our drummer drank a pint of kerosene and smashed a beer can against his forehead at 120 BPMs. I set fire to the control panel, and we made off with thousands in high-end microphones, vintage amps, and monitors.
Later, after the band split up, it was back to migrant farm work for me: blueberries in late summer, apples in fall, oranges in winter. I got my knuckles tattooed and lived in a yurt. I discovered Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre.
One morning, years later, back in Little Walnut, I saw Bruce Springsteen again. I followed him through a cornfield at dawn. The leaves of corn were decorated with beads of dew, my cotton pants heavy from the wet stalks rubbing against my thighs. Finally, I caught up to him. He was wearing his ‘Born to Run’ era outfit: black leather jacket, white T-shirt, and torn jeans. I tapped on his shoulder, and he turned to me, but by then I wasn’t a punk anymore, just a regular guy with a receding mohawk and nothing to prove.
Round and Round
Beef is forty-eight. Works in the record store and sings in a black metal band. Lives on Pop-Tarts. Is locally famous. Every Saturday night, a dozen hoarse, middle-aged women scream his name, fists raised in the sign of the devil horns.
Beef has a son. The son lives in Phoenix. Caitlyn, the boy’s mother, seethes with hatred. Beef wants to talk to the son. It’s his birthday. The boy is eight. They haven’t spoken in—how long has it been? Never. They have never spoken.
Beef’s long hair is always wet. He stands behind the counter, unknowable. An early Japanese import of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid in one hand, Samsung in the other. He dials. The boy’s mother answers.
His mouth is dry. How can he explain?
“Is that you, Fuck-wad?”
He hangs up.
Beef rings up customers. Record Store Day—the biggest event of the year. There are boxes to unload, exclusive ten-inch records, split singles, box sets. Beef holds a life-sized cardboard cutout of James Hetfield under his arm. The ceiling fan goes round and round.
*
His ex, Caitlyn, was always on the move. Huntington Beach, San Francisco, Buenos Aires. By the time Beef got an address or phone number, she and the boy had already moved on. When he knew her back in the day, they painted each other’s nails black and snorted heroin. But then she joined a religious cult. There is a BBC documentary about the cult.
“Tell me about him,” Beef says when he gets the nerve to call back. He’s in the storage room of the record store. “It’s his birthday, right? What does he like?” He still hasn’t chosen a record for his son. Something rare. Miles Davis or Sonny Rollins, the Blue Note years. Even in her wild days, Caitlyn carried a faint whiff of praise music about her. Now that she’s gone full-tilt nut-job, he can’t imagine what kind of music the child is exposed to.
“Tell me about 80k in unpaid child support,” Caitlyn says.
“I tried to find you. You kept moving.”
“Bullshit.” She hangs up.
Beef puts on a record. Ambient music. Droning guitars, undulating distortion, a tone poem. He breathes. Eats a Pop-Tart. Doesn’t taste it. Back behind the register, there’s a line out the door. Customers complain.
*
After work, exhausted, Beef goes to the Alley Cat, a poorly lit dive three doors down. Cracked vinyl bar stools. A warped pool table. Dollar bills stapled to the ceiling. He has a polaroid of his son in the pocket of his leather jacket. A woman approaches, mid-forties. She looks familiar. She climbs up on the pool table, takes a dollar from the ceiling, hands it to Beef.
“Put on something romantic,” she says.
At the jukebox, Beef selects a Townes Van Zandt record. His eyes begin to swell: that first ambling section, the interplay between the two acoustic guitars. When Caitlyn became pregnant, he tried to be a good guy. Offered to pay for the procedure. When she refused, he told her he’d man up. Do all the things. Beef stands at the jukebox, breathes, steadies himself.
When he returns to his barstool the woman is gone and so is his leather jacket.
“Why do they call you Beef?” the bartender asks.
“I’m from Iowa,” Beef says, looking out the door.
Later, Beef stumbles towards home. Sees a shooting star. Lies on a picnic table in the park, looks at the Milky Way. Caitlyn never gave him a chance. He might have been a wonderful father.
*
At home the porch light is on.
“How was work, honey?” his girlfriend asks.
“Good,” Beef says.
“Were you a good boy today?” She wears leather. Her whip is long. She takes the last bite of an apple, leaves the core on the counter. “Do you want to play?” she asks.
“Very much so.”
The sheets are clean. It’s the duvet cover he likes—low thread count, scratchy. She binds his hands. Brings out the strap-on. Stuffs the ball gag in his mouth. Lights a candle. But there is a hole in the bedroom ceiling. He’s just seeing it now. A crack along the crown molding, three or four inches, and then a hole, like in the center of a record. Up through the roof, it goes on and on.
James Keith Smith’s work has appeared in Split Lip Magazine, Moon City Review, Sierra Nevada Review, Pithead Chapel, and others. He grew up in Michigan and lives in Tacoma, WA. You can read more of his work at jameskeithsmith.com.
I went to the grocery store because I wanted cereal, and also because I wanted to leave my apartment for a reason that sounded more respectable than I needed to leave my apartment. I bought cereal, dish soap, frozen peas, a loaf of bread, and one lemon. I don’t know why I bought one lemon. It felt like the right thing to do at the time. The cashier asked if I wanted my receipt. I said no. Then I said yes. Then I said actually no, you know what, forget it. She looked at me for a moment and printed the receipt anyway and put it in the bag without saying anything. I drove home and carried the bags inside. The plastic handles cut into my fingers. The loaf of bread fell out onto the sidewalk, but it was still in the plastic so I decided that was fine. I put everything away except the lemon, which I left on the counter because I kept forgetting I have lemons.
Later that night I wanted to know how much the cereal had cost. I looked through the bag for the receipt but the receipt wasn’t there. I looked on the counter. I looked in the bread bag, for some reason. I checked my bank app but it only showed the total, which I already knew, because the total had been bad. I went out to the car with my phone flashlight and looked between the seats. I found two pens, a hard french fry, a guitar pick, and the title to the car in an envelope I had been meaning to deal with for maybe two years. I couldn’t find the receipt. I sat in the driver’s seat in the dark and thought about how the cashier had definitely put the receipt in the bag. I tried to remember watching her do it. I thought maybe I had thrown it away involuntarily, out of habit. I thought maybe my body made decisions my mind wasn’t included in every now and again. I went back upstairs and checked the kitchen trash. There was coffee sludge, peas I’d spilled and then swept off the counter with my hand, and the cardboard sleeve from the frozen pizza I ate for lunch. Still no receipt.
The next morning the lemon was gone. I stood in the kitchen and looked at the place where it had been. I looked around like maybe it had rolled somewhere while I was asleep. I checked the floor. I checked the fruit bowl, which strangely had one garlic in it. I checked the refrigerator, even though I knew I didn’t put the lemon in there. I started to think maybe I was mixing up days and had never bought a lemon in the first place. I remembered placing it on the conveyor belt after the dish soap because I didn’t want lemon chemicals from the lemon getting on the bread. I still don’t know if lemon chemicals are real. They seem real. I found the grocery bag in the trash and looked into the emptiness of it. I became convinced that the receipt incident and the lemon incident were somehow related.
I drove back to the grocery store. I didn’t really have a plan. I went to customer service and said I had a weird question. The woman at customer service said okay in a way that suggested she had already heard what I would say many times before. I told her I’d shopped there the night before and lost my receipt and also a lemon had gone missing from my kitchen. She asked if I wanted a duplicate receipt. I said probably, yeah. She asked if I knew the time of the transaction. I said approximately. She asked if I had the card I used. I handed it to her. She typed something in her computer for a while and then printed something out. She handed me the duplicate receipt. I looked at it. There was no lemon on it.
I said that’s strange because I remember that I’d definitely bought a lemon. She said then you probably didn’t. I said no, I definitely did. She said then it would be on the receipt. I said unless the receipt was incomplete somehow. She said receipts are usually pretty committed to their thing. I looked at the receipt again. Cereal, dish soap, peas, bread. No lemon. The total was lower than I remembered, which I didn’t like, because it suggested the receipt might be right. And that I might be wrong. I asked if anyone had found a stray lemon. She said where. I said I don’t know, maybe near the registers. She looked at me for a while, then looked past me and said, next guest please, even though I was still there and no one was behind me.
I drove home feeling like I had been slightly inconvenienced. What’s worse was when I went back in the apartment the lemon was on the counter exactly where I’d left it. Beside it was the receipt. Not the duplicate receipt from customer service. The original receipt, folded once. I unfolded it. The lemon was on there. One lemon. 0.89. I looked at the counter, the lemon, the receipt, my own hand holding the receipt. I thought about calling someone (Mom, a therapist, the grocery store representative), though I didn’t know what I would say. I thought about taking a picture, but I couldn’t decide if a picture of the lemon or a picture of the receipt would make more sense. They both could look pretty normal in a picture. I picked the lemon up. It felt cold in my hand. Not refrigerator cold. More like outside at night cold. I put it back down on the counter.
I ate a bowl of cereal. I kept looking at the lemon while I ate. The cereal tasted a little like dish soap. When I finished, I went to pick up the receipt. I folded it into a ball in my palm and uncrumpled it to put it in my wallet. I put the lemon in the freezer. It just seemed safer somehow.
Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Wigleaf, HAD, Hobart, X-R-A-Y, Maudlin House, and Pithead Chapel, among other journals. He edits the literary journal The Bulb Region.
Billy swings the hammer. A big crusher of a thing. Feet of wood stem with a fat hunk of iron wedged on the end.
Remodeling, he calls it. It’s cheaper this way, he says. Opening up the room between kitchen and den. Some jargon name for this he saw on a show. Shared space. Dual use. Something. He swings the hammer again.
Things are moved out of the way. Household staples dragged. An end table, framed photos. Buckets of English ivy that once hung are set in a corner. Things waiting for a new equilibrium.
Plaster falls with each boom. He hits the same spot over and over. A hole appears and spreads. The structure underneath. He goes on swinging, pounding. Cursing and grunting and on.
There is a crack, a noise more fragile now. A thing shuttering all through. Billy lets down the sledge, where it wobbles and settles and sits. He leans down to look in the hole.
There is a darkness. He leans more still and a hint of light shows. But the smell. He presses close.
“Hon?”
Soft footfalls come. Amber. She says hey, she says what. He talks.
“Can you smell this?”
“Bill, hon, what?”
“Just come look.”
“Are you doing something gross?”
“I’m not joking. There’s a smell.”
She steps over the mess and leans down and breathes. She looks at him and breathes again.
“What the hell?”
“That’s weird, right?”
“Is it poison? I read poisons smell sweet.”
“I don’t think it’s poison. I think it smells like grass.”
Her eyes fall closed as she breathes. One hand picks at loose plaster.
“That’s so weird,” she says.
_____
It’s like a chainsaw. Some kind of jagged machine. He cuts at ragged edges and wall falls away and beyond this another layer waits. He steps back and then around to the side of the existing partition and he frowns. The fractured barrier shows an inner depth. He knocks away loose parts. He tries to enter the space. Crawling.
The first thing he feels is a heat. This little cubby. He wipes his face with a hand and he scoots. An inner wall shows cracks from his knocking. He turns and braces and he gives one hard kick. Plaster goes flying and then light comes.
“Oh. Shit.”
_____
The hole doesn’t show onto the den. The space beyond the shattered wall is open grassland. A soft breeze shuffles limbs. Animal noise hums. Bugs, other things. Wafting green leans under foreign sun. Billy shifts and turns and puts his face near the hole.
The air is jungle hot. The land ahead shows swaying fields of some alien grain. Maybe it has a name known but Billy doesn’t know. He looks around with a face stupid and shaken. He touches wood to make sure. The house is still here, he is still in the house. In the house’s middle, looking onto a grassland beyond. A little at a time he backs away.
_____
He pretends it’s fine for a day and another day. He doesn’t quite look that way going by. When she asks he says I’m going to get to it, I’m going to get back to it. The wood needs a different kind of support is all. I’m gonna get to it, I promise.
On the third day he finds her looking. He can’t find her and then he does. Sitting down in the hole. Staring.
“Billy? What is this?”
He crawls in behind. The smell is the first thing he notices. The change. Old mud now. Like a slap. He leans and he looks and the land has become something else. A pall has replaced the waving grasses, the green and reaching life now fallen over and gray. Here and there a patch of some familiar clover shows, and in the distance some bizarre pink thing rises in sprouts. The ground below is a wet black thing.
“I don’t understand.”
He pulls her back from the hole.
“It’s nothing.”
She turns wide eyes his way. Horror.
“Nothing?”
“Come on out of here. I just need to patch up the wall.”
“You’re going to patch it up?”
“That’s all I need to do.”
“Bill?”
“It’s fine.”
“Bill, what is this?”
He touches her arm until she turns and then he leads her back into the house proper.
“It’s just a hole in the wall. That’s all it is.”
_____
He wakes with red eyes. Touching, pressing. He clears his throat in hard chugs. Early morning light shows through blinds. He touches her hip and she moans and rolls away.
He pads to the bathroom and pisses and coughs and he spits into the toilet waiting. Snot and blood there. He stares. He hears her moaning again. Words. Babe. Babe?
Machine noise begins somewhere. A buzzing. Leaf blower, chainsaw, something. Babe? He’s moving through rooms in a haze. Is this a fever? Illness? He turns a corner and moves down a hall and he passes by the hole in the wall and tries not to look but he does look and a growth black and wet creeps in all directions from that cave.
Onward. The front door waits ahead. That machine noise still. And back the way he came, Babe? Stumbling steps. His breath labored, squeezed.
He turns the knob and pushes out and he braces for a breath fresh and deep he expects but it doesn’t come, and now he is gagging, and he is bending.
Landscapers move along the street in pairs. Industrial grade masks obscure the faces they turn to look. They move one with a weed eater and another with a pumped spray, marching up one side of the street and down the other, together attacking with a focused vigor the many patches of some pink and rising thing showing in sprouts all along the way for blocks ahead.
Craig Rodgers is the author of several books, dozens of stories, countless notes, and one convoluted plan to fake his own death.
Dear Leader says we will be taking over Cuba. “Almost immediately,” he promises. New wars spawn.
May 2, 2026
I have a new method to quit smoking. Charles told me about it. He said every time you want a cigarette you eat one. It’s supposed to disgust you and yet you still taste the tobacco, the leaves get stuck in your teeth. I have been shitting filters for weeks.
May 5, 2026
Iran breaks the ceasefire, attacking the UAE with drones and missile fire for the second straight day. The Iranian foreign minister is in Beijing meeting with his counterpart. The United States’ official opinion is the ceasefire is still holding up. I spent two days in the Lowcountry smoking cigarettes outside of munitions plants and a coating supply manufacturer trying (not very well, or hardly at all) to interview the workers. All expenses paid reconnaissance trip courtesy of Farewell Transmission. I told my editor I needed to get my hands around the means of production, specially volume. Were these guys working overtime? Have production orders changed? Have the bosses been by more, or less? A writer should spend more time with their feet on the pavement, getting the local flavor. You could learn a lot, and fill ¾ of a monthly column, from the munitions factory workers.
I was too chickenshit to talk to any of them coming or going and was eventually asked to leave by a parking lot security worker. I had taken too many of the wrong drugs at a highly inconvenient part of the day and I paid the price. I couldn’t unclench my jaw to ask a blue collar man what fucking time it was, forget about production schedules! When the rent-a-cop walked up to me I suddenly snapped out of it and ordered a Paloma. I said, “I stubbed my toe on my cigarette,” and he asked me if he needed to call the police or an ambulance. I said “neither officer, I’m no trouble.” I wanted to tell him I was from the papers but I wisely did not. I could tell he didn’t like being called officer, and thought I was being facetious. I was not. He had a gun and a uniform and I was wearing Balmain shorts and had two packs of nicotine gum and a notebook. Everything looked like an authority figure to me. He said he would like to not see me the rest of the day so he can get back inside. I said ‘sir, it’s seventy-two degrees and not a cloud in the sky in Charleston, South Carolina, why would you want to spend it inside?’ But I only said it inside my head as I was walking off the lot. I was unable to secure an interview with a worker at the munitions factory. But not for lack of thinking it was probably a good idea, driving eight hours round trip in a thirty-six hour window, and standing there.
The Chairman of War will not say whether or not America has kamikaze dolphins, but can confirm Iran does not.
May 7, 2026
The Americans and Iranians are firing on each other in the Strait of Hormuz this late hour.
How could a ceasefire hold in these unceasing times? Nothing ceases. Everything happens all at once constantly in our time.
I am going to see Bill Callahan with the courier on Tuesday at the Haw River Ballroom in Saxapahaw, North Carolina.
Charles told me tonight, outside underneath the lamppost (halos of smoke, moonlight), about a man he ran into some weeks ago, an old buddy, a Marine, Middle East combat veteran, American hero, and the man, (whose name I never got) used to have a wife and kids and a big, pretty house in the suburbs until Covid came along. When Covid came along this man started going out at night and walking up and down creeks behind neighborhoods watching women get undressed and middle-aged couples fuck through their windows. When Covid came he got active again. He was a sniper. He thrived at night. Old instincts, fresh desires. He had his favorites. On the night he was caught, half of his legs in the creek, bitten red by chiggers as usual, a husband shot him in the shoulder with buckshot. His wife left him. His kids found out. It was a pretty small town, Iowa somewhere. So he walked around the country, stayed some places for a while and had a mangled shoulder and kind, misty blue eyes.
May 9, 2026
The school in Iran that was double tapped on the first day of the war was the result of an Anthropic (Claude) agent embedded within Maven, America’s “Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team,” using ten year old data and the American military glanced at the output and approved without any additional research or even a second layer of confirmation.
May 18, 2026
We are delaying tomorrow’s scheduled attack on Iran at the request of Middle Eastern leaders, Dear Leader says. An incredibly obnoxious, obvious political era we are witness to. I blame television. I blame other people. I blame each other. I blame myself. It was probably always going to end up exactly this stupid, how else could it be?
On to more important things. I prattle too much. Editors cannot handle me. I’m too much meat, no bone. I have the beginnings of a plan. See, well, first of all, here’s the situation. I need to finish my novel. I know, I know, this is the absolute worst literary device and has the insufferable quality of being true to boot but this is who I am.
I have the edits. I have started working through them. In the meantime, I will write a monthly war column and gain readers and interest, and perhaps an ambitious publisher will see the vision, and then think maybe he’s not too old and lazy and living too stupidly to seduce a few readers still.
The war I cover is the Ukrainian war or that was the war I was hired to cover, I thought, and did cover and still do too but then, of course, Israel, and America. Iran kicked our asses, they will try to tell you different. I wrote it in real time which is the only time I got and you can go back and check my notes, and while you’re at it check my credentials, would you please? I report on wars, for a living, from a motel (where I pay a monthly rate now), at the very outskirt of a mid-Atlantic capital city, I am still the wartime author.
The plan is I stole a rolling cart desk from one of the office services temp jobs Carol put me in and now, with a proper desk, I can finish the novel. I have not used it yet, or touched it. It’s been here a week, I bet.
Two Iranian oil tankers made port in China during Dear Leader’s arrival. President Ji had his way with him. Russia and America are struggling, China rising.
Ukraine’s drone strategy has turned the war somewhat in their favor. The superpowers are being tested. All wounds, self-inflicted.
May 22, 2026
Dear Leader has turned Airforce One around, unable to attend his son’s wedding. Iranian airspace has been closed. The Director of National Intelligence resigned. It is the Friday of Memorial Day weekend and I am hiding out at the Crystal Coast.
The courier supplied me with hashish before I departed. My headlights are busted so I can only travel in daylight hours. An awful case of indigestion from the nicotine lozenges, I must take up smoking immediately to defeat it. I came here to fish and edit my novel. I ate dinner alone inside my car in the parking lot of a putt-putt course. The world is opening up to me, and I can sense the intervention of the divine.
May 23, 2026
The hashish empties me out, and I spend the evening splayed out alone, buck naked, catching occasional glimpses of waxing gibbous between mostly stuck clouds. I traveled with sheaths of paper, large binder clipped, Caran d’Ache Ecridor, orange highlighter, index tabs and a clipboard. I am meant to be finishing my edits and finishing my novel. Everything seems so imminent and obvious on nights like this. The whole of it all washes over me and I am glad for it. To lay in the sand stoned is enough. War will always be there. War is happening. We live in wartimes. I cannot count every second.
Dear Leader announces the strait of Hormuz will be opened, a deal ‘largely negotiated.’
May 25, 2026
The encyclical letter is being read aloud at a makeshift Mass on the beach this Memorial Day.
May 26, 2026
Moscow is under attack. The war I was first hired to follow is heating up, and in starkly surprising ways from when I last left it (involuntary). Ukraine is attacking Moscow, a city that has not been touched by enemy fire since World War II. The United States prepares to capitulate to a militant, murderous extremist regime and create a new middle power in the Middle East in the short to medium term. I can see the end of the month coming, and wonder what I have gotten down. Likely not much. My novel is unedited. I have several excuses. None of them are convincing. My ex-wife is in Baltimore, and I do not think I will see her for a good, long while. This time wasn’t as bad as the last (and no charges were filed), but we’ve got nothing but practice leaving each other. I am back in my room at the King’s Motel. I booked a two night stay in Pittsboro, a cabin in the woods not far from the King’s Motel, for the 7th and 8th of June to finish the job.
I predict China makes a move on Taiwan while Dear Leader is still in office, likely around the midterms when America is in the thick of the roil.
My stay on the Crystal Coast was excellent. I read The Information by Martin Amis, seeking clues, and avoided my own thoughts. I turned the safety on. The wars did seem to heat up during my stay in the sun. It all came through me like electricity if electricity was Valium instead. I rustled around my papers and did not open them or make a mark. Is this dereliction of duty? Duty to myself, perhaps. The wars go on regardless.
The yield on the thirty year note is at 5.2% mostly on account of energy prices, the highest level since right before the financial crisis in 2007.
Keep the powder dry. Preserve and protect.
May 27, 2026
I write by mouthfeel, I refuse to fear large language models taking my job as war correspondent for Farewell Transmission.
More strikes against Iran. This is not peacetime. Superpowers rarely take defeats well, and tend to multiply their damages seeking Pyrrhic victories to sell to unwashed masses. I am back in the office buildings, shuffling papers for Carol at my latest temp assignment. I have no one to blame but myself. It’s my country, my war, my ex-wife, Carol’s sadism (a re-insurance company, Carol?!?, really?), my legion of nonreaders, the games on our phone, this dumb century, artificial everything, microplastics, and SSRI’s in the water supply. No one to blame but myself.
May 29, 2026
The Chairman of the Department of War assures select uniformed U.S. service members may be allowed to attend the upcoming UFC match on the White House lawn provided they meet the Department’s standard waist-to-height ratio of 0.55.
Derek Maine writes about the war for Farewell Transmission.
