Creative Nonfiction
THE SYMMETRIES by Marshall Moore
A spider took up residence in my conservatory several months ago. It’s not enormous, half an inch in diameter, but I hate spiders. Winter loomed. Those were days of dread. A seasonal terror gnaws at people who live at northern latitudes as the sun sets incrementally sooner. Here in Cornwall, the exact time of sunset means little when clouds and rain can make it night-ish at three. Having a spider suspended overhead by the door, just over my clothes-drying rack, doesn’t help when my insides are already chewing themselves up over the darkness to come.My partner doesn’t hate spiders, or didn’t, or doesn’t. The tension of tenses matters here not because he’s dead but because he’s my ex now. He could have died, perhaps nearly died. When he’d find a spider in his own house, he’d pick it up and toss it out the window. Don’t live in my house, he would say as the thing went airborne. But he didn’t scold the two false widows he found behind the washing machine. Those, he left where they were. They didn’t get him, epilepsy did. It went undiagnosed until his late fifties. In the three and a half years we lasted, he had several smaller seizures. He’d go out for a run and come to an hour later, lying in one of the fields near his home, his dog licking his face. He ignored those episodes in the “surely it’s not that” kind of way that sometimes puts the afflicted in graves. The day a grand mal dropped him flat on his back in his garden, the dog ran up to the house barking to get his son’s attention. The dog saved his life, I suspect. It could have happened in the road. No one let me know until later. I live a short walk from the hospital. I’m American. In my North Carolina of the ‘70s and ‘80s, big cans of bug spray were the answer to everything with more legs than our cats. I couldn’t stand bugs then and I still can’t. Exceptions can be made for the friendly ones: butterflies, dragonflies, ladybugs, grasshoppers, bees. But a wasp flew into my shirt once and stung me several times. I must have been nine or ten. It hurt like what I thought getting shot would, bam bam bam. I still have a sense-memory of the thing crawling down my chest before the pain hit. Even if I hadn’t panicked, hadn’t provoked it, it would have stung me anyway, or so my mother claimed as she daubed baking soda paste on the burning, throbbing welts. I hate wasps and hornets and yellowjackets, anything with a stinger and a mean streak. I hate the zigzag transdimensional flight paths of mosquitoes almost as much as I hate their bites. I hate spiders the most, though: the way they scuttle, their terrible symmetries. When I encounter one, decisions have to be made.My cat’s health began to fail about a year ago. The longhaired breeds are susceptible to kidney trouble. Early on, the vet told us that’s what would kill him. We could expect a lifespan of about 13 years, he said. We got lucky: the trouble started at 13 instead of ending there. Bloodwork in a regular checkup turned up a few red flags. Put him on a renal diet immediately, the vet advised. If he won’t eat it, mix it in with his regular food until you wean him off the stuff he enjoys. I ordered several kidney-friendly options online, mixed them and swapped them out in different combinations, and panicked when he refused to touch them at all. This went on for weeks. He lost so much weight that I took him back to the vet. I can’t starve him to save him, I said. The vet replied, cats are gonna cat. Those were days of dread too. When someone is tired of you, there are clues. You notice they’ve stopped saying I love you first. Then they stop saying it as a reply. You come to feel you shouldn’t say it anymore yourself. It’s too obvious a prompt. Their face hardens instead of softens. There are tight, impatient smiles and the occasional eyeroll. A sharp tone of voice, a note of irritation no effort is made to conceal. Replies to text messages come later and later, if at all. The pattern is hard to ignore. It’s the diagnosis, I kept telling myself. The indignity. The loss of agency. I sobbed the day he told me it was epilepsy. He’d have to give up driving for a year. Cornwall’s public transport sucks at best. Trains get cancelled all the time. Storms hit; fallen trees block the tracks; there are driver shortages. Buses where he lives run every two hours if they show up at all. He’d lose his spontaneous jaunts to the beach or the moors after work. He keeps a classic MG roadster in the garage—British Racing Green, of course. He restored it himself. Now it would be a year until he could drive it again, if and only if he didn’t have another seizure in the months ahead. Everything hinged on the meds working. Side effects were known to include violent mood swings and inchoate rage on top of the baseline despair.Although I didn’t think I could remake myself as the kind of guy who’d pick a spider up, tell it not to live in my house, and chuck it out the nearest window, I tried in my own way. It was more about holding onto something I could see slipping out of my grasp than it was about any sort of release. The occasional bee would fly in. My partner kept bees. Ex-partner keeps bees. Tenses, tension. Even without today’s prevailing apiary doom narratives, I couldn’t bring myself to smash a bee or spray one. They’re important. Instead, I’d trap them with a glass and a piece of stiff paper, then release them outside. Crane flies too, although their spindly legs rarely survived my good intentions. One night I noticed a small spider walking across the wall behind the sofa. Normally that would be a death sentence. It looked like it hadn’t had the best day, though. It looked injured. Can spiders limp? Across the room, my cat was napping on his heated bed. I’d put him back on the food he preferred. He’d gained weight again. He felt normal when I cuddled him or picked him up. But I could see the insidious changes—drinking more water, peeing more, snuggling less, seeming dazed at times, throwing up. I did not smash the spider.The night my partner assaulted me, I didn’t think to call it an assault, nor the next day, nor the day after that. Did that really just happen, I asked his son afterward. He had seen the whole thing. Denial is like that. There’s a first time for everything. It was a dinner party. Half the guests had gone home. There was wine involved. I tripped going up the low stone stairs in the garden, injured my left foot. I limped over to the bench he’d curled up on. Blackout drunk, he snarled when he saw me coming. Think of Jekyll and Hyde. I decided to take video. This wasn’t the first time he’d gotten hammered, morphed into a hateful stranger, and said or done ghastly things he would regret in the morning but not remember. It’s the diagnosis, I kept telling myself. It’s the side effects. The meds. The interactions. He wasn’t like that before. I was thinking epilepsy thoughts when he jumped up from the bench, knocked my phone out of my hand, grabbed me, and threw me to the ground. Already favoring my throbbing left foot, I landed hard on my right one. Fractured something, I think, and didn’t feel it at the time. My left foot already hurt too much. His son and I managed to put him to bed. I stayed up until four trying to convince his son that his dad wasn’t like that, that it wasn’t him. Side effects, meds, interactions. In the morning, my partner woke up with a blinding headache and in a haze of dread. He knew something awful had happened, just not what. He apologized. He was horrified. We both cried. He insisted we go for a walk after breakfast to clear our heads. I couldn’t keep up and he wouldn’t slow down. I still limp some days. I’m autistic. Diagnosed a year ago. Finding that out in my fifties was like being handed a Rosetta stone that deciphered my entire life. The food issues, the texture issues, the constant grinding tension and anxiety, all of it. The night of the dinner party, everyone was sitting around my partner’s living room chatting. Both of his kids were there with their own significant others. Couple of friends from the village as well. With the music turned up, everyone’s voices made sounds shaped like words. I could hear but not follow along. To an extent, lipreading helped. Trouble with auditory processing is another of those quirky, inconvenient autistic things. Rather than adjusting the volume, he handed me my wine glass and told me just drink. He’d once shoved me across the kitchen instead of turning Spotify down so I could hear him better, so this didn’t come as a total surprise. It’s the diagnosis, I kept telling myself. Side effects. Meds. Interactions. He wasn’t like that before.When the end came, he had another ruinous hangover and couldn’t remember the previous night, only that he’d done something bad again. No violence this time, no fractured bones, just a drunken tirade: I disgusted him, he couldn’t stand me. That morning, he confessed he knew how he’d been treating me. He’d been hoping I’d just get sick of his bullshit and walk. Easier that way. For him, at least. And to cope, he’d been keeping a diary. He showed me a year’s worth of handwritten entries, page after page, lines of dense scribble about the relationship he didn’t want to be in. Now he didn’t want to lie anymore, didn’t want to keep pretending. When someone is tired of you, there are clues. I’d seen them all, connected the dots, and prayed it was the diagnosis and not the truth of him. For a year, my insides had been chewing themselves up. Those were days of dread. I felt like ashes.When the next ending came not too long after, there had been a reprieve. The second-hardest thing about taking care of a longhaired cat with failing kidneys is the thirst, as it turned out. The hardest thing is knowing what’s ahead. He’d guzzle water from his bowl, so much and so often that the fur on his face and neck stayed sopping wet. I would chase him around the house with a wad of paper towels or a microfiber cloth, sometimes a hair dryer. Just when I’d get him semi-dry again, he’d go back for more. Cats are gonna cat. This went on for weeks before I thought to buy him a fountain he could drink from without getting drenched. Once his fur finally dried, he bounced back, started eating again, put on the weight he’d lost. Those were days of dread too, albeit sweet ones. I had three more months with him. The decline, when it came, was sharp and sudden. The end happened when it had to. The vet made a home visit. I have his ashes in a bamboo box.I hate spiders. If the one in my conservatory had turned up anywhere else in the house, I’d have killed it without hesitation. One once crawled across my left ear while I was lying in bed. It met a quick, splattery end. But with another living being incrementally slipping away in front of my fireplace, I couldn’t smash this little speck of fading life. They don’t live long, less than a year. Every day I think about getting it over with, spraying it, something. I think about capturing it, telling it not to live in my house, and tossing it out the door into the garden. Yet I’m afraid it will get away when my big clumsy hand tears through its web. I’m also afraid that it won’t, that I’ll end up touching it. I’m afraid of it running up my arm. I’m afraid of it growing larger, maybe jumping at me. I still have sense-memories of a wasp inside my shirt, of a spider crawling across my left ear. In the months ahead, I will be leaving: I don’t want to live in this house anymore; I don’t want to stay in this part of the country. These have been days of dread. I feel like ashes. Decisions have to be made.
August 27, 2025
Interviews & Reviews
NOAH KUMIN INTERVIEWED by Matthew Binder
In 2023, I published a novel called Pure Cosmos Club. For reasons still unclear to me, it was embraced by the downtown New York literary scene loosely known as “Dimes Square.” Despite the association, I never made real inroads—not because of the rumors (funded by Peter Thiel? Christian reactionaries?) but simply because I was too shy.One of the scene’s more prominent figures is Noah Kumin, founder of The Mars Review of Books. From afar, I watched his profile rise through various ventures: the magazine, a popular podcast, and a reputation for hosting raucous literary parties.When I saw on social media that he had written a novel, I reached out and asked him to send me a copy. Stop All the Clocks centers on Mona Veigh, a misanthropic programmer who’s developed a large language model capable of generating poetry. Her company, Hildegard 2.0, is acquired by a mysterious tech magnate named Avram Parr—who, we soon learn, has committed “suicide.” Something about Parr’s death doesn’t sit right with Veigh, and she sets out to solve the mystery, placing herself in the crosshairs of a plot by powerful tech overlords bent on reshaping human civilization.I’m pleased to report that Stop All the Clocks is a first-rate techno-thriller—sharp, urgent, and extremely timely. Matthew Binder: You’ve written two books with technology at their center, The Machine War and Stop All the Clocks. Given your background and clear interest in tech — a field where you could have pursued a lucrative career — what drew you toward committing yourself to writing instead? Noah Kumin: Robert Graves said something like: "There's no money in poetry. But there's no poetry in money, either."MB: With Stop All the Clocks, you’ve written a literary thriller. Which writers — whether literary or thriller — most shaped your approach to Stop All the Clocks? NK: I learned a lot from the writers I love. You might be able to guess who a few of them are. But I don't think I leaned on any of them very heavily for Stop All the Clocks. John Pistelli argued in his wonderfully perceptive review that this book heralds something entirely new: a break with the decayed modernist "literary fiction" model which has provided, over the past 75 years or so, ever-diminishing returns. Stop All the Clocks is meant to be a new type novel of ideas for the 21st century, and I'm not certain it has any direct predecessors. There's a German term I like: kulturroman, the novel of culture. We haven't had many of those in the States lately—not in a real way—and it's time we did.MB: How do you begin a novel? Did you know what was going to happen in the end from the very beginning? NK: I started with the last lines of the last poem, which came to my mind from a place I did not understand. I wanted to know what the poem meant. I had an idea of the sensation that the reader should have when he or she has finished the book. And I worked backwards from there.MB: In your novel, Mona creates a poetry-generating AI called Hildegard. At one point, she realizes her invention might contribute to the flattening of the literary landscape. I’ll admit I’m too wary of the future to follow the latest developments closely, but it seems inevitable that a flood of AI-generated novels is on the way — if it hasn’t already begun. How worried are you that human novelists could become obsolete, or do you think there are aspects of storytelling that only humans can capture? NK: Certainly LLMs will be able to outcompete humans at the generation of satisfactory bodice-rippers and pulp thrillers. But it doesn't do any good to worry. I write to say something that can't be said and to preserve that saying of the unsayable for those who will be able to understand without understanding. I only need a few readers in mind to feel it's worthwhile to keep on.MB: For a long time, the tech world was associated with the Left, but today Big Tech seems more aligned with the Right. In Stop All the Clocks, you write journal entries from the perspective of a techno-optimist titan. While the novel avoids falling into the typical Left–Right binary, were you thinking consciously about his political leanings as you wrote those entries?NK: I wanted to capture for posterity a new sort of person who is emerging in our age, as Turgenev did with Bazarov in Fathers and Sons. Not necessarily a left-right thing, though I understand if some see it that way.MB: A recent Compact Magazine essay, “The Vanishing White Male Author,” argues that white male writers have been largely shut out of the literary world over the past five years. For example, none of the last 70 finalists for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize have been straight white American men. Since 2020, no white man has been nominated for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Prize for debut fiction. And notably, not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a story in The New Yorker, while at least 25 other millennial writers have.You studied under Martin Amis at NYU. Given the shifts described in essays like this one, did you and Amis ever discuss how these trends might shape your prospects as a fiction writer?NK: Yes, it’s an interesting development. I suppose it means the field is pretty open for me. If I were to win one of those awards or have a short story published in the New Yorker, it might well generate a lot of interest and move a lot of product, since it’s such a rarity these days for those publications. But this is all business talk. Nothing like that came up when I was being mentored by Amis. He only talked craft, and I would have felt monstrously impertinent asking the great man about anything pertaining to business or money, though he is the author of the great chronicle of business and money, Money. Amis recognized that I had a good feel for voice and wanted me to focus more on my plotting. He told me to always keep in mind that the reader is just as busy and put upon as I am—advice which I feel has stood me in good stead.MB: Your publisher, Arcade, an imprint of Skyhorse, has a reputation for taking risks on work that other houses might find too controversial. What was your experience like navigating the publishing world and landing with Arcade?NK: It was a strange journey. It feels a little gauche to go over it. Sorry. But I'm very grateful to the team at Arcade for their intelligence and acumen.MB: A couple of years ago, you started The Mars Review of Books to publish serious literary criticism. I read that you’ve lately been more focused on editing than writing. Given that you’ve just published two books, is that still true?NK: The great Italian writer-publisher Roberto Calasso remarked that to be both a publisher and a writer is a bit like being both a commodities trader and a commodity. It’s a wonderful quip and absolutely true. It does lead to some schizophrenic tendencies. As a writer I try to write only what interests me. But as a publisher I must be a businessman first. Luckily I know how to compartmentalize.MB: What’s next for you?NK: I'm writing a book of nonfiction, tentatively titled The Mystagogues, about occult secrets in the work of a handful of 20th century writers. Either I'm crazy or I'm noticing something very important that most critics over the past 100 years have failed to notice. I feel it could actually have quite a broad audience, though it's technically "literary criticism."
August 26, 2025
Fiction
WOULD YOU TREMBLE IN THE PRESENCE OF THE VIRGIN SHOULD SHE COME TO YOUR TOWN? by Cortez
When Mother’s belly bloomed again, she pointed a french-tipped finger at the richest man in town. The accusation, though baseless, haunted him-- it polluted his polished lawn, noosed his silk ties. This was a man shrunken, a spirit corrupted, a man of real stature driven sick. But the town was small, and Mother was only getting bigger, and so he wished her away with a lump sum.Mother had two girls at home. The little one, blue-eyed and painted with the peachy, airbrushed skin of Jesus, thought she might’ve been born of dirt, like Adam, or rib, like Eve. The big one was old enough to know that she was half from mother’s tummy, she assumed the other half might be chipped wallpaper, or oil spills, or the pink in the faces of men at truck stop diners. Even when it seems these things disappear, the rich man often thought to himself, a certain stain is left on a man, a certain debris accumulates inside the soul. The girls had attached to their mother erratically. They sat sunny-side up, transverse, breech-- had to be unknit by gloved hands, unzipped from the same scar on her belly. The births were emergencies-- horrific blurs of fluorescent lighting and hospital blue. Mother requested a mirror for each procedure, glimpsing, in the fuss, creation-- the whole red mess of it. The rich man had three of his own. On Sunday, terror among the parishioners. Mother and her girls arrived late, sulked into a front pew during the Nicene Creed. Wives’ eyes darted in horror between Mother’s belly and their husbands. Through their loyal recitation-- Maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen-- they wondered: who made her a mother? Our fathers? Our sons? -- God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God-- Or worse, someone from out of town? The rich man’s own voice shook at the pulpit. He thought, a man can assemble a kneeling congregation-- He will come again in glory-- A man can raise a town from dirt-- His kingdom will have no end-- and for what. When Mother was young, she’d gone to a city. She was a girl then: golden, freckled, life so everywhere in her. It was a city from tip to toe: sparkling up into the clouds and carrying on a grisly, sticky version of itself underground. Mother stood in the highest point of that city, over evry metal monument reflecting sun and blue, over every creeping thing that crept in concrete veins, over every clay creature men had sculpt from dirt, and, summoning the miracle machinery of her insides, spoke:I will name this silver, and this riverThis, beneath my rib, cityThis, beneath my city, railI, blessed by the maker and the maker myselfWill tear trembling towns through mine divine routeIn agony, I will bear the fruit.
August 25, 2025
Fiction
MRS BEATRIX by Glenn Orgias
The Gimp BoxI lay in my apartment worrying about death and worrying that my constant worrying would eventually manifest in my sickness and death. So, when I saw a job ad looking for a “big guy” who was willing to “become anonymous” and to live in a “dungeon”, I said: Bingo. Because I really needed a place to hide out from Shovel. Mrs Beatrix’s place of business was on the cobbled streets of the Rossebuurt district, Amsterdam.“That house,” said a man, pointing at a terrace house. “The dungeon is below,” he said, with a terrible excitement. “Are you the new Gimp?”I said nothing. “How old are you?” he said in a whisper.“Twenty-six.”The man swallowed. “Mrs Beatrix makes the Gimps wear masks, so you never see their face,” he said. He looked crazy, but crazy in a way that I could handle. Not the pitiless kind that made Shovel a monster. My first month working for Mrs Beatrix, I learned to hog-tie clients, and gag them. I learned that clients liked to laugh as they whipped me. And I began to feel like maybe I wasn’t as heinous a person as I had thought. This all happened strictly under contract, on Tuesdays through Saturdays, matinee and evening sessions. Mrs Beatrix turns the dungeon lights off at ten pm each night, and I get locked up in the Gimp box with Gary. I’m 6’4” so the box is tight, it’s wide enough but not long enough. Gary gets in first, curls up, and I spoon him. We sleep together like big puppies.Gary used to be an accountant. He is short and pudgy with grey skin and greying hair that’s flat almost as if it’s been ironed. He is teaching me the Gimp code. In our situation it’s good to stick together, he says. Follow the code, he says. He’s a good leader. You know? We live in symbiosis. We ablute together. We eat together. That shit engenders a closeness. Gimps are supposed to be occasionally “naughty”, sometimes we’re supposed to resist the clients and—but what happened was, I punched out a farmer from Nacogdoches, TX. Broke off his tooth.This farmer was strangling me. Not in an out of the ordinary way, but certain kinds of men remind me of Shovel. And this Nacogdoches toolbag reminded with more veracity than most. And I fucken lost it. À la his broken tooth.So after we get locked up in the Gimp Box, Gary says, “You’ve got a lot of repressed rage, buddy. You broke the Gimp code.”“I know, man. I’m sorry.”“Also, you breached your contract. You’re lucky Mrs Beatrix didn’t fire you.”“I know. Thanks for talking to her.”“The client wants to sue. Litigation, buddy. And we couldn’t find that tooth. Luckily, she’s got a soft spot for you.”“She fucken hates me.”Gary sighed...“I’m sorry man. I know you’re trying to help me.”“I’ve never seen a Gimp go ape-shit like that,” said Gary. “With one of your arms chained to the wall? No, I have not seen that. Just between you and me, that was impressive.”I didn’t say anything.“You’ve had some experience brawling, huh?”“Some,” I said quietly.“Buddy. Are you hiding from the law?”“The law? No. I got myself in trouble with a guy.”“And he’s not a good guy to be in trouble with?”“Yeah.”“It’s okay,” said Gary. “This is a good place to hide. You’re anonymous. But you also need to be submissive, okay. Calm.”“Yeah.”“Now, let’s go to sleep. And no more bad dreams, okay?”“Okay.”“Because we live in a nightmare world, buddy. A world of the dark and the depraved. And so our dreams are our freedom. So dream of white sand, untouched and serene, the ocean lapping warm over your feet, coming and receding like a heartbeat – Dum-dum, dum-dum....”Gary goes through the ritual, and I fall to sleep. Since I’ve been working for Mrs Beatrix, my nightmares have been less. They are almost gone, Gary says. He says it’s just training. You do the work, work hard on yourself, then you change. You change yourself. Rather than external shit changing you. Then you’re on a path to freedom. Doing the workThe dungeon has brick walls and slate floors. Easy to clean. It has a wooden door like a castle. It’s heated by pipes and is always warm. Sweating is important to the clients. Two Saturdays a month, Mrs Beatrix runs the beginner sessions. Mrs Beatrix has to work hard to get the newbies into the zone. Every new face, I’m looking for Shovel. Would he recognise me in this devil-horned oni kabuki mask? While I’m chained against a wall and getting limply cat-o-nine-tailed by a short fat guy with his balls duct-taped against one thigh and his dick duct-taped against the other? Gary is in a leather onesie that you crawl into via an ass-crack zipper. He has a red-fanged oni kabuki mask on and an elegant lady is tentatively slapping his bottom with a paddle.When Mrs Beatrix finally creates a suitable atmosphere of fear and adrenaline, when the clients enter the zone, what I see is: Gary is getting hot candle wax dripped on him by a bird-like male in a fedora hat. And Gary’s oni kabuki mask, is it smiling, or grimacing? I can’t say. But it’s just a mask, and under the mask Gary is calm, because Gary is on a white beach, feeling the sand between his toes, feeling the sun on his back, seeing the wonders that God hath made. The fedora hat man gets me in a choke hold and I’m gagging for air while Gary serenely submits to about twenty pegs being latched onto his nipples. I wish for that kind of serenity.What does the Gimp contract allow?-Open handed slaps,-Pinching,-Tickles and horsey-bites.Just for starters.Gary and I have different contracts. In my contract there’s no nudity. No sex. General cleaning duties. Light battery. Slapping, whipping, etc. Strangulation within reason, no blackouts. Those are the basics, which is good enough for most clients, apart from the more sickos. The sickos want more and pay more but are still never happy. That’s why I also have “security duties” in my contract. The idea is I’m a Gimp primarily, but also a Security Guard in the event of some sicko getting out-of-kilter. My safe word is Bananas. But if a sicko gets out-of-kilter and my role becomes Security, then the code word is Thunderdome.A hundred dollars an hour, plus board.But Gary’s got different clauses in his contract.Because Gary can take almost anything, submissively and contentedly.-Getting peed on, for example.At the same time as wrestling a client, Gary is watching Mrs Beatrix’s back to make sure no one sneaks up on her, and also keeping an eye on me—he can tell just from the pallor of my skin what my O2 levels are. I’ve seen him subdue volatile clients with little other than gentle patting; love basically. What Gary does, it comes from compassion. The clients come for Mrs Beatrix in the same way that fans went to see Nirvana because of Kurt Cobain, not realising that there in back was the hero Dave Ghrol.By the end of the beginner session, Mrs Beatrix is stepping on client faces, twisting her foot down on strangled balls. She is six-one and PVC-clad. Only wears black. She is visually ageless, and raven. How I see all of this is through a plastic bag over my face held there by the pale, hazy form of a plump patron. My hands are chained to the wall and there is a moment of panic but Beatrix pulls the bag off my head just before I call Bananas.She has a sixth sense for that shit. And she whips the frenzied plump guy into a corner and he begs for forgiveness.I will kill that fat shit if I ever see him in the real world.Oh I will. Oh my God, I am a killer at heart.I memorise the motherfucker’s face.Which, of course, is a breach of the Gimp code. Sometimes in the Gimp box, Gary coughs. He tries to muffle the coughs, but we are pressed together in just loincloths, so I can tell. I’m not sure why he’s trying to hide it. But the morning after the Saturday session I see a fine mist of blood adhered to the wall of the Gimp box.What does the Gimp code say about secrets?The same as every other decent code. So I wipe the blood clean and say nothing. On SundayWe clean the dungeon. We use a high pressure washer. But first we scrub the walls with a Makita Power Bristle and a Bulk Blenz Industrial Cleaner that smells like Forest Pine. We mop the floor. We lubricate the chains and whips. Disinfect the swings, slings, cuffs, restraints, masks and gags (anything leather). Wipe down the nipple stimulators. Fold the laundered hand towels. And oil the dildo machine. This is all contractual.Afterwards we sit in the small courtyard out the back of Mrs Beatrix’s terrace drinking coffee. It is cold but sunny and I can sit out here without a mask. Gary says Mrs Beatrix is married. Her real name is Carol Smithers. “How long have you worked here, Gaz?”Gary looks up from the De Telegraaf, shrugs. “Ten years,” he says. Gary is wearing cargo pants and sandals. He is also wearing socks. “It’s been interesting work,” he says. “There’s always more to learn.”“Learn what?”“Inner peace,” he says, standing. “Let’s go for a walk.”I don’t know about that. No one knows me in this old part of the Dam. However, my likeness is easily described. Shovel has ways of finding people. There is an answering machine in an apartment that I still, theoretically, rent; and I called it not that long ago, and there was a message. Come see me, he said. Don’t make me look, he said, not indifferently but not without heat. The anguish of waiting, buddy, isn’t that worse than just plain blackness?“Come on,” says Gary. “We’ll be fine.” I pull my cap low and put my grey hoodie up over my head, and follow Gary into the gothic adventureland of De Wallen.The streets are one-way ruts made in Medieval times that are used now almost exclusively by Volkswagens. Sex workers in windows remove sleep from their eyes and stifle yawns. Gary buys a twenty-four pack of toilet paper and carries it around. In a church hall beside the Hash & Hemp Museum there is ballroom dancing on Sundays.Gary can dance.Waltz, Samba, Rhumba, Capioeria, Salsa, Tango, swing.He dances, portly Gary. He can lead. Good leading is invisible, unnoticeable. Gary maintains tautness between himself and his partner. When Gary and a new partner become synchronous, each surrenders to the other. Gary’s ability to surrender is his strength. It’s why he’s a good dancer and it accounts for the deftness of his fingers as he hogties a client, for his tolerance of fear and pain, and for his oneness with the revs of the dildo machine. HaircutGary wants to get his hair cut. I sit on the stoop out front of the hairdresser. “I’ll mind the toilet paper.”“I had a son about the same age as you,” says Gary. “He never made an effort with his appearance either.” Gary is smiling but there is pain there. The door bell chimes as he goes inside and sits and the hairdresser floats an apron over him.What I do with the info that Gary had a son is I wonder what if I was Gary’s son. Gary would be a great father. I lean back against the building and close my eyes.In my mind I see a debtor, a man so far in debt that it cannot be repaid by money alone. The man is on his knees, holding his forearm protectively across his face but it doesn’t stop the bat as the bat comes crashing down on his arm and his face and he lies shivering there, flat on the wet bitumen. Haha, harhar, goes Shovel. Again, he says to me, as I am holding the bat.When I open my eyes, a man across the road is staring at me. “You were talking in your sleep,” he says. He puts his finger to his lips and sits back into a shadow. I can see why I didn’t see him before, the building is grey and he is grey–grey face, grey beard, grey beanie, sitting in a grey sleeping bag, ready for the Arctic, but wearing black sunglasses and holding a bunch of dead flowers. This man is a chameleon against a wall, no predator would ever find. Perhaps this is a choice he made, to hide. Or, he has become like this through being forgotten. Does it matter? What it comes down to: he is no one.“What you doing with all that toilet paper?” he says. “You going to use it all?”“In time,” I say.But I get up and I give the man two rolls, and he asks how much money I have. I don’t like his smell, he smells like piss, I don’t like that I don’t like it but I still don’t, and for this reason I don’t lie to him. I tell him I’ve got fifty Euro on me. But I’m keeping it. I don’t know what you would use it for, but that’s not why I’m keeping it, I say to him. I’m keeping it because I’m selfish. I want it.“Well, thanks for the roll,” he says, holding the flowers and the rolls. “Happy dreams.”I take a mental snapshot of his face for this is a man who has seen me at my weakest and knows that I am vulnerable. Ampallang As I lay down with Gary and close the lid of the Gimp box, the dungeon door opens and Mrs Beatrix comes in. I can see her high heels through the breathing holes at the bottom of the box.“Hello boys,” she says as she sits down and crosses her legs. “How is buddy today?”Gary says. “He’s doing well, Carol.”Mrs Beatrix says, “He’s doing a lot better, lately.”Gary says, “yes.”I don’t speak to Beatrix. Gary is The Gimp Rep. Beatrix is negotiating an appropriate reparations deal with the farmer from Nacogdoches, TX. His dental bill was four thousand dollars. We don’t want any police or lawyers involved, so she is having to figure out a way to console him, financially. “What are you getting at?” says Gary.“Well, I’ve had a request that might help us with the finances,” she says. “A well connected, potential, new client, who is willing to pay extra if you were both to be ampallanged.”I feel Gary tighten. The tip of Mrs Beatrix’s heel begins to jiggle.“Body piercings are excluded under contract, Carol.”“Yes Gary. This would require an amendment. You’d be compensated. We’d all be well compensated,”“How well compensated?” “A thousand dollars, for each of you.”I try to advise Gary through touch that this is more than fucken okay with me.“I’m unsure if buddy knows what ampallanging involves Carol.”“Tell him it’s a male genital piercing that penetrates horizontally through the glands.”“A barbell through the head of the penis,” says Gary.My grip on Gary weakens.“Yes,” says Mrs Beatrix. “I’ll need to discuss it with him, Carol.”“Of course,” she says getting up. She pauses though. “Gary, this is an... important client. I...” she sighs.“It’s okay, Carol. Let me speak to buddy.”“Good night boys.”“Good night,” says Gary and there is a solemnity in his voice and great power, the amazing power of the unsaid and a kind of love. Gary says there’s nothing in the code that obligates a gimp to respond to non-contractual requests like this. But there’s the money though, Gary doesn’t mention the money. Gary’s question is: if it’s not in the contract, and it’s not in the Gimp code, then why (aside from the cash, I’m thinking), would we agree to this? This painful thing. And the answer for Gary is that Mrs Beatrix has been good to us and cares for us, and pain is just pain. Because Gary does things out of kindness. But I want the money, a grand might get me out of a good part of the trouble I’m in. A Bullet In The HeadThe body-piercing place is in a tattoo studio just over the Rokin. We have a booking under the name Carol Smithers. The receptionist’s eyes flick to my pants before she looks up. “Right,” she says, jabbing her thumb backwards. “I just need to get... Bear,” she calls.A bear-sized man comes out from the curtain, wizened and rough with scars. He assesses me professionally. “That’s some crazy ink, brother,” he says about my face. He slaps his palms together. “So, who’s first?”“I just need to sit down a minute,” says Gary, and he begins coughing.“You alright?”“Yes.” He nods, coughs. “You... go...”There is a white room behind the curtain. There are instruments. The young receptionist joins us. There is a big boned woman in there with a Maureen nametag in a nurse’s outfit who is wiping down tools with alcohol swabs.The Bear asks me if I want to sit or stand. He says that the young receptionist is going to do me. She hasn’t done genital stuff before, because she is a trainee, but that’s why we got the discount, he says, smiling.I stand in front of a waist-high workbench. The young receptionist puts a wooden block down perpendicular to me and I take out my dick and lay it along the block. Like a corpse at the morgue. She looks at it. Then she looks at Maureen. Maureen looks at it with a medical expert’s indifference. “Bear,” she says, “you want to take a look at this.”Bear comes over, raises an eyebrow. ‘Better use the bigger gauge,’ he says, and he selects a long, tri-bevelled, steel needle from a tray of equipment.. The average penis has a 3.2 inch circumference. You drive a 12 gauge needle through 3.2 inches of dick, then there is a scientific law from which you can deduce how much meat will be displaced by the needle. But displaced where? Out the side of the head? Like brains from a gunshot wound?The young receptionist holds the needle a half inch above my dick. The second before you shoot someone in the head for the first time, as the gun is shaking in your hand, that’s the moment you remember, the moment when you could’ve, in theory, refused. Through the back window I can see a timber Ferris wheel, its empty cages trundling up and over, the whole thing seeming to move like a giant cog driven by some mechanism of wind and time. The receptionist’s hands are trembling.…… “Just fucken do it,” I say to her. Gary and I shuffle back to the dungeon like two critically ampallanged soldiers. There is nothing for the throbbing except to ice ourselves and become absorbed in a few rounds of Canasta.But, there is something wrong with Gary in the Gimp box that night. I wake up because he is so hot he’s burning me. He goes stiff, then his body becomes a bag of air, then it’s like the bag has wild rats in it. But I can’t wake him. I shove up onto my hands and knees and press my back against the Gimp lid. He’s convulsing. I slam myself upwards until the hinge gives. And I get out and Gary flails against the walls of the Gimp box. I bang on the dungeon door but it’s soundproof. The dildo machine weighs about 15 kilos so I grab it and ram the door open. Then I limp upstairs to the interior door that leads into Beatrix’s house. I bang my fist on the door. “We need help.”Bang. Bang. Bang.“Hello?”“Something’s wrong with Gary.”“Pardon?”I can feel Beatrix’s presence behind the door, strangely tentative.“Open the door Carol... Don’t make me bust it down.”The door opens a crack. There is a light behind the door and Carol–Mrs Beatrix–Carol Smithers is way older than I thought. She is an elderly woman. Dressed in a terry toweling robe, her hair in curlers, she looks fragile. Her eyes widen as she sees my unmasked, tattooed face, as she sees the version of me that I have long cultivated. I have worshipped all versions of the devil. “Call an ambulance,” I say. I carry Gary upstairs into Carol’s living room. The room is cluttered by two skirted, overstuffed sofas in floral green and floor lamps with lace-fringed shades. In the corner is an ancient man in a wheelchair, Mr Smithers I assume. He breathes through an oxygen mask.Carol is on her knees holding Gary’s head in her lap, talking to him. The way she talks to him, and smooths his hair, it’s what Gary deserves, that love. The Gimp Box Gary doesn’t come back the next morning. So I clean the dungeon. I clean it once so it’s clean and then a second time, because I’m in here alone but if I’m cleaning I’m not just alone I’m doing something.I’m sitting on the Gimp box icing my penis when there’s a knock on the dungeon door.“Buddy, can you get in the box please. I’d like to talk to you.”Beatrix comes in. She tells me that Gary is out of hospital, but he is not coming back. The doctor recommended against further Gimping.“What’s wrong with him,” I say. “Was it the ampallang?”“He’s...dying buddy.”“What?”“I’m sorry. He’s known for some time.”“What’s wrong with him?”“He said you’d ask that, but he doesn’t want anyone to dwell on it.”“Dwell on it... Well, how long has he got?”“I don’t know,” she says her voice shaking. “Not very long.”“Where is he?”Carol sighs. “He said you would ask that, but even if I knew I couldn’t tell you buddy. I’m bound by confidentiality.”“What, by the contract?”“Yes.”“... did he tell you not to tell me?”“I’m sorry buddy,” she says quietly. “It’s not about you or us, he wants to be alone.” Through the holes in the box I can see her heels and the shins of her leather pants. “I’ve known him since he was a boy,” she says. “I loved him, very much, before I met Alfred.”“Alfred. The old guy, with the tank?” “Gary says he doesn’t know if you’ll want to stay, if he is gone.”I don’t say anything.“Gary wanted me to read you something. Okay?”“Okay.”“Dear Buddy,” she reads. “I’ve known a handful of Gimps in my time and not ever have I felt as strongly for one as I do for you. I know you are a gentle man under all the smoke and mirrors, and I like that man. I know you hate the thought of yourself alone in the gimp box. But buddy, the sufferer is the liver of life, experiencing life as it is. The hedonist only ever searches for life. To live with suffering and worry is a learned skill like any other, to forgive is a learned skill too. And there is forgiveness in the box buddy. I found it in there. We live in a nightmare world buddy, but there’s a white beach somewhere with your name spelled out in its sands.”Carol folds the note. “You know I can’t do the shit Gary does.”“I know, we need to expand your capabilities.”“I don’t know about being in this fucken box alone.”“I know. I’m scared too. I’m scared of you. You’re a fearful creature. I want to do this though, if we can. I need to. Can I rely on you?”“I don’t know.”“Gary says I can,” she says.I can’t answer for what Gary says. I can’t say if Gary is right or wrong, all I can say is only Gary would say that.Carol tells me that she has done a deal with the farmer from Nacogdoches where we don’t have to pay his dental bill but...he wants to come back, with two Texan friends. For what she is calling a forgiveness session. “Is that something you could handle?”“I don’t know.”“It avoids any legal consequences.” “He looks like a guy I know. A guy I do not like.”“I’ll help you.” “Okay.”“Okay? Okay. I’m locking the box now buddy.” She’s had new hinges put onto the Gimp box with 40 mill screws. There will be no breaking them. I already miss Gary. I don’t want Gary to die. I don’t care about the Texans or the whips or the choking. What scares me is what is in this box.She locks the Gimp box and her heels click across the floor and the dungeon door locks. And what is in front of me is pure darkness and the questions that this darkness brings.“White sand,” I say. White sand.
August 19, 2025
Fiction
UNDERGROUND READS FOR FREAKS WHO CAN’T WAIT FOR THE NEW TOXIC AVENGER MOVIE TO COME OUT by Rick Claypool and Lor Gislason
Everything is fucked up, okay? Ask us what’s fucked up and if there was a gesture to gesture toward all of it, that would be the gesture we’d make. This deep, deep fucked upedness – which is also a wide, wide fucked upedness – means a lot of things. Geopolitical things. Authoritarian things. Environmental things. Toxic things.And you know what? We’re tired. And we’re guessing you are, too. And we’re just going to assume if you’re reading this that we’re all tired because we’re all doing our best fighting the good fight, doing what we gotta do, helping how we can help, protecting what we gotta protect.But at least the new Toxic Avenger movie is finally almost out, because as a reward for dealing with all the fucked upedness as best we can, we all deserve a little treat. And the treat we deserve is a remake of a low-budget horror comedy from the 80s about a twerpy, mop-wielding loser who is transformed into a hero by exposure to toxic sludge (aka the type of thing giant corporations describe to their shareholders as externalized risk). And that hero, of course, is Toxie, the ass-kicking superhuman mutant who defends the citizens of Tromaville, New Jersey from fascist thugs and corrupt politicians.Now it’s only fair that, while waiting for this treat you deserve, you reward yourself for doing such an outstanding job of waiting so patiently with – you guessed it – MORE TREATS. And the treats you deserve for so outstandingly waiting patiently are books.And the specific books you deserve are these, according to us (in no particular order): Behind Every Tree, Beneath Every Rock by Michael Tichy (Castaigne Press, 74 pages)Tichy’s kickass nature’s revenge novella answers the question, what if the Toxie and Treebeard had a baby, and that baby slaughters neo-Nazis. Maggots Screaming! by Max Booth III (Ghoulish Books, 342 pages)A father son duo find corpse copies of themselves in the backyard and decide to watch The Simpsons together, typical Texas activities! Max goes into every detail of decomposition and it's an absolute blast. Ghosts of East Baltimore by David Simmons (Broken River Books, 189 pages)John Dies At The End meets The Wire. David Simmons’ unique voice tells a deeply weird and extremely fun story in this horror novel that winds through the grittiest and grimiest corners of Baltimore where occult addictions and mechanized villains rule. My Dog Shits Cash by Luke Kondor (Bod Dot Press, 208 pages)We adore Luke's writing and we will shout about it from the rooftops. They're incredibly fast reads, that perfect Bizarro blend of absurdism, gore and humor. The latter half of this gets WILD. Transmuted by Eve Harms (Unnerving, 113 pages)Queer stories by queer writers! A back alley style gender affirming surgery goes haywire for our protag Isa in a big way. Eve’s descriptions are delicious. Lars Breaxface, Werewolf in Space by Brandon (Spaceboy Books, 320 pages) It's stupid fun riding along with badboy space werewolf Lars and his gang of misfits through the galaxy, causing mayhem and escaping from some of the most fucked up space enemies ever, including a variety of killer dildos. This book has a one-star Goodreads review that reads, “DNF - so ridiculously crude” and a five-star Goodreads review that reads, “So ridiculously crude I finished twice.” Slices: Tales of Bizarro and Absurdist Horror by Scott Cole (Black T-Shirt Books, 160 pages)Round out your toxie reading with a collection! The weird has its roots in short stories, and Cole is a master of hooking you from the first page. Huge variety here, so there's something for everyone. Bullet Tooth by Grant Wamack (Broken River Books, 164 pages)A VHS-entombed demon awakens and wreaks havoc on the streets of Chicago, manipulating people around a student artist named Caleb and stoking beefs to fuel gang violence and feed on the ensuring death. This is literary B-movie horror with a message that hits its targets dead on. Witch Piss by Sam Pink (134 pages)Sam Pink’s signature deadpan absurdist lens on everyday life turns the experience of hanging out with neighborhood oddballs into a series of strange adventures. Another Chicago story, the abandoned buildings and dead-end streets set the stage of this side-splittingly hilarious book where Pink’s reveling in bad taste and broken dreams calls to mind some of Troma’s best (worst?). The Nothing That Is by Kyle Winkler (179 pages)A broke-as-hell employee of a small town catering business versus a cosmic manifestation of demonic greed. Love a likeable loser turned working class hero! Coyote by Max Restaino (Amphetamine Sulphate, 69 pages)A grim and grimy love letter to the forbidden horrors and pleasures of cult VHS gems, Coyote legit feels like a cursed and grainy lo-fi nightmare. Chaindevils by Matthew Mitchell (Weirdpunk Books, 128 pages)A propulsive post-apocalyptic splatterfest where meth addict warriors terrorize the post-apocalyptic countryside and wage chainsaw-powered war against all manner of menacing mutants. And there’s lust and love and a blood red anti-authoritarian streak running through it too! And finally, here are our shameless plugs for each other’s books, which we both genuinely love and which absolutely belong on this list: Inside-Out by Lor Gislason (DarkLit Press, 86 pages)Gislason’s debut novella gushes with lo-fi gore and goo. But don’t mistake Inside Out for nihilistic ultra-violence – the sympathetic characters and relatable emotional arcs make this not just gross, but fun. Is cozy body horror a thing? It is now. Skull Slime Tentacle Witch War by Rick Claypool (Anxiety Press, 298 pages)I'm in awe that Rick can make a story featuring a guy who pukes knives pull at my heartstrings. It's such a “this is what writing’s all about” inspiration. Live your best goopy life!So… yeah. It's easy to get lost in futility when the world is this fucked up on the regular. But that just makes the little moments of joy and weirdness even more important to hold on to. Watch a stupid movie. Read a demented book book. Tell your friend a bad joke. And take it one day at a time.
August 18, 2025
Fiction
DAWNS by Bright Aboagye
On some days, you’re a ghost to your own body. Some mornings, your bones feel borrowed. Never been yours. Just something you’re renting till it all breaks down. You lie still and feel every joint light up like someone lit a match inside your marrow.
***
It’s 4:27 am and you’re staring at your laptop, trying to write a suicide note that sounds less dramatic than it is.All you’ve got so far is, I am tired.Three words. Nothing more. You backspace it and watch the cursor blink like it’s judging you. It’s the only thing in this room that has energy left. Your chest feels like it’s being stomped on from the inside, but you’re used to that.That’s the thing about sickle cell anaemia. It doesn’t kill you quick. It just… makes life a battle to survive. One crisis at a time. You were born on a rainy Friday in Accra. Your mother still says your scream sounded like broken notes on a piano. You spent the first two weeks in an incubator while your father paced the hospital halls, Bible in one hand, borrowed money in the other and watched for miracle. You almost died three times before you could crawl.By age 6, you knew the word “crisis” better than your own name.At 10, you learned to fake smiles in class when your fingers swelled like fat sausages and your spine throbbed like it had been crashed. Teachers called you lazy. Friends called you weak. You learned how to laugh it off.At 12, you wrote your first story. It was about a boy who turned his pain into fire and burned down everything that hurt him. You showed it to your English teacher. She said, “This is very… interesting.” She never brought it up again.Now you’re 25. A writer. Or at least you try to be.You’ve submitted stories to every online magazine. Most people never reply. The few that do send the same line, Your work is interesting but doesn’t quite fit our current needs. Or the usual, unfortunately we must pass it down. You used to believe that meant try again, edit the story and submit a better one. Now you just delete the emails without reading.One time, an editor told you, “Your writing’s too dark. Can you maybe add more hope? Readers like a little light at the end of the tunnel.”You wanted to ask her if she’s ever spent three nights awake trying not to scream because your bones were fighting each other. There’s nothing like hope in your journal. Just pain. Your friends say they love you.But they also say things like, “So, what triggers your sickle cell? Like… if you drink too much or what?”“Do you think you’ll live to 40? Have you thought about kids? I mean… would that even be fair?”Sometimes they say nothing at all when you tell them about the bad nights. They just drop emojis.A friend once said, “But at least you get to stay home and write, right?”Right. Stay home and bleed without screaming. Stay home and count your red blood cells like coins in a dying piggy bank. Stay home and write stories no one publishes and even if published, no one really reads. You want to die. You were more than tired. You just hate being the only one in your body who knows how much this hurts.You’ve thought about everything: Overdosing (you’re already halfway there with the meds anyway), slitting your wrist (but that might take too long, and you hate mess), hanging (but there’s no beam in your room that looks strong enough) and sometimes you think you’ll just will it. Just lie here and tell your heart, you can stop now. Just go.Last week, your old crush Dufie texted out of nowhere.“Hey stranger. Was just thinking of you. You, okay?”You stared at the message for two hours. Typed “yeah, all good” and deleted it.You almost told her.Almost said, “I wake up and it feels like my skeleton wants to escape.”“I haven’t written in weeks because my hands don’t always obey anymore.”“I think I’m losing the war in my body.”But you didn’t. Because Dufie likes pretty things. And you’re not one of them. You’ve never been attractive.The sun’s starting to argue with the horizon. The pain has reduced but your hands still shake. You start typing again.I’m tired. But I’m here. And I wrote this. That must count for something.You save it as a draft. Just in case you wake up tomorrow. You have a half-finished novel on your desktop called Sinking Life. It’s about a sick boy who becomes a famous writer and dies before his first book is published. You wonder if maybe you should finish it before you go. Or maybe leave it half-done. Let someone else write the ending.***
It’s 4:48 am now.Your parents prayed for ten years to have you. Ten long, fasting, and all-night vigil years. Anointing oil on their foreheads every Sunday, candle wax melting into prayer mats, womb soaked in prophecy and mouths sipping holy water. Your mother nearly died giving birth, and your father named you, Nhyira — blessing.The irony doesn’t escape you. You were supposed to be a miracle. Instead, you became a calculation. A schedule. A lifelong stress no one clocks out of.“Don’t sleep without a blanket.”“Did you drink water?”“Take your folic acid.”“Have you eaten?”“Don’t strain yourself, remember your blood.”Every phone call is surveillance. Every visit feels like a check-up. Every hug is full of fear.You started noticing it in their eyes by the time you were fifteen. The look that says, if anything happens to you, we’ll die too. You became the air they breathed and the choking in their throats.Your father still tells people, “My son is a writer.”He doesn’t mention you haven’t published a single book. That you’re rejected more than you’re read. That you spend most of your days in a dark room, writing paragraphs you delete an hour later.Your mother is worse. She sends you Bible verses every morning. Sometimes five in a row. Psalm 118:17 is her favorite, “I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord.”You don’t have the heart to tell her that just surviving doesn’t feel like living. And the good works is the death you keep waiting for to come. You tried, though. God knows you did.***
You enrolled at the University of Ghana, studied English, made few friends and got good grades. Interned at a radio station. Had hope. Had plans. But pain doesn’t respect dreams. And crisis doesn’t care about deadlines.By your third year, you missed too many lectures. Couldn’t walk some days. Couldn’t even speak some nights. You almost died in a hostel room surrounded by empty ORS sachets and paracetamol drug to subside the pain. Your father drove from Tema at midnight. You could tell he wanted to be angry. He wanted to ask why didn’t you call sooner?But he just held your hand and said, “You’re all we have.”And that’s what broke you. So, you moved out.Rented a tiny single room in Dome. Far enough that your mother can’t drop in unannounced. Close enough that your father can still send Jollof with the delivery guy. They didn’t understand it. Your mother cried for a week. Your father just said, “At least let someone stay with you.”You said no. You didn’t want a nurse. Or a cousin. Or a caretaker. You just wanted yourself. And a space where you could fall apart without making someone else bleed. You told them it was for your writing. But really, it was because you couldn’t bear to see them wait for you to die.Some days you wonder if your mother regrets praying for you. If she watches you limp into the living room and thinks, maybe it would’ve been easier if we never had him.You try not to think like that. But the thoughts come anyway.You are their answered prayer and their curse. You’ve tried to write about it before.A story about a woman who gets her miracle child and then loses her mind caring for him. You submitted it to a magazine in Nigeria. The editor replied, “This feels too personal. Too bloated. Can you give it up with some humor?”You laughed until you almost coughed blood.***
It’s 5:02 am now.You hear the muezzin call for prayer from the mosque across the street. A rooster screams behind your window. Your joints feel like they’ve been replaced with rusted bolts. You haven’t slept.You open your WhatsApp. Your mother has already sent you Psalm 118:17 again. You type, “Morning, Ma. I’m okay.”You delete, “I’m okay.”You type, “I’m still here.” Then you put your phone down.You hoped your mother wouldn’t reply instantly. Because if she did, it would be another trap. Another invitation disguised as concern.“You should come to church. The Legon Interdenominational.”“The drama group needs someone like you to write their plays.”You never told her that your heart has been dry for years. That the ink she sees in your stories is mostly pain. You don’t believe in miracles anymore. The first and only time you went to the church, you sat rigid (as if you were imprisoned) in the back row, counting ceiling fans and exit signs. The choir sang and you wished to be a part of them. But you weren’t about to stand up there and sing to a God who hasn’t even blinked in your direction. The same God who lets you scream into your pillow night after night and never sends even a squeak back.You can’t write for a drama group when you’re living in one. And the script? It’s just hurt on repeat.The fan keeps spinning. The cursor keeps blinking.You close the suicide note; you’ve not changed your mind. You just want to finish one more story first. A second chance to live for few minutes. August 14, 2025
by Mike Topp
$25 | Perfect bound | 72 pages
Paperback | Die-cut matte cover | 7×7″
Mike Topp’s poems defy categorization. That’s why they are beloved by seamstresses, pathologists, blackmailers and art collectors.
–Sparrow
