Creative Nonfiction
FALLOUT by Marta Regn
Every weekend we begged our mothers to drive us to the mall, to leave us at the arched entrance by the Red Robin, and not to look back. We pooled our money. Birthdays, summer chores, quarters from fluorescent plastic Easter eggs. We bought T-shirts emblazoned with the names of bands and bracelets shaped like penises, breasts, middle fingers. We wore our contraband to school under our jackets and swapped shirts while waiting for the buses. No other kids recognized the faces spread across our chests, and we liked it that way. When we stared at our navels, we tugged our shirts tight until the singers’ black eyeliner stretched and smeared, until we were looking in a mirror. We straightened our hair, fried it, frizzed it, teased it with combs and cut layers up to our temples. Only Shyanne could convince her mother to buy the black box dye from Walmart. The rest of us concealed our envy and relief. We once went too far. We met older boys on the internet who sent us songs thick with screams and photos of their beat up cars and blue bangs and wistful eyes. Shyanne’s parents found our messages and phoned the school. We pleaded with the counselor not to tell our mothers. We laid low. We waited for the summer when Kelly would come to Grandma’s for a week. We smuggled a book, Introduction to Buddhism, all the way to New Jersey, desperate to decode the Nirvana lyrics all the blue boys wrote in their statuses. We wore skin-gripping gray jeans to Sunday Mass, and when Grandpa found our Buddhism lessons, he made us sit at the kitchen table while he read from the Book of Job. Grandma felt guilty and drove us to the shore. We wandered the sandy boardwalk, breathed salt air and never changed into our bathing suits. We yanked our tank tops above our ribs and let a local man give us henna tattoos. Peace signs, yin yangs, bold exploding suns. We said No when he asked if we wanted an outline of Italy on our inner thighs. We said Yes when he asked if we had enough olive oil at home to rub into our stained skin. That’s the secret to it lasting longer, he said with a wink. We made a plan to hide our bodies.A few weeks later, Kelly’s mom discovered the olive oil stashed behind the toilet, and we soon fell out. We went back to school, different schools, all of us. We swore we’d talk everyday, but Kelly told us not to call anymore after we tasted vodka with Shyanne’s brother. We got boyfriends, drank too much, lost each other's numbers when we lost our phones in dark rooms. Our lives unfurled on Facebook. We got tattoos, permanent this time. Kelly got married. Shyanne’s profile stayed frozen in our past. A middle school mall selfie. The sun ricocheting off a backdrop of parking lot snow, her black hair catching all the spare light. We have what relics we can remember. Not relics, fossils. The figures that left depressions in the sand are long gone, sand themselves now, returned to a great current I remember the Buddhists call a stream.
May 21, 2025
Fiction
SEA MAIDENS by Ravi Mangla
Ever since her husband was hit by a municipal bus, Mrs. Atwal would spend her afternoons watching the hippos at the aquarium. Their fleetness of hoof belying their primordial size.At two o’clock, on the nose, the hippos were isolated in a separate part of the tank and the mermaid show would begin. Children crowded the double-paned glass. A drowsy piano tune was piped through the speakers. The mermaids emerged from some unknowable recess in the tank. Each time one of the mermaids waved at Mrs. Atwal, or otherwise made eye contact with her, she imagined a hippo breaking loose of its enclosure and flattening the mermaid against the glass.“Afternoon pick me up?” The question threw her, as the man was small—very small—and she couldn’t be sure whether he was asking to be physically picked up.“It’s the good stuff,” he added, and held out a large soda container with a crooked straw poking out from the lid. Then shook the drink so the ice rattled against the sides. “Seems like you could use an eye-opener.”She declined as politely as possible. They watched one of the mermaids purse her lips and blow a kiss to the children.“I hate these floating turds. I wish one of them would get crushed by the hippos already.”She decided she liked this man, and when he asked her if she wanted to visit the food cart—the one by the penguin exhibit—she accepted his invitation.Outside, an axolotl-shaped balloon escaped a child’s hand and floated skywards. The man pointed at the boy and bent over in laughter.“Idiot,” he said. “How hard is it to hold on to a balloon?”The man ordered a single tray of fries, which he proceeded to slather in ketchup from the condiment pump. Mrs. Atwal ordered a small pouch of chips, which she slipped into her bag for later. They sat down at a picnic bench overlooking the Gentoo penguins.“You know how much they pay you if you fall into one of the exhibits?”She shook her head.“I mean, with a good lawyer, we’re talking millions. Even with a bad lawyer, you’ll be set for life. Just for slugging it out for a few rounds with some puffin.”He continued: “A couple of months ago some kid got bit by an otter. Guess what? A quarter million dollars. Can you imagine? He was ugly as sin before the otter got him. A quarter million! What would you do with all that money?”She tried to think of an answer. It shouldn’t have been hard to imagine as her husband had taken out multiple life insurance policies before he died and she had that much—more—in the bank.A seagull flew over to pick at the greasy jetsam under their table.“Fuck off, you ocean rat,” he said, trying to kick at the gull, but his feet couldn’t reach the bird from his seated position.Mrs. Atwal rose to go to the bathroom.“Where are you going, lady? It’s just an ocean rat.”The bathroom was precisely empty. She sat down on a toilet seat in the stall and thought about whether seagulls could digest fries or if it caused them to get sick and throw up later.Under the stall, she saw a coral blue tail fin trawl across the floor tiling. She opened the stall to find a mermaid in a silver wig crying over the sink. She edged beside her.“Why doesn’t Jason look at me the way he used to?” the mermaid said.She wondered if Jason was the other mermaid in the show. Or a land dweller with the biologically appointed number of toes.“He’s always talking with Miranda. And she can barely go thirty seconds without reaching for the air hose.”Mrs. Atwal nodded conspiratorially.“Miranda doesn’t have the lung capacity for this work.”“Right?”“And Jason, I saw him laughing earlier when a child lost his balloon.”“How cruel.”“Cruel indeed.”The mermaid threw her mammalian arms around Mrs. Atwal.“Thank you.”The mermaid hopped and shimmied out of the bathroom. Mrs. Atwal returned to the picnic bench, where only the man’s partially eaten tray of fries remained. She took out her bag of chips and ate them leaning over the railing encircling the penguin colony.“Ma’am,” said the moon-faced attendant. “You have to stand behind the red line.”She looked at the red line, which was several inches behind the railing.Would standing behind this line shelter her from life’s assorted dangers? A tall order for a band of paint, she thought.But like the well-mannered woman she was, had been raised to be, she stepped behind the red line, and for a moment even she believed that nothing bad could befall her.
May 20, 2025
Fiction
SEASON OF THE RAT: AN INTERVIEW WITH ELIZABETH HALL by Aiden Brown
Against the verdant landscape of boarded-up gay bars, bluffs that swell over cresting waves, and hot sand between toes, a haunting, frenetic, and razor-sharp narrative scurries to life in Season of The Rat (Cash 4 Gold Books, 2025). Like the rat, author Elizabeth Hall invites her readers to “taste it all- flowers and cigarettes.” The result is a work which resists definition—part novella, part confession, part dissertation, and part infestation. The reader plays the simultaneous role of voyeur and confidant, observer and observed, the rat in the ceiling and the girl who listens to its scurrying steps below. Season of the Rat is subtle and riotous, “a fat California orange in the palm of your hand.” Hall invites us to examine how we are changed by our tragedies and our inquiries—every shard of human experience piled at the sides of our roads. It is an exploration of our private ruins and all that finds a home there. I sat down with Elizabeth in West Adams to discuss Season of the Rat, anal breathing, sex, shapeshifting, California, and what’s on deck for this literary powerhouse in the making. Aiden Brown: I was so excited when Allie [Rowbottom] asked me to read this book. Without knowing what to expect, or knowing you, it just blew me away. One of my favorite things about it is the ambiguity of its genre identity, so I have to start by asking how you describe Season of the Rat. Elizabeth Hall: I think I’m officially calling it autofiction. It’s definitely based on my actual life. I’m usually not very interested in writing just a straight memoir because I get bored easily. And so the research is a huge help to stay motivated, and also provide a necessary counterbalance of joy and exhilaration—so any memoirs or essays I’ve written in this vein dovetail heavily into research, for better or for worse. AB: That was one of my favorite things about the book—the research kind of weaves into and around the more emotional and personal narrative, which creates such a strong portrait of intellectualization while still resonating emotionally. Your protagonist’s—or your—exigence for the rat research is self-evident within the narrative, but what drew you to researching abandoned gay bars?EH: The bars were actually before the rats—I found this book about Orange County by an LA Times writer Gustavo Arrellano, and there was this anecdote in the book about them. My friend Caitlin and I started going on adventures to these places in Laguna. It was an avenue of research that served as kind of a reprieve from my other research about my mom, or the cult she was part of that was founded in Orange County. A lot of my work focuses on sex trauma. Some heavy things were coming up within my own family in that regard. So I think it’s natural that I gravitated toward locuses of queer joy, especially in what I tend to think of as such a stiff place. And that research, too, helped me navigate my own queer journey. It was easier for me to go to an abandoned place to discover my queerness in a way than to go to a gay bar with people in it. I took the introverted path.AB: That’s so interesting because in the book, there’s almost always someone with you in those scenes. Actually, that brings me to one of the things I loved the most about this book—I mean, of course, I don’t love that it happened—but the way your relationships, for better or for worse, kind of lurk beneath your research and weave in and around it. In particular, I found the connection between the trauma you endured and the research on rats, garbage, and ruin so striking. How did those connections develop for you? Was it something you planned going into the project or something that emerged over the course of writing it?EH: So, the origin of the book was the sex assault. It started, honestly, because of an argument with my wife. The scene was cut from the book, actually, this tiff about the tent. But it was the first camping tent I’d bought for myself, and I’d taken it on so many solo camping trips, including a journey from here to Portland for my first book tour. And when I was about to go camping by myself in Joshua Tree with it, my wife was like well, you’re not going to bring that tent. And I was like obviously I’m bringing the tent. I don’t have another tent. She and I had just moved in (this was during the pandemic)—my wife also works a corporate job, and so she was living at a very different income level than I was. So, I took the debate over the tent as almost a symbol of that disparity. Like, of course you can just buy a new tent while I have to be okay with sleeping in my rape tent. I also didn’t want to give [Mark] or the assault power over my beloved tent. Eventually, it became a joke between my wife and I—we had a riff on “rape tent” for a very long time. And so the first scene of the book was originally going to be about this rape tent. I had intended it to be an exploration of [Mark’s] and my relationship through the lens of class. Actually, the assault came to be more in the background compared with the original exigence of the project. I really wanted to emphasize how much resources play into why people stay in abusive dynamics. AB: Period. Absolutely. EH: This was around that time when it was really popular in certain lit circles to listen to edge lord-y podcasts like Red Scare. They had an episode—actually, just the other day—where the hosts speculated that people stay in these dynamics for psychosocial reasons—they were attempting to do a psychoanalytic read on various dynamics like narcissism, or codependency. So, there was also a part of me that wanted to write this in opposition, not to Red Scare specifically, but to that whole idea that people are addicted to their lover, or that emotional reasoning is even a primary motivator. I wanted to shift the conversation—people, I feel, are almost taking pains not to talk about the resource aspect. It’s expensive to live in Los Angeles, and a person shouldn’t have to give up their life in a place because someone chooses to do something to them. When the assault happened, we had already been broken up for a while, but we were still living together. My primary motivator for staying wasn’t that I was just having such a good time hanging out with this person, it was for want of choices which didn’t implode my life.The choice to stay was one I made to try and control the situation. I’d just gotten a nonprofit job, which I was able to turn into a full time position largely because of the stability I had at that time, and because of the stability I’ve had with my wife Heidi since. At the time I was writing this book, I was working at one of the most beautiful libraries in Los Angeles. And I’ve worked hard to get these two idyllic situations. Had I gone to a shelter or stayed on a friend’s couch, that destabilization would have been observable to an employer. And I’d never had a full time position. I wasn’t able to even get a tooth fixed. I’m a big proponent of Maslow’s Hierarchy—like, how are you supposed to concentrate when you’re worried about having your basic needs met? Without the stability I have now, I probably wouldn’t have been able to write this book, at a minimum. AB: What is your relationship with [Mark] like now? How did it change or what changed about your perspective on it while you were writing Season of the Rat?EH: A part of me wanted him to bear witness to the pain he’d caused. Another part of me wanted to write about it quickly—I wrote it within months of leaving the situation—to preserve the sense of love I still had for him. Another myth that I’ve encountered is that you’re supposed to immediately hate someone after they’ve harmed you in that way. But we shared all kinds of deep intimacies with each other over the years. I understand why people do close their hearts, and my feelings toward [Mark] have hardened over time.I don’t think of [Mark] as a monster—I think doing that makes it harder to heal. While I understand why people would need to think of someone who did that to them that way, it created a dissonance for me between the reality of what happened and the ten years we spent together, the friendship we had. And even after it happened, we lived together; we were in a band together. Prior to his violations, I really did enjoy his company. After the assault, he was still my primary emotional support, which was that much more destabilizing. There’s a pattern in my life of being close to someone that then I had to extricate myself from—music I couldn’t listen to anymore. I always knew I was going to write about him, and I wanted to do it with a degree of diplomacy. I mean, I could write another book about sex assault two years later and write it totally differently. AB: You say this in the book—and really it was a gut punch for me as someone who’s had similar experiences—that he never denied the assault, it was just something that didn’t impact him on the day to day. EH: Yeah, he just went on living his life. The day after it happened, we dropped off the other person who was on the trip with us (who didn’t know what had happened) and I noticed that [Mark] was already on dating apps. He dropped me off in downtown LA to go on a date, and I spent the whole afternoon floating through the city. By the time I’d gotten in my Uber home to San Pedro, he was taking selfies in the desert with a new girl he was dating. I remember going home, crying and just thinking I can’t run away from this—I mean, literally—I didn’t have a car. And he got to just go on like everything was normal.AB: I was really struck by that portrayal of the banality of that kind of assault, and how human—or maybe diplomatic is the word—you were while still expressing that anger and that devastation that comes with sexual assault. I mean, we harden toward them over time, like you said, but making them monsters can also obfuscate a situation for us in so many ways. It is like floating, or like walking a tightrope. That brings me to this tension between fear, harm, and love. I felt that tension very strongly in Season of the Rat. What’s the relationship between those ideas for you personally?EH: I'm someone who grew up very much fearing showing emotion with the exception of, perhaps, within the church system. Definitely one of those people who went wild at a youth retreat—hands in the air, all that. I felt like it was like a safe form of love, I guess. I'm not religious now, but when I was younger, the idea of Jesus providing unconditional love was huge to me. Especially because that was not something I was getting necessarily in other aspects of my life. My mom is a wonderful person, but she has a lot of anxiety that tends to manifest as hypercriticality of herself and others. I think she moves through the world believing criticism is really helpful, and that it’s a loving thing to do. She grew up in a very dysfunctional home that created that lens of get it together, you know—“lock in.” That was translated to me and my sister through her, so I don’t think I was ever going to have that easygoing, free feeling love vibe. Part of [Mark] and my whole relationship was that we were both very much afraid of vulnerability and emotionality. The main thing we did together was smoke a lot of weed all the time and listen to music together—we really were not linked up in a soul-bonded, emotional way. In fact, I don't think we ever even said I love you until we’d been dating for four or five years—which is insane—and it only happened then because I was having an emotional affair with someone who was so free-flowing with love. That's why I was attracted to the affair, I'm sure. It woke me up to the range of love that I was missing out on. Even today, I'm married and I still get very embarrassed about showing affection. My wife worked on a really big live show, and I was making her a little card for when she came home, and then I was so emotional, and it low-key embarrassed me. I was like, I'm not going to put this out. And then I was like, wait, yeah, I am. This is so dumb! I am almost 40 and married. I don't still need to feel that way. So it still happens, that fear of being seen, to use a TikTok phrase…AB: The mortifying ordeal of being known.EH: Exactly. I mean, love is one of the most vulnerable things about us—the fear that it won’t be returned. I'm not like that now—compassion is free, love is free; it hurts me none to share these things with people. I think having access to love from Heidi—she's a very extroverted person, very giving, a very different person—and seeing her vulnerability with me and with her friends has been really helpful in navigating that vulnerability and fear, and letting love kind of effuse within our dynamic.AB: I haven’t had the pleasure of reading your first book, but I assume by the title I HAVE DEVOTED MY LIFE TO THE CLITORIS, that it explores similar ideas around vulnerability, love, and sex from a different standpoint, since you were in a very different place in your life when you wrote it compared to Season of the Rat. I’m curious how, if at all, your process differed between the two books?EH: Both were written during destabilizing times in my life. Going to CalArts for an MFA was a pretty good culture shock for me. I'm really more of an autodidact. I barely went to undergrad college, skipped a lot of classes; I thought it was like a hack to use a spreadsheet to track my class absences. It's not a hack, it was a waste, but I thought I was real slick. Going to CalArts was, in and of itself, a bit of a risky move for me. [Mark] had applied to grad school in California, and CalArts was the only place I got into near where he was accepted. At the same time, my mom was in the process of finding some things that had happened in the past with my sister which were pushing her to get divorced, and then she went bankrupt—her whole life kind of blew up. So, I don't think it was that surprising that I was drawn to an excessive research project. I think it was escapism. I'm a very escapist person, whether that be through marijuana or exercise. The idea for the clit book came from a poem that I had previously published, which was comprised of sex writing cutups, that people were responding really well to. I didn't feel like I had the writerly skillset for a novel, but what I could do—similar to the rats—was, and is, research. I can always do that because it makes me happy, and research is an escape in some ways. You get to live in another world. The clit research made me feel so alive. I’d wake up in the morning at like 5am (I’m an insomniac) and the sun would be shining—California sun, you know, every day.It was so beautiful, and I could travel to the sixth century or something and it felt crazy, and that made me really happy. I also was learning at the time how unhappy my sex life had been with [Mark]. Because I was raised really religious, he was the first person I’d ever had sex with. Even though I wasn’t religious anymore, there was still that internal backbeat of thinking it was cool that, although I was like 26 and in grad school, I had only had sex with one person. It was definitely misguided in retrospect. As I wrote, I was having a lot of compulsory sex with [Mark], because I just didn't know. I was having sex every day and giving blowjobs every day, and had no idea that wasn't a normal thing. And I never came, obviously, so—I'm only being this frank because it's a sex book—AB: No, I love it.EH: So, I was in the process of recognizing that cultural training, and of discovering that it wasn’t just me—it was actually everyone I talked to. I would talk to friends in the grad program and they all were like yeah we never come, even people who’d had upwards of twenty partners. I initially thought maybe it's just [Mark] and then it's like–, okay, no, this is systemic. Actually, until he read the book, I don’t think he had a desire to focus on my pleasure. I really think this comes from an internalized misogyny among many women and men, this idea that women's pleasure just doesn't matter. Like, no one comes from penetration. I mean, some people do.AB: Love that for them. Huge if true.EH: Right, it’s rare; the vast majority of people don't. And he was like Well, I've never had that problem with previous partners.AB: Okay, so those women were lying to you. EH: They're lying to you! Until he read the book, which probably hit home the ethical aspect of pleasuring a partner, did anything change in terms of us having better sex. But writing the book was eye opening for me and really changed a lot of how I thought about actual sex and agency around sex. It also exposed a lot of my own internalized misogyny, which I'm still working through.AB: Speaking of things you’re working through, I’m curious what your writing life has been like—how did you start?EH: I struggled with learning disabilities, and didn’t really read a book until high school, which was when I got into diaries—Sylvia Plath’s specifically. Then, I got into biographies of writers. Anaïs Nin was the first writer I was obsessed with. I was still very religious then, so I would go through and cross out the curse words and the sex words. I always knew I wanted access to a different life than the one I was living, and reading and writing were windows into other worlds. Reading shapeshifts time; you’re slowed down and almost living inside the book and alongside the book. I was interested in the lifestyle of a writer or what I thought that would be. A lot of my favorite writers were very craft-oriented like Nabokov, Miller. But Nin especially—she was self-taught and kind of a bad writer when she started, so revision was big for her. I knew with my academic sensibilities that it would be huge for me too, and that’s really informed the kind of writer I’ve become.AB: I really see the confessional style in this work. That’s so interesting you say that because my primary impression of this book (once I could catch my breath) was how well-crafted it was, both structurally and on the sentence level. Season of the Rat comes out in May—what else is on the horizon for you?EH: I’m not working on a big project right now, but I am working on some smaller essays. I write reviews, for Full Stop and other places. I really like doing critical work. I think I was scared to do any kind of review work because I didn't feel like I had the academic training to understand books systematically, but I found out I really love doing it and my editor at Full Stop, Fiona, is such an amazing reader and editor that I just want to keep working with her. I’m kind of loosely working a novel idea—the problem with novels is that I lose interest really quickly—but, it's about a health clinic that does anal breathing—AB: Oh, hell yeah.EH: —which doesn't exist, but it's inspired by trends in colonics. I've always written a lot about wellness and been interested in it, not as a practitioner necessarily, but as a cultural phenomenon. AB: I wouldn't be surprised if you don't see someone trying to harness anal breathing in a few years. EH: Oh, anal breathing is the final frontier. I feel like whenever my larger projects don't work out, they usually become a smaller piece. I have an essay coming out in Hobart that kind of dovetails with Season of the Rat’s storyline. I feel like there is an idea for something about my mom that’s percolating. I tend to be inspired by things in a moment and then go hog wild over them. If I were a really disciplined person, my life would probably look different, as would my writing, but I let my ADHD take the reins creatively. I'm definitely here for the girls and for the messiness.AB: There’s a lot of really beautiful vulnerability in that too. Girls forever. I can’t wait to see what you do next.Season of the Rat is forthcoming this June from Cash 4 Gold Books.
May 19, 2025
Fiction
CITY DESK by Michael McSweeney
Last spring the county newspaper paid me $200 to write about local dreams. I interviewed a man whose job it was to cycle out the books from the little lending library in the center of town. We met at a diner nobody liked and was always empty but stayed in business as such diners often do. He told me he mostly dreamed about colors. Yellow in spring, green in winter, purple in autumn. Summer heat made the man's legs swell and he didn't want to talk about what he saw those nights. He seemed uneasy about the approaching season. As we spoke my smartphone gathered time beside undercooked bacon. Recording a voice I'd listen to speak these words once and never again. This is the nature of the news and the people who write it. We fill our notes with memories and chronicle a world that grew so fast it forgot how to stop and remember.I ask the man if he believes in dream analysis, and he tells me when he sleeps on his back he sees faces in the colors. People he met when he served jury duty in Greenfield three years before. I don't know their names or anything about them, he told me. The day aged through the pollen-painted window. Buzzards circled above the bridge across the river to the rust-lined highway to Boston. The man fingered the bacon on his plate. Oh, he said. We sent a boy to jail for murder. Outside the diner the man asked me if I'd put him in my story. I told him it's up to my editor. I didn't know if that was true but when I don't know something I appeal to some faceless power. We shook hands and he asked me what I dream about. I told him reporters should never become part of the story. He laughed and said, No, really. Tell me.I told him when I dream about the places I used to live, they look nothing like those places, but in the dream it's all real and true, that I know those places like I do the people I've loved. Every place in my dreams has a road leading north. I thank him for his time. You're from around here, he said. Not really, I said.The man got in his car and backed into a fire hydrant. Water gushed like blood from a torn-off thumb. Then he turned the car around and gunned it against the hydrant. His engine sobbed. I took pictures with my phone but they were all blurred, out of focus, smeared with light. Faces filled the windows around us, some I knew, faces angry and entertained, faces of why now, of not this again, of I get it, man, I really fucking do.
&
The paper assigned me to cover a recent wave of carjackings. Not the carburetor thefts. They told me that was a different beat, and that we'd talk about pay when I had something good.As I waited at the light on Avenue E one morning a woman opened my passenger door, flashed a ten-dollar utility knife, and told me to drive.Where? I asked.South, she said. I gassed it. A pollen-clouded patrol car was parked outside the gun store at the intersection. A cop, leaning against the door, didn't look up from his phone. We left town. Drove past restaurants, gas stations, farms. All for sale. The butterfly sanctuary was closed for repairs. Further south a line of cars waited to park at a brewery. Food trucks belched steam and a couple locked arms on the grass. I nearly collided with the car ahead of us.Watch it, said the woman.Sorry, I said.The woman told me to take the highway. We inched through Sunday construction. Men clustered by potholes and idle machines. I wondered if any of them looked inside my car and confused us for husband and wife. I told her this.Don't say that, she said. She checked her phone and was on the verge of tears.Her directions were more forceful now. The ramp past Deerfield, left, right, left. Take it slow down this street. Look for a truck with no bumper. Apple red.The same, the woman said. The same.She was out of the car before I parked. The woman sprinted, slipped and shouted up the angled drive and flung open the garage door. Two men fucked on a yoga mat, free weights and kettlebells and gym clothes abandoned around them. A radio spewed dad rock on a chair. The woman grabbed one of the men by the hair and tugged. The men broke apart, their passion fissioned to sweat and rage. I see you, the woman screamed at one of the men. He didn't seem angry or shocked. Calm, almost, as if this was expected, predicted, even welcome. No one said anything. Just frozen acknowledgement, where no words suffice to explain how the resolution of tension causes both pleasure and pain. Then the woman shoved me back to the car. Pushing tears back into her eyes as she moved. Drive, she whispered. South I drove again. Small mountains rose as if the world was teething. We approached the tallest, one I'd climbed before blind-drunk on a snowy, lonely night. I hooked an observation road and shot past hikers too weary for the steep rock path. My legs ached from the long sit. At the peak we got out and gazed across the valley and the towns and the curves of the green-brown Connecticut River.I dreamed about this, said the woman.What do you mean? I asked.I saw my husband. Driving there. I felt how happy he was. How that garage felt more like home than ours.How did the dream end? I asked. The woman rocked back and forth, hands in her pockets.Like this, she said. What do you mean? I asked.I forced you to drive at knifepoint. When we arrived I forgot my knife in the car. My husband chose someone else. Then we drove up this mountain. Then I woke up.We said nothing for a while. A prop plane flew above us in a circle and then turned north, against the wind.Then the woman said, The way my husband felt. That love inside him. That deep, physical love. I'll never forget.Then she said, I don't have any money.We drove back to town under a rose-gold sky. There are no sunsets anywhere like those in western Massachusetts. I wondered if I had the right to tell this story, or if everything was off the record, or whether these things even matter when you're a witness against your will. As we turned onto Avenue E the woman pressed her knife against my neck. Wallet, she said. Then, more softly, she said, Please.She took thirty bucks and a gas station gift card and the picture of my nephew, then tossed the wallet in my lap and stepped out into the street.&
The paper laid me off on the fifth of July. In June we covered bridge repair delays, unaffordable homes, church fires, community musicals, childhood illiteracy. Covered births, deaths and arrests. Covered sickness, hope and happiness. We covered the war, and then they shut us down. Some private equity barons out in Boston coveted the land beneath our office. I had an hour to clear the city desk I shared with three other journalists. One week's severance. Benefits 'til the end of the month.I asked my editor what to do with my half-finished story about a man who'd drowned in the river. He was a local, an institution, a bellwether figure. Sought your change outside the sandwich shop. Bought milk and bread from the communist theater group on the corner of Avenue G. Once, he told me a story about being a judo champion in California and as he spoke he hand-chopped the air and winced and bore his teeth, but he seemed proud to remember those moves. Ben. Ben Armstrong. I'd written his name on a notepad and circled it in red ink.Forget it, my editor told me. We were close in the way you become when you deal with the constant mess of private lives, because that's what local news is, a constant mess bursting into public, ordered and shaped by writers and publishers. But I knew next to nothing about him, his family, what he wanted, how he saw himself, here, at the end. But it was too late to ask. I watched him slide a half-dozen reams of untouched paper into his backpack and step nervously out into the light on the sidewalk outside our office. On the bathroom wall I wrote in permanent marker The News Was Here. Then I pissed, didn't flush, and left with some notebooks and pens.At home, I caught up on my drinking. Shouted at hummingbirds. Built a castle of beer cans on the back porch and staggered through its walls before a midweek thunderstorm could blow it down. Mostly I slept. My blanket gathered cat hair as I moved from bed to floor to couch like some forgotten, guilt-soaked king. I wondered whether the stories I told really mattered. If they changed the world or changed someone's mind. If any sort of story matters when a story must make noise, provoke, and never repeat.My mother, a man's voice said from beside the couch one day. It was the man from the diner. He gripped his legs with thick, red hands. Like many men who lived in town, he seemed on the verge of explosion. His eyes darted between the brown houseplants on the windowsills.Then he said, That's who I see in the summer when I sleep. That's not a color, I said.She is, he said. Like this. The man pinched his arm and then held it close to me. His arm shook and a small spot bloomed red then purple-brown. The ease of his bruise scared me and I wanted to tell someone about it.I loved her but she, well, you know, said the man. The man's arm kept shaking.Then the man said, Someone can love you and still do terrible things. Like nobody taught them how to do it right.Yeah, I said.I rolled over and listened as the man watched me and breathed. Am I asleep? the man asked.I think I am, I said.No, said the man. I'm asleep. And I really don't want to be. I want to wake up.I turned back toward him and then said, Sometimes when I want to wake up I open my eyes as wide as they'll go. Sometimes if I do it enough I can break through the sleep and escape.The man tried it. The valleys beneath his eyes turned the color of plums. He used his fingers to stretch the skin like he was trying to release air from inside his head.It's not working, he said.I'm sorry. Am I dead? Did I die in my sleep? I don't know.Please wake me up. Please. Please!Alright, I said.I threw off the covers and gripped the man by the shoulders. We made eye contact. Blue ones. The sky in spring.Ready? I asked.Yeah.I shoved him. As he fell backwards the man grabbed my face. I lost my balance and we tumbled together in darkness. I don't know if I hit the ground. Don't remember. All of a sudden I was awake, alone, in my blanket, and that was all. I sat up. I had nowhere to be. No stories to sell. I closed my eyes.What remained was a burst of relief. Like a bath of liquid gold. But it wasn't my relief. In half-awake clarity I knew that the man had escaped from the dream. His dream or mine, I wasn't sure. But he was free, somewhere out there, even if it meant returning to whichever hell had inspired the dream to begin with. I wanted, desperately, for the man's happiness to be my own. May 14, 2025
Interviews & Reviews
SIGNAL ISSUES AND FUZZY SNIPPETS: AN INTERVIEW WITH CHASE GRIFFIN by Rebecca Gransden
Chase Griffin’s alchemical style continues with Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace (Corona/Samizdat, 2026). At once a fanciful record of an unfathomable mind and experiment in merriment, the book is unabashed with its lingual adventurousness. When life gives you strange frequencies it’s time to whistle your own tune. Griffin is a psychedelic jester, and, as is common to that type, also the smartest guy in the room. I spoke to him about the book. Rebecca Gransden: Where there are gaps in this text, there are gaps in my life. I was only able to write this introductory material after an extended break from text of all types. They say the only way to get out of a black hole is to have never gone into it. While I don’t recommend going any further into this one, it’s already too late for you. -Roy Christopher, 2024 What’s the deal? When and how was this written and translated? Where does Roy Christopher fit into all this? Chase Griffin: Zoidoid was written in an alternate 1980’s by an alternate-me. And Roy is an alternate-Roy. And Roy has half-translated (half-translated because he suffered some Lovecraftian-madness while translating and he couldn't finish) Zoidoid from a fake future language (alternate-me is also a philologist) into English. Thanks for writing that intro, alternate-Roy!RG: How long did it take to write Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace? Did time pass fast or slow or in-between?CG: It took a year to write Zoidoid in my head. I was working as an overnight stocking clerk at the time. And it took a couple nights to let the whole thing pour out of my head onto the page. The year was long because overnight jobs are fucking awful. The two days passed slowly, but that was a pleasant slowness. I think one of the greatest feelings in the world is being in the midst of that fabulous kind of writer's schizophrenia when time stands still and the alien worm voice guides the pen.RG: It’s been a while since I've written in commonplace. I shouldn't be writing so sporadically in here... the way I’ve been writing in here for the past twenty or so units. I am realizing now that I should be much more diligent. What are your aims regarding language and style for the book? Any intentions regarding world building or backstory?CG: Context: Peter has this notebook filled with his archeologist, archivist parents' writings on the past (our present) and the language of the past and how the language might be able to unlock the secrets of the mind control device permeating all. Further context: So the commonplace book referenced is both Peter's diary (the back half of the fictional notebook which makes up the whole of Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace) and an archeologist book (the front half of the fictional notebook which we do not get to read).I went with this constrained epistolary style because that style best suits a story about translation and a world that makes unreliable narrators of its population.RG: Believe me, I wish I could turn off fresh emphasis. I don't want this trouble. I wish to be a googly-eyed wacko normie schmuck just like everyone else. Who needs this kind of stress? What would you like to emphasise?CG: I don’t know. Having a faulty, sparky monkey brain is great. There’s nothing wrong with the mass madness that is humanity. Because none of it matters. I love my madness. It’s my superpower. And only the outwardly mad ones are the sane ones. We’re all flawed and terrible because we’re gross animals. But who cares. Let’s all forgive each other for being born dumb animals. The sooner we get over this mass psychological determinism we are all bound to, then the sooner the big, dumb Doubt can begin, and then we can all accept it, and then we can go ahead and finally begin gently, cautiously being big, dumb monkeys attempting to not be big, dumb monkeys (which I think involves a lot of mass inaction and quiet and staving off entropy and the elders starving for the young (my modest proposal)). Maybe it is written that we will stop doing things for long periods of time. Maybe it is written that we will finally give up and realize we’re not good or better because we’ve done nothing bad. We’re just lucky. The circumstances we were born into gave us ourselves. We did nothing to earn a self. Not one of us has free will. So these words don’t matter. Nothing matters.God, I’m such a drama queen.Ask me tomorrow. I’ll emphasize a belief in something tomorrow.RG: Why am I still eating this dip? What is the best dip? What is your favourite dip? (Not necessarily connected).CG: Guacamole. Guacamole.RG: Have you ever smirked momentously?CG: Sure. After a good fart. RG: I believe I'm having a strange reaction to death. Makes sense. I often have strange reactions to many things.Have you ever had a strange reaction? Do you aim to establish a particular type of reaction in those who read your work?CG: Sure, I have strange reactions all the time. Life is weird and I have a faulty, sparky monkey brain. And no, not really. I'm not looking to establish a particular reaction in readers. I'm looking for readers who are down to have fun with the text.RG: I think I will crack open my briefing case. Today's setting will be archoniff sider and maybe it will help with my damn sass. What is the importance of sass to Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace? Where does sass begin and end? How much is too much? Does sass have an objective measure?CG: It might not be sass. Sass might be a random word that Roy chose when he was translating. And I don't know about the beginning and ending of sass. Maybe there is no beginning or ending. Yes, I feel like sass has an objective measure and its measuring instrument is an oversized spanner covered in purposeless springs and gears. RG: Please introduce Bippy.CG: Bippy is Peter's dead mom’s cat. This prissy furball is the hero of the book and the best character I have ever written.RG: I’ve written too much and I am going to become an unshakable thing. How horrid!Have you encountered any horrid unshakeable things, either in the writing of the book or generally?CG: Surely. All the time. I encounter horrid unshakable things all the time. I live in a densely populated village. How could I not encounter horrid unshakable things? Don’t read the local paper, by the way. But what am I to do? Nothing really. I see it all as character building. I have to be like the Buddha Or maybe not. People suffer so much more than me, so why shouldn’t I suffer some too? I just got lucky because I wasn't born into terrible circumstances. No one earned anything. How horrid! RG: The book features song lyrics. Are there melodies behind these lyrics or do they exist solely on the page?CG: I have melodies for them, but the reader can make up whatever melody they want.RG: What significance does music have to Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace? Do any bands or albums share common elements?CG: Music plays a big role in prosody, and prosody is very important to me.Music is always on my mindMusic prompted the writing of Zoidoid. One night at work, while I was listening to “Doctor Worm” by They Might Be Giants, I came up with the basic outline for Zoidoid.Also, Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace and its fraternal twin, Satanic Panic & the Very Special Episodes (they will be published together as The Ampersand Collection on Corona Samizdat), are like the twin Guided By Voices albums Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes. The common elements are the signal issues and equipment blockage. The books and the albums have these fun messages to send you but the low studio quality and signal issues (mostly due on both parts to limited budget) only allow fuzzy snippets of the messages to get through. And, of course, this fuzzy snippet-ness (this constraint technique) is all a part of the charm.RG: I am the only untranslatable person in the world. There's no one here who can decipher the whispered gibberish. Does your writing demand comprehension? What is lost or found in translation?CG: My writing doesn't demand comprehension. All that matters is the emotion and the emphasis, the incomprehensible human-ness (the faulty, sparky monkey-ness), poking through the rigmarole-membrane of the literal and figurative institutions. My works are more like fantasy and fairy tales (which don't require explanations for their motions) than science fiction (which is like a fairy tale giving excuses for its behavior).RG: How do you define New and Old?CG: Pre-old is our time. Old is the glorious golden civilization that arose from the ashes of our time. New is the oppressive society that followed the downfall of Old.RG: Does Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace have anything to say when it comes to politics and current affairs?CG: Not sure. I don't think there's much to say. We're all actor-bodies of the leviathan-theatre and all political conversation is a big script. It's all catechisms. Even what I just wrote. And also with you! Gesundheit!But maybe the book is asking about obscurantisms and mesmerisms. Are we searching too hard or too little for obscurantisms and mesmerisms? Are we too paranoid or not paranoid enough? Should we be putting our energy elsewhere? Is this, the searching and obsessing over possible hidden things, a design—like a figurative Air Loom? RG: How do you approach the use of signs and symbolism in your work?CG: Character and story always come first. The conceptual materials are handed to me by the characters and the story. Then comes the welding torch.Going back to music, this is how a lot of the great concept albums were made. Fellowshipping equals motif discovery.RG: Onomatopoeia—what are its limits?CG: What are the patience-limits of your ideal reader?RG: How would you advise someone approach reading this book? Any particular demeanour or method of engagement that would enhance the experience?CG: My books like to be read aloud (although many readers have told me they prefer to read them silently)—in the same way Shakespeare is best ingested when read aloud aloud. Not saying I’m Shakespeare by the way. I need to add way more dick and fart jokes to my work if I want to be Shakespeare. With something like Hamlet, even if you don't understand the language and the cultural references, if you read it aloud you understand the emotions and the emphasis. And maybe that kind of understanding is more important than direct understanding, which is an understanding that always ends up getting folded into the flux.Also, use whatever pronunciation you want for my made-up words. And then stick to whatever pronunciation you choose.RG: I looked back to Shea to make sure he wasn't examining my facial expressions too closely. What facial expression best expresses what Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace is trying to express?CG: How about that fun face Johnny Cash is making in that famous picture of him flipping the bird?RG: Do you hate computers?CG: Meh. I'm pretty indifferent. What even is a computer? Are they terrible for the earth, like air conditioners and cars?RG: Believe me. I didn't want to trust him. I didn't want to set aside my urge to stomp his brains in. I didn't want to not hate him, the fucking mentor fuck. But I submitted, and I set it all aside.Have you ever trusted someone to be your mentor? If so, what influence have they had upon Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace?CG: No. No mentors.There have been Lots of cool old guys and gals in my life though and they’ve given me really good advice. Please excuse this aside. The most trustworthy old people I ever met was this hippie-pirate couple who owned this fantastic used bookstore and junkshop called The Memex. I spent most of my youth sitting in the back of their store reading old copies of Mondo2000, the Illuminatus Trilogy, Rocco Atleby novels, Ursula Le Guin, and the Whole Earth Catelog.RG: Do you ever get the feeling of brain growth caused by reading? In a physical, oh jeez, something changed and I’m not sure in what way?CG: Yeah, definitely. I feel squirming sometimes. And I hear a little voice. The voice says things like, “It's just you and me, buddy,” and, “More guacamole, please.”RG: What portmanteaus, neologisms and/or spoonerisms do you like? Are there literary devices you would NEVER use, because they are lame? Conversely, are there literary devices you consider underused, so would like to advocate for?CG: I like whatever looks good on the page. And, I don't like to knock stuff. Because I wouldn't want to indirectly knock a fellow writer’s style. Everybody is allowed to do their thang. And, I don't know what's overused or underused. I use devices when the need arises.RG: Is there a chance that Bippy could have her own spinoff universe?CG: Yes, absolutely. Bippy deserves ten books.RG: Which renowned philosophers would read and appreciate Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace?CG: He’s a TV character, but I feel like Bernard Black might like my book. I had his voice in my head, impatiently making up words and saying sassy lil deconstructions, when I was writing this one.Although, Bernard would probably open my book, drop a piece of jammy toast in it, make a face at his mess, and then toss the book-jam-toast monstrosity at an annoying customer.RG: How is information transferred via Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace?CG: Information is transferred through the air via the Air Loom.Spoiler alert: The Air Loom was built during the golden civilization when we finally figured out the horrible truth. We built the Air Loom in order to hide the Lovecraftian revelation from ourselves.RG: Have you ever kept a journal, diary, or log?CG: Yeah, I keep a journal. I mostly write about the cute things my kids do. I keep a commonplace book too. That’s where I do all of my story and character mining.RG: What is your dream for the book?CG: My dream is for it to get folded into the book cocooning all of my current books, SCHLEMIEL GAUCHO, which is about this one-man Brothers Grimm who is collecting postmodern fairy tales (my books) before they are swallowed up by the flux and incorporated in the fold.RG: Where is Peter Zoidoid and where is Chase Griffin?CG: Peter Zoidoid is in the book writing with the slime-pen filled and Chase Griffin is in Tampa writing this answer.
May 13, 2025
Fiction
A GAME OF GO by RY
A miracle had come to the mansion that evening, dressed in peasant robes as she played go on the doorstep. The house of Lord Liu was in desperate need of a blessing. The past month had been disastrous for those staffed within its walls. The change from a serene yet celebratory atmosphere had quickly dulled after one of the maids caught sight of the Lady’s physician leaving her room with a cut over one eye. Surmising that he had said something to anger her, rumors spread over the course of a single night – vines choking the mansion halls, blossoming with fragrant anecdotes.The less fantastical yet albeit as shocking truth was made clear the next day, when all the maids were assigned dark sashes to wear across their waists. A sign of mourning, a homage to the Lady’s stillborn daughter. They were to wear them throughout the year and were warned to tread carefully around the Lady’s room, as she was, according to the physician's report, “of a disagreeable disposition.”When servants came to deliver her meal trays, they came silently, heads hung low like crouching flower stems. She would get angry over the most menial details – a stray stain on one’s cheek, a distractingly uneven gait. Once she had clutched a young maid by the cheeks, demanding she get on her knees and pluck out her own eyes.Those are my daughter’s, do you understand, you knave? My daughter would have had those eyes. Her nails dug into the maid’s face, drawing blood with her thin fingers. She would have had them. Greedy. All of you, taking what isn’t yours.No one could bring themselves to complain. Employment at the wealthiest home in their village was the best most of them could achieve, beyond taking up whatever meager trade their families specialized in. They were well compensated, and much of their pay sustained relatives. They were servants, masters of staying out of the way when need be, so they listened as she wailed night after night and learned to adjust.It was on another of those tumultuous evenings that the girl arrived at their doorstep. She couldn’t have been more than eight years old, barefoot in white robes, setting up black and white go stones on a wooden board. Her dark hair was short, brushing against her shoulders, two buns tied with lavender ribbon on either side of her head. At first, she appeared to be some beggar child, perhaps sent out to be the breadwinner by a parent. More careful parents would have their children rummage through the cook’s trash, and the servants, who had all come close to living similar lives, turned their heads whenever they saw mousy clumsily scampering off with bones and rinds. The nature of her posture, too straight and poised to be that of a poor person, was immediately suspicious. Her robes were free from blemish. Though she wore no shoes, her feet were similarly spotless. Most striking of all was her skin – the palest, most enviable shade imaginable. Courtesans spent half their earnings on lead powder to reach such lengths, and died before they ever could.The maids exchanged furtive glances. They ought to remove her quickly, or call one of the guards – how had she managed to evade them, anyway? And while lugging that wooden go board, too?Before any of them could attempt to escort the girl off the premises, the Lady appeared from the opposite end of the courtyard. None of them realized she had left her room, and her steps held no trace of a sound. Her dark, ebony colored hair slid in lazy circles down her back, uncombed for days. “Who,” she said aloud, in that quiet tone that suggested a beating, “are you?” “Hello.” She rubbed a white go stone between her fingers and looked up eagerly.That day, the Lady of the house received the daughter she had so badly wanted.
. . .
She was, according to the maids, a no-name girl from a no-name land.Her official words were that her parents had died of plague, and she was now an orphan. The go board and stones belonged to her father, the last sentimental possession she carried. The establishment they used to run had been burnt to the ground to stop potential contagion. She was – according to her words – all alone and dearly missing her mother, and had caught word of the compassionate Lady Yin of the Liu household. Compassionate? Was the same dry, echoing thought in all the servant’s minds. By now everyone had heard of how unhinged she’d become during her time of social recluse. She was still visited periodically by other court women, but solely because she was of higher rank and could not be disrespected in such a way without the possibility of punishment.Compassionate was not a word that could be used to describe her any longer, but it was the one the go-girl used, and just the thing to soften the Lady’s hardened heart. She had taken the orphan in and claimed her as her own. The Lord had contested the decision at first, but he worried that any comment on the girl would revert his wife back to her former state. Lady Yin kept the girl at her side during all her daily activities. During the few times she left the house – still publicly in her year of mourning – she toted her newfound child with her. The Lord had decided that the girl was a cousin they were charitably adopting. Visitors had no choice but to believe it – she had all the doubtless exuberance of a noble. She looked like the Lady, and many theorized that once she was of age, the two would be difficult to discern from a distance. The girl was not prone to childish outbursts. She wasn’t meek by any means, but she never seemed to share the tantrums of others her age. She settled disagreements by striking deals, a skill that amused elders of the House. They engaged in her games for their own fun, and thought nothing of the calculated way she examined their moves, mistaking her serene expression for complacency.But the servants noticed the girl’s strolls through town, where she talked with any established businessmen she could – and their sons. She was never swayed by material things. Birthday gifts of jewels and silk managed a thin smile from her. And when she was presented with a meal, she ate alone unless it was required that she dine with guests. A guard posted outside her window had caught her pouring soup on the flowers below, a wastefulness that could never have been attributed to someone of her supposed origins. All their combined observations were, together, a coal lump of speculation. How could they explain the bone-chilling coldness of the girl’s skin, the strange way she smiled, as though unsure of how her cheeks would shift when she did? How she embraced her mother with all the affection of an undertaker, arms stiff as wood? For a while they entertained the notion that she was a demon – told stories to each other in the servants’ quarters about how often the Lady and Lord would get sick now that they’d accepted the girl as their own. Some days it seemed they were well and truly dying, with how skinny the Lady had gotten, though she insisted that she was fine, that she was getting better; she said all these things as she cradled the young girl in her arms, the girl who was squeezing her fragile mother tightly, latched onto her skin like lice.The conclusion came upon them swiftly. The girl had come when the House was at its weakest, the Lady at her most vulnerable, to drain every last drop of good fortune from them. And what would the servants do once their master was buried and gone? Where would they go? Back to the streets, every last one of them, begging as they once did, or working in the sweltering forges, or sewing cheap tarps in the shops. They had been nothing before and would be less than nothing now, the dirt that lined the irrigation canals.So they plotted, as servants are naught to do, and waited until the girl had departed to her own chambers – which took days, to the point where the cook had suggested they just pry her off, the Lady was too delirious to know, she’d probably appreciate the lack of weight pressing against her feeble lungs. At the behest of the maids, they waited for the girl to finally leave her mother’s side, all teary-eyed as she sullenly returned to her room.They caught her as she was about to climb into bed. Her eyebags were swollen and dark, and her skin paler than usual. She shuffled onto bed like a maggot, and asked quietly for the furs she adorned herself with before sleeping. The maid held the blankets above the girl’s head, intending to drape them over her shoulders, and with the other hand sliced her neck.The girl made a sound, something like a whine, an animalistic noise. The blood gushed from her in crimson ribbons, streaming down the bed. The other servants left their hiding spaces and circled the maid with the knife to watch the demon die. It twitched on the mattress, writhing weakly, fighting with a frail, human-like strength. It made slow motions with its mouth. What demon cried out mother with such a cracking voice?They all seemed to shake their heads at the same time. No, they thought, watching the little girl go still on the mattress, she was killing them all. May 9, 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
