Fiction
POOL RULES by William P Adams
The below-ground swimming pool in our neighbor Robbie Garvin’s backyard was ready. Robbie’s father, the beneficiary of a large insurance settlement, wasted no time improving the Garvins' status in the neighborhood. I heard my parents talking about it; they used terms like ‘not above board’ and ‘possible fraud,’ which I knew nothing about. The pool was heated and had a diving board – enough said.Robbie let on at school that he would throw a start-of-summer pool party on the first Saturday after school was out. He bragged that there would be unlimited food and drink and bikini-clad girls from our junior high. I was beyond stoked for the party.Saturday came. The early summer sun was beating down at noon when I arrived at the pool. The only girls were two eight-year-old neighbors splashing in the shallow end. No food in sight, just a six-pack of store-brand soda. Robbie and two pals started a cannonball contest off the diving board, scaring the little girls from the pool. I sat poolside, drinking warm pop. A sign on the shed where Robbie’s dad kept the pool equipment read: WE DON’T SWIM IN YOUR TOILET—PLEASE DON’T PEE IN OUR POOL. I finished the soda and slipped into the shallow end, lazily back-floating with my eyes closed. As Robbie and the others cannonballed into the heated, chlorinated water, I added to the warmth, letting twelve ounces of fizzy cola stream from my young loins, imagining Robbie and his buddies swimming in our toilet.
April 1, 2025
Fiction
WOLF IT DOWN by Billie Chang
I push Ally’s note clean into the corners of my mouth, the motion wet and slow, the ink kissing molar. Finn is in the shower. The bathroom door splintered last week after Mr. Rutabaga ran into it, full force and head-on, in pursuit of a fast spider. We drove him to the on-call vet. He sits now in his doghouse with one less tooth and a tender snout. I can hear Finn’s motions through the wood-chipped cracks: the stumbling as he raises his leg to wash the bottom of his foot, the collapse of water after he pools the drops and cups them to his face. I swallow. The wad is thin, mushed-through, tickles my esophagus. Binder paper goes down smoother than, say, cardstock. And when lined with a three-hole punch, I like to start by pressing my tongue clean through the holes, make a game of it. The shower squeaks off. Steam erupts, slowly escaping.Finn is not technically my boyfriend. The neon “O” in JOHNSON’S BAR was flickering in and out, one night a month or so ago, and he was there standing under it. The glow made the stubble on his chin shift from dark to light. Feeling bold and bright from the pregame and in want of the cig in his hand, I’d gone up to him. Now we see each other intermittently: He knows my roommate by name but I’ve never been introduced to his. We’re doing a dance, where we both don’t talk about the unspoken thing, and I don’t ask because I’m scared to lose the attention. But if someone new were to come up to me, their head halo-d by the club lights, and press their face close to mine, I’d turn away. I feel loyal to Finn. When casualty becomes punctuated by nakedness, it morphs into something else entirely. The intimacy of a mark, sleeping skin-to-skin. It’s a mower to lawn, all my fine prickles picked and collected. The door unlocks downstairs. Must be Gloria with the cake. It’s her birthday today, 23. She’s always been particular about her cake, an 8-inch tres leches from a quiet market in Rockridge. Louis, the baker, delights in this annual cycle. Every year since I’ve known her, she returns with a Happy Birthday, Beautiful Gloria, iced on the cake in Louis’s thin cursive. Gloria sleeps next to me, two twin beds separated by a desk, in a cramped one-bedroom. We’ve been roommates since the 49ers won the Super Bowl, an event which, coupled with Mom’s death, catalyzed my move to SF.Gloria and I have only fought once, after my last boyfriend. He was hard to forget. He left me his childhood stuffed teddy, brown and made of pilling cotton. It took Gloria and I five days to finish and a bottle of Frank’s RedHot. The stuffing was bloating, glue-like. Each piece went down in big gulps, lumping together in our throats, like tens of Adam’s apples. I split the teddy with Gloria because she kissed Reef, once, while we were still dating, and regretted it fully. This betrayal was so shocking that when Gloria first confessed, the sidewalk where they’d kissed erupted and split right down the middle.
–
Gloria places the cake on the table. She’s wearing her favorite dress, all-black with polka dots. She glances at the shoe rack. “Finn is here?” she asks. “He came over early to help set up,” I say. I pad over to our standing cabinet, a heavy wooden thing Gloria found on the side of the street. We dragged it to ours, down Rincon Hill, the concrete smoothing the wooden feet out into patchy bulbs. We keep our party decorations in it, a few nice plates and a sword. For intruders, Gloria said, when she unpacked it. “Are you finally done with Ally?” Gloria asks. I nod Yes. Ally is my community theater director. She left me a note, after she’d given the part of Baker’s Wife to Emma Rose, a preppy girl I hate. Sorry, I know you wanted it, she’d written. Fuck her. Down the hatch she went. When I want to forget someone, I eat and digest whatever they’ve left, things they’ve given me. Gloria is the only one who knows. She’s no stranger to the process; sometimes, she’ll do the same. But it gives her hives and makes her throat itchy, so she’s more selective, has more baggage to carry. It must be hard to walk around so heavy.For me, the gut is its own biome, a paradoxical landscape where digestion means complete erasure. My side of the room is white-wall bare. Everything once meaningful exists instead in my stomach, deep down and feathered by acid. Letters, rings, Mom’s photo album. The hardest was a key, one time. The ridges burned all the way down. I hand Gloria the balloons and we take turns blowing air into them. Finn walks in, his hair all wet. He rubs my shoulder and kisses the skin.–
Evening and the birthday party is in full swing. Gloria is drunk and so am I. The kitchen light is on, but the rest of the apartment stands dark. I’m chatting in the corner with Hanna, a frilly girl with asthma, who’s in Gloria’s roller derby club. “Hannaconda,” she says, pointing to a word on her sock.“What’s that?” “My roller derby name. I had them specially made.” I big-belly laugh, pressing my glass of wine to my forehead. “What would mine be? Wait, no. Do Finn. What would Finn’s be?”“Who’s Finn?” Hanna asks. I smile and look around, trying to point him out. I see two seconds of a man-body rush into the kitchen and have an urge to follow. “Right there. He’s my guy.” “Finndiana Jones,” Hanna decides, and then I giggle-collapse to the floor, too drunk to leave.Thirty minutes later, Hanna presses me about singing and says, "It’s the perfect time. Gloria is in the kitchen." I light the candles and cup the little flames so they stay lit. I lock eyes with the people around. Press a finger to my lips. The quiet spreads and then it’s only breathing. We stalk over in a mass towards the kitchen. The light is still on and a shadowy blob swells on the tiled floor. I hold the cake out in front of me and turn in, Happy Birthday on the tip of my tongue. But then the blob reveals itself and on a chair, Gloria sits straddling Finn, her fingers cupping his face. He’s looking at her, soft. Then the mass begins the chorus and the two pull away from each other, all guilty. Finn’s eyes sweep down to mine, his gaze troubled, and with the candle flames bouncing the light, he looks like he did the night we met, stubble and all.–
It’s no shock when the apartment splits in two, right down the desk. The plaster separates and the house-bones shake. The rip is so big, it cracks the ground and halves the dirt, all the way to the center of the Earth. If I lie down and lean over, my stomach flat against the second floor’s hardwood, my head peeking out above the cavern, I can see stalagmites, bats, Hell. I’m working on finding a tarp so that I can cover my half of the apartment without having to see Gloria across the ravine. She’s trying to fashion a bridge to mine, already threw a can on a string and missed. I should call my landlord. Maybe my rent will be less.I haven’t talked to Gloria since she untangled herself from Finn. When he left our place, his shoes hanging loose in his hands, I stood tall and still on the doorstep and told him how much I cared for him. "I’m surprised," he said, his voice low. "I feel like I don’t know you at all. You’re all blank."–
Before this, Gloria meant trumpets blaring and pop music coloring the background – my weak memory placing her onstage in that dark karaoke bar, all confidence and a soft, lilting voice, on our first night out as roommates. I started work at the seafood house early the next morning, a prim and proper waitress, shucking oysters and recommending white wine to pair with Tilapia. Gloria had gotten to the bar early and signed herself up for karaoke in slot #2. It was a few days before Halloween, the 25th or 26th, and so all the windows were colored with cobwebs. Gloria was in a big bedsheet. Ghost Gloria can sing, I said after, my hands buzzing from applause. She stretched her legs out onto my lap, piling the soft points of her heels into my thigh, and smiled big at the attention, establishing then some sort of need to prove herself worthy. “I’m dressed as my mom,” she laughed, her eyes ablaze. “She haunts me.” I stilled, because I had come here to start again, to try and erase my history. But feeling the alcohol snake its way up my chest and knowing, truly, that memory is inevitable, water to a sinking ship, I coughed and said, "I lost my mom too." And then we spilled open, craft scissors to the hippocampus, remembering things we long fought to forget. A few hours later, we both took to mouth our first memory. For me, a picture frame. For Gloria, a pill bottle. Her mother’s.–
About a week passes and I’ve got the tarp up. But it’s cold in SF, and the wind presses the sheet outwards, making gaps. Eventually, a paper airplane finds its way in. The front says Please forgive me in Gloria’s careful scrawl. I don’t open it, because otherwise I’ll have to sit in the hurt, like I did when Mom died, all the pieces of her life staring empty and back at me: clothes, a toothbrush, her will. God, it’s so much easier to prepare a feast. I take out the seasonings– pepper and salt, some parsley for a green. I go around the house and start the pile. When I’m done, Gloria’s things fill my room. She is in every crevice, from ceiling to floor. I put on a song, let it boom around, and crawl my way to the top. I start with the paper airplane– crumple it up so it’ll sink down smoother. I take big bites and try to forget. Even with the music blaring, I can’t help but listen to the slippery sounds of it all entering my belly. It tastes cozy. Like warm apple pie.The next day, I’m feeling big. I take Mr. Rutabaga on a walk. As we’re climbing up a rounded hill, I feel something grumbling upwards, from deep in the gut. I let go of the leash. Mr. Rutabaga runs ahead, his body disappearing in the tall grass. After a heavy breath, I heave forward and throw it all up. Salmon against the stream. March 31, 2025
Interviews & Reviews
KYLE SEIBEL’S ‘HEY, YOU ASSHOLES’ IS NOT NEAT, BUT IT’S PERFECT: A CONVERSATION by Naya Clark
Kyle Seibel is not a veteran writer or a magical realism writer, but he is a veteran and his writing has magical and realistic attributes. He is still breaking into the literary world even though he seems to have a hang of it. He’s witty on a website we used to call Twitter, and can write a hell of a short story. Rarely does he add quotes when his characters are speaking and he doesn’t capitalize his story titles. Seibel is based in Santa Monica and lives with his wife and dog named Snacks—who also has an established internet presence now. In this interview, Seibel and I chat over the phone, discussing what it means to be a “break out writer,” the literary industry, crafting a story cocktail of real-life anecdotes and surrealism, and his short story collection Hey, You Assholes (Clash Books, 2025). Naya Clark: The nuance in the situations and the characters you write sometimes make your short stories feel surreal. Do you consider any of your work magical realism, or is that just happenstance?Kyle Seibel: No, I don't know if it's intentional, and I don't know if I could say it's magical realism. I think that comes with its own audience, parameters, and guidelines. I read that kind of stuff, so I imagine that it's had some impact on my work. I think there’s that feeling of uncanniness to something that's normal. I really love art that does that. It's the normal stuff, and that’s subverted by something absurd. Those contrasts and that tension make really interesting stuff happen in art. And that's the kind of stuff that I'm drawn to. David Lynch is the really big kind of tentpole in this kind of stuff. But then also, I think of Denis Johnson. There's a book called Jesus’ Son. One of my favorite stories in this book [called “Work”]—these guys are ripping copper wire out of a house that's been destroyed by a flood, and sell it for money to do drugs. And while they're getting all the wire out of the house, they see a naked woman in the air, and she's parasailing, being pulled by a boat down the river, and it's this guy's ex-wife. It's never explained, but I love that. There's this crack in reality, where something extraordinary comes through, and it throws all of what preceded it into a new context. I think that's a trick that I try to bring to my writing.NC: I feel it’s the same with life. Sometimes there is no understanding of reality, or justification for why something happened, or why you, in particular, saw a part of someone or a situation. I'm particularly thinking of “Be Gentle”.KS: That one, especially, is such a special story. It's one of these stories where I was kind of writing it and putting it together and had an idea of how I wanted to have the basic idea that a veteran gets a job at a computer lab and befriends a weirdo student. I started to really think about the idea of the weird kid in class. So, I would ask all my friends about their stories about their weird kid from class. And everybody has this story of that kid from class. I started to put them all together. This character of E.J. started to take shape, and he just became a very real person to me. So I developed the story over a couple weeks, and edited over a month or two, and I got very attached to it. At the end of the story, I think E.J.’s fate is pretty tragic, and I wrestled with it, because I think what I really wanted to do was to give a really happy ending to this kid, and I knew that wouldn't be honest to the story—wouldn't be honest to what this character has seen in my mind. You get the fast forward of what happens to E.J., but what I wanted to leave the reader with is the feeling of what anyone is capable of doing—to be gentle enough to hold a bee.NC: It’s one of those things that has no explanation. I feel it’s more realistic that this character didn't have a happy ending. You said E.J. was a culmination of people's stories of this kind of kid in school. Is that the same for most of your characters?KS: Several real anecdotes braided together to form some of the characters in the stories. There's a story [called “I Suppose You’ll Want To Know About My Life Now”] that is about a guy who, on the day his grandma dies, goes for a run along the beach and almost gets hit by a car, gets a boner, and then gets stopped by the police...so that story is several stories kind of all rolled into one. I think what it ultimately becomes is a love letter to this guy's wife, and I think I use part of it in my vows. So part of my vows are enshrined in that story. There's some language that's pulled from that. And then my last grandma died. I was on a bike ride in Santa Barbara. I don't run, so the running part was fiction, but I almost got hit on my bike by this woman in a car. This was years before I even wrote the story. It was kind of funny that it was not written in the moment it happened—it was only in reflection, years after. The first line of the story came to me and the rest wrote itself. I mean, the first line of the story is the title of it. Then I would realize that I was writing about my grandma. Then I realized I was writing to this woman that I dated in the Navy who had died. And then I realized that was all to my wife, Ali. So it was just a bunch of different things. That was how I drafted it. Then as I edited it down and made it more digestible, it became what it is now, which is a little bit tighter of a narrative. But yeah, that's how it starts: taking from anecdotes or these shreds of memory or something that sticks in my mind, or I've written down for whatever reason, and then just kind of slamming them together on the page and seeing if anything jumps out. I think that's...a chaotic approach. Maybe other people will have something more intentional, but that's how I've been doing it.NC: Something I appreciate about your writing is that it’s complex, but not flowery. I feel everyone can read your stories. How have you developed your distinct voice, and how do you edit to ensure it comes across how you intend it to?KS: I think a lot of the stories in this collection are representative of this style. Stories that feel like they're being told to someone. I feel that makes it feel so intimate. So an occasional second person is addressing the reader. I think that it can be effective. And feeling like a story is being told to you personally is a big part of the guiding style of the voice. There’s a lot of first-person stories in this collection. They are not all me, thinly veiled, at all. I try to let the characters speak in their voice in the stories. In doing so, you're understanding a character, but also why they're telling their story. It gives a sense of urgency, and I think that makes them feel readable. I think sometimes you can be reading a story for five or six pages and think this is beautiful, technically proficient, but why is this story being told to me? What's so important about this story? That's something I really try to center on. Is there a reason this person is telling you this story? It’s because they can't help themselves but tell it. This is this person's one story to tell, they're telling it to you right now. Hopefully, that's the kind of energy some of these stories bring.NC: I do think that is the energy they bring. I don't know what's been up with people hating first-person stories lately.KS: I thought people were mad at third-person stories.NC: Whichever number story perspective they hate this week, I don't know. But I feel how you do it is very effective. I think it makes it more intimate. Like a story that you hear when you're grabbing a drink and you meet a friend of a friend, and they start telling you a story. I will admit that your book was my plane read. I've been traveling a lot lately. So it's what I read when I'm on a plane to stay up. Your stories feel like meeting someone while traveling and they start telling you a story. Another thing that makes it feel that way is the rhythm of how you write your stories. The character always has a goal, they're on their way to do something, then there's these characters that are just so fucking stupid. I could imagine these being my friends because of their decisions and personalities.KS: “Newlyweds” is definitely a story. Those guys are boneheads. They just can't help themselves.NC: That’s one of those rules in writing: make your characters do something that when you're reading it, you go “God, no, why are you doing this?” Again, a lot of the rhythm is because there is a goal. How do you maintain rhythm when you're writing a short story?KS: I hate to shout out my experience as a copywriter at an ad agency, but I'm gonna have to. I'm gonna have to give it up to the absolute boot camp of writing that being a junior copywriter is. You have so little time. Not just in an ad, but of your creative director's time and of the client's time and attention. There's something about being a copywriter that you innately understand how media — regardless of whether it's art or just dog shit — is a competition. It is a competition for your attention. Knowing that as a copywriter, and being able to bring that sense of attention and competition is just something that is very useful. You understand about attention span. You're just not gonna keep people around forever if you don't hook them immediately. So that's always on my mind when I'm revising things and tightening things and going back and rewriting. I ask how big is the hook of this story? What is the sentence that someone will read and have to read the second one? Those are the stakes really, especially when a lot of this book was previously published online. The rule of digital media is they must be hooked immediately. Obviously, it's different for literature, and I think that the immediacy applies. I think that ended up giving my voice a real distinctive quality, especially in these couple stories.NC: Yeah, I will agree. That feeling of I need to get to the point quickly, or something else needs to loop around to almost give the reader whiplash from what's going on in the story...I do feel it is great training. I'm not saying that most writers should be copywriters at all, but it is an exercise in brevity. My background in journalism is another thing. So much of my writing is about getting to the point. How do you get this information across quickly? But bringing in that creative, surreal element that you bring feels like breaking the rules.KS: I will read some stories—of the kind you would read in The New Yorker or a big publication like The Paris Review—where the stories are almost mysteries to be solved. In some ways they're to be figured out, and their value is to be assessed by the complexity of the process in which you have to figure them out. I think there are exceptions to this rule. I'm generalizing, but when we were submitting Skylarking [novel] there was just no interest. We kind of had to let Skylarking go. I don't know what's happening with it now. So that was my big bummer this summer. I was waking up in the morning thinking “Do I want to do this anymore?” I feel all the stuff with the collection has been going really well, and all the stuff with the novel is just tedious, and I feel frustrated. I think there's just really strong headwinds in publishing right now in general. Publishers are tightening budgets and doing layoffs and stuff like that. So the tendency is towards safe bets. It’s not really a climate where people are taking huge swings on new voices.NC: Do you consider yourself a new voice? When do you think being a new voice and being an up-and-coming writer, or being someone deep in the literary world, starts?KS: Well, I think that you can have an infinite amount of debuts. I think everyone's a new voice until they've really broken out. That term, “breaking out”—I've heard a couple of writers recently use it without any hint of irony, and it’s just strange to me. I don't know if it exists anymore. I mean, I think it's rare that people talk about breaking out. It feels to me like a term of antiquity. It was just funny how we people can have three or four debuts—if the last one didn't reach that threshold of audience, or whatever. “Oh, it was just a chapbook. It was just a mixtape” kind of attitude. Does that make any sense?NC: It’s when you can start breaking rules in what you do. Although you consider yourself a writer, that's just breaking in. I do feel you break a lot of rules in your writing style and your grammar. I feel you've maybe gotten to a point where you can say “Fuck grammar.” For instance, your lack of quotations when characters are talking—what is the choice behind that?KS: I'm trying stuff in the collection. A lot of them are new, and then a lot of them are from when I first started writing fiction. I’ve had a change of heart about quotation marks. There is something about when I remove quotation marks from a particular story, I always tend to think that means the entire story is in quotation marks. They could almost be monologues. Maybe that’s how I've intended them to sound; as if they're all contained within one quotation mark. I think I was trying different things—to use voice, and use a point of view and perspective in a narrative way to frame it, as a deeper dimension of the story. Here it exists outside the text, or in the blank that you fill in. I don't know how effective it is or how much it’s working, but that's how I came at some of those stories.NC: I think it works really well. I feel this is a major goal for a lot of writers. If somebody were to show me your writing without your name or the title, after reading a body of your work, I can tell that it's you, because it creates a distinct writing voice. It kind of zooms out and becomes its own monologue. When you write a short story in particular, what is your goal?KS: I think that changes when I'm in different seasons of writing. Sometimes I will sit down to write a story that evokes a special or particular feeling, or a unique flavor of a broad feeling, whether that's loss or anxiety, or joy or horror. There are special kinds of nuanced feelings being explored. Something that feels rather broad, but bringing it down to its sinew, examining it and exploring it at that magnification. It makes it seem much more specific—much more personal and intimate. That's sometimes how I approach stories, and I think that's maybe a first draft kind of thing. Then the narrative takes over, and there's other craft things to consider the different components. That’s usually when I sit down to write a short piece, especially a flash piece. A piece under 1,000 words, I'll be out to explore the nuance of a particular feeling as a jumping-off point, using a personal anecdote as a way to explore it. And I think that's really as simple as those two things coming together, and then it becomes something else that evolves into other things. That's my goal...to bring those two things together.NC: How do you find a humorous voice and inject that in your writing?KS: It's tough and humor is hard. I'm not saying that I figured it out. It's so individual. What you might find funny, someone else might not find funny. It's so weird, having done a couple of readings this year and seeing what I think are funny jokes that just go nowhere. Then what I think are pretty, plaintive lines of narrative get big laughs. It is so strange getting that kind of immediate feedback on different parts of the language of a piece. The collection as a theme, it's kind of—that these are all assholes, right? On any day, everyone, anyone could be an asshole. And they could have a story too. There's something about the charming asshole that is a very, very funny and bewitching character. And I think it holds multitudes. There's an element of selfishness and cruelty and casual violence that some of these guys [in the collection] seem pretty accessible to. But then there's also a little humility and tenderness as well. And in the distance between those two there's humor. There's comedy. So I'm glad that people think it's funny and I'm okay if people don't think it's funny at all. I'm okay with both reactions.NC: Some of it is the situation that your characters find themselves in are realistic, yet they're absurd. Veterans or Navy guys. How much do you pull from your own experiences?KS: It's because those are the characters and settings that I'm familiar with. I think it just feels authentic. Some of these stories are stories that have been told to me third-hand, or things that have survived as memories that are probably not true, in the way that I remember them. Sometimes that can have its own kind of internal magic. The veteran stuff is interesting, because I definitely write about military veterans, but I don't think of myself as a veteran writer. I just don't think that I fall into that category neatly. I don't know if I have anything interesting or particularly meaningful to say on the subject of service. I think it’s almost besides the point that some of those guys are in the military. It just happens to be where their story is taking place.NC: That's your experience, so that's where you're coming from. Do you think it's important for writers to write at least some of what they know? Does that help your writing?KS: I think so...It lends to the authenticity of the story's construction. It gives credence to the more incredulous elements of the plot. So I think that in that way, it can be effective. I think it's important to pull from your own experience, but more than that, it's important to follow the story and have the story be at the center. To lose track of the story, or distract from the story, or to make a choice that deviates from where the story should go because it happened in real life, or because it was part of your real experience, doesn't impress me. That doesn't convince me of it. I think that there should be a point where the story takes over, and all the details and craft, and all the tools and elements and language, roll up to in service of the story that you're telling, and that should be preeminent. And if it happens, the story becomes centered around the factual narrative that you're pulling from. It's a simple question that I'm answering currently in my life.NC: So are there elements that you feel aren't your experience that you add that aren't from your life. How do you write something that you haven't experienced? For example, the “Fish Man” story.KS: This was a story that was told to me in the Navy over a cigarette. One guy grew up on a farm, and was telling us about how there was some sinkhole in this lake, and they couldn't figure out why they had to take all the fish out. What happened in the story is kind of what happens in real life. They did their best to save all the fish, and in the end, they went back the next day, and all the fish had jumped out and died, and they didn't know why. It was this big, crazy mystery. But then I was starting to think about it. I don't know how I came on this idea of a guy getting drunk and finding these fish in a municipal area. It was such a delicious premise for me. It unfolded as fable to me, with the boys finding him and helping, and it being this crusade. Then the idea that it was supposed to be this moment where everything changed and got better. Instead, it was the last breath of hope on a downward spiral. Very little in that story happened to me, except for the feelings of imminent failure. I think everyone feels, or has had the feeling of, nothing going right. Being one of those boys feels so real to me. Having written that story, I don't think it happened to me, but where I feel I show up in that story is not in the main character. It’s in one of the boys that comes across him. So I think that there are different perspectives in the story that I associate myself with, but it's not always the first-person perspective in the story.NC: I feel a lot of the stories, they're all trying—on a mission, a side quest—to do something that's right. As a writer, it's exciting because you don't have to be the main character or the narrator in the situation. You can even appear or identify with a side character in a story. It makes it feel like a lot less pressure to tell a story from another perspective.KS: A lot of times the narrator is the least interesting person in some of these stories. I'm thinking specifically of “cullen”. The main character in that story is having a nervous breakdown and a complete manic event. If you really wanted to make the wildest story Cullen would be the first person, and you would see it from his perspective. You would get a front-row view of his paranoia. But you don't get that. You get this. You get states removed. You get countries removed. This friend that he calls and who's going through his own kind of crisis and you see the real main human crisis is being viewed through a telescope in the story,NC: Right. These things are happening at the same time, but also in retrospect. Then there’s this idea of making it out alive. Something I really respect about your writing is that the endings aren’t always in a neat bow. How do you approach writing the ending of a short story?KS: The endings are truly mysteries. One of my friends, Mike Nagel, has always said“A good short story ends on a sharp intake of breath.” You're just coming to. You're being removed from the moment where the next thing happens. Which I think is interesting. I don't think this is the case for everything, but it can lead to some interesting results. The endings, I mess with so, so much. I'm rarely happy with it. I think sometimes the stories just exhaust themselves. Maybe that’s not being fair to the stories that are a little bit more tightly scripted.NC: Endings are hard, but you do them really well. You trust that the reader is intelligent enough to take from it what they want. They’re not neat, but they’re perfect.KS: I think the endings kind of revealed themselves. It was one of those things where I gave them to a couple early readers, and they had a bunch of notes about how to fix the rest of the story. But there was this unanimous consensus that the endings should be as is. And I think that was the same thing with “A New Kind of Dan” as well. I worked on that story for a long time, and got a lot of feedback on that story specifically. But then again, the unanimous consensus was that the ending, and the content that that bookends, is something solid and to be retained.NC: Thank you so much for this conversation.KS: I sounded insane 85% of the time. You got a good 15%.NC: It’s totally workable. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.
March 26, 2025
Creative Nonfiction
HIDE-AND-SEEK by Nathaniel Lachenmeyer
It’s my favorite game I was so happy when you rang my doorbell and asked my mother if I could play because I wasn’t always asked sometimes I would see you all playing running through yards or peeking around bushes looking for the person who was it and once I heard two of you under my window whispering about where someone was hiding and of course I could hear the laughter and the shouting whenever they were found and I would tell myself it didn’t mean anything that I wasn’t asked even though everybody knew it was supposed to be all the kids on the block no one ever said it but we knew it and no one had asked me in a while I didn’t know if it was because of my father or if it was something about me so of course I said yes when the doorbell rang and I had known for a long time where I was going to hide I had picked the perfect hiding spot if I was asked to play again it was behind the garage in my backyard the narrow space between the back garage wall and the fence separating our backyard from the people who live behind us who I didn’t know at all and had seen only once or twice through their windows so when it was my time to be it I ran as fast as I could and squeezed in between the wall and the fence and it’s been okay waiting although it is a tight squeeze and I don’t like thinking that the neighbors might be looking out their back windows and seeing me here doing what they would wonder but I can ignore that the thing is though I have been out here a really long time and no one has found me even though I remember I saw one of you run past and I thought he saw me but he didn’t say anything and that was forever ago and I haven’t heard any callouts or cries or laughing in so long I almost think the game is over but I could be wrong and about to win and I’ve never won before so I will stay out here until someone finds me or I hear them calling even though it’s been so many years now since my father officially went crazy and left me in this town and my mother sold the house and moved away and then died not literally but to me just after my father died really died she was the one who got the news and she decided not to tell me because we were about to go on a vacation together for the first time in years and she didn’t want me not to go so she waited until the vacation was over and pretended he was still alive each time I mentioned him so I haven’t had any family for a long time now and all of us on the block we have all grown up and I think most of you have moved away too but I will stay here until one of you finds me or until someone calls out to say I won and the game is finally over and then we can all shout and laugh together which has to happen sometime one or the other because every game has an end or it isn’t really a game at all and if it isn’t and if it wasn’t if it was a prank or maybe the doorbell never actually rang then I am and have been completely alone and hiding all this time with no one searching in a place where no one will ever find me
March 25, 2025
Fiction
SWORDFISH STRIPS by Michael Brooks
Emily spots her strutting up to the hostess stand: a willowy curl of a woman, Asian and raven-haired, white blouse tucked into a black pencil skirt at her narrow waist. Her eyes are sharp as blades, bright as the silver chain about her neck. She grips a Prada handbag that fins from her side and points with a slender finger to a table at the wide bow window, in Emily’s section. Nothing in her face or posture wavers.A man strides in behind her—maybe fifteen years her senior—a graying swoop of hair roofing a scrunched face and thin-framed glasses. He lacks the woman’s flash, sporting a blue button down, slacks, and simple leather shoes. Pocketing the keys to a BMW, he puts a hand on her lithe lower back. It remains there as the hostess weaves them through the sea of green-checkered tables, the woman’s jet stilettos clacking against the herringbone floor. Only once they’re seated does Emily note the vacant space on his wedding-ring finger.She lets the clumsy busboy fill their waters, waits for the ice to settle before gathering herself and approaching. The bow window overlooks a bluff beyond which sand dunes stretch like bloated bellies skyward. Past them are the liquid plain of Lake Michigan and a lowering sun that honeys the crossed thigh poking from the side slit of the woman’s skirt. The leg is smooth and lean-muscled, making Emily remember the donut she downed for breakfast, the way the jeans she’s worn since sophomore year have tightened as of late.She greets them, offers her name, asks, “Anything I can get you folks besides water to drink?”“The demi sec,” the woman says without hesitating. Her voice is low, even. Outside a mass of clouds swells over the lake. “And you, sir?”The man surveys the menu before glancing up at Emily. His cheeks flush when he does, but without wavering, he says, “Do you recommend one merlot over the other?”The woman gives a curt laugh. “Tom, you see how young she is. I bet you can’t even drink yet, honey, can you?” She bores her gaze into Emily, who looks away and feels her face warm. Emily is nineteen. A year out of high school with no more direction than she had last June when deciding to delay the college decision. She dreamt of going into business, growing chic and commanding, like the woman before her. But she never left southwest Michigan. The comment peels her confidence away like the thin shell of a boiled egg. “The 14 Hands blend is popular with our guests,” Emily says when she lifts her chin again.“I’ll have that,” Tom says.Emily nods. “I’ll go put those drink orders in for you.” She starts to turn, but the woman says, “We know what we want to eat.” Emily takes a silent breath. She laces her fingers together and looks at Tom.“You go first, Annie,” he says, scooping a menu from the table.“The swordfish strips,” she says. “Light on the butter. Make sure there’s a lemon on the side. And a garden salad too. Aren’t you gonna write this down?”Emily crosses her arms. “I have a good memory.”“I’ll have the lake perch,” Tom says.“Chips or fries?”He adjusts his glasses. “Do you have sweet potato fries?”“Just the ordinary kind,” Emily says. “Yellow, thin, and crisped.”She feels Annie’s scathing gaze upon her but doesn’t break eye contact with Tom.He gives a bored half-shrug. “That works I guess.”Emily nods and collects the menus. She brings the drinks out minutes later and sets them on the table. Neither of them acknowledges her. Annie rolls up her sleeves, revealing an indigo birthmark on the inside of one forearm, the only blemish on her otherwise flawless skin. Far over the lake, curtains of rain begin to fall.Emily attends to her other table, asking a young couple what they think of the Angus burgers they ordered. “They’re perfect,” the dark-haired man says. His wife offers Emily a kind smile. Their green-eyed daughter mashes the remains of a French fry over the wooden table of her high chair. When Emily waves at her, she gives a high and bell-like laugh.Emily braves a glance at Tom and Annie. The sun has lowered, hovering just above the advancing rain clouds. It casts Annie in a citrus aura and turns the blacktop before the bluff’s edge to dark marble. Their wines trap the light. Annie’s glows like tree resin, Tom’s like blood collected. A tiny lamp stands between the glasses, its shade like an umbrella, unable to shelter more than the salt and pepper shakers. The clouds outside swirl and seem to ripen.Later in the kitchen, Emily retrieves the couple’s plates, ensuring Annie’s holds a cloven lemon. She shoulders them on a serving tray across the dining area to an old stand whose black straps sink from the food’s weight. She serves Tom first, sliding the perch between his flatware. Annie’s swordfish strips encircle a creamy dip in a small, porcelain bowl. Sear marks stripe the lean strips of meat. Sour fruit halves flank them. Emily places the dish before her then offsets the salad plate.“Why didn’t you bring this out first?” Annie demands looking at the crisp arugula. “And where’s the dressing?”Emily’s mouth dries. “My apologies for the delay, ma’am. What kind of dressing can I bring you?”“Honey mustard. But I don’t want it on the side.”“Very well. I’ll take that back.” Emily reaches to retrieve the salad, but Annie slides it from her reach, toward Tom.“This one’ll be on the house then, right?”Emily bites a corner of her lip. Tom ignores them both, forking into his perch. It takes Emily a moment to muster, “Of course.” At her other table, the baby cries, two spaced out sobs that give way to wailing.When Emily passes, the dark-haired man says, “Sorry about the noise.” His wife scoops their daughter from the chair. “Can we snag the check when you have a second?” Mauve shadows show beneath his otherwise gentle eyes. “Thanks!”By the time Emily rings up their orders, pockets a generous twenty-percent tip, and brings Annie her dressed salad, the sun has disappeared, swallowed by the approaching storm. The first fat drops of rain cast liquid streaks across the windows. Annie has already devoured the swordfish strips and cleaned the last of the creamy dip from the cup.“Much better,” Annie says, eyeing the golden-glazed arugula. “With that kind of follow-through, you’ll be more than a server someday, won’t you?” A crooked smile lingers on her face. “I’ll have another glass of wine. And we’ll split the chocolate ganache for dessert.”Emily manages a nod. Her hands start to shake. She wanders through the kitchen and into the walk-in freezer, letting the door clamp shut behind her. She takes two deep breaths and feels the air’s chill. Vanilla ice cream tubs engulf the top shelves. Thick cuts of meat slump across remaining racks. The stainless steel door reflects her blurred figure. Her hips and waist look wider than she remembers.When she emerges, there is the sous chef, scraping silver scales from a fresh-caught walleye, fillet blade tight against the gills. “What the hell were you doing in there?” he demands, already galled about the extra salad. His cheeks stay as red as the raspberries on the chocolate ganache she carries out minutes later with a second glass of demi sec. She sets them both before Annie. Gooey chocolate oozes from the crinkled lava cake. The dining room is quiet now, without the crying baby.“Enjoy,” Emily says without eye contact. She wanders to a corner. The busboy clears the kind couple’s burger plates and hefts away the high chair. The storm outside spews rain. Tom clicks on the tiny lamp, which reflects in Annie’s necklace. She eases her thin figure back in the chair, tracing a pearl nail along the bony shoulder of her blouse. Emily bites her lip.They clean the dessert plate in minutes. Annie takes generous gulps of the sweet wine. Emily stares between her model-thin waist and the crumbling remains of the lava cake. Tom tongues the last of the dark cream with a spoon. With her front teeth, Annie bites a scarlet berry.“Anything else I can get you folks?” Emily asks when she approaches minutes later.Tom’s wine glass is empty, but a rogue tint colors its curved bowl. His eyelids have a slight droop. He looks at Emily’s face and then other parts of her.“The check,” Annie says.When later they saunter toward the door, Tom’s hand rests upon her rear. He gives it a squeeze. On the table, chocolate crumbs pepper their dessert plates. The wine glasses are empty, and the untouched waters condense, forming liquid rings on the checkered cover. Past the undressed salad neither of them touched, Emily discovers the receipt and the too-small tip—not even in cash. She grinds her teeth together. The sky outside is crow-colored. Clouds obscure the moon and stars. Rain patters on the roof with a sound like a hornet swarm.Not wanting to brave the sous chef’s wrath, Emily ventures to the bathroom near the front of the house. She looses a pent-up breath when she finds herself alone, the two stall doors slightly cracked. She thinks about rich Tom pawing Annie’s slim hips and studies herself in the mirror. Her straw-colored hair looks unkempt and her plastic earrings cheap, childish. She tries to stand with Annie’s poise, but instead of a sleek pencil skirt, she wears a server’s apron over broad hips. Blue pens poke from it like hairs from a mole. She grimaces, reapplying lip gloss, when she hears a guttural kecking.“Hello?” she says.The noise sounds again. Emily peers through the far stall’s open door. She sees the stilettos first, pointed like brandished knives toward her. Past an onyx skirt, a ringless hand pulls a mass of dark hair fin-like back from a thin body. A line of vomit needles from cracked lips. Then animal eyes, zipping back and forth, like those of a fish forced from the water. Kneeling, Annie writhes and twists looking sickly. She slides two hooked fingers from her mouth.“Are... are you ok?” Emily asks.Annie leans against the toilet paper dispenser to pull herself upright. When she does her necklace unclasps, peeling from her paling skin, sliding to the tile. There it stays, its tiny links glinting as the gaunt woman stumbles from the stall.“Wait!” Emily calls pointing at the floor.Annie ignores her. She missteps in her stilettos, catching herself on the vanity. She gasps for breath and angles away from Emily and the wide mirror, floundering out the bathroom door.Emily scoops up the shimmering string and follows Annie’s skeletal figure, crying, “Your necklace! You lost your necklace!”Annie doesn’t look back. Her handbag thumps against her ribs as she rushes out the restaurant’s front and leaps into the passenger seat of a waiting BMW. It loops along the bluff’s edge before speeding into the dark and soaking night, leaving Emily in the vestibule, clinging to the cold silver chain.
March 24, 2025
Fiction
ROSE BOOKS READER VOL 1: GROUP INTERVIEW
The Rose Books Reader Vol 1, “Primal Scream,” publishes March 20th, full of “prose that explores characters or narrators somehow on the edge or on the brink, in chrysalis or transition, in various states of emergency or desire, struggling to cope with the realities of our contemporary world in real or surreal ways, with some success or no success at all…” that is “an engagement with emotional extremes or environmental collapse or feelings of bodily entrapment…that is desperate, unhinged, hallucinatory, hormonal. In keeping with Rose Books’ mission—“we believe in taking risks for the sake of beauty[.]’” I asked the contributors to answer a question on the theme:What primal person, place, or thing are you most interested in, and why?
ESTHER ALTER
Transfemininity extrudes from the flesh and tapers into a spear tip aimed at the throat of this awful country that I live in, for I have made my body a political weapon. I am the patriarchy divided by zero, and I will write rage and beauty until you all go fuck yourselves.KATE BARSS
Birth.ERIC BOYD
I’d say that creativity’s role in society is becoming more primal. Major labels, studios, and publishers are all flirting with AI while churning out “content” whose greatest value is filling empty space. The screenwriters at Netflix are told by the execs to make sure characters in their productions verbally announce their intentions because they understand most viewers are fucking or folding laundry while the app is on. To combat this I think real art is becoming less obvious, more neurotic. Increasingly feral; imperfectly human. Evidenced even by Rose Books’ call for this anthology, I think there’s a need for artwork which challenges people, even if that means alienating many.I think this is true on the audience's end as well. The worst thing a piece of art can be is “mid.” People want to love things or hate things. They want to care. I read an article the other day about the rise of “anti-fans” who enjoy hating certain stars / films / artists as much as they might enjoy loving them. This mindset ends up flattening most art. Nothing is allowed to breathe anymore. A movie comes out and if it doesn’t make a bazillion dollars on day 1 it’s dead on arrival; if it doesn’t shake you to your very core then it’s bad. You don’t get to think, “Well, I didn’t like that at first but the more I think about it it was kinda good!” We’re living in an artistic age of homeruns or strikeouts, despite the fact that most games are won by a healthy mix of singles and doubles. I’d rather hear songs, see films, and read writing that's good at one or two specific things instead of beating me over the head with its omnipresent greatness, which is usually short lived.MICHAEL BUCKIUS
The U.S. Interstate Highway System is a primal place. It connects the wide open spaces in this country. In many patches, it’s a strip of concrete surrounded by nothing. And then, a town blooms, barely watered and ragged around the edges. The LED beacons of a truck stop pierce through darkness. Often, there are moments of silence. Crickets. Then the howl of a big rig like a wounded beast. The windows of an old farmhouse rattle. Tragic accidents, big, smoky, and smeared. A clogged artery. Flyover country it’s not. It’s fly under country because everything feels under the radar, attached to a feeling, and not any particular moment in time. Here in the U.S., we have more roads connecting us than any other country on earth, but we remain, in many ways, completely disconnected from each other. The deterioration of these roads is too obvious a metaphor, but it’s there, like a giant billboard promising salvation through Christ.Recently, I visited my hometown of Lancaster, PA. I drove down my old street, stopped in front of the house I grew up in, and took a few photos. Then I curved around the block and turned down the potholed alley I rode my bike through thousands of times. There was one thing that was noticeably different. Thirty years ago almost every backyard was open. Now, nearly every one had a fence built around it. I still rememberwhat it felt liketo ride away from homeas far as my legs could take mepicturing great distances and what promise lay beyond them…DANIELLE CHELOSKY
Sex.CHRISTINA D'ANTONI
Sunbathing! Growing up in the early 2000s, every movie seemed to have a poolside montage, girls in threes rubbing on tanning oil, holding their foil sheets towards the sun. Studies show that sunbathing is addictive, a biological mechanism from when people lived in caves. We developed this sun-seeking behavior when our Vitamin D dropped too low.In my writing, my characters tend towards the indoors. It’s where they battle their brains, boil eggs, take a phone call from the toilet, sit and stew. It’s only in moments of sheer desperation that they seek the sun’s rays. I’ll open up their landscape, introduce a lawn or a porch. I like these settings because unlike parks or campgrounds, there’s nothing to do. The sun obliterates all. I’m similar to my characters—as soon as sunlight hits my skin, I remember that apricots exist. Tie-dye, daffodils, sidewalk chalk exists. From there my brain speeds on to sensations: tree-hugging, sipping a fruit-infused iced tea, wearing the good clothes. A friend offering you satsuma slices in the grass, plenty to go around. Sunbathing feels like catching up on lost time, all the days wasted pacing inside. Suddenly your endorphins have you racing towards anything else.I think about that popular painting Morning Sun by Edward Hopper often, especially in the colder months. A woman enjoys the sun’s rays from her bed. There along with the sun patches and her pink dress are the shadows, the worry on her face. The melancholy of the cave. If only she would stick her head out the window, engage in her primal instincts.NATALIE WARTHER
Berries. Specifically, jumbo blueberries from Trader Joe’s. Just like the ones my ancestors scavenged for. Sort of.Did I pick these berries from a bush? Definitely not. But I did fight valiantly for a spot in the parking lot, which is, in some ways, a primal chore. Man vs man in the wild, etc.What do jumbo blueberries go with? Yogurt. Cereal. Ice cream. Have you ever pitted a date and stuffed it with two berries the size of a racoon’s fist? Because I have. Do I eat too many jumbo blueberries? Maybe. If scanned in an MRI I suspect my insides would light up blue like a bear’s. Or Andrew Huberman’s.What makes them jumbo? Science, probably, or chemicals, which normally I’d be against, but in this case I selectively ignore, given the rich antioxidant content of the fruit, which may or may not be compromised by the jumbofication process. But probably not.ERIN DORNEY
Noticing—and then picking up—a pretty rock. This is a part of human nature that has existed forever & I love knowing that I'll die before my collection is complete.KATE DURBIN
I first wrote about Hugh Hefner back in 2011, when I published a series of poems based on The Girls Next Door reality show. The poems are a tour of the Playboy mansion, where the women have all vanished, their rooms occupied only by their objects and the ghostly echoes of something bad that happened. (What that bad thing is, is never named).I wrote the poems years before #metoo, before Holly Madison’s tell-all, and the recent The Secrets of Playboy doc. Back when social media was something very different than what it is now, and tabloid culture reigned. Now I know my intuitions of just how fucked life at the mansion was, how trapped the women there really were–intuitions I picked up on by writing through the show–were spot-on. They’ve been publicly confirmed by the people who actually lived there. And now there is all this new material, in various forms, from the women of Playboy talking about their experiences directly–podcasts, Twitter threads, YouTube channels, books and documentaries, etc.And so I wanted to go back into the mansion again, after poring through all these new materials, and from inside the nightmare of this new Trump era. HUGH HEFNER BEDROOM FURNITURE, my piece, takes its name from the online auction that sold off all of Hef’s stuff after he died (he was a hoarder). It’s a tour of Hef’s bedroom. All the stuff in the poem is Hef’s real stuff. All the things that happened in the poem are the things that actually happened–that, in a way, are still happening.OWEN EDWARDS
The primal is the first. It precedes rationality and language. It's a sort of energy whose consequents include desire and hunger. The primal is unmediated, amoral, taken for granted but never absent. It sticks around and demands ventilation. The basic needs that drive you around provide a framework for all that thinking that wants to get done. Sometimes you bump along the edges and glimpse where it starts and ends–everything within the pure requirements for life.The word calls to mind a pre-historic animal, a time before civilization. Primates are like wise older siblings, or a part of yourself you forgot but always knew was still kicking around. See an infant monkey eating fruit and lounging in a stream. Noteworthy cases of the primal include when you eat bone-in wings, let desire take over your life, abide power and allure, pick up a heavy object, wander in the woods and come across an animal, or speak without hesitation.Buster Keaton had primal intuition. His movies are direct and chaotic. What he does on the screen is understood without explanation. Keaton pursues love, shelter, money, brute survival. But the gags are meticulous and illusory. He was effortlessly inventive, which makes his work immediate and free. He makes you wanna do some crazy shit. When you're watching him, you almost think he's invincible. (The day before he died of cancer, he played cards with friends and paced restlessly in his room, waiting to go home. He was never told his illness was terminal.) You get a close-up of his pale face. People say he was stoic, but his eyes reveal measures of fear, sadness, and shame. Is that what they call bravery? He just breaks your heart without a word.JULIET ESCORIA
Myself. Not because I think I am especially interesting or "primal," but because our own behavior is often the most difficult to understand.JULIA HANNAFIN
Sea glass keeps showing up in my fiction, forged by the ocean and the primal force of its tides. Lately I’ve been seeing less sea glass, more mangled strips and beads of plastic. I miss the soft and clouded pieces I found at the beach as a kid. My mom taught me to watch for sharp edges—if the sides of a piece of sea glass hurt, it was too soon to collect. Back into the waves. I like the idea that force and time can soften us, not do the opposite. Resisting a defensive response to change.ORGhosts. Shadows of death, our maybe most primal experience. We miss the people who die. We fear the ghosts that return. I keep thinking about the ghost perspective—pissed that they’re stuck halfway between this world and the next, unsure why the living are so afraid of them. I most hear of ghosts as unwanted visitors, as if their longing to stick around is to blame. But what if it’s us, the living? If it’s our grief, forcing a natural process to halt? I have more compassion for the ghost, then, as if they must pat our backs as we process what they already know.JAMES JACOB HATFIELD
I’m interested in primal instincts in regards to emotions and thoughts because it gives my life meaning.There are different definitions of primal. For me, when I hear “primal” I think caveman. Pre-conscious animal. This proto-human base layer.Most notably in the form of knee-jerk internal monologues right before logic and context come in and rewrite them—the split second where your mind is completely naked before deciding what mental attire to wear in response to the weather of this moment.In every interaction I have that small space where I am able to decide how I respond. I can ask myself “who do I want to be in this moment?”In that liminal space between stimuli and response, I am nobody. Which means I have the highest potential in terms of creativity.So in reality, I'm creating a new self for every situation. Which means I have no idea who I am.And the unknown always excites my curiosity. So it’s an endless well of interest.But through practicing awareness these thought protocols can be rerouted and actually reprogram my instincts. Over time, with effort, I can do the “right” or best thing in the moment without expending too much energy, similar to a near-automatic reflex.So technically, through effort and required maintenance, our primal can be updated; we create what is innate in us over time.After I’m done with a project I am ritualess and insane. So I like to use that excess RAM that was dedicated to the recently ended project to update my primal and become post-caveman in small areas, like doing laundry, until the next story comes along.And it should be said, I have far too much time on my hands to think about this. Go read Rose Books Reader. Let’s have fun.J. KEMP
12/31/18, I made a vow with myself to squeeze accountability from the world. With only 3 letters and 4 numbers, I found out more than just the name of the rotten apple of my eye.Asher wasn’t laughing like he was when we first crossed paths. He was too fixated on how long Ihad waited in the parking lot to answer my simple question of why he waved his middle finger.His wife unloaded all the groceries while he locked himself in their 2014 GMC Sierra that they had owned for 408 days, now 2644 if they still do. The sale price is still more than I make a year.My persistence led to Asher telling Jess to call 911. Instead she just sped off.I stood their let down, like I had finally built enough courage to call the number I dog-eared in the phone book just to have a father get back on to tell me she doesn’t want to talk. I’d always pout briefly then forget it, but not with Asher.With him, I still fantasize about sitting at his desk. He makes little jokes during small talk, our foreplay. My eyes lay on a white mug on his desk that has a big-box insurance logo on it. In the bundle of too many pens, a letter opener calls to me with its shimmer. I cannot take it slow any longer. I make the mistake of asking him why after impalement, he just whimpers while trying to get his hand unstuck.The obsession to help someone who not only doesn’t want help, but also doesn’t even remember you. That is primal, isn’t it?AMY LYONS
I’m interested in home and in how people decide where to live. I’ve lived in five different states and I am constantly experiencing the tension between wanting to go home and wanting to run away from home.AMELIA MANGAN
Two days before I sat down to respond to this question, I was bitten by a spider. I'd already made vague plans as to what my response might look like: something quick and clever, something I hoped would make me sound thoughtful and incisive and witty, some funny little quip about the only subjects I ever tackle in my work being Sex and Death.A tiny red eye watches me now from beneath my upper right bicep; this is the arm that leads to my writing hand. Dark pink threads trail from each corner of the eye; this is the venom attempting to trickle down my veins, to embark on a voyage throughout my bloodstream (the attempt will be fruitless: the spider, dead now, was tiny and non-lethal and nothing will happen save my feeling like hell for another day or so before I am in the end returned to myself again: Thoughtful and Incisive and Witty). There is a thin, smudged veil between my brain and my world and my typing fingers; everything seems underwater, up in space, echoing, changed and charged.These altered and transformational states. These sudden shifts in what we see and seem. It occurs to me, at this addled moment, that this is the primal state my work returns to, over and over again: something, or someone, changed and charged. Sex and Death, yes; and venom boiling in the blood.SHAY MCINTOSH
When they dug up the Egtved Girl, the thing everyone noticed was her outfit. Matching separates in a brown knit: miniskirt, crop top, freeboobing it. Blonde bob, short nails, pretty dykey. Chunky jewelry. All of it vintage—3,000 years old, in fact. She’d opted for a green burial (no embalming, just a hollow tree), but the bog had preserved her anyway. She was buried with some hair accessories and a bucket of beer. She was a teenager, after all. RIP angel, you would have loved Claire’s.As a 20-year-old irresponsibly wearing crop tops to my internship, I got obsessed with the Egtved Girl’s fit. Turns out, in the grand scheme of things, our centuries-long detour through hoop skirts and corsets was just a blip. Don’t lecture me, Dad, you’re eating paleo and I’m dressing Bronze Age.Like all European cool girls, she lives in Copenhagen. She doesn’t even have to pay rent—she’s got her own room in the National Museum. Pay her a visit sometime. She’ll remind you that some things, like a bare midriff, are timeless.SHELBY NEWSOME
I am most interested in our internal landscapes, the primal and, often, hard-to-decipher feelings that drive our movements through life. As someone who is late-diagnosed neurodivergent, has struggled with mental health, and is a writer, I am in my mind a lot. I’m picking apart my behaviors and emotions, exacerbating my worries—but I know these aren’t unique to me, which is why I’m so drawn to these kinds of characters in my work. I want to see our messy interiority splayed out on the page. I want to understand our idiosyncrasies and how they inform our construction. Because at our cores, we’re all operating with the same set of emotions, regardless of how we let them instruct us. And this intrinsic likeness provides solace and brings about a sense of being less alone.BREEN NOLAN
The primal part of me is interested in dissecting the idea of who I think I am to uncover what's really there.JOANNA NOVAK
Bodies of water, man-made or frequented by humans, fascinate me. They appear in my fiction over and over again. In the story I contributed to the Rose Books Reader, the narrator finds herself on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean, on a rocky beach in Brittany. In the story I wrote prior to that, a very dejected husband of a man stews by a hotel pool. For a while now, I've been trying to figure out how to write a certain story set in a bath. What could be more primal than water, analogous as it is to amniotic fluid? I like pools, hot tubs, dark water rides, lakes, rivers, peopled ocean areas, ponds, creeks, waterfalls––all of it. And, while we're talking water, let me recommend Leanne Shapton's wonderful memoir-ish meditation on aqueousness and almosts, Swimming Studies.GINA NUTT
Nature—the natural world, human nature, all of it. Though isn’t it all intertwined? In the garden, disappointments aren’t personal, growth isn’t hubris; they’re part of a pattern in which death—or hibernation—is the only certainty. Memories of the stray who used to hang out on my patio exist alongside the knowledge that the cat was never mine (RIP Bones). How nature’s indifference reminds us our presence is finite, so too are joy, suffering, relief. I love the gentle, peaceful surprises that transform loneliness into solitude: when I’m out with my dog early in the morning and a rabbit darts out ahead of us; rounding a corner and finding a deer, or several, snacking on bushes. How private acts of observation inspire connections with others: voice note full moon reminders to friends, dividing plants and saving seeds to give away. How curiosity grows into fascination, simple care becomes intention. How worlds weave: nonhuman and human animals, insects, plants, environments. And so, too, do behaviors, consciousness, and being. Harmonious intersections and disastrous collisions; the humbling unpredictability. Longing and desire tangling thick. The moon and tides, so mysterious, grounding, and ancient. Anyway, what’s lonelier than your own voice echoed back when you call out? What’s more hopeful than a seed? Doesn’t survival ask of the living a certain amount of surrender?ZOË RANSON
I connect to sounds, movements expressions and gestures we make to communicate that ultimately manifests as language. Syntactical curiosity is my daily excavation into how, in poetic forms, we are able to skip over the linking nuts and bolts - those tired instructional manoeuvres that claim to be essential in anchoring an audience - and use experimental form to tesselate and transmit the unconscious.Uncertainty is the usual state Isn’t it possible to win over and deeply connect to other human spirits without them understanding materially where they are? Through an embodied connection to making, I explore methods of portalling to Open Space, a glitch in proceedings that allows: the reader to experience the poemthe listener, or the audience to derive meaning from what is unsaidfor silence to hold - a negative space that connects the individual to something unseen that is both of language and more colossal than it.BROOKE SEGARRA
The orgasm. It often doesn't stand on decorum and its strength, ferocity, and mysticism often disturbs. I'm fascinated with how close pleasure can look to pain, how pain can lead to pleasure, and how pleasure can shatter pain held in the body, mind, and spirit.NICOLE SELLEW
I was going to be cheeky and just say sex, but I think that's reductive. Lately I've been obsessed with attention, which Simone Weil calls "the purest and simplest form of generosity." There is no divorcing either attention or sex from the economic conditions of late capitalism, though. It can never be that pure and simple. Engels writes that monogamy is “the first form of the family to be based, not on natural, but on economic conditions – on the victory of private property over primitive, natural communal property.” I would probably define monogamy as deciding that you're only going to pay sexual attention to one person for the rest of your life. Is it primal that we should all live, own, and fuck communally? I don't know. I mean primal in the sense of ancient, but also as prime: best, optimal, excellent. Prime like Amazon Prime. But I’m getting off track.My story in the reader is about a woman in her late twenties having a dalliance with a teen boy, but really she's having a crisis of attention. Young women are sexualized—that's the way in which people pay attention to us. As we age, that attention wanes, and that drives some people crazy. Capital is another way of commanding attention. But attention is so, so slippery. It has this almost mystical quality ("Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.” That’s also Simone Weil). But now I’m not sure I even answered the question. I should have just said sex.CATHERINE SPINO
Breaking apart a rotisserie chicken with my bare hands. Reaching orgasm as a trance state. Large cats. Open wounds. Accidentally putting my car keys in my mouth and the way they tasted. Mold. The first time my gyno measured my cervix. Jackson Pollock’s One: Number 31. Wanting more from a kiss. The fact Mary Shelley lost her virginity on top of her mother’s grave. The body as a piece of meat. Sobs of immense grief. The final scene of The Piano Teacher. Roadkill. The line “Ever seen a human heart? It looks like a fist wrapped in blood.” from Patrick Marber’s Closer. And dreams, always uncontrollable dreams.MARY ALICE STEWART
My answer—Wile E. Coyote, or my rabbit, Buster, or the ocean, or sun faded, partially mossed over roadside signs, the ones eroded by weather and time, or sickness (of mind, of body, of spirit), or spirituality, or when people sing together.GINA TOMAINE
Probably the dinosaurs from 1993’s Jurassic Park. Jurassic Park has been my favorite movie since I saw it at the drive-in when I was 6. There was something irradiating about it, something I didn’t understand as a kid but knew I loved. Of course I idolized Laura Dern as Ellie Satler, who sticks her entire arm into a pile of triceratops shit without a thought, rolls her eyes as she walks off into the jungle alone to turn the park’s power back on, saying, “We can discuss sexism in survival situations later,” and finishes Jeff Goldblum as Ian Malcolm’s musing of "God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs…” with her own edit: “Dinosaurs eat man. Women inherit the earth.” But it was more than that. All the dinosaurs in the film are bred by scientists to be female, but halfway through, it’s discovered that they’re gender-bending—they’ve found a way to naturally reproduce together and are breeding baby dinos in the park. “Life, uh, finds a way,” Malcolm notes. The dinosaurs are the movie’s “villains,” in the sense that they’re eating everyone, but they’re also not the villains at all. The dinosaurs, a stand-in for nature, are respected by Malcolm, Grant, and Satler, even as they terrify. There’s a sense of reverence for the unknowability of certainties in the world. Sam Neill as Allan Grant says succinctly, “We’ve decided not to endorse your park.” T-rex roars; nature overcomes the film’s actual villain: Ingen, the billionaire-funded bioengineering start-up, and its lack of humility, loss of touch with humanity, and ineffectual attempts at exerting control and categorization over what is primal—the inherent fluidity, violence, unpredictability, and beauty of everything alive. Life finding a way. Plus, Samuel L. Jackson saying, “Hold onto your butts.”FELICIA ROSEMARY URSO
There’s nothing more primal than gut instinct. Mine told me to say Aileen Wuornos.ADAM VOITH
There’s a studio apartment on Boren Avenue at the bottom of Capitol Hill in Seattle where my friend James lived in 1998. I was in Seattle for a few weeks that summer, before moving to California, and spent a lot of time at James’ place. James was starting a record label and running it from a desk in his closet. He rented an extra closet in the common hallway from the landlord to warehouse CDs and 7”s, and his rented mailbox was in a shop on the same block. He still had a day job at another label, but hardly paid attention there anymore.I’m trying to get my head back in that apartment for the novel I’m working on. The place was heavy duty for me in 1998, I was aware of that at the time, and it’s held that weight all these years. I’ve got photos and they almost get me there, especially this pair of Polaroids my buddy Kyle and I took of each other. We’re both leaning out the windows in the front of the apartment. In the frame you see the chipped paint of the widow frame moulding, the classic brick of the building’s façade, and our young heads and skinny torsos, leaning towers of dipshit, surrounded by the Pacific Northwest summer-blue sky. We’re high as fuck, happy as hell, and we’d left the Midwest.RAY WISE
Masturbating while driving. March 19, 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
