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Interviews & Reviews

TEX GRESHAM on film with Rebecca Gransden

What film, or films, made the first deep impression on you? This might come as a shock, but I think watching E.T. as a kid rewired my brain, changed my DNA, shaped my life’s path. I would rewind the ending over and over and just bawl my eyes out as the ship made a rainbow across the sky. I wasn’t just sad—it was joy as well. And I didn’t understand how I could have two feelings at the same time, and how this movie could do that to me. Very often film is one of the ways we first come

January 25, 2022

Fiction

THREE SELECTIONS FROM MORE ANIMIST BABBLE (A WIP) by Bram Riddlebarger

The Hornworm and the Green Tomato The hornworm had eaten the better part of the upper reaches of the tomato plant. The green tomato was petrified. It was already late in the season and now this. “YOU BETTER NOT EAT ME,” screamed the green tomato as the hornworm cast glances its way. “I’m so fucking horny,” said the hornworm. Its rear horn rigid. “I’ll BE RED IN A FEW DAYS,” negotiated/bargained/pleaded the green tomato with a faint blush. “You’ll be red-y now,” leered the worm. It ashed a cigarette as tobacco worms did. The cherry burned. The hornworm bit

January 24, 2022

Fiction

IS IT OK IF WE DISCUSS YOUR SISTER? by Mitchell Duran

On the day of her funeral, twisted roots and ashen rocks jutted from the edges of the concrete vault. I had never seen a grave before. I had never seen a casket. I had never seen Earth displaced with that kind care and disregard. After carrying her, side by side with the family, our fingers stiff from the cold of morning, we placed her final bed on the mechanical lowering-device. A part of me wanted to do it myself. The impulse felt foreign, but close. A part of another part. After, I was told the help always did it, that

January 21, 2022

Fiction

COURT MANDATED THERAPY by Sage Tyrtle

Bill is not having flashbacks to Vietnam. Even though the shiny-haired psychiatrist says there’s no doubt at all, even though the list of symptoms looks like his autobiography. Bill sits on the burnt orange couch. He looks at the palm frond wallpaper. He says in his most even tone, “No, I believe you’re mistaken,” and he’s being careful because if the psychiatrist decides that he’s a danger to himself or others then he could end up a Thorazine zombie like Harry Alessi up at the sanitarium. Bill clears his throat and makes himself look into the psychiatrist’s eyes. Makes himself

January 19, 2022

Fiction

‘BLUE BANJO: THE HIRAM SADLER STORY’ DELETED INTERVIEWS by Bodie Fox

HAZEL COX (Hiram’s first wife): I was pregnant with our first the night he played the Russian Roulette. We was in a dive bar after a show in Lubbock, Texas—I’ll never forget the place, neither, ’cause it had a sawdust floor and the piano played itself. He was drunk, of course. Except for that first year we knew each other—from the day he walked into my music store to the night of our wedding—he always had something to sip on, whether it was a bottle of rye or a bit of sippin’ cream. He lost. But, in a way, he

January 17, 2022

Fiction

MOVEMENT STUDY by Amelia Scott

The only way they had was their nakedness. This and this alone delivered them through the many corridors of their pursuit: their innumerable stations of falling over and springing upright. Their eyes, their pupils, were open, bright, darting: brilliantly black-on-white. They were silent—mutists—but too antic for the soliloquy over the straitjacket. They were turned out of the asylums as quick as they were caught, hopped then over hedges and fences, scattering the hills. The realm of objects at all times tried to court them; its advances went unrequited. (That is what a prop is, said Marx: a thing that tries

January 14, 2022

Fiction

GREAT BLOOD by Zee Carlstrom

Every day, during his half-hour lunch break, Horace Median Dahl strolls along the ornamental concrete pathway that cuts through the center of Grace Hill Cemetery. During this restive walk, he eats his usual brown-bag lunch: a snack-sized sack of Doritos and a chicken and cheddar sandwich with BBQ sauce, the way his mama always makes it. Today, however, Horace strays from the ornamental concrete path and tosses his mama’s lunch into the garbage. Unencumbered by tradition, he strides down a weedy gravel walkway that takes him into a dark corner of the cemetery, devouring a tilapia salad sandwich and a

January 12, 2022