[{"id":20366,"date":"2026-09-02T05:03:59","date_gmt":"2026-09-02T12:03:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xraylitmag.com\/?p=20366"},"modified":"2026-09-02T05:03:59","modified_gmt":"2026-09-02T12:03:59","slug":"it-has-come-to-our-attention-by-christine-sneed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xraylitmag.com\/it-has-come-to-our-attention-by-christine-sneed\/fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"It Has Come To Our Attention by Christine Sneed"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For many years, so many we have lost count, a Stairmaster has occupied this room, an unsightly apparatus left to gather dust after a (short-lived) period of committed use, its panels and planks fading in the sun, the curtains on the window it faces left open as often as not by the owner of this room and the many adjoining rooms. The window once overlooked a sycamore tree, but it was chopped down by sullen men in gray jackets who arrived early one morning before the first snowfall of the waning year.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We were not expecting this uproar, nor could we believe how quickly the tree was undone. The stump is still out there, and when we see small birds roosting on its weathered edges, robins and finches, the occasional towhee and dark-eyed junco, we feel in these moments slightly less aggrieved about the sycamore\u2019s fate. We are always so happy when the birds come. They know we\u2019re here, peering out at them, but they don\u2019t seem to mind.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It would lift our spirits further if one of them landed on the window ledge and looked in on us as we are looking out at them, but they have their own avian prerogatives and preoccupations. (This is what one of us likes to say, in any case, and whether we agree with this presumption or not, we have not aired our objections.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Before the Stairmaster, this room held a child\u2019s bed, a dresser made of oak by the child\u2019s grandfather, and toys in a box also made of oak by the grandfather. The child had a habit of extracting every one of his toys from the box and leaving them on the floor in stunning disarray when he had finished amusing himself. We\u2019d often speculate whether the child\u2019s mother would appear and place the toys in the box again or if the child\u2019s father would stalk into the room and argue with the child, whereupon we\u2019d soon be unwilling witnesses to much sulking and foot-stomping, and on occasion, sobbing. These tantrums were, without exception, to our relief, followed by a long, still night of deep sleep, so deep we could enter the child\u2019s dreams and see the shapes and hear the voices he was hearing too.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Before the oak toy box and dresser, this room contained a cradle, not the cradle of the child with the toys and the temper. No, a different child. This child\u2019s father sometimes slipped into the the room very late at night, so late it was almost morning, and stared down with pained love at the child who was so young its mouth could not yet form words. The child\u2019s mother came to the room less often than the father did, whether it was night or day. This mother was not a mother in the sense we had always understood a mother aspired to be, or, as one of us has argued (not the same one of us who claims to be an armchair bird behaviorist), is told a mother must aspire to be.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">With increasing frequency, we heard the father exchanging unflattering words with the mother until one day the father took the child and did not return, leaving the cradle behind. The mother began sleeping in this room beneath the cradle on a nest she made of blankets, a practice we found troubling but of course we were powerless to comfort her. One of us considered scaring her out of the room, but when we voted on it, there was only one vote in favor, four against.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We are not that sort, we all agreed, except for the one who voted in favor, but this one of us has always been a mischief maker and a stick-in-the-spokes\u2019r, and during the twenty-odd years she spent in the world of birds and trees, she met her end when planning a foolhardy prank on her betrothed, who we must assume was something of a simpleton, considering whom he\u2019d chosen for his bride. The prank involved a large bucket of water placed high above a household doorway. While rigging the iron bucket for this ill-planned prank, it fell from its perch and clocked the one of us firmly on the head and sent her swiftly to this place between the world of trees and birds and the far-beyond world (so mysterious, even to us, as is the question of whether we will ever be permitted to enter it). We were already in residence in this room, in this in-between place, and before we knew her well enough to form an educated opinion, we allowed her to join our company, and here she remains, our albatross, we suppose, our cross to bear.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As (another) one of us likes to say, having picked up this lamentable phrase from the current owner of this room and its adjoining rooms, \u201cIt is what it is.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Before the cradle, this room was crowded with wooden crates containing jars with plums and peaches, dill pickles and sauerkraut, purple beets and tiny corns, raspberry jelly and strawberry jam. There were burlap sacks of potatoes and yams, of bread flour and millet and cornmeal\u2014until the rats came, which did not happen as quickly as some of us assumed it would. When the rats came, the owner of this room tried to shoot these dark, scurrying creatures, a measure we would have advised against if we had been consulted (which, alas, was an impossibility).&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We knew it was an execrable scheme. The bullets ricocheted off the walls and killed the owner, his poor wife screaming and rending her garments in a biblical fashion, jars bursting open all over the room, and such a mess it was, a crime scene, if we\u2019re speaking candidly\u2014human and rat blood commingling with shards of glass and ruined food, and most of the rats still alive and skittering about and squeaking in maniacal alarm. We were not in our most stoical form either, let us tell you, but what could we do but witness this horror and shake our proverbial heads? Even the inept prankster among us agreed it was a calamitous situation, and the owners should have known better\u2014even a child of average intelligence would foresee that firing a pistol in a small room filled to brimming with fragile objects and quick-witted rodents was a deeply ignorant undertaking.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Before the wooden crates and flour sacks and jars of preserves so pretty they could have been sold at a mid-summer fair (a high-spirited gathering we miss from our years in the world of birds and trees), this room was mostly empty, its only occupants a few narrow bolts of cloth meant to be transformed into blouses and britches, but never were, not in this room or any adjoining room, as far as we know. For a time, a chair and a stand with sheet music clipped to it were the only other earthly occupants of this room, the bolts of cloth corralled into a corner by the cellist who appeared every morning (for such a long succession of days we began to wonder if he would always be with us, and if, in fact, he was one of us too). He played his scales and wrote his own compositions in between gazing out the window at the sycamore, which was very young then, a sapling that grew and grew with each subsequent season of sun and snow.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But of course the cellist did not stay with us forever. Before him, we are not sure what the room held, as three of us arrived when he was already here, and the other two of us arrived during the era of the rats and the fool with the pistol.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Why are we recounting these stories, we imagine you are wondering. And how long have we been occupants of this room we\u2019re describing with such specificity and in some cases, affection? So long, so long we have lost count of the years we\u2019ve passed in this in-between place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We will be frank with you. It has come to our attention that the owner of the Stairmaster and this room and all adjoining rooms is selling them. This room will no longer be our refuge from the snow and rain. From out there where we never venture, except when one of us slipped into the elements late one night, due to a petty disagreement with the rest of us (you can guess who it was), over a matter we do not now remember. She didn\u2019t return for so long we assumed she never would. (She became lost in the wilderness just beyond our sightlines, until a squirrel foraging for nuts and other foodstuffs, a creature she recognized as a resident of the sycamore\u2019s high branches, led her back.)&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The owner of the Stairmaster and this room and all the adjoining rooms isn\u2019t selling them to a person whose appendages include a spouse and progeny. No, he has sold it to a commercial entity inscrutably known as Dyco Industries. Soon our room (and all adjoining rooms) will be demolished and replaced with a hulking structure meant to hold many discrete but linked spaces for commerce. We have overheard men talking outside our window. We know what is in their hearts and minds, whether we want to or not. We know their secrets, which are disappointingly bland, although they have no idea this is so.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Each linked space will contain numerous glaring lights and shelves stocked with objects of questionable utility and value. These objects will not be made from stones or glass or metal. They will mostly be fashioned from slippery materials that never decompose. We have looked out upon these materials through the window, snagged in our erstwhile sycamore\u2019s branches, insinuated into piles of decaying leaves\u2014so many forms and manifestations of these unholy materials\u2014Satan\u2019s resin, one of us, the bookworm among us, believes they have been called in some quarters. We have overheard the former occupants of this room and adjoining rooms alternately decrying and praising these materials in their conversations and arguments.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We do not know what will happen to us if this room ceases to exist. Will we be separated, forced against our will into configurations of other displaced and disbanded (and we must assume, grimly dispirited) souls? Or will we no longer exist at all? It is a frightening prospect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Consider this our petition for leniency, for amnesty. Save us. Please. We cannot yet see all of what is coming, but we feel it. We know that you do too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"height:100px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Christine Sneed<\/strong> is the author most recently of Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos, The Virginity of Famous Men, and Direct Sunlight: Stories. Her work has appeared in publications such as Boulevard, Ploughshares, Story, New England Review, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. She has received AWP\u2019s Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Award, among other honors, and has been a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize. She teaches for Northwestern University and Stanford Continuing Studies and lives in Pasadena, California.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For many years, so many we have lost count, a Stairmaster has occupied this room, an unsightly apparatus left to gather dust after a (short-lived) period of committed use, its panels and planks fading in the sun, the curtains on the window it faces left open as often as not by the owner of this room and the many adjoining rooms. The window once overlooked a sycamore tree, but it was chopped down by sullen men in gray jackets who arrived early one morning before the first snowfall of the waning year.&nbsp; We were not expecting this uproar, nor could&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":208,"featured_media":20367,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"contributor":[],"class_list":["post-20366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v28.4 (Yoast SEO v28.5) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>It Has Come To Our Attention by Christine Sneed | X-R-A-Y<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/xraylitmag.com\/it-has-come-to-our-attention-by-christine-sneed\/fiction\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"It Has Come To Our Attention by Christine Sneed\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"For many years, so many we have lost count, a Stairmaster has occupied this room, an unsightly apparatus left to gather dust after a (short-lived) period of committed use, its panels and planks fading in the sun, the curtains on the window it faces left open as often as not by the owner of this room and the many adjoining rooms. 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Teddy Riggs: Drew Buxton interviewed by Matthew Binder"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\" style=\"font-style:italic;font-weight:300\">Every spring, the inimitable Sam Berman gathers the finest writers in the land, and me, for the StoryFort Festival in Boise, Idaho. One of the writers who made the strongest impression on me at the 2025 festival was Drew Buxton. After one of his readings, I pinned him in a corner and bombarded him with questions about his work-in-progress, a novel titled <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hubcity.org\/books\/fiction\/daytona-teddy-riggs\"><em>Daytona Teddy Riggs<\/em><\/a><em> <\/em>(Hub City Press, 2026). It\u2019s about a promising football star who gets himself kicked off his college team and then pursues the World\u2019s Strongest Man title.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\" style=\"font-style:italic;font-weight:300\">To say I was excited about the prospect of such a novel would be an understatement. As a kid, I spent countless hours watching Strongman contests on ESPN. At one point, I even bought a Magn\u00fas Ver Magn\u00fasson, four-time winner, T-shirt, and it became my uniform for two straight years. I may have even worn it in my eighth-grade yearbook photo, to my mother\u2019s dismay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\" style=\"font-style:italic;font-weight:300\"><em>Daytona Teddy Riggs<\/em> is slated for publication on August 25, 2026, but I asked Drew to send me an advance copy. I\u2019m thrilled to report that it\u2019s even better than I had hoped. <em>Daytona Teddy Riggs<\/em> is one of the most sensitive and thoughtful picaresque novels I\u2019ve read in years. In a literary landscape crowded with novels about Brooklynites living cosmopolitan lives, <em>Daytona Teddy Riggs<\/em> stands out as a deeply interesting exploration of traditional masculinity set in middle America.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large is-resized\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"680\" height=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/xraylitmag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/DrewBuxtonBOOKCOVER-680x1024.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-20381\" style=\"aspect-ratio:0.6642599277978339;width:222px;height:auto\" srcset=\"https:\/\/xraylitmag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/DrewBuxtonBOOKCOVER-680x1024.png 680w, https:\/\/xraylitmag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/DrewBuxtonBOOKCOVER-199x300.png 199w, https:\/\/xraylitmag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/DrewBuxtonBOOKCOVER-594x894.png 594w, https:\/\/xraylitmag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/DrewBuxtonBOOKCOVER.png 736w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matthew Binder: <\/strong>Much of contemporary American fiction is set in New York or Los Angeles. Perhaps that\u2019s because so many ambitious writers move there for MFA programs and publishing networks. But you\u2019re from Texas, you\u2019ve stayed in Texas, and you write about Texas. What made you stay close to where you grew up?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Drew Buxton:<\/strong> I\u2019m from Texas, and have spent the majority of my adult life here, but I\u2019ve also bounced around the country quite a bit. I always end up coming back, though. I think spending time away from the state helped highlight the uniqueness of it for me. The novel is set on the coast, which I\u2019ve always found fascinating. When I was growing up, we would visit my grandparents in Corpus Christi fairly often. I later lived there as an adult for about a year, and I\u2019ve always felt there\u2019s a strangeness to the area that is hard to put into words. The great William Boyle said that since he moved away from his native Brooklyn, it has become a mythic place in his mind. That\u2019s how I feel about the Texas coast. Though I\u2019ve spent a lot of time there, it remains in my mind a surreal, uncanny place that I love exploring in my writing.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large is-resized\"><img decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/xraylitmag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/DrewBuxtonHeadshot-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-20379\" style=\"width:292px;height:auto\" srcset=\"https:\/\/xraylitmag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/DrewBuxtonHeadshot-1024x1024.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/xraylitmag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/DrewBuxtonHeadshot-300x300.jpg 300w, https:\/\/xraylitmag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/DrewBuxtonHeadshot-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/xraylitmag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/DrewBuxtonHeadshot-768x768.jpg 768w, https:\/\/xraylitmag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/DrewBuxtonHeadshot-1536x1536.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/xraylitmag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/DrewBuxtonHeadshot-894x894.jpg 894w, https:\/\/xraylitmag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/DrewBuxtonHeadshot.jpg 1750w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>MB: <\/strong>Your main character, Daytona Teddy Riggs, is a massive, hulking man, an ex-football star who got kicked off his college team and then pursued the World\u2019s Strongest Man title. You\u2019re nowhere near as big as Teddy, but you\u2019re a big guy. Did you play football? Were you ever involved in the world of strongman? What made you decide to set a novel in this milieu?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>DB:<\/strong> People always assume I played, but the truth is I only lasted a few days on my middle school team. I was a late bloomer, so I was pretty shrimpy growing up. Practice was after school in the blazing heat, and it was just miserable. I was also terrified, haha. I remember some of the guys were basically fully-grown men at age twelve. I\u2019m glad I didn\u2019t play. I\u2019ve got enough problems with my brain as it is! That being said, I\u2019ve always been a football fan, and watching the Cowboys was a huge part of my childhood. I\u2019m really interested in the former athlete who thinks they should\u2019ve made it big time. I\u2019ve met so many guys who swear they would\u2019ve been in the NFL or NBA had it not been for an injury or a coach who had it out for them. Their identity and self-worth stays tied to their athletic ability long after they stop playing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I\u2019ve never been involved with strongman. As far as weightlifting goes, I\u2019m weaker than I look. I watched World\u2019s Strongest Man on TV as a kid, but it wasn\u2019t until I watched the documentary <em>Born Strong<\/em> (2017) that I became fascinated with the sport. It\u2019s the dedication to craft that I admire so much. Out of love for the game, they do things that shorten their life expectancies significantly. Also, let\u2019s be honest, there\u2019s just something awesome on a primal level about seeing massive dudes lift cars and hurl kegs through the air. I try to catch all the major competitions now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>MB: <\/strong>In many ways, Teddy is totally buffoonish and na\u00efve, but when it comes to building physical strength and competing, he\u2019s the real deal, a true contender to be the strongest man in the world. How were you thinking about this juxtaposition as you crafted the character?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>DB:<\/strong> The book is really a study of Teddy\u2019s psyche. It was important that his mind be the main factor in his success or failure. He has all the physical capacity, and he\u2019s from a wealthy family, so it just comes down to the decisions he makes, and how he copes with his mental illness. One thing I\u2019ve noticed about successful high school and college athletes is that there\u2019s often a na\u00efvete. Their lives are so busy and structured, and they have this built-in social status, so there\u2019s not a lot of time or need for reflection or questioning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>MB:<\/strong> Teddy\u2019s constant visits to fast-food joints are one of the great motifs of the novel. Every few pages finds him cramming down a couple of bacon-jalape\u00f1o burger combos. But Whataburger is not just a place to eat for Teddy, it\u2019s his place of solace, where he does his thinking. That said, Teddy doesn\u2019t like to eat this much food. It\u2019s almost a form of self-imposed torture, and it takes on an almost meditative quality for him. It was very interesting to see fast-food joints\u2014often dismissed as part of \u201clow\u201d culture\u2014become central to Teddy\u2019s training regimen and his pursuit of greatness. How did you arrive at this idea?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>DB:<\/strong> I was raised by a single dad, who, to his credit, did cook pretty often, but we also ate a lot of fast food. I have fond memories of our little family sitting in fast-food booths on weekday evenings. I still love fast food, and have that same fuzzy feeling about it, but I\u2019m almost forty now, so I can\u2019t eat as much Whataburger these days as I\u2019d like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I\u2019ve heard many strongmen describe the eating as the hardest part of the sport. They call it force-feeding. Generally, they try to get a minimum of 10,000 calories in daily. They talk about how much of their lives is just chewing and swallowing, chewing and swallowing. It sounds miserable\u2014turning one of life\u2019s simple pleasures into a grinding chore, but again, that\u2019s dedication and sacrifice. It\u2019s just the opposite of how we generally think of the strict diet of an athlete.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>MB: <\/strong>You explore Teddy\u2019s sexuality in interesting ways. Early on in the novel, we learn that he\u2019s a virgin when he suffers a failed sexual experience with a girl who picks him up while he\u2019s working as a bouncer at a bar. Later, one of Teddy\u2019s male clients comes on to him, and Teddy becomes curious. Throughout the novel, Teddy is always questioning his sexuality, constantly checking whether his dick gets hard when he deals with men. Teddy, obviously, inhabits a world intensely focused on the male body. Were you deliberately exploring the tension between obsession with the male physique and gayness?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>DB:<\/strong> OCD, actual obsessive-compulsive disorder, is something I\u2019ve dealt with since adolescence. In my short story collection <em>So Much Heart<\/em>, there\u2019s a story set in a present-day OCD treatment center with a narrator who understands the disorder and all the clinical terminology. That isn\u2019t the experience of most sufferers. Almost no one, including clinicians with Ph.Ds, actually understands OCD. If it weren\u2019t for the internet, I never would\u2019ve figured it out, so I wanted to explore OCD in the pre-internet era. Often, the core fear behind OCD is a fear of ostracization. Teddy is Gen X, but I imagine it was quite similar to the experience of millennial boys where, in the eyes of the world, nothing could be worse than being gay. Teddy\u2019s OCD latches on to that, and he has to constantly check that he\u2019s straight. Abandonment is another common core fear\u2014Teddy needs constant reassurance that his granny is still alive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>MB: <\/strong>My absolute favorite section of the book is when Teddy attends a personal development seminar with Pat Dupree, a famous self-help guru he idolizes. Teddy is convinced that this man holds the key to helping him unlock his potential. I was very impressed by how you handled this section. A lesser writer would\u2019ve written Pat Dupree with cynicism, portraying him as an outright charlatan, but you walked a fine line between hucksterism and genuinely helping people find purpose and meaning in their lives. Can you say something about this?&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>DB:<\/strong> The reality is that good therapists are few and far-between. Even if your insurance will cover it or you can afford to pay out-of-pocket, you may not be able to find a decent one. An alternative is self-help books and gurus. There is always some amount of bullshit with gurus, but with the best ones like Tony Robbins and Eric Thomas, it\u2019s complicated. I find them genuinely compelling and inspiring at times. A lot of people swear their lives have been changed by a seminar or a book. Who\u2019s to say they\u2019re wrong?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>MB: <\/strong>Many readers and critics will probably describe <em>Daytona Teddy Riggs<\/em> as satire, but I don&#8217;t think that&#8217;s quite right. You&#8217;re not using humor or irony to mock Teddy or his way of life. You&#8217;re simply observing him as he moves through the world, and sometimes that observation happens to be funny. Do you think contemporary audiences have become less willing to extend sympathy to traditionally masculine men?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>DB:<\/strong> Maybe to an extent, but regardless of era, Teddy isn\u2019t a very sympathetic character in how he presents to most of the other characters in the book. It would be hard to feel for him if the novel were written from a distant third-person point of view. For the most part, his struggles are internal, and go unseen by others. With the access that the first-person allows, we see the difficulty he has navigating the world, and therefore can root for him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The word satire gets thrown around a lot these days, and is sometimes just used as a synonym for funny. There\u2019s some satire in the book, but satire alone isn\u2019t interesting outside of two-minute comedy sketches. We are taught from a young age to analyse art for themes, and there are plenty that occur naturally in the story, but I\u2019m more interested in Teddy Riggs the individual. He\u2019s a complete jackass, to be certain, but he\u2019s also a unique and bizarre dude full of his own twisted fears and dreams and all that shit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>MB: <\/strong>Now that your debut novel is about to see the light of day, what\u2019s next?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>DB:<\/strong> I\u2019m hard at work on a surreal noir set on Galveston Island in the \u201980s.<strong> <\/strong>It draws some inspiration from Rian Johnson\u2019s first movie <em>Brick <\/em>(2005), which is a hardboiled noir involving high school kids in the LA suburbs. It\u2019s much more complicated than the plot of <em>Daytona Teddy Riggs<\/em>, so it\u2019s been an interesting exercise in thinking intensely about structure and character motivation. I\u2019m excited to share it eventually!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"height:100px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matthew Binder<\/strong> is the author of the novels <em>Pure Cosmos Club<\/em>, <em>The Absolved<\/em>, and <em>High in the Streets<\/em>. His forthcoming novel, <em>My Painted Smile<\/em>, will be published by Stalking Horse Press in April 2027. He is also one half of the recording project Bang Bang Jet Away.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Drew Buxton<\/strong> is a writer from Texas. His story collection <em>So Much Heart<\/em> won the Texas Institute of Letters&#8217; Sergio Troncoso Award for Best First Book of Fiction. <em>Daytona Teddy Riggs<\/em> is his first novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Every spring, the inimitable Sam Berman gathers the finest writers in the land, and me, for the StoryFort Festival in Boise, Idaho. One of the writers who made the strongest impression on me at the 2025 festival was Drew Buxton. After one of his readings, I pinned him in a corner and bombarded him with questions about his work-in-progress, a novel titled Daytona Teddy Riggs (Hub City Press, 2026). It\u2019s about a promising football star who gets himself kicked off his college team and then pursues the World\u2019s Strongest Man title. To say I was excited about the prospect of&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":208,"featured_media":20378,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"contributor":[],"class_list":["post-20376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v28.4 (Yoast SEO v28.5) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Daytona Teddy Riggs: Drew Buxton interviewed by Matthew Binder | X-R-A-Y<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/xraylitmag.com\/daytona-teddy-riggs-drew-buxton-interviewed-by-matthew-binder\/fiction\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Daytona Teddy Riggs: Drew Buxton interviewed by Matthew Binder\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Every spring, the inimitable Sam Berman gathers the finest writers in the land, and me, for the StoryFort Festival in Boise, Idaho. One of the writers who made the strongest impression on me at the 2025 festival was Drew Buxton. After one of his readings, I pinned him in a corner and bombarded him with questions about his work-in-progress, a novel titled Daytona Teddy Riggs (Hub City Press, 2026). It\u2019s about a promising football star who gets himself kicked off his college team and then pursues the World\u2019s Strongest Man title. To say I was excited about the prospect of...\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/xraylitmag.com\/daytona-teddy-riggs-drew-buxton-interviewed-by-matthew-binder\/fiction\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"X-R-A-Y\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/xraylitmag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-09-01T12:28:12+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2026-09-01T12:28:13+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/xraylitmag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/buxton-post.webp\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"2048\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"1070\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/webp\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Chris Dankland\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@xraylitmag\" \/>\n<meta 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Babby Is Formed by Theo Thimo"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I was actually at the thing nobody wanted to be at.<br>Taking pics with Asher there like I needed somebody to know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As if my dealer were the whole globe to me reading her poems like it was just me there on this rooftop but all the while in my periphery was a monogamous mosaic blur that pursed my lips into a neutral non-expressive smile moving my face not even a little and still it became most of what I could focus on but never really see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What I came to then and there was a conclusion about poetry that you could never understand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Over the tent of light pollution I peer reviewed at the nearly no stars barely visible while not thinking anything or even able to feel time when I noticed the reading how oh my god it just would not stop.<br><br>It just never ends.<br>They wont stop it just keeps going.<br>I hate it here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">These nonfiction writers in their all black reading in their perverse monotone voices I can&#8217;t stand them. I don&#8217;t even care if what they&#8217;re saying is true I could never agree. This was actually real life here on the roof of Lubov observing Asher descend the stairwell to get Charley\u2019s blazer back while the person with me was elsewhere and others reclined against the embankment ignoring the weight of our life but this is it while most people refuse to see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It only took Asher a minute and a look from a Canadian to start pleading to me Trudeau&#8217;s case about his past attire choices and without missing a beat we both started acting like who could ever say a word to the man at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Then I glance over at Asher like, <em>You&#8217;re so dramatic<\/em> but it didn&#8217;t change the truth that whatever had been standing there between me and him was still there meaning the globe to him but no one else realized or cared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I just shake my head and involuntarily check my pocket for a chance to live too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Wishin wishin they wishin on me<\/em>, I drakely recite and think how temporary and miraculous this all is and look to the mostly just waning moon above us where the other luminaries reflect off my screen just to witness you forever typing that message and all of us aligned waiting to be pushed into my eyes a text not even a word but just your name in my notifications. I turn to that 5G tower in the foreground of One World Trade Center like, <em>Please please just let me see.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But your ellipses just continue to twist their liquid crystal display and eclipse me.<br>Those three dots appearing then disappearing,&#8230; waiting for you to just stop and send.<br>Maybe for it to only be a simple phrase or passing remark that would be so beautiful to me.<br>One word could change this life forever.<br>Just a string of letters as a text with a way to leave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Over the edge of the rooftop awning and along the roadside median the crabgrass goes rough where two maybe three fireflies performatively gesture like they thought someone should tell me but what I just don&#8217;t know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I grab my bag out the puddle where the same pollen has fallen all on a car and into water runoff or nearly standing on the rims of filled things there where I start to head and think how those three words after fallen sound just like your name. I jump down the last few steps of the building stairwell my bag swings over my clavicle and splashes a wet impression on the entryway bulletin board. My shoulder trajectories into the pony wall of the foyer and then I land on my thigh when it feels a buzz and chime from you. There was fallen again before you but this time in real life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I try unlocking my phone but drop to a knee without a ring.<br>How I just oh so badly need this text to do something to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I had just seen Coco and I needed to see if it was true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If skeletons were real. If guitars were real.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I went to Mexico because I had to know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"height:100px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Theo Thimo<\/strong> is an Albanian-American poet. Their novella Trauma In Metro (2019) is available through Amygdala Press. Their newest book Simp is forthcoming on Test Pie Press.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was actually at the thing nobody wanted to be at.Taking pics with Asher there like I needed somebody to know. As if my dealer were the whole globe to me reading her poems like it was just me there on this rooftop but all the while in my periphery was a monogamous mosaic blur that pursed my lips into a neutral non-expressive smile moving my face not even a little and still it became most of what I could focus on but never really see. What I came to then and there was a conclusion about poetry that you&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":208,"featured_media":20373,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"contributor":[],"class_list":["post-20370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v28.4 (Yoast SEO v28.5) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>How Babby Is Formed by Theo Thimo | X-R-A-Y<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/xraylitmag.com\/how-babby-is-formed-by-theo-thimo-2\/fiction\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How Babby Is Formed by Theo Thimo\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I was actually at the thing nobody wanted to be at.Taking pics with Asher there like I needed somebody to know. As if my dealer were the whole globe to me reading her poems like it was just me there on this rooftop but all the while in my periphery was a monogamous mosaic blur that pursed my lips into a neutral non-expressive smile moving my face not even a little and still it became most of what I could focus on but never really see. 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Story by Charlie Beckerman"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Your mother found the place on the website that back then seemed so novel and now is considered low-key evil. \u201cIt\u2019s on the second floor,\u201d she\u2019d said. \u201cThey say there\u2019s no elevator but that shouldn\u2019t be a problem.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As the two of you roll your bags through the streets of Brighton, you notice other people moving in festive clumps. Someone told you at some point that Brighton was a party town, a fun fact you had forgotten until just now. You and your mother are wrecked from the red-eye, and as you follow the map on your phone, leading you in the same direction as the party goers, toward the sea, you worry that the raucous city might make it difficult to sleep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The flat is on the third floor\u2014in Europe, you will quickly learn, the first floor is considered the zeroeth floor\u2014and the steps are narrow and steep. When you get into the apartment your shirt is sticking to your back. You told your mother you\u2019d go down for the second heavy bag, but you hear a <em>thunk<\/em> and see that she\u2019s carried it up herself. You feel bad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You long for a shower the way you long for a drink of cold water. The tap water comes out cold and clean, but there\u2019s no shower, just a tub. \u201cTake a bath,\u201d your mother says, and you can hear the way she used to say, \u201cTime for bathy!\u201d when you were little. But a bath is not what you want. You fantasize about a flow of water washing away the crud. The idea of stewing in it is gross.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cCome look,\u201d your mother says, having figured out how to open the doors to the small balcony. From the road, you had been able to see a small sliver of the sea, but now it spreads out below the city like a rough sheet of gunmetal. The Victorian pier pirouettes out into the water. The chatter of a seaside city on a warmish day makes its way up to your ears. You squint and try to think of this place as home, since it\u2019s about to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cWhat would you like to do?\u201d she asks. You say that you need to take a nap. There\u2019s only one bedroom, which she will take, but for now she tells you to go lie down. \u201cBut don\u2019t sleep for too long or you\u2019ll never be able to sleep tonight.\u201d You set a timer on your phone for 42 minutes, which you think is the longest you can nap without falling into REM sleep. With the jet lag, though, you seem to enter deep sleep immediately, in a way that feels too good to resist. When the alarm goes off, it takes almost a full minute to penetrate your unconscious. You sit up and blink, both aware and being not entirely sure of where you are. The sun is in the wrong place, as far as your body is concerned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You stumble back into the living room, where your mother is flipping through a local guidebook.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cApparently this building used to be a home for pregnant girls back in the 19<sup>th<\/sup> century,\u201d she says, and reaches down to the coffee table to pick up a book, the kind you could get bound at Kinko\u2019s, or whatever it\u2019s called now. \u201cThere\u2019s a pretty interesting little write-up in here.\u201d You hold the book in your hands and open it to this passage:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Providing her recollections to oral historians in the 1950s, Abigail Telford of Poplar, London, recalled the conditions of the home:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>\u2018I hadn\u2019t realized my mother had been tracking my monthly so closely. Even I hadn\u2019t been that worried when I missed one\u2014it had happened before\u2014and I hadn\u2019t yet developed any of the usual telltale signs, or none I recognized as such anyway, but my mother seemed to know. I had been working at the pottery as a cleaner, that\u2019s where I met James. Oh, my mother never liked him. \u201cGreen eyes aren\u2019t natural,\u201d she\u2019d say, but I couldn\u2019t look away. When we finally, you know\u2026 I don\u2019t think I really understood what was going on, even though now it\u2019s plain as day. One morning I woke up to go to work only to find my mother standing over my bed holding a carpet bag in her hands. She just said, \u201cGet ready, Abigail,\u201d which she never called me, always Abby, except for that one time, as far as I can recall. I got ready and we got on a train to London and then to Brighton. It wasn\u2019t my first time on a train nor my first time in London but it was my first time seeing the sea. The sun lighting up the waves. My mother walked slightly ahead of me through the streets. I have no clue how she knew where to go, she certainly never looked at a map. Finally, we got to the front door of a house and she knocked with this big door knocker and the Mother Superior answered the door and just nodded and indicated that I was to follow her. Mind you, I still had no idea what was going on but I knew I was in trouble. The Mother Superior walked first, then me, then my mother, as if they were worried I might try to run away. We got to her small office and the nun asked me if I knew why I was there. My mother started to say of course I did, but the Mother Superior silenced her with a palm, her arthritic hand unable to flatten fully. I shook my head. \u201cYou\u2019re going to have a baby,\u201d she said. I laughed. I looked at my mother to see if she was somehow in on this joke, but her face was dead serious, and she didn\u2019t look back at me. I protested, even as I realized it was true. The Mother Superior told me that my mother had arranged for me to stay with the order until the baby was born. She said something about sin but also that every child is a gift from God. I barely knew what was going on, and then, suddenly, my mother was gone, and I was being shown to my room.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Well, I say, \u201cmy room\u201d but really it was a room I shared with nine other girls, all of a similar disposition, though at different points on their journey. Another girl who was just starting to show was tasked with getting me settled. Her name was Mary Price and we became fast friends. To make money, the nuns ran a laundry which we were expected to work at until our condition prevented us, and even then we were given mountains of clothing to fold while in bed. The nuns were not warm, but they were not cruel, most of the time. In my seventh month I was feeling particularly rotten, with heartburn like you would not believe, and the hot laundry would make things worse, and one day I asked to be able to rest. This older nun, Sister Mary Michael, I think her name was, said that the Lord favors industry. I\u2019ve never been very religious, and I called her an impolite name, and she slapped me across the face. But that was the worst of it.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>The worst of it from them, anyway. Mary was a few months farther along than me, and when she went into labour, I begged to go with her. But the doctor wouldn\u2019t allow it. Mary didn\u2019t survive the birth, nor her baby. I was bereft, and also terrified. I hadn\u2019t gotten on well with any of the other girls and the idea of giving birth alone gave me nightmares. In the end, when it happened, my mother returned and held my hand through it all, though the doctor protested and the nuns clucked their disapproval. I gave birth to a boy, but I never even got to hold him. A week later my mother took me back home and my life resumed as if I\u2019d only gone away for a short while. I don\u2019t think on my time at the home as good or bad, but sometimes, I can\u2019t help but wonder where that boy is, and if he is doing okay.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You put the book down and look over at your mother who is leafing through a copy of <em>Time Out Brighton<\/em>. \u201cThis restaurant is the place that makes vegetarians say, \u2018Oh, god,\u2019\u201d she reads. Your recent conversion to vegetarianism is still novel to her, and she sometimes worries when you eat out that there won\u2019t be anything on the menu for you. \u201cShould we go?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cAbsolutely,\u201d you say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cOh, god,\u201d you say as your take your first bite. You\u2019ve ordered a sampler platter of the restaurant\u2019s signature dishes (savory churros with nori and miso mayo; small parcels stuffed with paneer and daal), the kind of vegetarian food that is so rich that by the end you feel overstuffed. You\u2019re glad when the two of you get a little lost in the narrow winding alleys of the Laines, making your walk home longer than necessary. In one twisting stretch, the second (first?) stories of the buildings leaning over the two of you, like relatives gazing at a newborn in a bassinet, she asks if you\u2019re okay. It happens just as you find yourselves amidst several jewelry shops, closed for business, their velvet pillows emptied of their diamonds and gold. \u201cYeah,\u201d you say, curious if you\u2019ve done something that\u2019s made her worry. \u201cYou?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cAre you kidding?\u201d It\u2019s another one of those phrases where her intonation echoes out from your childhood, both rhetorical and a joke, even though your question was in earnest. You will not receive an answer, but also, you have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When you get back to the flat you\u2019re both exhausted, even though it\u2019s only 8pm. Your mom says good night and goes to the bedroom, and you set yourself up on the futon in the living room. You can\u2019t figure out how it unfolds but you\u2019re tired enough that it doesn\u2019t matter. You\u2019ve left the balcony door open to try and get some air, and you hope the party people of Brighton won\u2019t keep you up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You sleep for some indeterminate amount of time and awaken to the busy orange glow of the sodium streetlights and the resigned complementary purple of the sky. It is here, lying on the futon, staring up at the eaved ceiling, that you first wonder if this is the room where the women lived. The room where they slept and incubated and labored and sweat and bled and gave birth. For a moment, you think you can hear their howls and moans. But the cacophony is coming from outside, and you step onto the balcony expecting to see drunken fistfights or club kids vibrating from too many drugs.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It\u2019s the seagulls. Thousands of them, it seems. They cry and scream as they swoop onto rubbish bins and uncovered tips. They announce their dominance and never stop announcing it. You have heard people call this town a party town and a hippie town and a queer town but now you see it is a seagull town. And, perhaps for the first time, it starts to feel a little bit like home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"height:100px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Charlie Beckerman<\/strong> lives in an attic in Cincinnati where he is pursuing his PhD in Fiction at the U of Cincy. His fiction has previously appeared in Glassworks and Quail Bell Magazine, and you can listen to two seasons of his memoir podcast Serial Dater on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can find him on Insta and Bluesky @chozzles, as well as at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.charliebeckerman.com\/\">www.charliebeckerman.com<\/a>. He would someday like to have a dog, and until then would like to pet your dog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Your mother found the place on the website that back then seemed so novel and now is considered low-key evil. \u201cIt\u2019s on the second floor,\u201d she\u2019d said. \u201cThey say there\u2019s no elevator but that shouldn\u2019t be a problem.\u201d&nbsp; As the two of you roll your bags through the streets of Brighton, you notice other people moving in festive clumps. Someone told you at some point that Brighton was a party town, a fun fact you had forgotten until just now. You and your mother are wrecked from the red-eye, and as you follow the map on your phone, leading you&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":208,"featured_media":20363,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"contributor":[],"class_list":["post-20361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v28.4 (Yoast SEO v28.5) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Origin Story by Charlie Beckerman | X-R-A-Y<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/xraylitmag.com\/origin-story-by-charlie-beckerman\/fiction\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Origin Story by Charlie Beckerman\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Your mother found the place on the website that back then seemed so novel and now is considered low-key evil. \u201cIt\u2019s on the second floor,\u201d she\u2019d said. \u201cThey say there\u2019s no elevator but that shouldn\u2019t be a problem.\u201d&nbsp; As the two of you roll your bags through the streets of Brighton, you notice other people moving in festive clumps. Someone told you at some point that Brighton was a party town, a fun fact you had forgotten until just now. You and your mother are wrecked from the red-eye, and as you follow the map on your phone, leading you...\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/xraylitmag.com\/origin-story-by-charlie-beckerman\/fiction\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"X-R-A-Y\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/xraylitmag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-08-20T11:43:56+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2026-08-20T11:43:57+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/xraylitmag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/beckerman-post.png\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"2048\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"1070\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/png\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Chris Dankland\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" 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Screaming Place by Samantha Hund"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I always thought I lacked something, a fundamental muscle or chord. While other children shrieked in delight, in terror, in exhaustion, I remained mute and unblinking.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">At five years old, I was questioned, gently, by concerned adults.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I stared at them\u2014they stared at me, a Grand Canyon of misunderstanding between us.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I refused to answer stupid questions. I heard the lie from their lips, saw the masks on their faces, and I was terribly sad for these exhausted, fragile adults.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I said nothing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The suggestion was made, that I would be better suited to the special education classroom.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This was not meant to be an insult. This was about the best environment for Samantha\u2019s social needs.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">My parents disagreed. Vehemently. Spitefully.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">They would remind me, with thousand-yard stares, how I\u2019d narrowly avoided asphyxiation as my birthright, only to spend the next six months howling like a demon spat directly from hell thanks to my oppressively tiny ear canals.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I screamed every waking hour of my existence until all at once, I didn\u2019t.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When they told me this, I thought, very sagely, I must have used up my screams early.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">According to that childhood fairytale logic; If we\u2019re only granted three wishes, or one happily ever after, perhaps we\u2019re born with only so many screams.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I was wrong, of course.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">My first scream came late.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I sat in my car, on a beautiful day. I was in the parking lot of the grocery store. These sorts of moments always happen in the best weather and the safest of places. I held the steering wheel, but the car was off and going nowhere.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">At this point in my life, I\u2019d accumulated more armor than I could reasonably carry. My therapist was using <em>Monica vs. Phoebe<\/em> metaphors to convey how my white-knuckle grip was not actually a sustainable lifestyle, and explaining that a silent panic attack was still a panic attack, and assuring me no one was handing out medals for being the least problematic person in the room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But when the cashier, a pimple-faced boy who\u2019d probably been a victim of covid-prom, told me my card was declined\u2014the only one that would still fucking work, the one I really needed to get food on the table with, the one I was dead fucking sure had $600 in the account still unless that fucking car payment had gone through early\u2014that was apparently the last humiliation I could endure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I gripped the steering wheel, and felt cold shame run through me like years of pent-up glacial ice-melt. It shifted into the sweet agony of a lifetime of gritted teeth, the endless balance of skipping from rock to rock, of spinning every plate I was ever given with a goddamn smile and the horrifying competence of a deranged wedding planner. It was the screaming of a powerdrill just behind my ear, the steam kettle losing its fucking shit, It was the rage of my own body\u2019s betrayal, diagnoses of chronic things I didn\u2019t deserve, the loss of my Self, my goals, my dreams, my fucking endless potential.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I was being ripped off, denied my fucking sunset, my happily ever after, forced into choices I\u2019d never been qualified to make, but forced to endure.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That day, I realized exactly what a scream is made of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It didn\u2019t come from some complex mechanism of tendon and tissue. It wasn\u2019t the size of my lungs or the strength of my diaphragm. A good scream only requires one thing. Exquisite Pain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">An old woman stopped in front of my car, her eyes squinting into mine. I couldn\u2019t hear anything anymore. Someone had turned off the high frequency drill. There was a hole in my chest, vacant as an aftershock.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I breathed deep, snot running from my nose. She kept walking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"height:100px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Samantha Hund<\/strong> writes uncomfortable fiction and poetry with teeth. Her work is published in ExPat Press, BULL, Burial Magazine, Blood+Honey, and more. All rumors of vampirism are unsubstantiated. <a href=\"http:\/\/samanthahund.com\/\">samanthahund.com<\/a> and @sm_hund on twitter and instagram.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I always thought I lacked something, a fundamental muscle or chord. While other children shrieked in delight, in terror, in exhaustion, I remained mute and unblinking.&nbsp; At five years old, I was questioned, gently, by concerned adults.&nbsp; I stared at them\u2014they stared at me, a Grand Canyon of misunderstanding between us.&nbsp; I refused to answer stupid questions. I heard the lie from their lips, saw the masks on their faces, and I was terribly sad for these exhausted, fragile adults.&nbsp; I said nothing. The suggestion was made, that I would be better suited to the special education classroom.&nbsp; This was&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":208,"featured_media":20360,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"contributor":[],"class_list":["post-20358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v28.4 (Yoast SEO v28.5) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>The Screaming Place by Samantha Hund | X-R-A-Y<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/xraylitmag.com\/the-screaming-place-by-samantha-hund\/fiction\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Screaming Place by Samantha Hund\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I always thought I lacked something, a fundamental muscle or chord. While other children shrieked in delight, in terror, in exhaustion, I remained mute and unblinking.&nbsp; At five years old, I was questioned, gently, by concerned adults.&nbsp; I stared at them\u2014they stared at me, a Grand Canyon of misunderstanding between us.&nbsp; I refused to answer stupid questions. I heard the lie from their lips, saw the masks on their faces, and I was terribly sad for these exhausted, fragile adults.&nbsp; I said nothing. The suggestion was made, that I would be better suited to the special education classroom.&nbsp; This was...\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/xraylitmag.com\/the-screaming-place-by-samantha-hund\/fiction\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"X-R-A-Y\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/xraylitmag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-08-18T11:40:53+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2026-08-18T11:40:54+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/xraylitmag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/hund-post.webp\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"2048\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"1070\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/webp\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Chris Dankland\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" 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Spirit by Kate Xu"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I despise smokers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">With their receding gums and teeth like overripe bananas going black with spots. <em>Never cheap out on anything that separates you from the ground: shoes, mattresses, and your teeth.<\/em> Or their Duchenne smiles with perfect teeth and imported memory foam mattresses I couldn&#8217;t afford even after several months\u2019 salary<em>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"asterisk-divider wp-block-paragraph\">***<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">After graduating from a liberal arts college, I made cold calls from lead lists purchased from companies that trafficked in personal data at an unlicensed real estate company. The office had a half-man-sized fishtank glowing with blue light next to the front desk. The small thermometer always read 29\u00b0C; algae grew wantonly on the edge of the glass because of the cleaner\u2019s idleness; five or six blood parrots floating and sinking around some plastic-like aquaplants. The break room had unlimited refills of salted soda crackers, Lipton Yellow Label, and central air conditioning with no temperature or airflow control. Work started at 9. Every day I arrived at exactly 8:58, inserting my finger into the punch clock. By rights I shouldn\u2018t have arrived early (because someone might brand me an overly eager corporate buttlicker), but the machine often needed three or four fingerprint attempts before it would register.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I always felt this job was fairly lonely. A workstation used to have two people: one to handle the conversation, one to look up and dial numbers. Now there was only one person per workstation and the computer would automatically filter and dial numbers for us. We just needed to repeat the greetings, then ask whether they were sick of their life enough that they were interested in selling their houses. The suspicious pauses and the flatness of the robot\u2019s voice were still unsolved, and people hung up once they realized it was not human (the data shows within 0.85 seconds).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">My coworker stood in the stairwell smoking through a half-opened square window every lunch break. She was slim and tall. She looked pretty when she smiled (two dimples and eight white, straight teeth). I wondered whether she\u2019d been an ugly brace-face in high school, always with bits of food caught in the wires. I ordered roast goose fried rice in an oyster pail for lunch and looked through the restaurant\u2019s reviews while eating. A few bites from the end, I scrolled past a one-star review with three exclamation marks: <em>\u201cThey clearly used duck meat while calling it goose; will not be returning!!!\u201d<\/em> I looked at the scattered pieces of meat embedded in the rice; acid welled up in my throat. My coworker came in when I was about to throw away the oyster pail. The tiny break room had one table and two chairs, so she sat across from me. We shared a dry little relief that we still had jobs, then we reassured each other that we\u2019d always be fine because robots would never fully imitate humans. \u201cOur voices are real,\u201d I said. \u201cRobots can never replace what\u2019s real.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cLet\u2019s hope so.\u201d She never ate anything. She just drank a cup of not-sugar-not-milk-not-coffee (a decaf latte with artificial sweetener and almond milk) for lunch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A blood parrot died this morning, and the cleaner had been absent for a few days, so it just floated in the water, up and down.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">My coworker said it must be a bad sign. I nodded.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When I was job hunting, my mother called to tell me to pay attention to the work environment. \u201cIt would be best to have windows,\u201d she underscored. The office did have a window. One. A floor-to-ceiling window completely blocked by dense overgrowth and some short trees with red leaves. The manager said it didn\u2019t matter. \u201cPhone lines didn\u2019t need to go through the window, so tell me the difference.\u201d If the manager said it didn\u2019t matter, no one would say it did. The short tree had long branches that swung violently in the wind. There was a harsh sun shower with raindrops larger than soybeans one afternoon. Then the dazzling sunlight filtered through the dark red leaves and swaying branches, casting patterns like the fluttering aquaplant on the wall.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The office was attached to a residential complex with a private clubhouse, a gym with floor-to-ceiling windows along the entire wall, and an artificial lake (by the lakeside: No Swimming\/No Release of Animals\/No Diving\/No Fishing\/No Boating). <em>Perfect.<\/em> I thought to myself, then I called my mom to inform her about this job. I made sure I mentioned the floor-to-ceiling window (not that it was the only one in the entire office) and that the office was next to a lake (but not that only residents of the complex could walk by the lake\u2014we couldn&#8217;t even get past the security gate). I have to emphasize the nature part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We earned about a thousand dollars a month. After taxes, rent, food, discounted coffee, train fares, electricity\/water\/internet\/management fees, there was probably a little leftover. \u201cIt should be enough to buy two or three packs of Natural American Spirit Black after each payday,\u201d my coworker said. \u201cIt has truffle as the top note and sparkling sweet ros\u00e9\u2019s middle and base notes,\u201d she added. Which made the price of $20 per pack seem almost charitable because the world was marking a plate of Tagliatelle al Tartufo at $42 and a glass of Ruinart Ros\u00e9 at $28.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cOh,\u201d I replied, \u201cso cool.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">After lunch, the manager told us all we could pack up and go home after work that day. No need to come in tomorrow. Or the day after. Or the day after that. The latest electronic voice package was put into use yesterday, and the results were unexpected: the average continuous call duration with the machine was virtually indistinguishable from that of a real person (no one realized they were talking to a machine). Also, the cost of using the voice package was less than half of what it would have cost to hire people.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">After getting home, I felt like going out to the balcony for a smoke. But I didn\u2019t have a balcony, so I opened the window instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I didn\u2019t smoke. And I didn\u2019t know where the urge was coming from. The only cigarette I had was one my coworker gave me when we left. We left so easily \u2014 we didn\u2019t even need a cardboard box (the job only required a microphone headset). Standing next to the clock-in machine, she held her not-sugar-not-milk-not-coffee in one hand and reached into her pocket with the other. \u201cCelebrating the advancement of technology and the progress of humanity,\u201d she said, looking at me as she opened the pack of Natural American Spirit with her thumb.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I didn\u2019t smoke, and so I didn\u2019t have a lighter. I kneaded the cigarette until it was half unraveled. I watched the brown, dandruff-like debris for fifteen seconds before I slipped the other half into my mouth and started chewing. Saliva dissolved the remaining paper. Teeth pressing, grinding. The tobacco bloomed in my mouth.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Truffle, sparkling ros\u00e9, memory foam mattress. Liar.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Scalding and acrid, my tongue had fallen off.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"asterisk-divider wp-block-paragraph\">***<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I despise smokers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For a long time afterward, there is a metallic taste in my mouth. I suspect that afternoon, I might have gnawed on the metal railing of the balcony. But I don\u2019t have a balcony, so maybe I was just gnawing on the windowsill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"height:100px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Kate Xu<\/strong> is a student and writer currently based in Connecticut. She writes weird stories and collects limited-edition colored vinyl. You can also find her work in\u00a0Hobart\u00a0and\u00a0Polyphony.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I despise smokers. With their receding gums and teeth like overripe bananas going black with spots. Never cheap out on anything that separates you from the ground: shoes, mattresses, and your teeth. Or their Duchenne smiles with perfect teeth and imported memory foam mattresses I couldn&#8217;t afford even after several months\u2019 salary. *** After graduating from a liberal arts college, I made cold calls from lead lists purchased from companies that trafficked in personal data at an unlicensed real estate company. The office had a half-man-sized fishtank glowing with blue light next to the front desk. The small thermometer always&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":208,"featured_media":20354,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"contributor":[],"class_list":["post-20339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v28.4 (Yoast SEO v28.5) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>American Spirit by Kate Xu | X-R-A-Y<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/xraylitmag.com\/american-spirit-by-kate-xu\/fiction\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"American Spirit by Kate Xu\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I despise smokers. With their receding gums and teeth like overripe bananas going black with spots. Never cheap out on anything that separates you from the ground: shoes, mattresses, and your teeth. Or their Duchenne smiles with perfect teeth and imported memory foam mattresses I couldn&#8217;t afford even after several months\u2019 salary. *** After graduating from a liberal arts college, I made cold calls from lead lists purchased from companies that trafficked in personal data at an unlicensed real estate company. The office had a half-man-sized fishtank glowing with blue light next to the front desk. 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by Mike Guajardo-Bennett"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I lay here in my small bed missing him and want to tell him so. I believe he misses me too. Though, if I were to tell him how I miss him, I imagine he would respond in kind and that I would not believe it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"height:100px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Mike Guajardo-Bennett<\/strong> is a queer Mexican-American poet and short fiction writer. His work has appeared in The Cloudscent Journal and October Hill Magazine, among others. He grew up in Arlington, TX and currently lives in Manhattan, where he collects vintage film posters and dreams of his home state.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I lay here in my small bed missing him and want to tell him so. I believe he misses me too. Though, if I were to tell him how I miss him, I imagine he would respond in kind and that I would not believe it. Mike Guajardo-Bennett is a queer Mexican-American poet and short fiction writer. His work has appeared in The Cloudscent Journal and October Hill Magazine, among others. He grew up in Arlington, TX and currently lives in Manhattan, where he collects vintage film posters and dreams of his home state.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":208,"featured_media":20351,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"contributor":[],"class_list":["post-20337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v28.4 (Yoast SEO v28.5) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>\u2018Night by Mike Guajardo-Bennett | X-R-A-Y<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/xraylitmag.com\/night-by-mike-guajardo-bennett\/fiction\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"\u2018Night by Mike Guajardo-Bennett\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I lay here in my small bed missing him and want to tell him so. 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He grew up in Arlington, TX and currently lives in Manhattan, where he collects vintage film posters and dreams of his home state.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/xraylitmag.com\/night-by-mike-guajardo-bennett\/fiction\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"X-R-A-Y\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/xraylitmag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-08-13T12:00:38+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/xraylitmag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/xray-17.webp\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"2048\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"1070\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/webp\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Chris Dankland\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@xraylitmag\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" 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from &#8216;Serious Literature!&#8217; by Megan Martin"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h1 id=\"h-writing-at-19\" class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong><\/strong><strong>Writing at 19<\/strong><\/h1>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">was like glugging champagne while jacking o\ufb00 in a tubful of foie gras at all hours without shame, without shame, without shame.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"height:100px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n\n\n\n<h1 id=\"h-entry-point-ca-1998\" class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Entry Point (ca. 1998)<\/strong><\/h1>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Probably the man I maybe love is contemplating the blonde\u2019s twat across a Prague caf\u00e9. Maybe he\u2019s already tickled the twat pink. Or is busy knocking himself out with his own \ufb01st in the bleakest Czech hotel room\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If I were my mother, I would be trying to marry this man: just yesterday he crammed himself further into me than I will ever go. I am in love with this man, possibly, though I do not trust his haircut: the haircut of an adult whose sole means of transit is electric skateboard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He\u2019s not unlike my college ex: wrists cu\ufb00ed to bedposts, I begged him to slap my ass until it bloomed with ghastly purple bruises. Another time on my belly I wormed behind the bruising man I loved deep into the throat of a cave. I wasn&#8217;t sure how we\u2019d gotten there: he was petri\ufb01ed of the dark and spiders; blue cheeses and cruise control and most everything else. The center-of-earth smell turned me on like some dank, prehistoric perfume.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The diner afterwards had a confederate \ufb02ag out front and \ufb02ood-damaged walls and a retirement home smell, all of which I was too in love to notice. We scarfed fried chicken and instant mashed potatoes. I sucked at his greasy lips between bites. Licked gravy from my plate like a dog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Honey, why! He can&#8217;t even commit to a shave! the waitress hissed. It wasn\u2019t the \ufb01rst time I\u2019d heard it. Even in the center of the worst place, I could dig up something hot and wantable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Underground, even when I thought I&#8217;d die from the lack of air down there, I kept going.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"height:100px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Megan Martin<\/strong> is the author of three books of short, experimental prose, SERIOUS LITERATURE! (Stalking Horse, forthcoming July &#8217;27), NEVERS (Caketrain 2014\u2014out of print; republished by Dzanc as an e-book in 2025) and Sparrow &amp; Other Eulogies (Gold Wake 2011). Her fiction has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, WebConjunctions, The Offing, DREGINALD, and elsewhere. She lives in Cincinnati with her partner and three cats. Find her at <a href=\"http:\/\/meganmmartin.com\/\">meganmmartin.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Writing at 19 was like glugging champagne while jacking o\ufb00 in a tubful of foie gras at all hours without shame, without shame, without shame. Entry Point (ca. 1998) Probably the man I maybe love is contemplating the blonde\u2019s twat across a Prague caf\u00e9. Maybe he\u2019s already tickled the twat pink. Or is busy knocking himself out with his own \ufb01st in the bleakest Czech hotel room\u2026 If I were my mother, I would be trying to marry this man: just yesterday he crammed himself further into me than I will ever go. I am in love with this man,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":208,"featured_media":20350,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"contributor":[],"class_list":["post-20335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v28.4 (Yoast SEO v28.5) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Excerpts from &#039;Serious Literature!&#039; by Megan Martin | X-R-A-Y<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/xraylitmag.com\/excerpts-from-serious-literature-by-megan-martin\/fiction\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Excerpts from &#039;Serious Literature!&#039; by Megan Martin\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Writing at 19 was like glugging champagne while jacking o\ufb00 in a tubful of foie gras at all hours without shame, without shame, without shame. 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The austere village school, with its green roof and plexiglass windows bearing the faces of national heroes, didn\u2019t have much to offer Resti, they said at home. Bored one day in class, he started counting the ants that industriously crawled back and forth along the dirt floor. Chin planted on the old desk, he counted 18,657 distinct ants. Eventually, it became a habit, watching their trajectory as if under hypnosis. He learned to predict their movements. During these trances, his teachers would sometimes come by and smack him on the head, thinking he\u2019d fallen asleep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Resti spoke little, and poorly. They increasingly suspected he was deaf, and if not for the facility with which he solved complex fractional equations, his teachers might\u2019ve assumed his mind was not all there, or, frankly, that he was a complete idiot. At the age of six he was absentminded as a genius and had the social skills of a boy half his age. He was incapable of tying his own shoelaces without help, but he swiftly solved the convoluted puzzles his father brought him from time to time, after a trip to the city to sell the harvest. The whole town crowded outside the window of their simple house to watch Restituto quickly and dexterously assemble the tiny pieces that all looked alike.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He was a frail, sickly child. During recess, he preferred to stay inside writing out fractions or predicting the trajectory of ants. He hated gym, and walking the half kilometer between school and home left him exhausted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cMam\u00e1, why do I get so tired? And how come I have so much snot?\u201d asked Restituto one night while getting ready for bed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cIt\u2019s just a virus, Resti,\u201d replied his mother lovingly, while ironing his uniform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cMam\u00e1, what\u2019s a virus?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cThey\u2019re little animals that you can\u2019t see.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cAre they invisible?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cNo, sweetie. But they\u2019re so tiny, you can only see them with a microscope.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cWhere do they live?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cThey live in the air, and they\u2019re very light. That\u2019s how they get inside your nose and mouth.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cMam\u00e1, can you buy me a microscope?\u201d asked Restituto. He closed his mouth and tried to hold his breath.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Less than a year later, the principal, a friendly pot-bellied man who also doubled as the math teacher, set up a parent-teacher conference with Remberto and Modesta to tell them their son had finished reading every book the school had. He told them Restituto had nothing left to learn in their village, and he had already contacted the principal of a private school in the city that had agreed to give their son a scholarship. After talking it over, Restituto\u2019s parents decided he was much too weak for arduous work in the fields anyway, and they sent him off to the city to live with one of Modesta\u2019s sisters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The private school proved inadequate for the boy\u2019s advanced spatial intelligence. They started calling him \u201cthe village whiz kid,\u201d and offers of scholarships, domestic and international, from the most prestigious universities, rained down on him. Scientific and human-interest magazines showed him off on their covers with his puzzles and his ants. Remberto was pleased with his son\u2019s sudden rise to fame. Modesta, in contrast, noticed her baby was becoming even more frail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center asterisk-divider wp-block-paragraph\">***<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As usual, he woke up at 5:30 a.m. And as usual, with a bottle of alcohol and a lighter, he sterilized the sink and toilet with a small fire before using them. He wore plastic slippers into the shower, and he scrubbed his body as vigorously as his feeble constitution allowed. He often left bloodstains on his towel after drying. At 7:00 a.m., he donned one of his boxy suits and ventured out, counting out two thousand seven hundred thirty-two steps between his home and the lab, where he\u2019d spend the remainder of his day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The sole adornment in his office was the old leather case on his desk, which housed the rudimentary microscope his mother had given him twenty-five years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Accustomed to the solitude of those who see what no one else sees, and oblivious to the attention he received, Restituto became a leading authority on pandemics. International disease control centers relied on him. They used his algorithms to predict outbreaks. Thanks to his calculations, they were able to contain the wave of cholera that had lashed Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. In 2014, during the Ebola outbreak in Guinea, Restituto visited the epicenter of the infection with no protection whatsoever. His mental algorithm told him that the main risk of infection had by then migrated to Sierra Leone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In October 2021, to the surprise of some in the scientific community, he was awarded a Nobel Prize in Medicine. That December, his mother traveled to Stockholm to receive the prize on Restituto\u2019s behalf. He had died the previous month at the age of thirty-two, complications of the common cold.&nbsp;<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"height:100px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Gilberto P\u00e9rez<\/strong> is a songwriter, interpreter and author of prose. Originally from Mexico, he has been based in Houston since 1998.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Slava Faybysh<\/strong> translates from Spanish and Russian. His recent translations have been published in Copper Nickel, the Georgia Review, and X-R-A-Y.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ever since he was a kid, Restituto Padilla showed a great aptitude for math\u2014it was his one and only aptitude. The austere village school, with its green roof and plexiglass windows bearing the faces of national heroes, didn\u2019t have much to offer Resti, they said at home. Bored one day in class, he started counting the ants that industriously crawled back and forth along the dirt floor. Chin planted on the old desk, he counted 18,657 distinct ants. Eventually, it became a habit, watching their trajectory as if under hypnosis. He learned to predict their movements. During these trances, his&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":208,"featured_media":20342,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"contributor":[],"class_list":["post-20331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v28.4 (Yoast SEO v28.5) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Restituto Padilla by Gilberto P\u00e9rez, translated from Spanish by Slava Faybysh | X-R-A-Y<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/xraylitmag.com\/restituto-padilla-by-gilberto-perez-translated-from-spanish-by-slava-faybysh\/fiction\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Restituto Padilla by Gilberto P\u00e9rez, translated from Spanish by Slava Faybysh\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Ever since he was a kid, Restituto Padilla showed a great aptitude for math\u2014it was his one and only aptitude. The austere village school, with its green roof and plexiglass windows bearing the faces of national heroes, didn\u2019t have much to offer Resti, they said at home. Bored one day in class, he started counting the ants that industriously crawled back and forth along the dirt floor. Chin planted on the old desk, he counted 18,657 distinct ants. Eventually, it became a habit, watching their trajectory as if under hypnosis. He learned to predict their movements. 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Boys by Dalton Monk"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">They shaved their heads in Virginia. They bought knives from a man named Dog in Kentucky. A tornado twisted through Indiana. Two women offered unconditional love in Missouri.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In Montana, they loaded a truck with square bales and in return slept in an old man\u2019s guest room. A grandfather clock sat in the corner of the room, and so did the old man. He snored in a lime-green lawn chair with a pistol on his lap. In the morning, he made them eggs and kissed them goodbye.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It was just the two of them. They were nineteen years old. Their names were Earl and Joe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">At the edge of Wyoming, they stepped outside their motel room and came upon a baby.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cIt\u2019s a baby,\u201d said Earl.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cI see that,\u201d said Joe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For one reason or another, they decided to keep the baby.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cI\u2019ve always wanted a child,\u201d said Earl.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cI think you\u2019ve mentioned this before,\u201d said Joe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The baby had thin, brown hair that waved in the breeze. She came with a backpack full of diapers, wipes, and formula. They held her under the light in their motel room and read the note safety-pinned to her chest: YOU SEEM LIKE GOOD BOYS. GOD BLESS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">They did not know where they were going, but they knew they were not going back. Finding this baby seemed to solidify that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">They got farmhand jobs in Southern California. The man they worked for had once been married and had once had a daughter, but it was clear this was a sensitive subject. They ate ham sandwiches and crackers for lunch every day. The old woman who lived beside them watched the baby while they worked. She did it for free, so long as she could take the baby to church.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the evenings, they sat in the living room and listened to the radio, discussing what they could hang over the fireplace mantle\u2014perhaps a painting of a dog or a miniature replica of a historically important ship. Sometimes they played baseball outside with a stick and a golf ball. Sometimes they sat in the shade of the enormous apple tree and counted the fruit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Life went on this way for a while. Earl and Joe and the baby.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But one night, a man crawled through the kitchen window. He handled a rifle as if it were light and harmless, and hanging from his shoulder was a small black bag that looked more or less like a purse. He gathered the boys and told them to sit on the couch in the living room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cWhat is this?\u201d Joe asked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cI need a ride,\u201d said the man. \u201cAcross.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cYou\u2019re bleeding,\u201d Earl said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cYou\u2019re going to drive me across. Tonight.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cWe have a baby,\u201d Joe said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The man dug the rifle into the floor and held the other hand on his abdomen. He was dripping onto the thin floorboards, admiring the floral wallpaper. He had always wanted floral wallpaper, and he said so out loud. He seemed not at all intrigued by their situation, that two young men should have the responsibility of a baby.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cOkay,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The ride was quiet. The man sat in the backseat with the gun pointed at the back of Earl\u2019s head. Joe held the baby in the passenger seat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cWhen we get there,\u201d the man said, \u201cI want you to smile but not too much. I want you to tell them you\u2019re visiting relatives. Just do as I say.\u201d But not long after this, as they drove through a series of tunnels, the man stopped talking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Joe turned around and poked the man\u2019s knee. The gun, which was still pointed at the back of Earl\u2019s head, sat idly in the man\u2019s paint-stained hands. Leaning on his lap like a sad dog was the mysterious black bag with the wide-toothed zipper.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cIs he sleeping?\u201d Earl asked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cI think he is dead,\u201d said Joe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">They pulled over below a bridge and separated the man from the gun and the bag. They sat him upright on the embankment, as if he had fallen asleep waiting for a ride. There was blood in the backseat but not as much as they thought there should be for him to have died.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The baby cried and Joe fed her a bottle and patted her back to sleep. When she got older, they would tell her this story. Some details would change, of course, until she was old enough to hear them. They would have to relay the story of her life\u2014that was the least they could do\u2014and someday she would tell people she was raised by two young men who had found her outside their motel room. Maybe she would even name a child after one of them or both of them. Earl Joe didn\u2019t sound like such a bad name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the distance, a crew of coyotes howled. It was that time of night that made one become existential, and they both openly wondered how in the world they ended up on the side of this road with a baby that was not their own and a dead man they had not killed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">They stood over the man holding the gun and the bag and then they got back in the car.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The drive back smelled of the man\u2019s blood. In the morning, they cleaned the seat and then they cleaned it again. They sanded the spot on the floor where the man had twisted his rifle and then they sanded the entire floor and stained it so that it looked as if no one had ever even walked inside.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Then they counted the money and placed it in a tin box and buried it in the yard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As for the rifle, they buried it beside the money and then a couple months later, they dug it back up and hung it above the fireplace. If the coyotes got too close, one of them would take it down and shoot the sky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"height:100px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Dalton Monk<\/strong> lives in Huntington, West Virginia with his wife and two small children. His stories have appeared in New York Tyrant, Joyland, and Meridian, among other places.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>They shaved their heads in Virginia. They bought knives from a man named Dog in Kentucky. A tornado twisted through Indiana. Two women offered unconditional love in Missouri. In Montana, they loaded a truck with square bales and in return slept in an old man\u2019s guest room. A grandfather clock sat in the corner of the room, and so did the old man. He snored in a lime-green lawn chair with a pistol on his lap. In the morning, he made them eggs and kissed them goodbye. It was just the two of them. They were nineteen years old. Their&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":208,"featured_media":20341,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"contributor":[],"class_list":["post-20329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v28.4 (Yoast SEO v28.5) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Good Boys by Dalton Monk | X-R-A-Y<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/xraylitmag.com\/good-boys-by-dalton-monk\/fiction\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Good Boys by Dalton Monk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"They shaved their heads in Virginia. 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