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TOOTH by Joe Johnson

April 30, 2025

The itch begins in the jawbone under the gums. I can’t get to it with a finger or tongue or backscratcher. Have to let it itch, like watching a fly you can’t swat tickle your forearm. It’s happened before. Happens more these days. Nothing shows up on x-rays, and now dental insurance is all used up.The tooth itches as the boss talks. He’s wearing a suit on casual Friday. It’s gray and fits him in the shoulders but not the belly, so he leaves it unbuttoned. The blue striped tie hangs over his belt. It’s like he’s guest-hosting a nineties talk show. The boss scans the room as he talks, and it’s like he’s looking right at you. He makes that passing sort of eye contact of CEOs and preachers. The way experts do during their TedTalk on the secret history of statistics. You know the talk: This message will change your life.The office is desks and phones, like in old movies. Phones on every desk, desks in every cubicle. Phones now ring in the background because the boss has gathered us to stand by a long table—a hundred of us, the whole floor, in a semi-circle. The table is in front of the west windows overlooking the city. On the table sits a vase. In the vase, an orchid. By the orchid is a box. The boss is in front of the table. He raises his arms in symmetry. He learned this somewhere, probably the same boss school that taught ambiguous eye contact and said to give bad news on Friday afternoon. The boss, we all know, is about to lay half of us off. Year-end is the time of “tough” choices. Boss school must have taught him, Make sure to look like this hurts you too; you did everything you could.Right then, the itch itches, just at the bottom of the molar. Those roots go down into the bone. The boss is saying something about Hannibal crossing the Himalayas on elephants. He’s going to quote the Dali Lama. Put money on it.Speaking of the Dali Lama, four summers ago, on my two-week vacation, I was in India on overcrowded sidewalks. A bike courier blazed by in his cotton shorts and glasses and no-helmet, just pumping. He turned past a truck, then around a car, then hopped onto the sidewalk. But a pigeon, swear to God—didn’t even know India had pigeons—plopped down in front of him. Pigeon, gray and blue and clueless, stalled right in the path between the bicyclist, a bus in the road, and a fire hydrant.Instincts took over: Bicyclist turned, missed the bus but rammed into the hydrant. The bicyclist was going as fast as the cars were supposed to be going, so when he fell off the bike, his body flew car-speed. The pigeon didn’t flinch. Just waddled along while the bike bounced into the road and went under the bus tires, as the bicyclist soared overhead, like, yes, a bird, but landed like an egg. Rammed his unhelmeted head into a bench. The crowd swarmed the bicyclist. He was laid flat out, maybe breathing. All I remember is a tooth on the sidewalk. A whole tooth, the big molar. It’s like a wicked iceberg—the top half is rounded and blunt, but beneath that flat top a root system runs sharp and long, like those Italian horn pendants disco dancers used to wear. The bicyclist’s molar was speared with two points. Those points, when not being knocked out, stick in the bone beneath the gums.That’s where the itch is: in the bone, at the tips of those points at the end of the molar. Not a strong itch, just an unreachable one. But it goes on long enough—boss talks about how proud he is of what we’ve all accomplished “together” (arms raised like an Olympian)—and the idea of finding pliers and pulling the thing out seems reasonable.“…over the Himalayas,” says the boss. Himalayas? Hannibal crossed the Alps.While the boss is riding mastodons up Everest, here in the room, across the circle of employees gathered near the west windows overlooking the city, standing beside the boss, one of the secretaries, Shannon or Shelly-something, sneezes. And that slows the boss. The boss says “Bless you” like a priest. The sneeze, though, sparks an idea: Fake a cough. In the cough, maybe with my mouth covered, I could stick my thumb inside and wiggle the tooth. A wiggle usually makes the itch stop. Except the boss is the center, like the sun, of a half circle, and we’re in orbit around him, but also directly across from our current (and future-former) coworkers. So maybe a push against the cheek. The right hand comes up slowly. Don’t draw attention. Move like the room has motion detectors. Then a test—just a quick scratch of the neck, like maybe the heater kicked on and the breeze set off the small hairs. Nothing to notice. Take your time. The boss isn’t going to stop until he’s scaled Mount Kanchenjunga.No one turns. They’re all still focused on the boss. No one watches the fingernails scratch the side of my throat—up, down, small circle. The scratch takes focus off the tooth, but not all. Like a mosquito has somehow gotten inside. That moment when the mosquito is in the vein, before it pulls out and the brain says, “Kill it.” But by the time you notice a mosquito, it’s already got your blood, and left its spit.Boss pauses. This is the emotional climax. He says something about Nepal, and you know that he practiced this in front of a mirror. He’s got a ring on his finger. He practiced this for his wife. I assume he’s straight. It’s something about the suit, the off-the-shelf that doesn’t fit. He said to his wife, “How does this sound?” and he raised his arms and rehearsed, “The real test of character comes not in victory but in loss.” She said, “It’s great.” She asked if they had anything going on Sunday because an old college friend was in town and wanted to go for lunch. The boss said, “Sounds fine.”Then my knuckle pushes against the cheek, and it does nothing. The cheek is condoms. There’s no way to get to the itch without going in. But the sneezing secretary is looking across now. She knows who the boss means when he says, “and even in hardship.” For the boss she typed up all the emails and attachments waiting in our inboxes, ran the names by HR. She’s probably screwing Boss. His “Bless you” was too concerned. Boss probably tested his speech on both wife and mistress. He’s that kind, like Hannibal: too much man for one woman. Leaves his seed in every town he conquers. Or maybe I’m thinking of Genghis Khan.So, the thing to do is bring the other arm across the chest, to support the arm raised to the cheek, to tilt the head in the look of serious concentration: the dreamy co-ed in that Indiana Jones movie. The secretary is scanning the circle now. She looks past me. Doesn’t make eye contact. Maybe that means I’m not getting laid off. Or that I am. Once the secretary’s gaze returns to the boss, I push in again. Hard. And the push helps. It’s a dull pain. Cheek smushed into all the teeth. And the pain feels good. Push harder. The itch is still there, but the cheek, the inside mashed against the jaw, helps. The cheek warms like a fever.The boss pauses. He drops his arms. Puts them into his pockets and billows the edges of his suit jacket up and out. He stares at the ground. This is the point when all of us, fired and unfired, are supposed to feel for him. His Sophie’s Choice. This is when he talks about the American spirit after 9/11.It’s a stupid job anyway. Lay me off. Let me go. Terrible dental.The boss has his hands in his pockets, like a sign to do the same—lower my arms. Uncross. Unclench. And as soon as the cheek pain settles away, the itch comes back stronger. The tingle, like centipede feet. Inside the jaw, at the pointy tips of the molars in the bone. You would kill to fly unhelmeted and head-first into a bus bench. You would kill for pliers.And you can’t believe it, but that’s what the boss has. He pulls them from his pants pocket. One of those Swiss Army knives. No, a Leatherman. They don’t let you take those things on planes anymore. Someone would hijack a Delta with a Leatherman: “Take me to Cuba. I have a bottle opener.” With his Leatherman in hand, the boss reaches back toward a box on the table by the orchid in a vase. The box is sealed, so the boss needs the Leatherman to clip the straps on the box. Everyone is looking at the box. They all want to know what’s in the box. But I’m following the Leatherman with the knife out, with the pliers tucked inside.The boss sets the Leatherman on the table. The secretary watches the boss lovingly, excited about the box.The boss smiles. From the box, straps clipped, he pulls out a trophy. A real trophy, like they used to give in bowling leagues in those days when men wore Italian horn pendants and took knives on planes. He’s talking about the trophy, about Bill in Engineering, and forty years of service.Bill walks through the middle of the half-circle to the boss. The boss is all smiles. Couldn’t be prouder if Bill were his own father. Forty years of devotion. And there’s no way to replace that much knowledge and skill. No way to replace Bill. The company won’t be the same without him. But the boss and his secretary will make do. They’ll probably both get bonuses for replacing Bill with two part-timers in India.So then I step behind the circle and walk the perimeter because everyone is watching Bill get his trophy, even the secretary. Secretary most of all. The secretary seems really glad Bill is leaving. She says, “What are you going to do with your free time?” Bill grips the trophy and shrugs. And I’m closer now, side-step by side-step.The Leatherman waits on the table by the vase. Almost there. Jenny in accounting turns back, but not before I’m past her. Eyes forward, Jenny.Bill says he’s looking forward to time with the grandkids. What else is he going to say? That he’s planning to leave his wife. That he has a one-way ticket to Las Vegas. Gonna blow twenty-grand on legal prostitutes who smile when he asks for a birthday special.Now I’m at the table, behind the secretary, and the secretary has a good rear for someone who sits as much as secretaries sit. It’s just an observation. I don’t mean anything by it, but it is a surprise. How she lives at a desk, but she’s tight as a gymnast. It’s impressive. Just that kind of discipline.The tooth pulses now. Dull throbs, like a strobe light. And maybe it’s the movement, shuffling my way behind the half-circle, the blood pulsing. It’s pushing now. The boss says, “Let’s give Bill a hand.” The applause is my shot. So I press past, behind the secretary’s behind, reach across the table. My forearm grazes the orchid vase. It wobbles. I pluck the Leatherman. Pull it back smooth and quick as the boss says, “Bill, we’re going to miss you.” Orchid vase teeters. Vase does a spin like a coin settling—heads, tails. Vase stops.Bill takes his final walk back across the circle. Don’t worry, Bill. You aren’t the only one going home today. At least you get a trophy.And I’m back out, careful to slide the tool into my pocket, holding it with my left hand so it doesn’t slip and cut through the fabric. Moving step by step around the outside, past Jenny in accounting. Jenny’s not looking, but she steps back and closes the gap between me and the wall, and it’s her or the wall, and I plow into Jenny. Watch where you’re going, Jenny.Jenny teeters. She stumbles into the accountants, but I press on—didn’t even nick my thigh with the knife. The boss says, “On a serious note.” He’s at the end, and I’m back where I started. The boss pauses because the accountants are mumbling, and Jenny is straightening her shirt. The boss backs it up and tries again. “On a serious note,” he says. He says he’s done everything he can. He says, “But it’s like the Dalia Lama said, ‘If a problem cannot be solved there is no use worrying about it.’”He has a point there. When the pink slip comes my way, I can’t control that. The secretary waves her arms to get our attention. Good arms. Secretary is thirty-five, maybe forty, and goes sleeveless. She invites everyone to join in the break room. There’s cake for Bill. Cake for the lot of us who have emails waiting in our inboxes: instructions for What’s Next on our own journeys across our personal Himalayas.Then the circle collapses, splits into a hundred points all shuffling back to cubicles or to the break room, some patting Bill on his shoulders, Bill with his trophy on his way to claim his cake. The itch might go away with cake, the chewing. At least then, if I stick a fork in my mouth, no one cares. And I could cut the cake with the Leatherman, with the knife edge pressed against my thigh. But the cubicle first. The email, the merciful email.Back at the desk, the itch slows. I’m in my own cubicle, surrounded by a portrait of the 2001 Seattle Mariners, Taylor Swift bobblehead from a niece. I set the Leatherman on the desk. Close the blade. It’s the pliers I want.The computer screen wakes. It knows I’m back and has messages for me. The computer talks with other computers and already knows what the other computers know. Computers are gossips. From the other cubicles come the first sighs and oh-shits and thank-gods. The murmur like a hive. No one uses the office phones on their desks. They pull out their personal cells to call home. “Honey, I got bad news.” Some whimpers. Some sniffles. And I don’t know if the cries come from the people laid off or those left behind.My computer is slow. I’ve been asking for a new one since Halloween. The inbox is buried under windows. And by the time I get to it, there’s nothing. During that whole boss-talk, I missed six emails about invoices, but nothing like “it saddens me” or “we thank you for your service.” And the tooth pulses again. The Leatherman goes back in my pocket, and I head to the breakroom because at least there’s cake and maybe that will help. Maybe there’s ice cream with the cake and that can numb everything. Sometimes when this happens, I get a glass of crushed ice from the breakroom fridge dispenser and pinch the ice between cheek and gum like chew. The dentist says that’s no good. He says, “Have you tried B-complex vitamins?” Yes, and peppermint tea bags and hydrogen peroxide and Anbesol.Bill is by the microwave and flanked by other engineers. Bill’s happy, which is odd because no one’s ever happy. Yes, sometimes people are pleasant or amused, but never happy. And how the hell did Bill make it forty years—and is that the secret: that if you can give the company four decades, you get to be happy. In thirty-four years, I’ll grin like a piñata.No ice cream. And the cake doesn’t help. It’s white and over-sugared with supermarket raspberry jam for filling. The chocolate frosting is dry as plaster, but the breakroom fills with chatter about how good the cake is. Jenny in accounting says, “The cake is great.” You know nothing about cake, Jenny.I’m standing by the cake and Bill comes over for a second slice. He doesn’t want a whole piece. “Just a sliver,” he says, and I’m standing at the table by the cake, and Bill’s looking for a knife.“I have a knife,” I say, and pull from my pocket. “Great Leatherman,” says Bill. But he doesn’t take it.So I ask him, “What’s the secret?” Bill grins but won’t tell. Then the itch comes back like an allergy. And I know how rude this looks, but, on Monday, Bill will be in Vegas pouring massage oil on hookers, so I just do it. I set the Leatherman down by the cake and reach my hand inside and wiggle the tooth. My hand comes out pulling a string of spit—like I’m a basset hound.“Itch?” says Bill. He smiles like one of those wise Cherokee in every western movie. “Yes,” he says, “there’s a secret.” Bill sets down his plate. He moves his hands to his mouth. He flinches, pinches around, and draws from between his lips. Out, in his glistening hand, comes his top dentures. Bill smiles like a railroad tramp, all gums. And his face falls saggy. But happy saggy. Then tilts his head, puts the plate back in, bites down, and restores his face.He says, “Pliers don’t work. I know a guy who can get you forceps. And lidocaine.” Then Bill says he’s changed his mind and takes the full slice. He grabs a piece with his hand and sets it on his plate, then licks the raspberry jam from his fingers. “Here,” I say, and lift the Leatherman to Bill once more. “Congratulations,” I say. But Bill says he already has all the Leathermans he needs and walks back to the guys from Engineering with his full slice of cake.The Leatherman is perfectly designed. A knife and a saw and pliers all in one working unit. The knife for cutting cake. The pliers for pulling teeth. And maybe Bill is wrong about pliers. Only one way to find out. And maybe the company that makes the Leatherman is hiring, needs a good accounts guy. Probably that company has amazing dental. I could leave, at least after the Christmas bonus—no sense going before then. And the tooth isn’t itching now. And if the itch comes back, I know how to handle it. If it gets too bad, I have the pliers to rip that thing out or can get lidocaine from Bill’s dealer. I’ll take action. It’s like the Dalai Lama says, “Happiness comes from your own actions.” Or maybe it was Hannibal or Genghis Kahn. Either way, isn’t being happy what it’s all about.

BOWLING WITH DRACULA by Justin Gibson

April 28, 2025

The first thing we discovered was that vampires loved contracts. Well, no, sorry, I guess the first thing we discovered was the vampires themselves — that they’re real. We figured it out pretty quick, as pets went missing; as we started to get the heebie-jeebies when twilight flooded our backyards a cool blue; as pale strangers stood outside our windows in the middle of the night and asked if we’d let them in, voices like warm caramel. Very strange stuff for these parts, but very obvious: That’s vampires. But we figured out vampires loved contracts almost right after that. Erik Donahue down the street had the bright idea to finally say “let’s make a deal” to the ghastly specter of death hanging around his porch, pleading to be let inside. The specter of death very quickly produced parchment and pen from under its flowing black cloak, and said in a heavy European accent, “I am ready to record the terms of our agreement.” That first agreement was basically, “if I let you in, you can’t eat me and you have to shut up so I can get some sleep.” It ended with a house cat being eaten, and the cheeky devil gleefully pointing out that no terms had been broken. Still, it gave us two huge insights. Vampires like contracts. Vampires didn’t break contracts.It was only a day or two after that we had a mandatory HOA meeting to discuss our next steps. We couldn’t fight vampires outright: They were ancient beings of unspeakable evil and hunger, and we were a collection of working professionals and stay-at-home parents, barely equipped for a holy war beyond the odd hand gun. Calling the police or the military was also out of the question — we had property values to consider.I’ll be the first to tell you that the meeting almost wasn’t productive. The scars of past grievances and petty squabbles were just too fresh. Mr. Morton’s azaleas trashed by some kids’ hide-and-seek contest that spilled over into his territory. Debra Vorhees canceling book club at the last minute three times when it was her turn to host. Little Jimmy Merkins and his motley gang of ding-dong ditchers. Too many people seemed keen to enact some sort of lottery system; where the shortest straw or the lowest number or the painted pebble was simply sacrificed to the vampires every week/other week/month. Where every rules violation — be it a garbage can left on the street after pick-up, a hedge that wasn’t trimmed, a due that wasn’t paid, or a lawn that hadn’t been adequately cut and weeded — was simply punishable by death by vampire. Where we’d all just collectively feed a neighbor to these gaunt bloodthirsty shadows and make a big show of brushing sweat off our brow and going “phew!” like some sort of cartoon, because it hadn’t been us. Because we had been lucky.The sentiment that ultimately won out was: This is America, dammit. The land of freedom and bootstraps, elbow grease and jackpots. We all deserved to have a fighting chance, not just a random chance. If these monsters were going to be in our neighborhood, insisting they ate us, we deserved some sort of trial by figurative combat. To die with our boots on, standing up. The question then became: What should the combat be? What was a thing we all had a shot at?It was ultimately me that pointed out that we all bowl, but someone else was bound to get there eventually. Thanks to the neighborhood bowling league, our whole little subdivision did bowl — just about every Friday night. It was probably the one thing we had in common besides proximity and gossip and floor plans. Fostering and running this league had been my way of contributing to the community since I had moved in. The fact that I am the proprietor of Bowl-O-Rama is frankly just coincidence. I’ve always loved bowling; I’d organize a league even if I didn’t own a bowling alley. We had Jerry Vorhees, an attorney who lived two streets over, draw up a contract. We all signed, and that evening Jerry handed it off (through his living room window) to a vampire to have all them review it and sign if they approved. They returned it that same evening, no amendments or changes. Cocky bastards.That first Friday after was the inaugural bowling competition. Mrs. O’Hara, a grandmother at the end of the cul-de-sac, had hand-painted “Bowling with Dracula” on a cloth banner and hung it over Bowl-O-Rama’s entrance. The vampires grumbled at this; I guess Dracula was a sore spot for them. It was for that reason I’ve made sure to hang it every single week since. Despite that first time being almost business as usual for our group, there was a nervous undercurrent in the air. Like there was one sentence on everyone’s tongues that wasn’t being said. It was being spelled out, morse-code style, in the flitting glances we all traded each other. People shifted on their feet, weighing how heavy the air was — and if it might slow them down if they had to make a break for it. It was pretty easy to edit the existing bracket to now include the vampires. Now, instead of advancing further in a tournament, we were just all paired off with a bloodsucker. Everyone had one match to come out on top. Winners won the right to live another week, unbothered by the vampire’s nighttime solicitations. Losers were be drained outside in the back alley by the dumpsters, to avoid making a mess. The third thing we discovered was vampires are absolute dogshit at bowling. Maybe it was their wraith-like fingers that made it impossible to properly grip the bowling ball. Maybe it was their night vision that made it tough for them to see the oil patterns on the smooth wood. Maybe it was their flowing capes and cloaks that would set off the sensor at the front of the lane. Really though, I think it just came down to them being totally green behind the ears. Zero concept of what bowling was about. You’d think for being immortal beings, they would’ve lived a little. Branched out beyond stalking prey and writing contracts at some point. No joke, they were only getting one to four pins a game. Everything else was a gutter ball. Frankly, it was impossible for us to not trash talk this performance. “Ay, Count Sucks-Ass-ula, try hitting the pins next time.” “Have you guys always lived in gutters like this? I guess it must be cozier than a big castle.” “No sorry, bumpers are only for those under 300 years old. You’re a big boy, go ahead and throw it.” “If it helps, we’ll all pray for you to get a pin this time? Oh! Right, sorry, damnation. Forgot.”“I heard werewolves were great at bowling. Really makes you think, huh?”It got to the point that the cheers and whoops and jeers that would erupt at their garbage scores would shake the walls; we started toning it down only when someone worried that we might knock more of their pins down with our noise. The vampires left the Bowl-O-Rama defeated, dejected, and, we assume, on the hunt for some rats or squirrels to suck down since our pets were also now covered by the contract.That’s been life here ever since: Every Friday, we all get together and beat the bejesus out of a bunch of pasty Nosferatu dweebs to win another week of living. Bowling is typically a pretty social game, but besides the occasional trash talk, we hardly acknowledge them. I couldn’t tell you what any of their names were, or where their homelands were, or what it’s like being undead. Just knowing that they want to drain me is all I need to know. The most talking they might do on their end is a grumble that they’d like to revisit the terms of the contract. At this, we’d give them the bird and tell them to go suck a rat. I want to take a second to say — we’re just regular people, not dumb. We recognize these are immortal beings of endless appetite. Unholy things shaped and forged to utmost evil over the course of centuries. They’ve seen empires come and go. We can see that their scores continue to improve by a pin or two every couple of months. We know time is on their side; they will eventually, with enough practice, figure this out. That unspoken sentence is still at the tip of all our tongues. Someday, one of us will probably, finally, say it out loud. But that is a problem for future us, perhaps maybe even our children, or their children. For now, we’re together and we’re alive. Every Friday night at the Bowl-O-Rama, the beer is cold, the chicken wings are saucy and you simply cannot not bob your head and tap your foot to the music coming from the jukebox. Every strike we throw sounds like a thunderstorm, or a car crash, or the hands of God applauding us for how we’ve gotten on so far. Tonight, as it has been every night, life is good, even with all things considered and present company accounted for.

APPROPRIATE by Andrew P. Heath

April 25, 2025

She said something vague to me. I said something appropriate. She said, What? I said something appropriate. Looking at her. Her collarbone. She said something sarcastic. I said something appropriate. I looked at her collarbone, then slowly looked up at her face. She looked like a cocker spaniel (I did not say that). I had once been very attracted to her. When she would take a shower, I could hear the water running, and I imagined her in there, elegant, graceful, small, her long black hair slicked across her white body. The image was potent and intoxicating, I was drunk in my bed. When she left the bathroom, I would go in and there would be steam and a musky herbal scent. She was speaking, nervously, it seemed. When I don’t say anything, she tends to go on, I thought. I said something appropriate. Our eyes met for exactly one second. She was once very attractive, but now she looked like a cocker spaniel. She has not changed, I thought, I have changed, our relationship has changed. I have not changed. Have I not changed? I became aware that the conversation was strained, uncomfortable. I smiled. I nodded. I said something appropriate. Once, in the middle of the night I poured myself a glass of water and she appeared behind me in ball gown. She said something to me, then. I don’t remember if I said anything back, but if I did, I’m certain it was appropriate. She said, well, goodnight, and left the apartment. On a different night she was in the bathroom. The door was ajar. I could see through the crack of the door the shower rod was pulled down into the tub. I tapped on the door three times with the fingernail of my right index finger. She said, I’m sorry. I didn’t say anything. I went back to bed. I pissed out of my window.

THE COMPULSIVE ON MOTHER EATING by Chel Campbell

April 23, 2025

I have hurt my child by accident, banging his fine-haired head on open car doors or slipping down the stairs, purpling my spent body to shield his from impact. I used to be able to nurse the hurt away, both of us grateful for the easy relief. My inner voice says I am never glad when an accident happens. Another voice says I want to hurt my child on purpose. Those are the days when I am afraid to love my child, as if my love could eat him. My therapist says the past-abused often feel terrified that they or someone they love will hurt their children. I think of stressed mother rabbits that consume their young in disgraced conditions. How easily a creature breaks from her nature if the nest is sullied. I do not ask about the days I fear I do not love him enough, as if his love could eat me. In a mother velvet spider’s ideal scenario, her spiderlings consume her flesh after birth. Their womb-killing doesn’t prove her love or lack thereof. There is only the flesh of her flesh devouring her. Nature, too, is breakage. Thin white lines connect the nature of love and survival until the deep hunger passes. I let my milk dry. My son, walking and weaned, trips during our game of chase, teeth cutting lip. I kneel to mother his tear-streaked face blooming blood, steady for his burying into my chest. His fingers tug the neckline of my shirt for an opening. One of my hands stops his instinctual search while the other smears his blood on the wall. There, in that stain of flesh that belongs to neither of us, hides a love both familiar and new.“Let’s eat breakfast,” I say when the crying ends, leading him to the kitchen. He watches me with questioning eyes as I crack two eggs into the bowl and hand him a whisk. Together, we begin to beat.

ALL THE NAMES WE HAVE TO HAVE FOR LOVE by Lei Wang

April 22, 2025

Someone saw some cloudsonce upon a time. So what?I can see them, too —a haiku But better to have seen them a thousand years ago. I am not being sentimental. I like plumbing as much as anyone, and I know the more pollution, the more brilliant sunsets. But the first poems, you could write about anything. Day turning into night a real phenomenon, a mouth and another mouth. The first poems had no metaphors because nothing was like anything else yet.The kiss was a courting ritual involving, what else, food. A capybara feeding a berry to another capybara, baby birds, wolves translating deer. The first kisses were a promise of future fish, future strawberries: they were symbols, poems. What we want are practical morsels. Let’s nourish the fuck out of each other, a lover says. Hungry, we say, for anything we desire.The first poems were reports. The world was new and you only wanted to factcheck what you saw: are clouds white to you? White as pillowcases? White as teeth? Does billow mean the same to you as to me? How does a frog go? Is the sea far away or no distance at all? Does the moon look sad to you tonight as well? And every night?Why are there so many nature poems? I asked an English professor once. Well, there are just as many city poems, she said. She meant: you see what you want to see.The painters in the caves at Lascaux were saying, bison exist bison exist. Not nostalgizing or vision boarding: just stating the facts. Once upon a time, the facts were enough.

PARENTHETICAL by J. A Gullickson

April 21, 2025

The floor-to-ceiling windows let in so much light that the office is sweltering. Before the sun emerges from behind the tree line, the HVAC system will turn on. These brisk breaths signal the start of a new day for the company. Graham cycles through the presentation again, sinking deeper into his chair. Each slide features a corporate incantation coldly justifying decisions few care for. Key stakeholders have already made up their minds. This is only a formality.In the center of the cube farm lives Hannah. She stares blankly at the two screens in front of her, cursor gliding back and forth between them. The monitors exist separately, but within the technological sinew is a bridge which allows digital matter to travel between them.Here is Peter, some steps away, behind a closed door. Its frosted glass turns men into shapes from another place. He paces back and forth, waiting for the call. This urgency keeps the machine going.In seven years’ time, Graham will run Creative Services. Nine years from now, in Q2, Hannah will be promoted to SVP of Strategy. Peter will give the company over two decades of his life, eventually becoming Chief Technological Officer, before having an aneurysm at his desk late one Friday evening. He won’t be found until the following Monday morning.They will spend more of their lifetime with the company than their own families. That is to be expected. They owe it to the company who grants them paid time off, who provides them the means to pay for medicine, who needs the drones to exist. Graham and Hannah and Peter are just some of the thousands of employees who put in over 40 hours a week for the good of the company. Their roles are utterly meaningless. They’re all in this together. They’re like a family, after all.The drones don’t know the disease festering within. It started ten weeks ago. A group of kings in department store suits, who are seldom seen by their subjects, committed the unthinkable. At their roundtable, tucked away in the cavernous complex of the company, a meeting was held announcing the purported invasion and takeover of their rival Grant Holdings’ shining star: Parenthetical. The lifeblood of the portfolio, Parenthetical is a SaaS titan with a staggering 73% market share in the programmatic space. AdAge calls it “the last omnichannel platform the industry will ever need”.In Q4, a press release announcing the future of Parenthetical will be blasted out to relevant media outlets. The process begins here. The press release will be written by copywriter Felicia K. and will then be delivered to her creative manager, then submitted to the proofreading vendor, then returned to her creative manager, then reassigned to Felicia K. for edits, then delivered to her creative manager, then resubmitted to the proofreading vendor, then returned to her creative manager, then reviewed by her creative manager, then delivered to the creative director, then approved by the creative director, then submitted to the Chief Creative Officer, then returned to the creative director with massive edits, then rewritten by the creative director, then submitted to the Chief Creative Officer, then approved by the Chief Creative Officer, then submitted to Compliance for approval, then returned to the Chief Creative Officer with some light edits, then reassigned to the creative director with light edits, then submitted to the Chief Creative Officer with revisions, then approved by the Chief Creative Officer, then approved by Compliance, and then submitted to the Board, then it is approved, then it is sent to the public relations agency Stealth in Chicago to be released on Tuesday at 10AM Eastern Standard Time. This is the process. It does not forgive. Felicia K. will not recognize her work when she sees the news on CNN’s homepage. She’ll send a link of the article to Hannah on Microsoft Teams. She’ll tell Hannah she thought she wrote something else entirely. The process always transforms what it receives. At the time of its acquisition, Parenthetical employed close to 800 employees across the country with off-shore teams in the Philippines and India. This does not account for the unknown number of contractors currently working for Parenthetical, whose engagements span from a number of months to several years. The loaded gun Felicia K. thought she wrote would be the start of the swift and merciless gutting. The calendar invite is a death sentence. The words “All Hands Meeting” careens into inboxes companywide. A hushed chorus of uncertainty begins to throb.The impending restructuring awakes something. From the darkest depths of legal teams, parent companies, and non-disclosure agreements, a cruelty is set into motion. It will infect the workforce that once drove Parenthetical. Operations will reorganize. Departments will realign. Generations will cease. Bloodlines will end.The Parenthetical US IT team will unfortunately not be part of the migration. Once the merger is complete, they will be let go with a respectable (four-weeks’ pay) severance package. Two months following the announcement, former Parenthetical Network Architect Reggie C. will get a flat tire while driving to the second round of a job interview, then get hit by a car, then be paralyzed from the neck down for the next 19 years, then, at 58, he will purposefully drive his motorized wheelchair hard enough into the corner of the kitchen counter to split his forehead open. He does this while his wife, Terri, is getting groceries two miles away. He will continue to drive his head into the corner of the kitchen counter until he loses consciousness, then bleed out before Terri returns home. A year and a half after being laid off, former Parenthetical Senior Systems Analyst Erin M. will wrap her minivan around a mighty sycamore .6 miles from her home, then the impact of the collision will cause her daughter’s car seat to fail, then, as Erin slips into a warm endless sleep, she will try to take the glass out of her motionless daughter’s hair.Parenthetical grants its clients access to premium advertising channels, leveraging their catalog of quality inventory from over 170 supply partners to achieve campaign objectives effectively. Clients can harness the transformative power of Parenthetical’s in-platform AI optimization for their ad groups. Users can boost CPMs on top-performing inventory, trim underperforming inventory, and strategically direct spend in real time to their chosen KPIs. Enabled across ten dimensions, Parenthetical’s AI optimization, known as Parrot, revolutionizes efficiency across channels and audiences and unleashes the potential of Parenthetical’s optimization engine for a revamped advertising strategy.The Parenthetical marketing team is let go immediately. They receive a respectable (four-weeks’ pay) severance package. Two years after being laid off, former Parenthetical Marketing Manager Braam C. will become a family annihilator, then extended family members will be on the local news talking about how “there were signs” and how “we should’ve listened.” Six years after this, his life and crimes become the fodder of a bonus episode of a murder podcast for subscribers who pay $5 a month. Former Parenthetical Paid Media Analyst Keiko W. is approached by a headhunter on behalf of Henkel North American Consumer Goods, then is hired to work on the Persil laundry detergent marketing team, then Keiko W. develops acuphagia, a form of pica, then she chokes on a clear thumbtack in her car in the office parking lot. Former Parenthetical Social Media Manager Kevin A. marries his fiancé, Liam, two weeks after being laid off, then the newlyweds take advantage of Kevin A.’s newfound freedom from the workforce and plan a last-minute trip to South Africa as an impromptu honeymoon, then Kevin A. is mauled to death by a Boerboel in an alley while waiting for Liam to finish purchasing fruit from a vendor. Parenthetical bridges the gap between modern marketers and the advanced advertising tech required in today’s dynamic media landscape. It is a proverbial gateway to advertising across top DSP platforms like The Trade Desk, Amazon, and more. Clients can manage campaigns across various channels and devices easily and at their convenience. Clients can elevate their marketing strategies with Parenthetical’s suite of audience-targeting solutions. Digital marketers can benefit from first-party data onboarding, tap into cutting-edge third-party targeting tools, implement precision ABM targeting, and explore a wide array of tailored options. Parenthetical’s award-winning customer service teams playfully boast they are available twenty-five hours a day, eight days a week.The Parenthetical accounts team never stand a chance. They do, however, receive a very respectable (four-weeks’ pay) severance package. In the weeks following her termination, Former Parenthetical Client Success Manager Aubrey E. hires Ji Hwang on Fiverr to perform a resume audit and will quickly discover many of her skills are non-transferable. She still doesn’t have a job 18 months later. She will write one final note that will be added to her connection request on LinkedIn to Senior Recruiter Craig Motton at King Global Staffing Solutions which will read I think I’m done trying now. Cheers! Officer Wilmer Brusch will find her in her apartment bathtub four days later after a wellness check is called in, and Officer Brusch will find she sliced into the interior of her left forearm so deep the knife was stuck in her radius.Parker, Thomas & Associates has an ambitious goal for their client, Therapan: increase online sales by a minimum of 50% within two years. To achieve this, the focus must extend beyond mere visibility to a comprehensive strategy encompassing a broad range of online tactics. Target audiences were meticulously identified based on product categories. This involved a strategic blend of first-party and third-party data to formulate effective targeting strategies. A multifaceted targeting strategy unfolded, incorporating behavioral, retargeting, and contextual targeting. Specific campaigns and creatives were tailored to diverse promotions, strategically boosting sales across different product categories. Despite constituting only 3-5% of the monthly visitor traffic, the traffic driven to the site through the campaign substantially impacted 25-50% of online sales. The Return on Advertising Spend, or ROA for the uninitiated, ranged from 5x to 20x– a testament to the efficiency of the strategy. This outcome was attributed to collecting user data via the Parenthetical Smart Container Tag, consolidating insights from all website visitors driven by various media sources. The online revenue saw a 65% increase over the two-year advertising period, surpassing the initial goal of a 50% boost. This success has paved the way for future expansions, with plans to set even more ambitious goals in the upcoming years. The surge in demand prompted the expansion of the factory’s production to three shifts, underscoring the tangible impact of the advertising efforts on Therapan’s overall business operations.In 1999, Fred Gunnar was a Senior Account Representative at Jones Intercable, based in Georgetown, Colorado. During his 12 years with the company, Fred Gunnar accrued several thousand shares of company stock as part of his elected compensation package. The Comcast Corporation acquired Jones Intercable in 1999. Fred Gunnar received a large lump sum for his shares on top of a respectable (16-weeks’ pay) severance package. Fred Gunnar left Colorado shortly after Jones Intercable was acquired by The Comcast Corporation. Fred Gunnar has not worked in over 25 years. Fred Gunnar is a proud grandfather.The most disturbing aspect of this plague is how indiscriminately it kills. Parenthetical employees believed in their work. They reveled in the chance to become storied titans in the industry. With one indifferent sigh and slash of a pen, everything becomes small. So many creative sprints, workshops, one on ones—insignificant. So goes the acquisition ritual which pumps red through the beating heart of America.It takes 17 weeks for Parenthetical to be completely absorbed. Upon acquisition, Former Chief Executive Officer Martin P. receives a respectable (104-weeks’ pay) contract payout package and then Gold Private Equity offers Martin P. a fractional Chief Marketing Officer role at HanWool Corporation’s English speaking satellite office in Berlin. Former Chief Operating Officer Michael L. receives a respectable (208-weeks’ pay) payout and then retires. He is currently exploring the pharmaceutical industry after gaining interest in the Actiq Lollipop, a delivery device for fentanyl which combines the pain reliever with fillers and sweeteners. After developing diabetes in his mid-forties, Michael L. is interested in developing a sugar-free version. Former Chief Marketing Officer Elias N. receives a respectable (104-weeks’ pay) payout, takes a contract Chief Marketing Officer role with MullenLowe Group and advises the leadership team of both MediaHub and MullenLowe Profero.Graham, Hannah, and Peter don’t have much to say about Parenthetical. Graham is swamped this week. The brainstorming meeting for a holiday campaign was less than fruitful and really set him behind. Hannah needs to finish that deck about last month’s paid digital campaigns. The A/B testing yielded some rather interesting results that the strategy team should see sooner rather than later. Peter has a wedding he’s going to this weekend. He has a blinding headache right now, though. The floor-to-ceiling windows stand like monoliths after sunset. The HVAC system breathes its last breath at 7PM. The air in the office will slowly become stale and acrid over the next two days. On Monday, someone will cry in the handicap bathroom stall and everyone will pretend they don’t hear anything. Maybe a glass of water will help.

DO THESE BOOKS MAKE ME LOOK WEIRD?: JACK SKELLEY RECOMMENDS

April 15, 2025

Madison Murray, My Gaping Masshole (Self-published, 2025)A tart is born: Announcing Madison Murray’s fiction, poems, collages. The collection is replete with references to Boston (especially North Shore, Massachusetts). You know, Dunkin Donuts, clam chowdah, the Red Sox Big Green Monstah, Paul Revere, etc. My Gaping Masshole is one unholy, whole, big-ass jam on the concept. Murray’s lewd charm stains every page. My fave parts are Murray’s stories, with real laff-per-paragraph settings, characters, dialog. Of today’s several new writers who are also sex workers (or sex worker-adjacent), Murray is the raunchiest… and funniest.The geo-specificity reminds me of this essential William Blake riff from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive. And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity.” (Italics mine.) Not “genius” in the sense of Einstein (although that fits). But in the sense of the human imagination embodied in every locale. Every writer does this to a degree. I know I never cease the love-hate relationship with the Los Angeles of my mind. Of course, in 2025 we’re deep in tawdry, post-post-post irony mode, so Murray mocks and embodies a debased “mental deity” of Massachusetts with the obsessive affection of a dirty completist. Book vloggersThere’s a world of yackers on YouTube. Most stick to reviewing large-press fiction. But keener vloggers venture into independent presses and niche genres. Here are some trends. Best vloggers: Chanel Chapters (pictured) reviews from Melbourne with access to at least two excellent indie stores (Metropolis Bookshop and World Food Books) and local libraries. Chapters’ open mind, plunging cleavage, and sometimes potty mouth recently incited threats by YouTube to demonetize her! (All part of the global megamedia crackdown, folks.) But this reviewer continues to rock with wit, humor, urban tours and delicious fits. YouTube has not exactified what rules were broken, so WTF else is she supposed to do? Go, Chanel!Ana Wallace Johnson has accrued 68K subscribers not only for reviews (personal takes but I haven’t disagreed yet), but also for travel vids and glimpses of her low-budget/highbrow NYC lifestyle and tastes. What sets Wallace apart is a droll demeanor. Come for the laffs, stay for the books: Wallace’s taste ventures past mass-market narrative toward non-fiction, drama, used bookstores, and forays into independent presses. The Wallace wit includes impromptu raps where she observes her word-choices in the act—self-mocking/self-correcting. Her Sally Rooney review had me howling. Honorable mention: Chris Via on Leaf by Leaf has total cred and writes legit lit crit. Trend Watch: “Weird lit” is a big vlogger term, but notice how often it is equated with horror, a mega genre that occasionally edges into artful lit-fic via voices such as Elle Nash and Charlene Elsby. Also, is Shirley Jackson really “horror”? Vloggers sometimes confuse “weird women lit” with the “sad-girl novel” and straight-up narrative. Like, are Ottessa Moshfegh and Sally Rooney actually “weird”? This adjective is abused! Editor’s advice: Avoid non-descript, general terms: thing, stuff, good, bad, really, something and, yes, weird… unless that is indeed the best word. Emmalea Russo, Vivienne (Skyhorse, 2024) Resonant novel fashions a (fictional) update of (actual) deceased artist Hans Belmer’s long-surviving (fictional) lover Vivienne Volker. Vivienne may or may not have been involved in the long-ago suicide of Belmer’s other (fictional) lover Wilma Lang, who may or may not suggest (actual) writer and artist Unica Zürn. But never mind all that. It’s just intrigue to power the contemporary plot and stylistic gymnastics. These feats include revolving POVs and entire chapters rendered in YouTube comments. Themes include shady shenanigans of the art-world “industry”; the hypocrisies of cancel culture (the author was a prey of same); and cross-generational sex/romance offered nonchalantly. The book may haunt you months after reading if you encounter Belmer and Zürn. Jessamyn Violet, Venice Peach (Maudlin House, 2025)Uh-oh! A TikTok time bomb has burst the Superdoom Portal. A vengeful AI president punishes all citizens, sex bots and media stars. Nothing, it seems, can stop the haywire L.A Hellscape seen by twisted visionary Jessamyn Violet. Inside dope: The author wrote this dystopian funhouse during the first Trump preziduncy. She learned Maudlin House would publish it just as Trump was re-elected last year. This gives the story’s vindictive President TBD 3000 – and all its characters and scenes – the quality of a Cassandra curse. Except that it’s farcically funny. David Trinidad, Hollywood Cemetery (Green Linden, 2025)Heaven’s stars are quasi-immortal, while Hollywood’s are fated to fade. Graciously, Trinidad’s page-sized eulogies grant a couple dozen bit players one last flash-in-the-pan. The actors tell their own stories, but Trinidad’s voice floats above them, an angel wearing shades, bestowing epitaphs, footnotes and the harsh irony of glimmer and glamour doomed in a company town. (Capitalism, like time, is cruel.) The lives of these players (including one dog, Toto) end prosaically. Still, they emit elegantly tangy poetry, as does this book. Elaine Equi and Jerome Sala, Double Feature (Insurance Editions, 2024). Elaine Equi and Jerome Sala are poetry’s power couple. For decades they have lived, loved, performed and blown minds together. Equi with amusement, bemusement and rough-to-smooth edges that engage the senses, then the mind. Sala with knee-slap spit-takes on commodity culture borne from a career in advertising. Both are premiere pop poets, descending from the New York School of tender accessibility. Despite their years together, this is, to my knowledge, their first collaborative book. It’s two chapbooks in one… a bargain! Diva Corp USA, volume 2, zineI do not understand the art industry, especially how its monetary mechanics so unsustainably skew to collectors and a handful of “art stars.” This tracks roughly with music and publishing. But the art world erects a pantheon of demi-gods in acropolis museums: The new Los Angeles County Museum of Art is a $ billion palace of excess by “starchitect” Peter Zumthor. Hilde Lynn Helphenstein’s Diva Corp essay “Stop Crying Over Spilled Inauthenticity” says this “increasingly byzantine” world strains connections between genuine artists/art lovers and its buyers/institutions. And, as if embarrassed by fancy servicing of the 1%, it bathes in identity politics. Is this what makes it prone to serial cancelling even while its elites roam free, hypocritically? Other Diva Corp contributions include stories, poems and reproductions…all on newsprint. It performs its public service in mock mystery. I attended the launch event. The editors/publishers were MIA. They are anonymous. Issues were placed by the restroom toilets. I couldn’t find one. But they did print my theoretical manifesto “Das NeuroKapital.” Dunce Codex, anthologyPubbed by editor Roo, this is two collections: prose and poetry. Impressive design and voices. Gobs of lit-besties young and not so young: Benjamin Weissman, Dennis Cooper, Frank Demma, Gabby Sones, Lily Lady, Erin Satterthwaite, Riley Mac, Meat Stevens, Derek Fisher, Manuel Chavarria, Sophie Appel, Selva Imran, Priscilla Jasmine, Brittany Menjivar, Clarke e. Andros, Pedro Minet, Alistair McCartney, Thomas Moore, Eileen Myles, Jacqui Alpine, Charalampos Tzanakis, Amy Gerstler, Jimmy Vega. Plus many worthy peeps new to me. Freakishly, my name pops up in two unrelated pieces and in Roo’s intro! Order from duncecodex@protonmail.com. Car Crash Collective, anthologyLike Dunce Codex above, this robust volume is proof of scene solidity. It evolved from the same-named reading series by lit Angelenas Erin Satterthwaite and Brittany Menjivar. (Events in L.A., New York, Berlin and…) There’s no index, so rather than skip to a name, you open and read. Rewarding prose results include Zoey Greenwald, Kate Durbin, Chris Molnar, Taylor Lewandowski, Alec Niedenthal, Sarah Velk and Belinda Cai. Beau Geste, 2nd Issue, zineHere’s a multi-media mind fuck: A magazine that is also an oversized artwork is also documentation of a recent Los Angeles performance. Curated by Jordan Rountree, the texts/images reflect that event’s perpetration of a high-level goof: Ostensibly it celebrated playwright Bertold Brecht receiving a long-overdue star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Except there is no such star for Germany’s socialist inventor of confrontational theater. (He deserves one: As a Nazi-fleeing expat in L.A., Brecht co-wrote the screenplay for the Fritz Lang-directed Hangmen Also Die!) Work is by Rountree plus Hannah Bhuiya, Brittany Menjivar, Joseph Mosconi, Zara Schuster, Ian F. Svenonius, Dakota Blue, Jean Marco Torres. Silicone God, Victoria Brooks (U.S.: House of Vlad, 2025, England: Moist, 2024)Here is part of my Introduction to the U.S. edition of this freak-ass novel: The characters and narrator(s) of Silicone God reference by inference what elsewhere has been termed The Singularity—the point where all technology hyper-evolves to one mass/individual consciousness. This is not a future historical period: It is a forever present. In Silicone God, that point is called Time. It manifests in the characters of future Silicone/human/god hybrids (their bodies composed of The New Flesh), while the Now is “our” limited experience as fleshly humans, also known as The Rotten. The author’s stand-in, Shae, envisions the Singularity of Time in passages that mix the cosmic with the tartly comic… and just plain bizarre… sometimes echoing (to me) the deranged geography of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations:“When I first saw the Sea of Time, I thought it looked like heaven. It was a heaving mirror, the same colour as the violet sunset and the silica under my feet. Massive cock-shaped mushrooms poked up among the dunes.” This partly explains Silicone God’s portal shifts of temporal teases. With tentacle-tongue in cheek, Brooks’ book’s dramatis personae embody a menu of preposterous and sublimely amusing monstrosity. Personal apocalypse is a hot and horny bitch mistress from a “future” (teasingly aggregated into the figure of Evaline), ever out-of-reach from a yearning ego-desire (loosely reduced to a self-conscious, auto-fictionesque narrator Shae). This scrambles “character” and “narrative.” Not to mention “gender.” And even “species.” Interrupting and disputing Shae’s chronology (directly on the page!) is Nez, a divine transexual character (created by mushroom gods 3,000 years in the future). Among these figures, a form of gender politics is at play. Males are backgrounded or subsumed into sometimes-competitive female psyches. And the carnally charged friction between these characters pistons plot conflict, intermingling their voices… suggesting that in Time, they are components of one God—or Goddess—psyche. Networking such concepts is a web of purposefully messy evolution imagery. This includes mushrooms, plus cephalopods and their anime tentacle-porn appendages. If mushroom gods usher in the Silicone Becoming of Time, does their form signify the phallus? As with the living, twitching dildoes in multiple sex-scenes, the answer is yes. Except, like everything in Silicone God, the phallus mutates, often mid-coitus, to female organs, and mixtures betwixt:“My little suckers cupped her skin – the slimy hot and cold sensations sending her wild. I put one on her clit, and carefully engorged it with blood so much that it became a mini cock. She begged me to kiss it till she came.”The Hamletesque, self-doubting narration of Shae jolts these freak shows with the frisson of lived experience. This is Silicone God’s twist on the (by-now) depleted or (always) ill-defined genre of auto-fiction. Did these scenes “really” happen? I don’t mean, did Shae’s legs really engorge into semi-autonomous octopus limbs, the better to pleasure her lover? But did the narrator want you to wonder if the author “really” was/is a multi-lover mistress gunning for full-on lesbo relations in a world of earthquaking gender norms? Or, is the shifting of skin and sexes a metaphor for lovers deceiving their intendeds and themselves? For seduction?Brooks cagily demurs. In a 2024 XRAY chat, she posited her theories of plastic narrative to me thusly: “My book gives dramatic colour to thinking around the mistress archetype, and I have been a mistress many times. So, some of the tougher scenes (and some of the hot ones!) are direct from experience. I've paired the very real, with the outright unreal.”

CRYING FROM THE DUST by Jace Einfeldt

April 14, 2025

A week after my baptism, I hit my little brother in the head with a tee-ball bat and sent my whole family into a frenzy on a Saturday afternoon in mid-March and got locked out of the family car and told to sit on the couch and think about what I did while my younger brother bled all over mom’s brand-new dishtowels in the middle seat of our 1998 emerald-green Yukon Denali. As my family flew down the street on angel’s wings, I contemplated what I had done while picking at the beige, peeling leather couch in the living room and ruminating on the eternal ramifications of hitting my younger in the head with a tee-ball bat in the middle of March as the promise of new beginnings and new life stirred outside with the birds nesting in the globe willow out back and the grass greening again after being suffocated under months of snow. I thought of how Jesus died for my sins. I thought about my recent baptism and how all my sins must have sloughed off my body and swirled around the drain and were sucked into the city sewer system never to return. I thought of how now Jesus and Heavenly Father must have hated me so much because wasn’t I supposed to be my brother’s keeper and not his assailant? I thought about how I must be beyond redeeming, beyond saving, beyond the grasp of God’s love because if Jesus had a younger brother He definitely would’ve looked out for him before He swung the brand-new tee-ball bat He got for his eighth birthday on a cold day in early March as an incentive from His Father to practice swinging a bat in preparation for the upcoming little league season. Yeah, Jesus would’ve taken every precaution. He would’ve made sure that His younger brother was still in the house and not following Him into the backyard because His younger brother only wanted to follow His perfect example, learn from His flawless batting stance, His celestial follow through, to learn from the Master Himself about what it looks like to wind up and smash a homer over the Wall of Jerusalem and straight past the Judean Desert and into the Dead Sea where the ball would float at the surface forever as a reminder of His power and majesty at the plate and His impeccable .407 batting average. Jesus would’ve meant business. He wouldn’t have taken the bat out back willy-nilly. He wouldn’t have swung it against the concrete basketball court because He wanted to kill an army of giant, imaginary spiders. And if He had crusaded against this imaginary army of spiders in a fit of righteous fury, He would have done so with the certainty that His younger brother was a safe distance away. He would have had the foresight to, at the very least, tell his younger brother to stay on the back patio because the spiders were mean and liked eating little brothers for lunch. He would’ve told His younger brother that He was there to protect him, to save him, to vanquish the army of giant, imaginary spiders because the last thing Jesus would ever want to do was to inadvertently harm His younger brother and send him to the hospital to get seven stitches from his temple to his hairline. Jesus’ younger brother would’ve been safe, and the spiders would’ve been slain. And years later, when the two of them are older, you might hope to find them sitting on a couch eating Salt and Vinegar Lays and sipping glass bottles of cane soda while the Angels play the A’s in Anaheim. They would be talking about JJ Bleday and how even though the A’s have a young roster this year that doesn’t mean the future isn’t bright. They’d clink their bottles and nod in agreement. Amen to that, they’d say. Amen and amen.

FISHING FOR KAT by Wendy BooydeGraaff

April 11, 2025

He flies into town, late, rents a room in the neighbourhood, meets her first thing in the morning, holds her, remembers how her mother looked, same dark eyes, same dark curl on the top of her head. Every six months, he catches milestones: crawling, walking, first words, kindergarten, high school. Same room, same turquoise couch, same breakfast snacks. Years. Back and forth. He becomes an intermittent constant.At home, he cleans out the extra room, installs a Murphy Bed, hangs her favorite poster. He investigates the local university, uses it as a lure she won’t resist.

JAKOB, I DO! UNTIL I DON’T! by Ali Mckenzie-Murdoch

April 10, 2025

We drank Prosecco on the number 31, escaping the confetti blizzard, the plastic champagne flute cheap between my lips but the ring heavy on my finger, while my parents returned to their hotel and we continued on the early bus—Who gets married at eight in the morning?—and some passengers clucked and said Cheers, but most looked out to the felt-clad streets where stony-faced bankers marched to the rain, then we chugged up a small mountain on a train, and still in my wedding dress with the matching red patent shoes, I whispered footsteps in snow strewn with autumn leaves, and later, after we thawed our bodies in steaming water and fucked in the bathtub, bones squeezed between ceramic and lobster-pink skin, I hid the bruises beneath an evening gown, and we toasted again, ate pizza and lit candles jammed into green glass bottles while I picked at wax cascades with manicured nails never knowing when this day, this love, this marriage, would end.