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ONE GIRL – ONE GIRL by Sacha Francis

June 11, 2025

She thumbs the tumor where it rubbed on the boning of her bra. Her work shirt is half undone, her chest exposed to the mirror. The hooks unclasp, and it’s there in full view: pill-sized, pill-hard and intradermal. She squeezes, this is no pimple - the skin that hides it turns a deeper pink and that’s the end of it. An intruder to the bathroom fails to enter, the door ruts the lock. She buttons her blouse and smooths out her hair to return to her work. The tumor snugged in its place over her breastbone, against the bra, beneath the blouse.At home, the blouse is torn open for inspection. The woman lives alone, where no-one will stop her picking and probing. Her thumb angles it left, right. The node is anchored and completely numb. How long has it been growing there? It’s been a long winter. When dressing and undressing in the dark, certain sacrifices are made. It’s entirely possible for a woman to miss the point, no matter what she thinks she’s agreed to lose when signing the contract. Every job has its roadblocks. This was little more than the latest in a string of unanticipated set-backs.The tumor is clothed in soft skin, reddened from inspection. It slides downward when her thumb slips sideways, aghast and curious, she slides the pill further down and finds no resistance, no pain in the slightest. The effort translates it a few centimeters lower. The woman’s skin is split open. She opens a thin, oval window through yellow fat to the wet, pink muscle underneath. A clean wound, she braces for burning that she expects but doesn’t feel. For minutes, she is thrown back on her ass in shock before the mirror. Her features are catlike. She crawls forward again to inspect her opening. The tumor lies waiting, the skin above shows no sign of releasing it and when she tries to push it back up where it came from, it refuses. A dilemma presents itself. Reason dictates an open wound should endeavour to remain small - though reason has not encountered a wound as willing as this. Why didn’t it hurt? She thinks she might have gotten lucky. Logic dictates that harm creates pain. She will have to keep pushing to feel some. Then - and only then - will her condition make sense.As she tests, the pill slides further until it rests at the beginning of her stomach, a trail skating behind it like the fly of a dress. There is still no pain, but there’s something like it. Slowly now, the body peels tenderly, the split inches as the cells divide. Electricity from their parting comes in small dispersals, easy warmth. The sensation deepens with the cut, she realizes when the tumor passes over the naval that she is out of splittable skin. How unfair. Feline face flushed, mouth agape, torso yawning with muscle sparkling under the drooping cuts. Pill-like tumor pressed and ready over the mound of her cunt.She forces it down, measuring her limits. Her skin gives way. Pleasure courses thicker and hotter than blood though unready veins. The passage is savoured. Movement of the tumor over the slick flesh of her vagina arches and blossoms to unimaginable heights at every millimetre. It shoots through her legs and cools the palms of her feet. She feels holes torn where none have appeared. But alas! Her openings meet at last and somehow the tumor becomes lost inside her. It is gone. What remains is the woman, legs spread to reveal the opening wide enough to dissect her body to the breasts. Underneath the wrapping, the muscle is healthy and vibrant. It trembles involuntarily when inspected. Breath clouds her face in the glass, but she is not currently interested in breath.. Gently, she pulls the sides of the wound wider, it gives way easily. Pain refuses to find her, friction between skin and muscle is like slipping an old burn through velvet. Fingers find their way under. She is confronted with the image of herself, a woman she knows well, naked, panting and dipping her hands beneath her skin as though she were hungrily caressing a lover under their clothes. Whole hand under, whole hand up. The rift splits more where her arm has gone, it passes the breastbone to her neck. Wrapped in ecstasy, she has torn the skin all the way to her face in want of further release. Her fingertips run over her teeth and she recoils, at last, in face of what she has done. Is continuing to do. Terror grips wide eyes for a moment and the shock has sent her limbs moving spasmodically. She catches her loosened skin on the carpet. It pulls to the side, replacing fear with ecstatic friction once again and her thoughts of repercussion are replaced by greed. Her hand runs under the opposing arm and removes it like a glove. Just as simply, the other is removed, then she works on loosening her leg. She slips out of herself like stockings. Leveraging her hands over her top row of teeth, she reaches up, pulling her face off like a hood. She drops the whole thing on the floor, a deflated heap of blood and flesh.Free from her binding, the body feels lighter, less agitated. The pleasure has died down to an insignificant hum. But has not yet made a full exit, as the open air against her muscle brings a slight tingling sensation. Blood billows out around her feet like a shadow where she walks on her plush cream carpet, the fibres putting welcome shocks through her naked soles. Facing her in the mirror is a glistening wide-eyed creature of meat. Hairless, lipless, quivering red ape of tendons and sinew. Although it moves at her command, strangely, there is no compulsion to covet or mourn for it. Nor are there thoughts of returning to the chrysalis. She kneels in a widening pool of blood, raw palms smearing the mirror where her teeth grind the glass.

I SEE THE BEAUTY by Diego Lama, Translated from Italian by Rose Facchini

June 10, 2025

Behind the dune of plastics, hidden among the clumps of charred O-Rings and heaps of shapeless garbage, there is a large tank. In the tank are cockroaches. Every day, I climb onto the metal cover and contemplate the gray dawn that creeps through the hills of waste. Then I defecate inside the tank through the top hatch. Every day, my feces nourish thousands of hungry cockroaches. In the morning, I take my net and fish. The smell of the tank does not bother me. On the contrary. Sometimes I climb inside and catch the biggest cockroaches that hide at the bottom. Then I climb back up to the pot of water on the fire and cook breakfast, lunch, dinner. I eat fifty, seventy, ninety cockroaches a day. I also make a good, dark, bitter, thirst-quenching, nutritious broth from them. The cockroaches feed on my waste, I feed on them. Every day, I go for long walks through the sludge in search of more food for my farm: human excrement, remains of dead animals, or shapeless things. And then I collect fuel to keep the fire burning. This is my life. No one ever comes near. They are afraid, disgusted, pitying, horrified. They are shortsighted and confused, all moving towards their end, even if they run away in different directions. They run away and do not see the beauty. I do not run away. I see. And then, at sunset—gray, blurry, misty—I sit on a heap of garbage and smile, because life, every life, is wonderful.

WHAT I DID FOR LOVE by Catherine Spino

June 9, 2025

I can’t remember his name so I will give him one. Devin. He was 32, blonde, sun kissed, and standing on a dock in the middle of nowhere. I couldn’t tell what color his eyes were but if I had to guess, they were blue. I hit “heart” and a few hours later, I felt his “heart” back vibrate against my jeans. It was December 2014 and I was 21. Back then, the OKCupid app was clunky and I always gave out my cell because texting was easier. I gave Devin my number and his texts came in green on my iPhone 5. He tried calling me immediately after and I rejected the call. “Can’t talk now, what’s up?” “Oh, sorry. Just wanted to say hi.”I ignored this and went about my day, already forgetting him.The next time he calls, he calls three times in a row at 9:45pm while I’m cramming for a Bio Anth final in the Philosophy building with two other girls. I pick up on the third, frustrated and already bored. I tell him I’m studying for a final in a flat tone and don’t run with any of the small talk he’s making. Eventually he says, “You know, I was excited to get to know you but I didn’t think you’d be such a bitch.” His words are like a dental drill buzzing too close to my pink gums.I immediately stop breathing, faced with a challenge. I liked challenges, holding my hand over fire to see how long I could last until the burned flesh was too much. I liked stretching my endurance. I was young then, what an excuse.I forgot what I said next, but my voice changed. I remember thinking of a kitten before its first time getting its claws trimmed, unwieldy and meaningless. I petted him with my voice, pressed my hand to its nose for familiarity. Devin told me he worked in entertainment, lived in Jersey but went often to New York for events and premieres. I told him I was an actor and director finishing up college. I told him where I went to school and thought about joining him for premieres. He asked me what I was into sexually, a conversation I was privy to having. Nothing scared me about sex anymore after I lost my virginity in London the year before. Out of all the questions he asked me, the only one I remember is did I like having things stuck up my ass. I forget what I answered but it probably wasn’t the truth. “I wish I could meet you tonight”, his voice like gravel. “I’d love to pick you up and see you in person.” I told him I had to study for my final and he proposed to see me after I was done the next day for coffee before I went home for break. But we kept talking, and at one point, he called me from a different number. A work phone. Devin demanded nudes a couple hours later. I sent him a couple I took weeks ago in the daylight, light pouring into my room as I faced my Macbook, my bottom half covered with my Marimekko duvet but my top exposed, an indie sleeze Rokeby Venus. My nipple piercing on my right breast twinkled as my pupils focused on the spot to the bottom right of my laptop’s digital eye. I remember feeling beautiful, classy, powerful when I took those, thinking they were a gift. Devin responded immediately that these were old photos and that he was insulted that I didn't send him something new. “I want you to go back to your dorm and send me 30 photos of yourself in 15 minutes.”So I did. I sucked myself in, contorted my body and began clicking my iPhone camera. I sent him 30 and he asked to Facetime me. I said yes. I never thought I could say no or ask for photos in return. I don’t know whether I say this to prove I wasn’t asking for this or because I can’t objectively look back at this anymore.He Facetimed me and I answered on my computer. His screen was black, I could not see his face. He told me he turned off all the lights and was too lazy to turn them on. I vaguely remember he said he had a cat or two. Did I see them? I can’t remember. I can’t remember how it happened but I was laid back on my twin sized dorm mattress, pressing my cheap red marbled bullet vibrator from Spencer’s Gifts to my clit, fake moaning but trying to make it real. My eyes were fixed on the high cracked ceiling, avoiding the square of darkness on my laptop but more importantly ignoring my body reflected back to me, a form that felt so foreign and weak to me. I had a pit in my stomach that could’ve been sexual shame but felt coarser than that. I tried to ignore it. Devin’s voice was in my ear as I faked the build of an orgasm. Right before the false peak, he said, “now shove it up your ass.” I didn’t do it. By that point it was 3am and my exam was in five hours. He agreed he’d see me after for coffee and I went to bed with a sour stomach.I woke up and took my exam, running on acidic coffee and adrenaline. I remember passing my friend Carina in the dorms, pink and giddy because I found someone cool. We both always talked about our boy troubles at our small liberal arts school. I remember I imagined I was glowing telling her the news, like a drop of dew on a leaf. Once I realized I had nothing packed, I called Devin and asked if we could reschedule coffee for when I returned in the spring semester. He hung up immediately and five minutes later, I received five texts from an unknown number—his other number I forgot to save. All five texts were photos of a man I didn’t know—a brunette with a dark goatee who looked about 250 pounds. Photos of him standing with friends outside, his arm wrapped around a woman’s waist in a bar, him wearing those wrap around glasses dads wore. Another text came in. “I knew you wouldn’t like me because of how I looked.”I can’t remember how my body felt when I got all of these texts. I called one of his numbers back, I can’t remember which. I could tell I was on speaker phone and asked him what this all meant. “I have a medical condition where I look the way I do but I’m going to have surgery in a couple months. I wanted to find a person who could see beyond what I look like now so that when I look different, I know they will be with me because of who I am.” I pictured a fucked up version of Beauty and the Beast, my childhood VHS tape warped in the sun, all the cartoons twisted. I couldn’t understand why I felt conflicted. He kept talking.“Well, I’m already on my way to your college.” “What?”I only then recognized the fact that his voice sounded slightly farther away, in a tunnel. He was on speaker phone. I imagined his chubby hands on his steering wheel, every minute a couple feet closer to me.“I’m getting off at your exit now, it’s too late for me to turn around.”That’s when I remember how my body felt. It felt like glass.I thought it would be easier to handle all of this on my own. I didn’t think to get campus police involved or anyone else. Devin had my nudes. It felt like I had already signed over my rights and my body and there was nothing I could do. I told him where to go after he passed through the entrance, campus police probably waved him in without looking up from their phones. His black minivan circling the campus like a vulture over a bunny with a broken leg, too stunned to move. He pulled into the small parking lot of my dorm building. It was one of the older buildings on campus and the 4th floor was supposedly haunted by a girl who jumped out the window because some boy broke her heart. He got out of his van as I stood on the gravel. He had the same wrap around sunglasses, red adidas shorts that hit right at his knee, and adidas slides. I didn’t look at his toes for too long. My plan was to say hello and send him on his way. But once his soft, sweaty flesh enveloped me, he said, “I thought I’d get to see your dorm.”I remember walking him up to the second floor of the dorm, my shoes pressing into the grey carpeting, thinking “I have a loud scream, I have a loud scream.” Because even though I knew this wouldn’t end well, I thought I could handle it. Devin sat on my bed, his flesh resting on the same Marimekko bedding in the photo I sent that he hated.I buzzed around the room packing. He wouldn’t stop talking. About New York, about events, about how he worked on Lord of the Rings—a fact I checked on IMDB later and his name wasn’t listed on any of the projects. As he kept going on, I kept checking the clock, seeing time constrict as my Dad drove closer and closer to me. At one point, I remember telling him he needed to leave, that I didn’t want my father to meet him like this. He asked me to sit on the bed with him, my worn stuffed elephant as the only witness as he said, “I’m not leaving until you kiss me.”I wish I had taken the time to think, to slow down, to pause time. To rewind, to enter this dorm room as I am now, to grab my hand and run screaming down my hall. Knocking on doors until someone came out. I picture this now and my screams are silent. She lets go of my hand because no one comes out, no one hears me, and she returns to her dorm room, sits down, and kisses him.I have never felt my body shake as violently as it did then. Every muscle in me was alive, knocking against my skin like bees in a hive of flesh. I pulled away and remember seeing this booger, this gleaming moist pea green lump of rejected bacteria hanging from his right nostril and being disgusted. “I could tell you wanted more.” He said with a grin.He left shortly after because I said my dad was nearby. I forget if I kissed him again, and my dad arrived 30 minutes later with my sister in tow. We packed the car and drove back to Rhode Island. Right before my dad came, Devin called me again on speaker phone. “I know your dad wasn’t almost there. Don’t you ever lie to me again.”That night, I went to the 99 with my high school friends. After three five dollar margaritas, I told them numbly that I was catfished. I told the story like it was a joke, looking for laughs along the way. Three of my guy friends looked stunned, one of them saying, “Christ, are you alright?”The only thing that comes back clearly is what my only girlfriend said, “Are you sure you didn’t do anything enticing?”I called my therapist the next day and told her what happened. “I need you to block both of his numbers. This man has done this before, he has a story and a system to manipulate women.” she said. “Once you return to school, you need to report this to campus police.”But I didn’t heed this advice. I thought I could fix this. I texted him a couple days later and explained to him that I really couldn’t get into anything serious with my senior thesis coming up in the spring. It really wasn’t him or his looks (or his lie), it was all me.What came next was a large paragraph, jumbled and clearly voice to text, but the one thing that stands like a monument in my mind was that “he didn’t want to be my friend he would find a way to fuck me he would.” I blocked both of his numbers. I deleted my OKCupid account and never redownload it.I told some of my good friends what happened to me when I returned in the spring semester, always when I was drunk or stoned. I figured it was a good party trick, like my nipple piercing—something initially painful that turns into a cheap novelty. There was something about seeing people react to the story. How they laughed at the term “catfish” and then their faces shifted and landed in a place of concern. I watched this happen time and time again, hoping that concern would rub off on me. It never did. I graduated in May 2015, age 22. I packed up my parents' car and stayed in a hotel with my best friend for our last night in Jersey. “The Graduate” was on TV, Katherine Ross in her wedding gown and Dustin Hoffman staring straight ahead into a world we never see. It is now February 2017. I have forgotten about Devin. I live in Brooklyn and work as an executive receptionist for a luxury real estate company. I get a text from an unknown number around 3pm, nothing atypical as a girl who goes on a lot of first and only dates. “Hey beautiful.” “Who is this?” “Devin.”“Sorry I don’t know of a Devin.” “From December 2014.”Just as my brain made the connection, I received a photo of myself. Nude from the tip of my breasts up, a small smile painted on my face. My eyes locked with the digital eye of my phone.Another text. “I just wanted to see if this girl was still single.”I can’t remember how I thought of it but I texted back, “So sorry! I think you have the wrong number! Best of luck finding her.” And blocked the number. All I can remember was sitting in a packed L train during rush hour, feeling like I was being hunted, that he saw me hiding in Brooklyn. He knew where I was at every moment. I called both my Providence based therapist and my new New York based therapist as I walked home in the park. One said she was impressed by my text to him and the other said this had nothing to do with me, that this was some indication that he was flailing and reaching out to older situations. I pictured him in some basement in his same red adidas shorts and adidas slides, a single booger hanging from his nostril, the only light coming from a laptop as he shot off messages like bullets from a sniper rifle into the void. “You could be in Africa for all he knows.” I tried to believe that as I struggled to find sleep that night.Devin never tried to contact me again. I grew up thinking that love could be served up on a spoon or a knife, but it was love just the same. I had no concept of what negging was, what manipulation could look like, the idea of revenge porn was just whispers and nothing legitimate. For years I looked back and thought what an incredible idiot I was. How I got out by the skin of my teeth. How it really wasn’t that bad, all he did was kiss me in a small dorm I invited him into. How I should’ve known better. I retold this story countless times and I guess I was waiting for someone to ask why I did what I did so I could finally say that I did it for love.

LOOKING AND HURTING by Alice Rowena Wilson

June 5, 2025

In the bar, she stares at him constantly, which is embarrassing in and of itself, but also because she cannot seem to physically control it, and she knows his friends will notice (she somehow does not count herself in this body of people, although that is where she belongs; within this crowd, her desire isolates her, carves out a space of hot, silent shame), and she knows that they, his friends, will murmur to each other, that they will note her desperate, pathetic, puppy-dog presence, but she seems to have a physical impediment that means she can’t stop staring, and even when she forces herself to look at other people, she doesn’t see their faces but instead the overlay of his face, their mouths and faces moving and talking in a sick parody of his mouth and face, and when she glances across and sees him talking to another woman, it is as if she has been punched in the chest, it takes the wind out of her, she wants to cry, to scream, to cradle the other woman’s head in her hands and press down on her eyeballs until they turn to wet, soft mush. She spends so much time repressing this jealousy, certain that it is neither good for her nor appropriate for her feminist commitments, that it is a relief to simply thirst for blood.

CRUISE STORY by Aristotelis Nikolas Mochloulis

June 4, 2025

I was awake in what felt like an instant, a ray of sunlight splitting my head in half. Mom out of sight, I showered, redressed, packed my wet sheets into a bag, began to panic, and called her to see if I had it in me to tell her what was going on. In the few seconds between her picking up and my coldly replying, Where are you? I decided to give myself the benefit of the doubt until the second test. Outside the laundromat, I studied the manual, slid the swab deep into my nostrils, its tip into the liquid, and anxiously waited the fifteen recommended minutes while staring vacantly into the dryer porthole as it got increasingly encrusted with a disturbing white film. When I looked back down at the test, a faint second line was obviously apparent.The ride to the port was spent in our usual silence. Mom’s only interruption, to ask if I had finally checked the website for the cruise we were about to embark on, came as a good excuse to look at my phone, face pointed more consistently away from her and out towards the window. The ad was framed by blue and white variations of corinthian columns, evidently geared towards tourists; this much I had expected having become accustomed to mom’s capacity to fetishise the picturesque in all cultures, including our own. I skimmed the text and swiped down to an image gallery of a woman who looked eerily like mom in front of various beaches, olive trees, and donkeys, pausing to turn back to her and make sure it wasn’t just the fever fogging my senses, to see a self-satisfied smile plastered on her face. It looks beautiful doesn’t it?The taxi dropped us off a couple hundred meters away from the dock. Although small, this stretch took us an excruciating amount of time to trudge; due in part to my own hesitation in going through with the whole thing, but mostly mom’s habit of walking at an unhurried, almost geriatric pace she attributed to her diagnosis with a rare autoimmune disease, but I suspected had more to do with her recent self-imposed mental and physical shift into an old woman. Each of the three previous times she had visited me in Athens, different facets of her younger personality had all but completely eroded, a fact she was stubbornly unaware of to the point that when I mentioned them to her it was as if they never even existed, the image of her I had grown up with replaced in her mind by a more generic idea of what a young mother might be. Onboard, we were met by two deckhands in miss-matched costumes: a man imitating a revolutionary soldier from our independence in the 1800s, and a woman in a chiton, a toga-like dress worn in ancient Greece. Mom was quick to mention how beautiful it was—to the woman's surprise in Greek. She kindly thanked her and then asked if we would like our picture taken with them, the cameraman interrupting to mention it would come at an additional cost. As the four of us stood there shoulder to shoulder the cameraman suddenly shouted to the captain, Look, we’ve got four generations of Greeks in this one! and took the shot.Mom was quick to find the only other group of Greeks on deck, latching onto them for long enough for me to settle my nerves and concentrate on the practicalities of hiding my escalating symptoms. I broke off and stood by the railing to catch some of the sea spray and cool my fever. A couple hours went by, I felt a pat on my back: mom had an announcement to make. Maria, a friend she was supposed to be staying with after we got back, was ill. My immediate reaction, to ask why the hell she was having coffee with her this morning then was cut short by a cough I managed to contain in my mouth, blowing it out at the sea as I briefly considered telling her I was also, before blurting out, You can stay with me, don’t worry. She thanked me, reached out to me, I flinched, and then let go, allowing her to embrace me. Over her shoulder, I looked out onto the ocean, felt a wave of anger rising and welcomed it, wanting it to overwhelm my panic.For lunch, I made sure we sat at a table on the sun deck where I could smoke, covering up the occasional cough with the pretext of a dry throat. Mom had barely touched her food, when I provoked her into a monologue about a new diet she was on. You know it would be healthier for you if you finally started exercising, I interrupted. Oh would you stop, you know I never liked exercising, some people like it and some don’t, it’s not for everyone and the condition makes everything harder and there’s nothing I can do about that. Before I managed to reply, a waiter came to collect our plates, and asked us to join the rest of the passengers inside for a showcase of traditional Greek dances. Although seemingly enthralled by the idea, mom insisted she also have a smoke before following me in. Watching her infuriatingly drag each inhale and exhale, I got up, quipped, When you do that, it’s like if I pulled out a bag of heroin and shot it right here in front of you, and stormed off into the atrium on my own.The room was stacked with clusters of tourists I could vaguely organise by the similarity of their clothes and ages, was decorated with arching vines and olive branches, and the couple that greeted us at the entrance had seemingly multiplied, both in numbers and variations of time-period and local: there were now Spartans, shepherds, and Greek gods ushering the masses into their seats. The out-of-placeness I felt amongst them came as an unusual comfort, their genericness creating a clarity from which I could more easily disassociate myself from my reality; I considered that maybe it was this feeling that appealed to mom in her own transformation, and for a moment, it even felt as if we were all in on a broader lie together. Three middle aged men in skirts and vests pushed their way into the centre of the room; mom and I now sat between two elderly couples at the edge of it, where an opening was left for us to view them through the crowd. As the music started playing – opa’s sounding off-beat from the tables – I began to fixate on how sweaty the dancers' hair and faces seemed, unable to put together if they had been this way from the moment they arrived on stage. I ran my fingers through my own, tracing the beads of sweat rolling down the back of my ear; under the scorching sun of the midday heat, this could have looked normal, but I had been in this air conditioned room long enough now to have dried out. I told mom I needed another cigarette, rushed outside, down to a lower deck, into the bathroom, where I put my head under the sink, replacing my sweat with a stream of fresh water, and dried off using an enormous amount of paper towels. Peeking through a window at the dancers throwing their legs up half-way to the ceiling, for the first time the urgency of my circumstances really surfaced. It would be impossible for me to keep going in this state. I noticed mom in the crowd behind them, from my vantage she seemed to be holding her head in her hands. Worried, I rushed to meet her in our seats, where she was sobbing alone, the people surrounding her seeming mildly concerned but too awkward to do anything about it. Wanting to comfort her more privately, I tried picking her up from her armpits to guide her outside, but her weight sank fully into my arms. Through panting breaths she insisted it was nothing and to leave her be. I lowered myself down to my knees and quietly asked her what had happened. Her gaze still fixed on the show, she replied, I used to be able to dance those dances.

MY NAME IS JIM PARCHEESI OWNER OF JIM PARCHEESI’S AND I’VE WORN THE SAME PAIR OF SOCKS FOR 45 YEARS SO SUE ME by Dan Weaver

June 2, 2025

You're gonna come in here into my place and tell me to change my socks you're gonna tell me that? Get out of here with that horseshit. This is my place and these are my socks and I'm not changing them just because you don't like that I've worn them these same ones for 45 years.I'm not here to do what anybody says to do I've earned it you see the fucking pictures on the walls of this place? There's pictures of me with like several different celebrities ok? They came to my place here and they gave me money to give them drinks and that money didn't get spent on new socks I'll tell you that much right now and those celebrities didn't say like hey your socks you should change them it's been too many years. They didn't say shit. So yeah I've fucking earned it.And you think you're some hot shot because you put those socks on fresh this morning? Like you're walking on air or water inside those shoes? And you think you're the first chump to suggest I change these socks? You think you're special? You must think you're something real special walking into my place telling me that horseshit. I get a guy in here at least once a week telling me some horseshit about changing my socks. They say Jim you gotta change those socks. Well Jim Parcheesi ain't changing his socks for nobody you hear me? You hear me talking right now?You hear that? You're not even a celebrity you see those pictures those photos? That's me and you can't see it because my feet aren't in any of the pictures but my socks these socks are on my feet right then when we took the pictures me and the celebrities. God rest most of their souls. These socks have been in the presence of greatness. Several different times.These socks do the fucking trick ok. For 45 god damn years. I wore these socks in the war. I wore these socks when I married the love of my life my beautiful Maria Parcheesi. At my kids' events when they were kids I wore these socks. I wore these socks when the great sports moments of this city happened and people were here at Jim Parcheesi's drinking drinks and getting rowdy because of the sports. And I wore these socks at my dear Maria Parcheesi's funeral God rest her soul that treasure of a woman. So you don't get to come in here and tell me about no socks.So sue me ok? These socks were also not cheap mind you. Back in the day these were expensive fucking socks tough guy. So you think you're better than me? Nah you aint special. I used to have a best friend who I aint gonna name because I don't name names ok but he and I we were good buddies best of buddies he was at my wedding my best man when I wed the love of my life my beautiful Maria Parcheesi.Well one day my buddy my buddy he goes Jim what's the deal with those socks people are talking they know they're the same socks as for years. Well I looked at him and I said this coming from you from you of all people and this was right there right where you're sitting he was there and I was here right behind the bar right where I'm standing now and he goes Jim people are talking and you know what I said I wiped my hands and put down my towel because I was you know wiping a glass or whatever and so I put down my towel and you know what I said I looked him dead in the eye and I said out. That was 15 years ago and we ain't talked since. This guy he and I were practically brothers he was with me when I bought the damn socks! You believe that?So if you think you're gonna come in here and tell me to change my god damn socks Mr. nobody from out there on the street if you think that then you've got another thing coming my friend. I'm going to live for another 45 years and I ain't changing them then or ever and then when the lord God above decides it is my time I will be laid to rest beside my dear Maria and I will be wearing these socks in my casket and you can bet your ass that when I step into the eternal light and ascend to the celestial halls of heaven I will be standing naked before the original breath of creation itself except I will be wearing these god damn socks.

WHALE WATCHING by Kelly Dasta

May 30, 2025

My dead friend isn’t supposed to be on the whale watching tour. It’s a pale summer morning, the harbor glazed with fog. I’m standing on the boat’s upper deck directing tourists aboard, gesturing to empty seats, passing out pamphlets. And there she is, lined up behind a family of five. She’s wearing a navy windbreaker, jean shorts, and muddy white sneakers. Why are you here? I ask. You’re scared of the ocean. Only the Pacific, she says. The Atlantic is fine. I say, Okay, but don’t freak out the children. We jet off, gliding over the glass panes of the sea surface. It’s an hour journey to the watch spot, the boat picking up speed once we reach deeper waters. Roughly fifty passengers sit sardined on narrow benches, stuffing their arms into jackets as the cold cuts into the air. My friend follows me to the mic station. The concessions guy walks by and glares at her, since the area is roped off from pedestrians. I tell him she’s a wealthy socialite, so it’s fine.My voice vibrates through the shitty speakers: As you can see in your pamphlets, there are many types of whales. Blue Whales, Orcas, Sperm Whales…Forget about those. We’re here for the Humpbacks. A little girl, whose wispy hair is whipping in all directions, asks something. Her voice is drowned out by the engine, so I tell her to speak up.How long are Humpbacks!? They can be 48-62 feet, slightly larger than a school bus. My friend cups her hand to my ear. Are you on birth control? I mute the mic. Not everyone’s birth control kills them, I say. I know yours gave you a pulmonary embolism, but something like that simply wouldn’t happen to me. You were on some weird high-hormone brand anyway. So don’t worry. Now the little girl’s father is seasick. He puts his head in his hands, moaning and rocking. This kind of thing happens often. Through the intercom, I command him to stare at the horizon. Something about it resets your balance. But there is no horizon. Due to the fog, the gray blue sky melds to the ocean. Guess he’s out of luck. You weren’t my favorite, my friend says. But you were the fun one.You mean the slutty one, I say. I remember our first fight. In college I helped her make a Tinder, taught her how to scam men for money. But she got upset, called it amoral. She actually wanted to go on dates, to be touched. I called her unrealistic. That was a nice fight, she says. By the end, we saw each other’s perspectives, and I got a boyfriend. The dad is trying not to throw up, his forehead all sweaty. A stranger gives him a swig of Pepto Bismol. His daughter keeps poking him and shouting, Look at that! Look, Dad, look! She points to nothing. He stands up. Don’t go to the bathroom, I holler. It will only feel worse in there, and we need it available for the others. He sits down. I turn to my friend and say, I suppose you’re here to blame me for your terrible taste in men. That was the algorithm’s fault, she replies. You don’t have to make everything about yourself. I do make everything about myself. I wish my friend hadn’t died. It’s never fun to discuss at parties. I shelled out all this money for a therapist. For a whole six weeks, I stopped having sex. Then for a whole six months, I had too much sex. Her death makes me hate the ocean, which she always lied about being afraid of. The fog thins, tinting the water blue, deep blue, endless blue. I continue my spiel: Before a whale surfaces, there are clues. Look for circles of bubbles. If you smell something rotten, it’s their bad breath. The little girl gets a kick out of that. Her dad finally throws up in a paper bag, and the couple beside him flees. You know, I was in love with you, I tell my friend. There you go, making everything about yourself again. Isn’t that why you came, for a confession? No, I came for the whales. The boat slows, then stills, the engine clicking off. Bubbles form. We watch, wait. A Humpback breaches in the distance, a sliver of gray slicing through the waves. People rush to the railing to take zoomed-in pixelated photos for Facebook. Water spouts from the blowhole. Its tail tips up before submerging. The onlookers ooo and ahh. You should stop taking birth control, she says. Not any good. Do you want me to get pregnant? Kind of weird. Maybe if you got pregnant, you’d finally get over me. Now here she is, making everything about herself. When I take my pill, I think of her. When I meet someone with anxious-avoidant attachment, I think of her. When I imagine kissing a woman, I think of her. If she would have kissed me back. If she would have said I was doing it for attention. But isn’t it human to want attention? She’ll never understand that.The boat idles. The little girl is jumping up and down, struggling to see around the adults, and her dad has thrown away his bag of vomit. The sun spurts through the clouds. I point out more whales. To the right! To the left! Go, get your fill, your eighty bucks worth. The crowd clusters from one side of the deck to the other. You know, you weren’t in love with me, she says. Grief makes you uncomfortable, and pretending you loved me makes it easier to process. This is really homophobic of you.No, it’s homophobic of you. You’re fetishizing a dead woman. So what am I supposed to do? Just get over it?Yes! Just get over it! People die all the time. Go get knocked up by some man and move on with your life. You’ve been bumming me out. I announce that it’s time to get going. The engine starts, and everyone sits. I hand the dad another bag to barf in. I let the little girl keep her pamphlet, even though I’m supposed to re-collect them for other tours. I tell my friend she’s right. When I step off this boat, I’ll quit birth control, find a nice man to knock me up, and stop having gay fantasies about my dead friend. I saw the whales today, after all, and that’s what’s important.

WHISPERING GALLERY: AN INTERVIEW WITH WILL CORDEIRO by Rebecca Gransden

May 28, 2025

Will Cordeiro’s fiction unfurls a kindly finger and beckons you to follow an uncommon path. As you tramp along seldom visited trails, your mind wanders as much as your feet. You arrive at the peculiar, the disquieting and the mysterious, without a clue how you got there or even if you want to leave. With Whispering Gallery (DUMBO Press, 2024), Cordeiro invites entry to an off-kilter world, where those who disappear into the mist entrust their steps to the uncertain ground beneath them. I spoke to the author about this curious collection. Rebecca Gransden: Some people claim that time isn’t real, that it’s just a byproduct of our mental processes—as if the mind’s cocoon prevented us from remembering the future, from knowing the past was as much alive as the present moment.What do you think of when you consider time in relation to Whispering Gallery? From when are these pieces taken? What led you to include them in the collection? Will Cordiero: First off, speaking of time, thank you for taking the time to read my book and conduct this interview. It’s always a delight to hear questions and musings from someone who’s given my work such thoughtful consideration. It means a lot, especially given how many other things, I’m sure, compete for your attention on the daily. The manipulation of temporality is one of the storyteller’s oldest tricks: to reshuffle the chronological deck, to stretch out time like a taffy-pull, to quantum leap whole centuries with a paragraph break, or to freeze the scene and rove about with the camera’s eye. But time itself is also a central subject matter of many of the pieces in Whispering Gallery. There’s a kind of time that’s the objective rate of change and then there’s a subjective sense of the onrushing flow of events as they occur in our minds, a sense which is revealed by eddies of memory, or revels in glimmering intuitions of futurity. There’s a cosmological dimension to time, as well, a question of whether time exists independent of our perceptions of it. The paradox of time is one of Kant’s antinomies, not to mention the old (the timeless?) battle between eternity and the transitory things of this world. Then there’re specific cultural senses of time, too, such as the pastoral cycle of seasons, for example. All of which is to say that these pieces often juxtapose different understandings of the temporal order. The flash form affords me brief bursts and ruptures. I try sometimes to pull the rug out from under the reader by suddenly reframing the sense of this elusive dimension. I play with both narratological tricks (how temporality gets represented in a story) and with ontological questions (what’s the nature of temporality itself). We fall in love with the world then it’s gone in a twinkling. How can you capture that mysterious, that heartbreaking flux? Every time you remember something, you change the nature of that memory—you have no access to the past, only elusive rewritings of it. Is the future fixed and fatalistic or can it be changed with our free will? Time is at the heart of so many of our most tantalizing enigmas. I’ve been writing these pieces—and others like them—for over two decades. I assembled most of my favorite oldies together and added a sprinkling of newer work, too. There were many iterations of this book over the years. Even the draft the publisher initially accepted was markedly different than the final version. Along the way, I chopped, stirred, culled, seasoned, tossed in some cayenne, simmered, let it settle. I had overlapping principles of organization. Sometimes I like the contrast between two pieces, in mood or content or style; a short piece next to a longer one, a funny punchline against a somber tale. Other times I want pieces to speak across the book, letting a theme return in a surprising manner. Maybe a piece ironically turns another on its head. There’s an infinite branching network of ways these pieces relate to each other: I didn’t want to be too heavy-handed in imposing the order. I want to allow some breathing room for the reader to find their own connections and leaps. Or even flip around and reassemble the book to their liking, skipping over some, rereading others. Which, honestly, is what many of us do anyway when we return to a collection, isn’t it? RG: Have you ever had a nickname?

(Will Cordeiro / Will Cordeiro in an anime)

WC: Funny you should ask. I’ve had nothing but nicknames. My birth certificate nominated me “Billy Joe Bush.” However, my immediate family called me “BJ” when I was young. I grew up in downstate Delaware, below the Mason-Dixon line. Not at the beach, either, which is the only area downstate anyone’s heard of. As a kid, I came up poor in the rural sticks—a land of swamps and chicken farms and trailer parks. It’s a warp-zone to the armpit of the Deep South. My mom had second thoughts. When she remarried, she had my name officially changed to “William Joseph Cordeiro.” Much fancier sounding. But I often went by “Will.” Later, in high school, that led my buddies on the track team to nickname me “Free Willy.” In college, I was dubbed “Fake” (long story). These days, I live in Mexico, so everyone who knows me here calls me “Memo,” which is the apodo for “Guillermo,” the Spanish equivalent of “William.” Constantly taking on different names probably gave me a more mutable sense of self, as if my many sobriquets were a form of cosplay, embodying different avatars and drag personas. “BJ Bush” and “Dr. Cordeiro” and “Fake” and “Memito” and the trunkful of other monikers I’ve gone by give me a malleable personality composed of aliases and fictional guises. To this day, I’m not keen to identify as any one thing: trying to locate a single locus of so-called “authenticity” seems like a mug’s game. But then, can’t most of us say, with Whitman, “I am large, I contain multitudes”? I’m not someone who’d cling to a stable narrative of self: the story of who I am changes with each retelling. Selfhood is not important. The elemental force of metamorphosis is what’s more vital. RG: Your style displays a relish for language, and an appreciation of word timbre and rhythm when it comes to construction. Do you rewrite a lot? Do you have an approach to drafting that repeats itself?WC: A few pieces—often the small ones—came close to their finished form in the first sitting. I tend to write slowly, weighing the words, waxing poetic, whittling things down even on my initial foray: I double back to adumbrate or embroider before I finish composing each sentence. Pieces emerge gradually, condensing into shape over many drafts. Yes, it is iterative: loops within loops until I’m totally loopy. On occasion, I’ll let a piece incubate in my head for some days: I work out the concept, dwell on a character, or figure out the narrative threads before hunkering down to scribble on the page. No matter, all my pieces go through countless revisions and tweaks. This collection is the fruit—the vinegar—of over two decades. I return to each piece, usually over the course of many years, fussing and fidgeting with syntax and diction, with rhythm and mouthfeel. With the grain of the voice. Even when writing stories, and not poetry, it’s very much like a musical composition where I listen for the overtones, the resonance and timbre as you deftly put it, as much as for the referential sense. Of course, with any piece I must also attend to the workaday plot, the tension, the turning points. I guard against becoming too precious, too self-indulgent, with the prose—the story’s pacing sets the momentum. After all, tempo is a crucial musical element, as well. These pieces may be miniatures, but they’re rarely minimalist in nature. I love textures and layers and lyrical excess. RG: Its antennae blinked like the cursor on a screen.Many of the pieces included in Whispering Gallery address the fundamental forces that constitute existence as we know it. Forces of nature and science that are at work while everyday life moves on. Do you view your work as having a philosophical component?WC: Sure, in the sense that many stories by, say, Calvino or Cortázar have a philosophical component. Professional academics don’t have a monopoly on philosophy. Analytic philosophy frequently has an off-putting, pedantic tone anyway. It often presumptuously arrogates the rules of the game to its own methods. Yet, for me, philosophy can also be the everyday process of reflecting, interpreting, questioning: of reconciling oneself to life. Besides, lockstep, knockdown arguments rarely compel me. Instead, I’m more intrigued by paradoxes and dilemmas. I like it when stories contain an enigma, or as Sebald says somewhere, a spectral trace of a ghost. Stories can act as thought experiments and intuition pumps. They help us deliberate ethical situations; they provoke us to imagine stranger, more far-ranging metaphysical possibilities; they sharpen our epistemic knives, showing us ways our equipment might be limited or faulty. My own thinking is so often unsettled. To dwell on any idea begins to disorient me. The hermeneutical circle’s not a smooth wheel—it’s wobbly and oblong, punctured by disruptions and bafflements and afflictions of doubt. My own elliptical insights can swing from sudden revelations to ignominious defeats. In many cases, it’s this inner adventure that I portray in my characters; that I want to recreate in my readers. I try to use tools like defamiliarization, humor, skepticism, and irony to move my readers, to incite new recognitions, to instigate a playful tension between differing values or perspectives. I don’t aim for any foregone conclusion. I hope my work acts as an invitation to contemplate nuances and ambiguities, at times holding contradictions in abeyance. Perhaps my work can cultivate a richer sense of “reality,” whatever that means. Or perhaps it only impels a reaching-forth amid vast ranges of uncertainty, a bewitchment of one’s curiosity. Stories can cast enduring spells. Don’t most of us want stories that can make the humdrum world thrum once more with the undercurrents of its secret magic? Plato and Aristotle both believed philosophy begins in wonder, which is the same place most of my stories start from, too. RG: Everyone had gone to sleep in the city. I wondered if the buildings might vanish—if they were only the collective apparition of the inhabitants. It was dark out my window. Only pinpoints of glister winkled in doubt: starburst, lamp-glow, hallucinations. The streets were empty. Wherever the people were, they must be dreaming of something else.“Lucid Moment” makes reference to hallucination and dream logic. What part do altered states play in Whispering Gallery?WC: I enjoy those moments when reading can induce a tripped-out and ecstatic wakefulness. Imagining a story is a bit like concocting an illusion: it’s knowingly dwelling within this hallucinatory space you’ve projected. Visionary flashes of perception don’t need to come from a mind on drugs or dreams or yogic navel-gazing or religious epiphany or tantric sex or Neuralink—though all those scenarios can be interesting. Merely thinking can be a kind of drug almost, generating a giddying habitation of umbras and insights; and thinking (one might think) is an activity that’s intrinsic to minds. To talk about “altered states,” you’d need a baseline of what a normal state of consciousness would be, right? To me, consciousness itself has a magical quality to it. If my work appears to explore altered states of consciousness, perhaps it’s a way to goad readers into recognizing the spooky inner workings of their own apprehensions; a method to defamiliarize and thus reenchant the world. If milk is the mildest of liquors, as Carlyle wrote in Sartor Resartus, maybe meditation—whether lovelorn or logical, lucid or ludicrous—is one of the strongest. RG: “A New Realism” raises some interesting questions on deception, authenticity, artistic practice and the right to privacy. What is your approach to the promotion of your work? How important is privacy to you?WC: I’m not temperamentally a self-promoter. No shyster barking and jiving, I. No desire to be an influencer, a marketeer, a celebrity shilling their own brand. Power, money, fame: none of ‘em’s my bag. Of course, I’ll exercise my power by voting; I want enough money to have the leisure time to read and write, to travel a bit, to afford healthcare; I’m not such a recluse holed up in my room that I won’t saunter out to give a talk once in a blue moon or respond to interview questions such as you’ve been so kind to ask. There’s no real danger of my becoming renowned or popular, in this lifetime anyway—it’s not like I need to disguise myself in sunglasses and a big floppy hat on the street or use assumed names at hotels to avoid the paparazzi. I don’t need to retreat from all media appearances to go plunk myself in a cave in New Hampshire. As if. But maybe I do live in a cave, sort of. And not just a Platonic one, like we all do. I mean—I’m not on any social media. Isn’t that pretty hermitic, hermetic even, in this age? I just find it a huge brain-rotting time-suck which is disastrous for one’s mental health as well as the health of the body politic. So, I’m also not famous to ten people, either, the way a lot of folks are these days. It's not that I’m private per se. But I tend to resist drawing connections between fiction and real life, as your question does here, for example. I doubt there’s some childhood trauma that’s fed my writing or some ghastly secret I’ve been hiding that impels me to tell stories. Whatever tales I spin out about myself probably obfuscate as much as they illuminate anyhow; I spin them out because it’s my nature to unspool these spider-spit writerly threads. One story hides behind another. Looking for the root of a text in an author’s supposed lived experience is an ubiquitous move in literary culture nowadays since audiences want to know about the author, hear anecdotes, feel connected to the source as if they could thereby come into contact with the work’s aura. Or maybe it’s just that authors are reduced to media “personalities” since often audiences haven’t read—don’t want to read the work. I’ve met a fair number of authors, and the majority are just regular Uncle Jim-bobs or Aunt Mays; some are a little dopey or true snoozefests. Others are snooty academics or anxious fusspots or doddering busybodies. They’re a scrapheap’s worth of skipjack jackanapes spooning boondoggerel. Myself perhaps included. (I’m ambivalent—as I am about most things). Authors come in all types. But a literary work distills an author’s ideas into their wittiest and most vivacious expression, if the author’s any good. Why should it surprise us, then, to feel disappointed when the incarnate human being can’t live up to those expectations? “I’m Nobody! Who are you? / Are you—Nobody—too?” as Dickinson said. Who wants to end up “public—like a frog—”? I’d rather be the prince of my own solitary room, voyaging around my head. Sometimes I wonder if writing is a ceremony converting the stuff of our language—what could be more public? common as air—into the fabric of our interiority; and simultaneously airing our most inward-turning thoughts into chirps and croaks. RG: Looking back now, years later, the whole city seems an underworld, an air of cinders, foreshadowing its own downfall. A field of cenotaphs. Long rows of ruins frozen into schlag and marzipan. Pediments like dinosaurs. Everything half buried under the weight of what it once had been.Frequently Whispering Gallery contains a tension between the immediacy of your descriptions and a more contemplative framing. Are there pieces that stand out to you as being a memorable experience to write?WC: In what sense can you say that you will your thoughts? Thoughts, the better ones at any rate, often come unbidden. We do not think our thoughts; our thoughts think us. Writing usually occurs when I’m pinballed around by powers almost outside myself. The sounds entangle their own eerie melodies; ideas stray paths of errant logic; characters chatter in voices not my own. It’s not that I throw my voice—rather, I’m thrown by the voices. They ventriloquize me. Where these thoughts and voices come from remains something of a mystery. You harvest them from reading and experience, perhaps. They are what we vaguely term “imagination.” You can make yourself receptive to them, a quivering electrometer that picks up the subtle variations in magnetic charges that coruscate the atmosphere. But who has the muse on speed dial? No matter how much you plan, there’s always an element of spontaneity. The voices can’t be summoned at will. The best you can do is prepare and practice, listen and long for them to return. Afterward, the editorial and critical parts of your brain apply the scalpel to shape this material into a more handsomely polished, more sure-handed form. My descriptions often try to shed light on earthly flora and fauna, figuring the minutiae of landscapes and the immensity of dreamscapes, thereby gesturing toward how invariably blind we are to the larger cosmos around us. They juxtapose scales and temporalities, points of view and paradigms. Still, we don’t call a stone blind. As Heidegger says, blindness afflicts only those beings who are capable of seeing. To ask whether someone is blind foreshadows—shadows forth—the very possibility of their having the nature of a being with sight. I try to trace the contours of both our perceptions and our presumptions. I attempt to look closer at the things around us while reframing the background concepts that inform how we see those things. It’s this dual, this dialectical unfolding that unveils how the seemingly immediate experiences of our own body and environment are, nevertheless, already mediated by our mental and corporeal equipment. To see anew is to recognize that one has, all along, been blind to the world; and maybe thereby to recognize that this new sight could, upon another disclosure, reveal itself as a type of blindness, too. There may be no end to revelation.RG: For “Sadness” the world you create sees an air of melancholy descend. If eras are defined by a prevailing mood, what do you view as the tone of these times we are living through?WC: Chaos? Malignant asociality? A giddy, trollish nihilism? It’s hard to understand the era we’re living through. These, unfortunately, are interesting times. In my youth, reading history with the aid of hindsight, I’d often wonder how people could be taken in by the Know-Nothing Party or William Jennings Bryant’s “Cross of Gold Speech” or other such flights of demagoguery. Today, living through a tumultuous period of history, I’m equally baffled by how a good chunk of the populace can be hoodwinked by criminals and charlatans. Confidence men worry great pearls of falsehood upon tiny grains of truth. Then again, there’s plenty of born suckers. The broligarchs can manipulate people in nearly clandestine ways: think how innocuously an app might change its terms and conditions, for example, or the way algorithms spread misleading stories much faster than true ones. Lots of folks are upset, at what or whom they’re often not sure, and that very anger is then redirected to their disadvantage. The ethos of “move fast and break things” has become a goal unto itself, writ large. Democracy depends on an infrastructure of news sources, public forums, civic organizations, educational institutions. These are being atomized, privatized, or wiped out so that the robber barons can have unregulated control to exploit and extract wealth. Most people are too preoccupied with their everyday drudgery to pay attention, read, participate in their communities, or make art; this leads to a vicious cycle where the oligarchs can turn the screws on a disengaged and uninformed citizenry, beating you down and fleecing you even more. Everything’s a distraction from something worse on the horizon. Doomscrolling might be a good metaphor for how the system uses our own anxiety against us: we can’t help rubbernecking the wreckage that our tech addiction itself has caused. To bicker about the problem only fuels the flames—and flame wars—higher. We’re too burnt out to care that a handful of folks are burning it all down. Climate change isn’t happening fast enough for some folks, I guess. We’re accelerating toward a corpocratic state, a zombified corpse state, the necrotic triage of vulture capitalism: escalating scarcity for the many, overwhelming plenitude for a vanishingly few. But people just keep going about their business because business is what people do. RG: What was your conceptual framework for “The Lost Gospel of Caiaphas”?WC: I think the initial inspiration was reading excerpts from some of the Gnostic Gospels and chapters from Elaine Pagel’s book of that name. The Nag Hammadi manuscripts were discovered in 1945 and only made readily available to the public in the 1980s. They were Coptic papyri discovered by an Egyptian farmer in a sealed jar with a likely provenance of the 4th century—and their impact was revolutionary, upending the scholarly understanding of the historical foundations of Christianity.Too, rewriting the gospel narrative is a veritable subgenre unto itself—novelistic examples include The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (Saramago); The Gospel According to the Son (Mailer); Figuras de la Pasión del Señor (Gabriel Miró); and King Jesus (Graves). Barabbas by Pär Lagerkvist is one I recommend. Siddhartha by Hesse or Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra do something similar in other religious traditions. Apocrypha and heretical accounts have their appeal. They are the marginalized and forgotten stories that were refused a place in the church, that is, the dominant version of the church we know now—the one which survived from competing sects and schisms that cropped up as early as St. Paul (or one might claim, as early as the disciples themselves). At a time when revisionary histories (on the left) and “alternative facts” (on the right) are popular, when everyone questions the official version of a tale, when nobody is satisfied with a univocal canon, it makes sense that apocrypha would have its allure. Besides, the canonical gospels themselves are four wildly different stories that vary both in style and substance. There’s already a pluralism built-in to the structure of the gospels. Their gaps and contradictions gesture that no single version is definitive. Co-opting a gospel-like narrative gave me the freedom to appropriate a simple yet vatic tone to write parables, proverbs, and epigrams—to make mystical pronouncements: it’s a type of writing that, while I find it has a uniquely enthralling energy, can be very difficult to pull off in contemporary English without some such framing device. One can’t make oracular, rhapsodic pronouncements in propria persona. Yet, once that framework was established, I felt disinhibited and could make witty underhanded comments against authority, tell stories that took on different significations to different audiences, and challenge the reader’s habitual understanding of traditional values—all things that the gospel narratives (whether apocryphal or not) are often so good at, though we sometimes can’t appreciate their weirdness and originality. RG: There’s an erotic charge around these objects: they’re ghosts leftover from being handled. Things you would find in any mall, swap meet, flea market are transfigured at every turn. A remote control appears moon-beamed in from science fiction. A salad fork looks like a cannibal’s keepsake.The ordinary is given fresh perspective in “The Museum of Ordinary Objects”. As well as raising questions on the meaning attached to such objects, the story invites speculation on the nature of viewing in itself. How do you view this story? If you were curator of your own Museum of Ordinary Objects, what would you exhibit?WC: I went gallery-hopping during ART WKD GDL last Saturday. In one gallery, you couldn’t tell where the curated displays ended and the unfinished work and raw materials of the studio began. There was a Xeroxed paper affixed to the wall with blue painter’s tape next to the painting the image on the paper was of. Was this just the haphazard environment of a working artist’s studio or was it some kind of self-referential meta-conceptual hijinks? I liked not being able to tell. Across town, in a different gallery, I entered an empty room. My partner was looking at a prominent pile of debris exhibited at the center of the floor: multicolored paint flakes and assortments of concrete gobs were framed against the checkerboard tiles. This one was my favorite piece so far, I thought: the paint could be house paint from the wall; the dust could be the crumbling wall itself. It made me feel the transitory nature of the space—the visceral, immolating decadence of ruin porn. The whole site-specific exhibit up to this point had been about repurposing stretched canvas and frames and painterly materials in a sculptural, almost environmental way, that referenced the architecture of the gallery itself (it was a house designed by Luis Barragán). Barragán’s architecture transforms spaces into planes of color; the artist, by contrast, transformed planes of color into spaces. While we were rubbing our chins, shrewdly observing the piece, along comes the gallerist with a broom—sorry, she says, we’re still getting everything settled. In certain frames of mind, I inhabit a world where any object can become a Duchampian readymade. I’m reawakened to its aesthetic dimensions, its anthropological significance, the Barthesian mythologies it extrudes. I observe an item’s singular quiddity; its multivalent symbolism. Every point is the origin of the universe; every node stands at a crux reticulating it into the warp and weft of meaning. Perhaps I’m low-key infected by the disorienting palpitations in the presence of beauty, a condition known as Stendhal syndrome. Art has a way to induce a manic state in me at times. Or maybe it’s the mania of the gorging eye or florid mind that imbues an object, any object really, with the same arresting qualities we seek out when we view great works of art. It’s the opposite of museum fatigue. Looking can become a frenzy that feeds upon itself, rendering the dizzying optics of scopophilia. Any ol’ junk—gum-wrapper, paperclip, tissue box—begins to iffily shimmer and zing with ineffable brindles of import. It’s not the object that matters, it’s one’s susceptibility to cozy to it with a rigorous vulnerability. The process of being whelmed in the sheer presence of something, looking deeply at it, prompts a scatterbrained brainstorming, an ornery—an incorrigible—associational vigor where a thing becomes at once dis-cultured, relieved of its habitual connotations, and yet enwoven into countless symbolic networks. RG: “Masquerade Store” presents an ordinary town caught in the spell of a business that sells masks, identities. A deep sense of unease unfolds as the town’s nature is changed. How do you approach high concept stories? Where does the weird come into play in your fiction?WC: “Masquerade Store” was a later piece I added to the collection. I’m still uncertain if it really captures the full sense of unease I was going for. I’m glad to hear you think it works. During the writing process, there were a few adjustments that helped. I created two turning points in the story. What at first seems like a description from an impersonal third-person narrator about the facts of a garden-variety, deteriorating town (though it is “our town”) emerges as a fulsomely first-person voice about midway in the story, where you realize the narrator is implicated and complicit in the events being described. This shift of perspective, of narratorial vantage, relocates the stakes involved and may also undermine the seeming objectivity of the first part with hints of unreliability. What once appeared to be a sociological description of a town retrospectively turns into a fucked-up person’s defense tactic to distance himself from his problems by using a more clinical, arm’s-length tone. Another turning point occurs near the end, when the narrator suddenly gazes off into the distance, using a collective voice, “we.” The yearning both to watch banal superhero movies and to dress-up as some powerful if exoticized “other” is exposed, at the end, to be predicated upon inchoate heroic longings. A grandeur that’s glimpsed in sunlit oracles and sublime flames but cannot be realized, a longing that ultimately casts each person further adrift in their lonely quest to circumvent the self as much as to find it. Yet such drift, we might say, is what unites the citizens of the town as a civic body, too. Who one is must be projected and absorbed from those around one in a hall of mirrors; yet, doing so requires a motive power of self-transformation. Heck, rereading the story now, I realize that the third-person voice quite quickly begins ventriloquizing in the second person, using “you” in a way that is ambiguous between meaning an anonymous, impersonal “one,” calling out the real reader, or addressing a particular person offstage. This is even before the first-person voice fully emerges. These peculiar gear-shifts between points-of-view and subtle changes in tone help convey the breakdown of coherent identities the town is undergoing, whether these devices are explicitly noticed or not when you’re reading. Still, each story is different: a lot of my writing is a search not only for a compelling plotline, but for the adequate technical means to have a story express some conceptual dilemma, oftentimes one that’s a bit abstruse, so that it’s uncanny, disquieting, and affecting for the reader. RG: The collection was released by DUMBO Press on 31st October 2024—Halloween. For stories where the veil between worlds of strangeness is thin, this is a wildly appropriate date to present the book to the world. How have you found the experience of releasing the book? What is next for you?WC: Yes, Halloween felt like the perfect release date for this collection! These are eerie, metaphysical tales influenced by the likes of magical realism and Gothic and absurdism and offbeat speculative fiction. I’m happy to see Whispering Gallery launched into the world. To hold the tangible book validates the years of effort—the writing feels more real than when it consisted of dozens of little stories trapped on my computer or floating around online lit journals, many of which are now defunct. It’s gratifying when I gain readers. I’m very thankful DUMBO picked it up. At the end of the day, though, this book’s an odd duckling published by a small press. It won’t be everybody’s jam. That’s ok. My hope is that a handful of readers will really crush on it. Maybe a book goes in search of its true readers. Whatever others think, I write because I enjoy the process. The grind of sitting down to peck at my keyboard can feel ecstatic and ravishing. I’ll give two-three readings or talks, a couple interviews (like this one), maybe get a review or two if I’m lucky. That’s the nature of small press publishing. Small presses provide a space for such queer birds to take flight or just waddle around—for books to pursue their own ideals, and authors their own evolution, largely outside the pressures of the mainstream marketplace. I have several other projects on tap in different stages of completion. I’m currently sending out my second poetry manuscript while tidying up poems for another. I’ve been slowly accumulating essays for a nonfiction book, mostly dealing with art and travel, which has also taken decades to compose. And I just started a notebook to jot down plot points and outlines as I ideate my first novel. I write plays and operas on the side, too: I just wrapped up a new three-act opera that was produced last year, which could use a few rewrites maybe. But my most concerted task currently is completing a textbook, The New Foundations of Creative Writing, which I’m writing with my long-time collaborator, Lawrence Lenhart. Our pitch just got a contract offer from Bloomsbury. We started this project from all the material we couldn’t fit in the first textbook we wrote together, Experimental Writing, which came out from Bloomsbury last year. Most introductory textbooks in the discipline feel twenty years out of date. It’s a very contentious time in the field—there’s a lot of debates and changes taking place in the discourse, both within academia and the industry; that will make this book quite a challenge. Or maybe that’s why we’re the only ones foolish enough to attempt such a preposterous errand?

MIKE TOPP by Mike Topp

May 27, 2025

TODAY Today a bully from my high school is coming by to beat me up one last time (he has cancer). AMERIKKKAOf course Amerikkka leads the league in serial killers. There are a great many serial killers in town right now—because of NYC’s favorable tax laws and enterprise zones and the big serial killer parade we have every year, and because in a lot of our restaurants serial killers eat free. A JOINERHere’s something you might not have known about me: I was a joiner in high school. Carbona Club, Whip-Its Society, Nutmeg Club, Friends of Cough Syrup, Society of Huffers & Baggers, Air Dusters Club, United Helium Party, Poppers & Snappers Study Group—I did just about everything. THE DARK WEBAnother strange aspect of the dark web is that some entrepreneurs have set up shops there. So you can stop and enjoy a hot dog. Or you can take a break at a little booth and get your photo taken with a monster (it’s really just a cardboard cutout, but it looks very real. And the teeth work). PROVERBCan’t have people looking up your cornhole. I think Benjamin Franklin was the first one to say that. BEATLEI’m told 60% of “A New Film About the New Beatles” had to be reshot because of me. Unfortunately, that was the end of my movie career. I checked around but nobody needed a Beatle right then, not even one with as much experience as I had. (I said I had a hundred years experience.) JAILHow did I end up in jail? When I got to Yuma I hadn’t slept in two weeks and hadn’t shaved or showered. My clothes smelled like farts and clams and were stiff from sweat and dirt. The police got dozens of calls claiming a caveman had just robbed the bank! I got a chuckle out of that one. RSVPSadly, due to a bean diet and other environmental factors, I will be unable to attend. THINGMy hand starred in the TV show The Addams Family. Yes, it’s true, Warren Beatty was definitely up for the part of Thing but I eventually snagged the role. I did an excellent job in the macabre/black comedy sitcom and to this day it’s still considered the best TV show of all time.

POWERPOINT JESUS by Izzi Sneider

May 22, 2025

I found the file by accident.It was tucked between Q3BudgetProjections.pptx and TeamSalesSeminar_2021(final_FINAL2).pptx on the shared drive.Jesus.pptxJust like that.I clicked it out of curiosity. Or maybe boredom. It's hard to tell the difference between the two when you spend the day in an office staring at spreadsheets that mean nothing to you. The file was empty. One blank white slide. No title. No bullet points. No formatting. Just a white void.A warmth emanated from the screen. I stared at it for a while. I bathed in its glow. My body slackened. My thoughts dulled to a low hum. Like I was recharging. Like I had taken something I wasn’t prescribed. Somewhere below the static, I thought I could hear a choir humming. Maybe it was the computer’s fan speeding up. The electric sermon lulled me into a trance. I don’t know how long I sat there.A wave of anxiety snapped me out of it. Any of my coworkers could have walked by, caught me slacking off. I told myself to close the file, to get back to work. But I couldn’t. My hands moved without me. My fingers hovered over the keyboard. I started typing.I wrote:I was the one that stole Rachel's underwear at the 6th grade sleepover.I had never admitted that to anyone, though the memory haunted me awake with guilt many times in the 20 years since. It felt good.I typed another confession. Then another. And another. I kept going until—"Mary," the voice said. I looked up, heart racing. My coworker stood across from me, arms crossed. "You're in this meeting right?" he said. "You coming?"I clicked save and exited out of the file.It wasn't until later that night, stoned and half asleep in bed, that it occured to me. Other people had access to the shared drive. My stomach twisted. I sprung upright, grabbed my laptop, and logged in. Jesus.pptx was in my recent folder.I opened it up. Checked the file history:File owner: Mary SLast edit: Mary SI didn't remember creating it, but then again, I hardly remember anything I did at work. Assured that no one else had read through my confessional, I shut my laptop and drifted off.Weeks passed before I opened it again. Work got busy. Days blurred. But one slow morning, restless, I clicked the file. Just to vent. Just to kill time. I typed secret after secret. My muscles unclenched with every confession. I wrote down my hopes. My childhood fears. I described my first kiss. It was at that moment I decided I would speak to Jesus.pptx every morning when I got to work.The next morning, however, I discovered something strange.I opened the file, expecting relief before the first slide even loaded. But a new slide had been added:I miss the way my mother stroked my hair.I was hit with nausea. My vision tunneled. I hadn’t typed that.I deleted the text and replaced it with a secret of my own choosing:I google myself everyday. I saved the file. I closed it.I began checking the powerpoint every morning.Like clockwork, new slides appeared. And they knew things that I barely admitted to myself. Things I had buried. I wasn’t sure if the feeling it incited stemmed from feeling seen or feeling surveilled. Slide 16:It felt cold and sterile and free of guilt. No one noticed.Slide 21:I haven’t been touched in 46 days.Coworkers glanced at me differently. "You look great," one said in a tone that meant nothing. "You seem tired," another offered, like a question. I started bringing lunch from home, eating alone. I stopped taking breaks. I withdrew, unsure if I was becoming more real or if I was being erased.Eventually, the file ran out of confessions. It had mapped every failing, every fleeting shame. It started predicting my future.Slide 56:I won't be needed after Q1. I stopped checking the file after that. Not because I didn't believe it. Because I did.On March 31st HR called me into their office. I knew what was coming. Before packing up my few belongings and returning my laptop to IT, I deleted the file. Cleared the trash.On the way out, I passed the printer. A stack of fresh printouts sat waiting for someone. In big bold letters the title page read:JESUS (FINAL).I didn't stop to read it.