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SOMEPLACE ELSE by Emma Stough

December 28, 2019

I am here now. Wide unexplained sky. How did I get here? Wait. Let’s stop. No, let’s start.

We are here now. Again, I think.

Purple wallpaper. My family huddled around the TV watching Seinfeld re-runs. I am squeezed between Aggressive Older Brother and Sensitive Younger Brother—I am boiling with discontent.

My family huddles like this for decades. The living room stays the same: plush green sofa (embedded with chips and cat hairs, is the cat still alive?) and purple wallpaper. Purple like the dregs of the bitter plum tea. Purple like the dying breath of stormy sunset. Purple like purple knows best.

Dark walls shelter my family forever. Safe.

I go to school because someone has to learn something. My best subject is shapes. I fall in love with shapes and refuse to let them out of my sight. I am put into an independent study because that’s how good I am. My mentor is a bristly old man called Stanley. Our relationship is loving because he trusts me and I am eager to be trusted. When I struggle or get angry he tells me to close my eyes and picture the most comforting thing I can imagine:

Purple wallpaper: Mom, Dad, Aggressive Older Brother, Sensitive Younger Brother, cat. Popcorn and silly TV glow splashed over our faces. We are full of understanding and empathy. We’ve been watching people playact for years. We pretend.

I get so good at shapes that they recommend me for a special program upstate. I pack all my belongings: secondhand copy of The Road, silverware, patchwork quilt that someone else’s grandmother made. When I am ready to leave, I find my family where I left them. Wrapped so lovingly in purple wallpaper. Safe together.

Goodbye, I tell them. I love you very much.

On the TV someone says, I didn’t think this was a serious relationship, you know. I didn’t think this would last.

What amount of distance is too much between who you used to be and who you will become?

In my special shapes program, I meet people that have never seen purple wallpaper. They are from faraway states and countries with long histories. They have beautiful faces and stories filled with grief. I want to hold them and listen to their breathing. They politely laugh at how serious I am.

I enter a strange shape of my own: lonely, discontent. I take up water aerobics and befriend women that have lost husbands and brothers to wars. I float in the water on my back, tracing the shape of the white-rafted ceiling, static rows of rectangular light. It makes me feel better to think the ceiling is likely never to fall into the water.

I call my family and Sensitive Younger Brother talks to me for hours and hours about the shows I’ve missed. He says, We noticed you left because your shape is missing from between our bodies. Where did you go?

I trace the cord of the phone between my fingers. It spirals boldly. This is a message.

I live in an apartment on the top floor, the fifth floor. It is small but sufficient, teeming with ferns and ill-matched patterns. Sometimes when the elevator is broken, I pause in the stairwell to think about what kinds of shapes might be waiting for me elsewhere. I start wearing mostly black and grey because I think that is the person I want to be.

There is a girl in my classes with lilac hair. Hints of purple wallpaper. She shows me new shapes; Honeysuckle-filled vase on bedside table, imprint of each head on each pillow, what saddened pit my heart becomes when I cry. Hold me carefully, she warns. I’m about to fall apart.

You have to be romantic to think that here will lead to anywhere else.

One day I graduate with accolades and handshakes from those who taught me. I feel incredibly brave. My family sends a card and apologizes that they couldn’t make it: The new season of their favorite cooking competition show aired, and they didn’t want to miss it. I write back a long letter full of new shapes and include a purple leaf I saved especially for them.

My lavender girl takes me to a fancy restaurant and asks if I plan to stay or go. I ask her if she would pose the same question to a river. She says if you feel like water then let me drink you in so you can hold up the shape of me. I ask her how she feels about cooking competition shows.

When I return to the purple wallpaper not much has changed—is there one less brother? The TV light has aged my parents beyond their years. They held me as a child and reach their hands out to me, draw me back into the glow. This is my heart, I say, and they look up at my purple-haired heart. They think she is another TV she is so beautiful. They are confused; is she pretending? They begin to feel unsafe. They begin to question. I try to reassure them. I point to all the reassuring, familiar shapes around us: circle lightbulb, rectangle picture frame, diamond clock, star lampshade, zigzag carpet, octagonal shelf, square TV. Square TV. Square TV.

It’s okay to look at something else, I tell them. I am whispering from my throat. It burns, suddenly raw. My family is scared of me. The purple wallpaper dims. Who is retreating from whom?

We leave that place. I find the shape of the sky—wide, changing, indefinable—reassuring. Like a warm wool coat. Wrap it around me.

My lover calls to me and says some things are mean to be held at a distance. Keep the purple, leave the rest. I guess that’s where we started. And where are we now?

GIRLS OF THE ARBORETUM by Brianne M. Kohl

December 27, 2019

The girls of the arboretum are just girls. Nothing more, nothing less. They do not speak to one another. Why would they? The wind blows through their branches. Everything that must be said has already been said. The world is over four billion years old.

When no one is watching, the girls pluck spider webs from each other’s hair and stretch the silk across the grass, blade to blade. They spend hours measuring the spiral burrs of a pine cone. In moonlight, they find constellations within the veins of Maple leaves. The girls of the arboretum have not yet discovered the stars.

The horticulturalist is a kind old man with creaky knees and eyes that water. At night he needs an oxygen mask to sleep. The girls would be baffled by the need if they could see. Sometimes, he leaves the girls presents of honey and bread, fruit and soda pop. He snips their branches, kisses their knuckles with his shears. The girls of the arboretum would forgive him anything.

His apprentice, a handsome young man, does the heavy lifting. He plants, prunes, sprays, waters and weeds. He digs holes and forces roots down. He sees the apprentice trying to root a branch and places a hand on the apprentice’s shoulder.

Not like that, the horticulturalist says, like this, and splits the band of bark between two girdling cuts on the branch. Never cut into the wood. They feel it.

The apprentice takes a deep breath in through his nose. He’s sick of the horticulturalist warning him to stay away from the girls.

They are beautiful, the old man says. But consider the Foxglove. Lily of the Valley. Consider Delphiniums. All lovely, all deadly.

The apprentice complains to coworkers that the horticulturalist must go. He is too old. He speaks of plants like a lover. He loves the trees too much.

Trees are just trees, he says. Even when they are clothed as girls. Nothing more. Nothing less.

The apprentice thinks the girls are wild like a rabbit is wild, like a heartbeat or a sagging Willow. He is right. The horticulturalist thinks the girls are wild like a storm is wild, like a cancer or a redwood. He is right.

The girls of the arboretum make a game out of everything. They stand at pond’s edge, peek over hedgerows, run through open woodland. Tools go missing only to be found hidden deep in the briars or in the hollows of dead trees.

The girls braid their hair beneath the honey locusts and eat ripe watermelon, seeds, rinds and all. They kiss one another with mouths full of melon. They know the apprentice watches them.

The girls feel his gaze like the silk of the webworm. He defoliates them with his eyes. When he approaches, the girls become deer, tip top white tails, thin legs. They fall to all fours and scatter. The apprentice laughs and a dozen black eyes turn to stare at him.

The apprentice is not afraid. After all, what is frightening about a tree or a deer or a girl? But the horticulturalist is aghast. Never laugh at the girls. Offer them sweets if you have wronged them. Leave them be.

But, as he works, the apprentice imagines tying the girls of the arboretum down, forcing their roots into place. When they steal his trench spade, he spends the afternoon hunting it and pictures burning the girls, blighting them, cutting them down. If they were gone, the horticulturalist would go too. It’s all he thinks about anymore. It spurs him to action.

It’s so simple, the apprentice rationalizes. You cannot allow disease to take hold in the forest. It will spread, root to root. The girls are a disease. Nothing more, nothing less.

The horticulturalist watches his apprentice walk down the path to the tree line, ax in hand. The old man rushes to his office and grabs a basket. He fills it with whatever he can find in the kitchen: apples, green grapes, a half-eaten chocolate bar. As he runs down the path, he scoops up acorns and adds them to the basket.

It is too late. The girls are naked, their skin full of splinters and barbs. They have hearts of ash, black poplar and oak. The apprentice stands before them, jaw tight. He grips the ax with a righteous fist.

The horticulturalist loves the girls of the arboretum, he would do anything for them. He always keeps his tools sharp; he never prunes in the fall. He watches carefully for pests. But the girls are wild like a rain drop is wild. Rain drops build and build. They become a swollen river. Water will not be denied.

When the screaming starts, the horticulturalist drops the basket, spilling his offerings across the bed of pine needles and crisp leaves. He walks away slowly. He does not to worry for the girls. They have called the apprentice to them. The girls of the arboretum never summon what they cannot banish.

THE SWADDLE by Janelle Bassett

December 26, 2019

I am at the sink, rinsing a food processor blade, when I hear the cry of a tiny baby. Carrot bits go down the drain, easy, but the insistent wailing isn’t going anywhere. I assume the sound is some sort of inner-ear repercussion from the electronic-tornado buzzing of the food processor, yet the sound continues even after I open my mouth wide to pop my ears. A baby is definitely crying and it’s an I’ve-been-left-alone-which-I-am-not-built-for cry.

I look up and think back, “Didn’t my babies grow past the baby stage?”

I consult the refrigerator where, sure enough, their recent school pictures confirm that my children are old enough to wear collars, sit upright, have teeth growing from their gums, and act natural when exposed to sudden flashes of unnatural light.

Have the neighbors left their baby outside? I don’t judge other parents (except constantly, inside my head) but I might have to call someone if the Rheingold’s have forced that baby to do yard work.

I walk to the other side of the kitchen to get a clear view of their backyard. No baby. Just an upside-down bucket. I don’t think the Rheingolds would leave their baby outside under a bucket—they put an awful lot of effort into their Christmas decorations.

I swear the crying must be coming from my own yard. It’s that close—I feel a certain duty. I dry my hands and head out the back door.

The baby isn’t even hiding, it’s on top of the picnic table. The baby would make a terrible picnic host— swaddled arms cannot scoop, serve, fetch or pour. All those tears would water down the potato salad. I say “shhh” to my incessant inner chatter and to the swaddled baby crying atop my backyard picnic table.

I realize the baby is translucent and that this means that I am having some sort of breakdown. An auditory hallucination led me toward a visual hallucination. I don’t like where this is heading. If this baby has a smell I am really in some trouble, mentally. I bend down and sniff. When my face is so-close the crying stops, or the hallucination mutes. The scent: a mix of blood, leather, and that smell the furnace makes the first time it kicks on for the season.

The baby and I stare at each other. It looks up at me with such love and acceptance that I feel rather guilty for looking back down with eyes that make accusations like, “You are not real. This is not happening. You are alarming evidence of my deteriorating mental health. You look a great deal like my father-in-law.”

The crying resumes. I’ve broken whatever promises I made with the earlier proximity of my face. I pick up the baby because it seems healthy to follow your instincts even as you’re falling apart. As soon as my hands touch the baby its skin and blanket become as solid and opaque as everything else in my backyard. Now the table-baby and the heartleaf brunnera are on an equal footing.

It stops screaming and I know it is my baby because I hear a voice in my head saying, “I am your baby.”

“You can talk? That doesn’t make any sense!” We both laugh at that, my laugh emitting out into the grass, the baby’s giggling between my ears.

“If we are touching you will know what I’m saying. I am the baby you are too selfish to have.”

I turn the baby over to see if it has a tag or a tether and also to punish it for calling me selfish.

I use my maternal-wisdom voice to say, “It’s not selfish to know your limits.”

“Okay Mommy, I am the baby you are too limited to have.”

My other children are also smart asses. My other children have also had my number from day one. I kiss the baby’s forehead and ask how it ended up on the picnic table even though I’d diligently prevented its existence.

“The short answer is that I wanted you that badly. I wanted you enough to manifest on my own, all while knowing you don’t want me.”

Look baby, this is exactly the kind of hungry need I was avoiding when I decided not to have you. “Do you have a name?”

“Lou.”

“Do you have a gender?”

“Why? Would you have me if I came with a certain gender?”

“No.”

“If you want to know my gender you’ll have to birth me and then keep me alive me long enough for me to know myself.”

“That’s a lot to ask.”

“Admit it, you think of me just as much as I think of you.”

I stick my face into Lou’s neck. “Of course I do. I am a walking hormone swamp. But it would be irresponsible to bring you here now. The planet is dying.”

“I’d love to witness a thing like that. What a gift you could give me: consciousness with which to view the great collapse.”

I cup Lou’s cheek. “If I had you, there would be fewer resources for your siblings: parental attention, money, hot water. It wouldn’t be fair to them. They got here first.”

“I’ll have you know they pushed and shoved to get to the front of the line. They maimed and belittled!”

“I’m sorry, Lou. Are you cold? Do you want to go inside?”

“Inside your womb?”

“No, dear. Inside the house.”

Lou cries a bit, setback, and then says, “I will love you completely despite your many faults. I’ll never ask for anything. I’ll wear hand-me-downs and eat table scraps. If you don’t like the name Lou I’d happily be called after one of your great-grandparents or the offspring of a bottom-tier celebrity. You don’t even have to look me in the eye! I just want to hold a bug in my hand and taste vanilla bean.”

“Oh Lou,” I say. “If you promised to never come out—a permanent pregnancy, an ongoing residency—then I’d do it. I think I could carry you as long as you were forced to go where I wanted.”

“Is that your best offer?”

“Yes. I’m not proud of it.”

“That helps.”

Someone nearby starts a lawn mower and I instinctively pull Lou into my breasts. “How do I put you in there?”

“Wait! Are you sure this is your best offer? I will wear any Halloween costume you choose and let you take as many photos as you’d like. I’ll pose without any regard for my own self respect. I could even carry a small broom and dustpan and sweep up all my own footprints and crumbs. And… I don’t mean to brag, but I will be your favorite. Hands down, your favorite. A joy. A delight. A human stocking stuffer.”

“You sound like the perfect constant presence, Lou—a right-nice inborn companion.” I squeeze so tight and push so hard that if Lou’s body were real it would be in great pain. But instead of being injured, Lou is being absorbed.

Lou quickly says, “You could be more generous. You could challenge yourself and then grow from it” before being fully smooshed into my body.

Lou is gone from my arms. I remember the stew I was making before being summoned outside. Lou says, “Can I have stew?” from within and I sigh so heavily I wonder if Lou could’ve been dislodged.

Before going inside, I place my hand on my belly and we settle our terms. Lou will remain quiet inside me—observing, recording—until we are in bed, alone, the siblings asleep nearby. At that point of the day I’ll be available for questions—we will engage, we will process and if Lou wants to jump and flail I’ll put my hand on the site of that jumping.

I go in and Lou goes quiet. I finish stew preparations, wipe the counter, and send my closest friend a text that says, “I hope menopause comes for me soon because every month my PMS gets deeper and stranger.”

I walk to the bus stop and retrieve my children. I greet them and in response they hand me their belongings so they can run ahead, unburdened.

I can feel Lou wanting to ask for a backpack.

At dinner my partner asks, “Since when do you put ketchup on cornbread? Don’t you hate ketchup?” I couldn’t tell him, “Lou wants it. Lou needs it. Lou is ecstatic about experiencing ketchup.”

After reading my children a chapter from a book about a family of bickering yet relatable armadillos I say goodnight, kiss their necks and try not to picture them forcefully kicking, slapping, or shoving Lou away from the front of the line.

Downstairs, my partner and I read and hold each other’s feet. Then he’s shaking my foot, waking me, telling me to go to bed.

I’ve barely laid down before Lou asks, “What did that tweet mean… about how people who are reluctant to pee in the shower probably have sad inhibited sex?”

“You can see out of my eyes?”

“Of course.”

“This is not how a pregnancy works, Lou. You’re supposed to be captivated and fulfilled by the sound of my heartbeat.”

“We both know this is a special pregnancy. Get up. Let’s go outside and lick the grass! I want to taste grass immediately.”

“No, it’s time to go to sleep. These are the rhythms of a day. Let’s talk about the sunset.”

“What was that feeling we had when we closed the door to my siblings’ room? I didn’t like it.”

“That was relief and regret and longing and tenderness.”

“What was that sensation whipping us as we rolled in the trash bin?”

“That was wind.”

“Why did you scrape the dinner plates into the trash?”

“That was waste.”

“Can we lick the grass now? I’m awake to it all. I’m not a bit tired.”

“No, Lou. I am going to fall asleep.” I put my hand on my lower abdomen. “I can touch your dance first, if you’d like.”

“The grass the grass the grass.”

“I said no and I meant it.”

Lou adds movement to the chant—pendulum elbows poke and stretch my skin to the beat of “grass grass grass.”

I roll onto my stomach, pressing my weight into the bed, trying to end this day.

“You push me and yet I can… feel myself growing. My intestines just developed a new capacity. My forearm can nearly flex. I think the spurts come when you deny me the experiences I need, Mommy. If you don’t respond to my impulses I’ll become a head to push. Life is insistent, Mommy. I’m a steamroller, Mommy. It’s all chemical, Mommy. My growth is your growth is all toward the end, Mommy. The grass grass grass. My lightening could be your strike, mommy. I could. Let me! Let me. And when I’m all said and done we can call it your decision.”

FISH GHOST by Kevin Richard White

December 23, 2019

My sister spoke of a fish ghost that occupies a nearby river. She raised her voice as if her sentences had a weight. But in reality, she's timid.

"It has bones and fins," she said, "but it is poor at cutting through the water."

"Amanda," I said as she swayed, a wind tearing through my hoodie that she always wore.

“Something like an urban monster.” Her eyes widened.

“Legend, you mean.”

“Whatever.”

It’s possible she’s correct. There’s always been rumblings from neighbors and lifers that there’s a creature existing in our milieu. Cameras mysteriously break when one gets close to it and they say that we get more snow because of it. All sorts of things like that. I’m a skeptical one, but I take facts over hushed whispers nine times out of ten.

“So is it a fish or a ghost?”

“It’s both,” she said.

“How can it be?”

“I don’t know. Because it can be.”

Amanda loves a good fantasy, though, so I let her tell me this as we let the night pass on our grandfather’s porch, counting little stars and corn stalks with cold fingers. Even though she’s dressed warm, she’s still stricken with chills, and I go to give her my flannel as well. For once I’m not drinking, but she’s having her share and mine too. The dead soldiers clink like perfect wind chimes. There’s nothing else to do but drink and talk of a better life. It’s more fun than you think.

“Maybe it’s time to go to bed,” I told her. Because I knew where this was going. She was going to tell me the history. She was going to tell me how it was born and how it became so ugly. How it was a metaphor for us, or something we were supposed to be—how WE have bones and fins too and are poor at cutting through the water. It was going to take up hours I didn’t have.

“No,” she said quietly. “No,” she said again after a time.

She was beginning to enter a haze. She’s been through some trauma and when she gets fixated, I know it’s better to leave her alone for a while. I knew she was warm and she had one beer left, so I wished her goodnight. It was important she had some time to sort this out.

After I shut the door, I heard her say, “A mystery. A mystery.”

She never came to bed that night. A police officer found her hours later, in the river, only wearing my flannel, with a net she stole from the neighbor’s yard. She had been saying different names out loud, but there weren’t of anyone we knew. No charges were pressed, so I went and picked her up just as the sun was rising.

“You don’t even fish, Amanda,” I said.

“You’re missing the point.”

“You said it was a ghost. Not even a real fish.”

“You’re missing the POINT,” she said as she punched my passenger side mirror. It hung by a thin cable and clunked against the door every time I sped up. So I crawled as the sticky morning air refused to let up.

“Then what is the point?”

She swallowed a few times. She fiddled with the broken radio and drank from a coffee that I accidentally left behind from the day before. She gurgled it and spat it out the window. I just kept driving because I wasn’t sure what else to do with my hands or body, and I knew she was preparing to let loose with some kind of storm. I kept straight on the highway until she unbuckled and told me to pull over.

I did so and parked at this abandoned farm that’s been empty ever since we were born. Ghosts, too, or just smarter people than us. Amanda punched the dirt and rocks until her hands bled. I couldn’t stop her, she didn’t want to be stopped. People who have been hurt and want to hurt don’t want to be told no. They want to continue until they are out of words and out of energy. Our point as those who are not hurt need to just shut the fuck up. It’s important to know us. Even if it’s about a fish ghost or not. Even if it’s about something that’s not even there. And if it was, who was I to tell her no? She was better than me. Stronger than me. Not my place to tell her anything different.

She held up a clump of dirt and left it sift through a trembling hand. “You know it’s there, right? You have to know.”

“Yes,” I said.

“We’re going to go back tonight.”

“No problem.”

“Bring your shotgun,” she said.

“Sure, I said.”

She picked up a rock and began to throw it at me, but stopped herself.

“The shotgun,” she said again, harder.

“I’ll bring it.”

She nodded and smiled. “We have work to do,” she said.

I picked her up off the ground and told her everything was alright. I put her back in the car. She needed to get some rest.

“You’re the best brother in the world,” she said as we began to drive off.

I nodded. Even with her eyes closed, I knew she saw it. Or maybe she was imagining something in the water below me, as she stared at it, hungry, wanting to defeat it, wanting to defeat whatever story she didn’t want to hear anymore. I’ve been there. I had bad ones, too.

But hers is one that needs to be stopped. Hers is the one that remains. Even if it’s not important to real to anyone else. It’s hers that needs to be heard.

I gripped the wheel. I felt something was chasing me.

LITTLE DISTRACTIONS by Sherry Morris

December 22, 2019

Maybe because I’m bored, I agree to see Barry’s fish tank. I’d just returned from three months in Europe where travelling with a circus through France or catching live octopus to grill for lunch while house-sitting on a Spanish island was just how some weeks played out.

I was back in Waynesville now, broke, regretting I’d come back too late to start the autumn term at the state university. The main attraction in Waynesville was the Walmart Super Center, which had never been that super. My dad knew somebody who knew somebody who could get me on at the cake-mix factory. It was the best menial pay going—a solid $5 an hour. It sounded easier than waitressing, and McDonalds was for teenagers. Assembly work would be dull, but I’d had my adventure. I’d do a bit of time then move on. Maybe find a little distraction or two to pass that time. There’d be no harm in that.

We go for breakfast first. It’s like going to dinner since me and Barry work the graveyard shift, eleven to seven. The days are shorter now, and as we leave the factory, there’s a hint of light in the sky. I feel my exhaustion fade as I step into the freshness of early-morning air. Barry says being awake before the birds makes him feel wise. We’ll eat in our uniform whites but remove our hairnets and dust off the fine white powder that covers us as best we can.

For the first three months I work the gentle macaroni line with mothers of classmates who puff up proud talking about their children and grandchildren as Kraft boxes and cheese packets trundled along. I join in, talking maybe a bit too loud about the French hairdresser boyfriend I’d had and tales of circus life where the troupe’s trumpeter lost his tongue by standing too close to a monkey. Then I get moved upstairs to a fast line.

I find myself standing elbow-to-elbow with sturdy stone-faced women who look like they’ve worked assembly lines for centuries—even the ones only a few years older than me. Their eyes and faces seem dead, but their hands are so alive. I’m transfixed by the way they flit like birds as we stuff plastic pouches of cake mix, muffin mix, and brownie mix into cardboard boxes that race by. All the women snap-to when the shouty little foreman appears. I keep my head down and hands moving, but he always stops near me. He stares at my hands, then shakes his head. I try and stuff like the others, but I miss boxes, a lot of boxes, making the women swoop in to stuff them. Sometimes I miss so many boxes the shouty little foreman stops the line during the three-hour run. If too many boxes are missed, we lose our fifteen-minute break.

Breaks are crucial. That’s when everyone flies off to pee, then smoke, flocking back together to chatter. But I don’t smoke and try not to drink anything before a shift. I stand apart and pretend not to notice how they tilt their heads or point their chins in my direction, stare at me with tough-guy eyes. I listen to them squawk about drunken honky-tonk escapades and how they lost their bras in barroom brawls. They’d probably roll their eyes hearing about all-night Italian beach raves and sunbathing topless. Doubt they’d care about cocktail recipes unless I left out the fruit. But it doesn’t matter—I’m here for only eight more months. So what if they don’t invite me to their lunch table or show me pictures of their babies and toddlers, friends’ bachelorette parties or pets.

A book is my lunch company, and I do my best to ignore the cackles that carry as they gossip, discuss TV shows I don’t watch, and grouch they’ll be stuck at home this weekend as they can’t ditch their kids with their parents. Sometimes a single shift feels like eight months.

At least Big Bertha tolerates me, giving me technique tips and stuffing most of my missed boxes without comment. But it’s hard working next to her. She smells bad and sucks soft caramels non-stop, popping them into her mouth even while working the line. Her teeth are grey stubs swimming in gooey muck, making her words stick and slur into a pool of mumble. When I look at her mouth, I feel sick.

At some point I notice Barry, the foreman of the pancake line. See how he laughs and jokes with his ladies throughout their shift, giving them little lingering pats on their backs or their arms or hips to celebrate the fact they have the most productive line. And he notices me, coming over one lunchtime to sit down and chat. We discover he went to school with my older cousins, and he asks me about the book I’m reading. Before long, I’m tell him my plans for college. How I’m living at home and working here because I’m going away next fall. He nods and tells me about the philosophy books he’s reading, how he’s always been interested in enlightenment. Adds he has a fish tank I really should see sometime.

We go to a family-run bakery for breakfast. We don’t want anything from a box. The smell of fresh bread, donuts, and coffee surrounds us and reminds me of my grandma’s kitchen. Breakfast with Barry is good. Even great. He’s funny, got things to say. He thinks it’s super I’m working to finance my studies. Says education is important, the key to enlightenment. In a lower voice he says he’ll try to get me on his line, but it’s complicated. It feels like Barry could be a friend, an ally, a mentor. That makes me smile, go a bit fluttery. There’s a white smudge on his cheek I hope he doesn’t wipe away. Barry tells me he once had an offer to go to college.

“But I got side-tracked. Don’t get side-tracked,” he says, shaking a finger at me.

Then he goes quiet and stares at his donut. Starts telling me about his ex-wife, how he’s on decent terms with her now. Has weekends with the kids sorted. Working different shifts helps. He perks back up after a bit. He wants to show me his trailer and some new furniture he’s bought.

“And the fish tank,” I say.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, the fish tank. And maybe we’ll watch a movie.”

But there’s no fish tank and the sofa sags in the middle. I can’t see a single book anywhere. I perch on one end of the sofa and watch as Barry makes us drinks even though it’s only 9 a.m. He says his Bloody Mary is a killer. I shake my head, but he hands me a glass anyway. He goes off to change and comes back wearing jeans and a red plaid shirt. He’s put on cologne, too. A lot. Something that smells like kerosene. The smudge has disappeared, and I hardly recognize him now. He says I can change if I want, but I haven’t brought any other clothes. I say I need to go, that I have to take my mom to her doctor’s appointment. Barry punches a button on the remote and the TV pops on.

“But we were gonna watch a movie,” he says. His voice has risen to an unmistakable whine. “I’ve got one I think you’ll like.”

And before I can say anything else, he presses another button for the VCR and a porno begins to play.

Barry’s got one of those old box TVs with photos of his kids on top. Two big 8x10 prints from a studio, with the kids dressed up in front of a bland blue backdrop. His boy is maybe four with a wide smile, cute and blond. His red cowboy boots are planted firmly, and his hat sits at a jaunty angle as he takes aim at the camera with a toy gun. In the other photo is his girl. She’s a little older, another blonde, with pink bows and matching Mary Janes. She’s perched on the edge of her chair, ready to bolt, with a ragdoll she holds tight. Her head is cocked, like she’s listening, her little face full of doubt. Maybe she’s been promised a fish tank too.

I concentrate on the photos, ignore the tangle of limbs and sounds coming from the TV. Barry’s advice floats back to me. I see how it happened. The repercussions that followed. How it could happen again. I take a deep breath.

“Nice kids,” I say.

Go on about how sweet they look, how I bet they enjoy spending time with their dad. That he must be super proud of them. I keep talking ‘til he switches off the TV.

“Well,” I say, standing up. “It’s been enlightening.” Then I go.

On the way home, I stop at Walmart. I’ve heard Vicks VapoRub under the nose works wonders. Peruse the hard candy aisle and buy a bag of sugar-free peppermints. I’ll tell Bertha they’re a thank you, that they were out of soft caramels. I grab a few of those glossy TV rag-mags I’ve only ever sniffed at. Tell myself to consider it research. That I should apply myself, make friends with the line. Maybe even offer to babysit. Enlightenment is everywhere. So are harmful little distractions.

IN A SMALL TOWN (CALLED AMERICA) by Christian Fennell

December 21, 2019

It’s getting worse, and Jake finished his beer, and together they listened to the rain on the tin roof of the drive-shed; the receptiveness of its falling; the comfort within its echoing.

Things are lookin up, said Jake.

Damn straight, said Jared.

I mean, now that things are great again, things are lookin up, and Jake stood and walked to the fridge and grabbed two more beers. He passed one to Jared and sat back down on the block of cracked white oak. He took a sip and looked at Jared. I went and saw the doc.

Oh?

Said I’m shooting blanks.

Shit, Jake, I’m sorry to hear that. Have ya told Sugar?

Last night.

How’d that go?

‘Bout as good as you’d think. Ya know how much she wants kids. Not that I don’t—I mean, you got your two and they’re doin okay, right?

Right.

Thing is, I don’t wanna adopt some stranger’s baby and say it’s mine. Sugar don’t neither. We could get her artificially knocked up, but—.

What?

Jake shrugged and took another sip.

They got DNA.

I know they got DNA, but nothins perfect, and it might work out you’re paying for somethin a little less than what you’d hoped for, ya know what I mean?

I guess.

And then you’re just fucked.

So, what’ya thinkin?

I want you to do it.

You what?

You heard me.

Are you askin me to fuck Sugar?

Yup.

Really?

Yup.

Have you lost your goddamn mind?

Jake lifted his John Deere ball cap, scratched the top of his balding head, and said, nope.

Does Sugar know?

We talked about it.

You talked about it?

Yup.

And what’ya think, Alice is gonna be okay with me walkin next door and havin a go with Sugar? ‘Cause I got news for ya, she won’t be.

She don’t gotta know.

What’ya mean she don’t gotta know? How the hell is she not gonna know?

Cause we ain’t gonna tell her, that’s how.

For fuck sake, this is nuts, I can’t fuck Sugar.

What’ya mean you can’t fuck Sugar? She looks good still. Hell, she’s a lot better lookin than that girl you were fuckin back in high school.

She wasn’t that bad.

The hell she wasn’t.

C’mon, Jake, get serious, you don’t mean this shit?

I’m as serious as the day is long, little brother, hell, it won’t take more than a time or two—didn’t ya always tell me all you had to do to knock up Alice was to hang your pants on the bed post?

I know, but, still—

At least this way the kid’ll be a Burleson. Jake finished his beer and threw the empty at the garbage can. Besides, ya don’t gotta worry bout thing. We’ll just get up a little early, you walk to my place, and I’ll come here. After you’re done, you come back here like nothing ever happened, and I’ll head back to my place. Jake stood. Do me a favor and just think about it. He walked to the door and looked back. Oh, and by the way, Sugar says she’ll be droppin eggs in the next day or two.

She’ll be what?

That’s what she said.

You talked about it?

Yup, we talked about it. Later.

Yeah, said Jared. Fuck me.

Jake opened the door and walked to the fridge and grabbed a beer. How’d it go?

Standing at the workbench cleaning an engine part Jared looked back.

Ya got it done, right?

Yeah, I got it done, but I had to turn her around.

What? Why? She looks good still.

No, I mean, to do it, ya know.

I guess, and Jake tipped back his beer.

Maybe cause she’s your wife, or somethin like that, what’ya think?

How long ya been married?

Eleven years.

Do ya love her still?

What? Yeah, I suppose so. How the hell should I know?

It’s hard to know, ain’t it?

Yeah, it’s not easy.

Ya think she still loves you?

Of course she does. Why wouldn’t she?

I didn’t say she didn’t. What about Sugar?

What about her?

Think she still loves me?

Hell, I don’t know. Why?

It’s just something ya wonder about, that’s all. It’s not like it’s not possible. It happens all the time.

I guess.

Do ya think it matters?

What?

Love.

I don’t know—for fuck sake, Jake.

Jake tossed his empty at the garbage can. I think it does. He walked to the door and looked back. We’d best try again tomorrow, well things are still going good that way.

Yeah, sure.

Later.

Yeah, said Jared, later.

Sugar walked out the door, her flip-flops smacking her heels, her white short dress tight all the way down.

She crossed the adjoining properties and reached the gravel driveway. She looked away, somewhere, and took a drag of her cigarette. She tossed it to the gravel, toed it out, and opened the drive-shed door.

Her eyes adjusting to the dim light she walked to the fridge and grabbed a beer. She looked at the calendar hanging on the wall, some girl with less than little on draped over the hood of a shiny red car. They make good money, ya know. She opened the beer and looked back at the poster. A blonde, like her. It's not just the money, it's the connections. Ya know that, right?

She walked to the workbench and pulled herself onto a high metal stool. She crossed her legs, her one foot bouncing—a nervous energy of how she was hinged, much like this place itself. I suppose ya talked about it?

Not much we did, no.

She took a sip of beer and leaned back, her thin milky-white forearms resting on the workbench, her dress high up on her long legs, and she tilted her head, the thickness of her blonde hair falling to one side and catching the light, just right, and she knew it, and did so without having to. What’d he say? She looked at her chipped red nail polish.

He wanted to know if it went okay.

And?

And what?

What’ya say?

Not much.

Not much?

No. Can we not talk about this?

Why don’t ya wanna talk about it?

What’s the point?

The point? She uncrossed her legs and re-crossed them the other way, her foot starting to bounce. Why’s it gotta be so hot in here? What’s wrong with that damn fan? She leaned forward. The point is, we need to figure this out, and right this minute we do.

Jared grabbed a rag and began to wipe his hands. What’s with you?

Did ya not hear us late night? I’d be surprised if ya didn’t.

A little, I did. What was up? He walked to the fridge and grabbed a beer.

I told him, I ain’t no puppy-mill slut, and I ain’t sleeping with you no more.

Jarred stopped. You’re what?

What?

They looked at one another.

You ain’t sleeping with me no more?

Of course, I am, I just ain’t doin it for him no more.

That makes no sense.

Are you dumb? There’s a world of difference between my wanting to sleep with you and him wanting me to. And I can tell you this much, we had better figure this out, and I mean now.

Jared leaned against the bench and sipped his beer. How long we been together?

I don’t know, a couple of years, I guess. Why?

In all that time we been doin it, were ya never worried about getting pregnant? Or were ya just hoping ya would and say it was Jake’s?

Ya don’t get it, do you? All this damn talk of babies, I can hardly take it.

What’ya mean?

She put her beer down and got and began to pace in her flip-flops. It’s the last thing I’m ever gonna do, do understand that?

What?

This world is a hard world, Jared Burleson, and it gets no easier being woman, that’s for damn sure. She picked up her beer and took a sip. And if you think I’m gonna get dropped down another rung or two by having either yours or your brother’s damn babies, ya gotta another thing comin. Besides, it plays absolute havoc with your body, destroys it completely. She looked at Jared. Is that what you want?

Hold on, are you telling me all this time you’ve been on birth control?

That is correct, smart boy, yes I have.

And all this time Jake thought you were trying to get pregnant?

Correct.

And then it turns out, he’s sterile? What would ya have done if he hadn’t been?

I don’t know. I’d of figured somethin out.

And now he’s got me doin ya to get ya pregnant even though I already am and you’re on birth control?

She pulled herself back up onto the stool. As it turns out, yes. She took a sip of beer.

Jared pushed off the workbench and stood in front of Sugar, his hands reaching past her to the workbench. You’re something, Sugar. I don’t know what, but you’re definitely somethin.

The small fan in the window began to rattle and it blew warm sticky air.

Sweat from his forehead dropped to her thigh.

She looked at her leg, at the drop, and she put her finger to it, and it ran like a tear.

She felt the smooth touch of her dress, moving up, and she pushed herself forward on the stool, just a little, just enough, a lazy southern cat stretching its underbelly to the warming sun.

Sugar.

I know, baby, and she put her arms around his neck. She looked out the small window. At the scrubby land. At the coming heat. A small bird came to the window. Maybe a starling? She didn't know. She did once, when she was just a little girl.

PROBLEM CHILD by Ellen Huang

December 20, 2019

Ariel often got in trouble for trying to escape. That was how he saw it, anyway. He spent much of his time enigmatically testing the limits of his body, such as a current frustrating inability to become liquid. "If cats can do it, why can't I?" he'd grumble. He'd try to vanish into the air but trip over balls of yarn left around the house. He was losing the skill of leaving his body. He was losing memory of transcendent experience fast.

They considered him distracted. His eyes were often elsewhere, in a different time and place, some good old days no one here would understand. Coma, lucid dreaming, and Peter Pan Syndrome were offensive nonsense words to him. He'd stew in the shadows at the staircase, grumbling at this illusion of these mere mortal adults being his senior.

Sometimes, he'd spin around fervently, in delusional attempts to become a tornado, feet flying. Then he'd get scolded as if he had spun the entire room around him. No one cared that it was the small bed that spiraled into his way first. All that mattered was he had knocked into it, making little Fey cry again.

He didn't know why Fey made such a racket. She wasn't a baby. In fact, she was rather a bit of a prodigy as far as creatives went. At only four, she was making pretty little cats out of fabric, quite possibly on the verge of giving them life in the future.

Ariel also got in trouble for telling Fey what the wind said on stormy nights. He told of how he had been a force of nature in a previous life, and thus once able to become the wind. Now, he could only interpret what ghosts on the breeze were saying, and embellish as he saw fit.

If he was feeling especially irritated about serving his sentence in this mortal shell, he would tell Fey the howling wind was saying very gruesome things. Four-year-old Fey had to hear that the wind was saying it'd rip out her hair and grind her teeth into bread for elementals in the afterlife. Or that the wind was getting angrier for missing one if its favorite gods (as Ariel often bragged he was), and the wind was going to vengefully destroy the villages while dumping Fey in a giant mixing bowl.

One night, Fey accidentally stepped on his cloak and choked him. Ariel wasn't used to such things as he expected to poof into air if anything got him. The wind was mild that night but angry Ariel was still able to scare the girl by saying: "The wind is saying it'll wait until you sleep first. Then it's going to wrap you up and throw you far away, to get caught on a telephone pole. And then the telephone pole will unravel your innards. And then, when it's had its fun, the wind will empty out your head like a melon."

"Noooo!" cried Fey, holding the button-eyed patchwork cat she had.

But then Ariel jolted when he actually did hear the wind speaking.

It was howling louder outside, but nothing in the house seemed to be disturbed. Ariel's eyes felt like they were going to pop out, but now that he was a mortal they remained secure.

"Ariel," boomed a voice in the wind. "Why are you tormenting your sister?"

"She's not my sister!" Ariel huffed, hands over his ears. "I'm not meant to be a babysitter. When will you let me go?"

"Ariel, you fell out of your own accord. Do not blame the child."

Ariel groaned. "I am a DRAGON. I am an ELEMENT. I am the SLEEPING GIANT BENEATH THE SEAS. And in this life, if you insist...I am a BOY. I don't settle for tea parties with lost girls!"

Then the wind got into his head, where he could not escape. "You are still made by something and will fall by something. Take the chance to become something more than a fool."

Suddenly, Ariel began to tremble. The wind had never gotten into his head before, commanding silence in the unsettled storm in his head. A whirlwind of suppressed thoughts, perhaps hundreds of years old, suddenly ceased. There was only the voice, a whisper in a closed, empty room. "Don't bother Fey again."

So for the rest of that night, Ariel did whatever Fey asked. He baked the cookies, set up the tea parties, flattered her eleventh thrown-together-and-not-yet-live cats. He let her try his black cape and he resisted all urge to tighten it until she squeaked, for fear the wind's voice would shut off all sweet room tone, all white noise, all other dreams. He gritted his teeth and held himself together while Fey drew on his face and braided his short flame of hair. He resisted all desire to burst the tiara into flames. It was surprisingly easy.

He caught a glint in the little girl's bright green eyes, a concentration of power the neighbors feared. People around here had fearful tales about black girls with green eyes, as if she were some possessed gris-gris doll and not a little girl at all. Yet the voice told him such tales only planted forces of hatred in this world. The voice told him within her was the tested, resilient, blinding power of good, that many would not understand. They would be responsible for not provoking each other. This practice of shaping life in the moment and being slow to anger, this gradual cultivating like waiting for yeast to rise in the blip of mortal life—that was where the wind was present. Ariel was going to have to understand that. He had never noticed Fey's irises, gleaming with other lives, too. He let goosebumps crawl on his bare white arms for the first time in ages.

"Your Papa sure loves you, I'll give you that," he muttered as the girl finally went to sleep with a smile on her face.

“WHAT? NO.” by Scott Bryan

December 19, 2019

One time, at least, an elephant ate a bat.

It wasn’t a mistake, either. Nothing is.

It wasn’t like the bat was flying around, all willy-nilly, and the elephant was yawning, as pachyderms have a tendency to do, and the bat just, like, zigged when it should have zagged, and instead of a mouthful of cud or hay or greens, delivered by way of a droopy, rough, wet schnoz, the poor elephant unintentionally brought down their ill-equipped herbivore's chompers (humiliated and hiding behind the impressive tusks of fortune which had been bestowed by whatever glue-sniffing god to whom elephants pray [Do you think elephants pray to Ganesha? No. That doesn’t seem right. I guess most people would assert that elephants don’t pray at all. Then most people would put their hands on their hips and authoritatively nod their head, proud of their superiority over such a staggering creature]. Crap, what was I saying? Oh yeah, the elephant didn’t accidentally clamp down) on the soft, light, furry flesh of the bat.

Nope. That’s not what happened at all.

“Grandpa, did you mean the elephant’s presence was staggering? Or that the elephant was staggering around?”

What? No.

What I meant was, the bat was in no danger whatsoever. This wasn’t normal, predictable, or fair. The elephant swung their mouth wide and lifted their girth away from the ground like a monkey lifting its paws off the earth for the first time, quite a feat for such a colossally distributed animal.

“Does ‘colossally distributed’ mean there are a lot of elephants, created by a god to which they do not (or can not or choose not to) pray? Or does it mean elephants are big and have a strange center of gravity?”

What? NO.

Turns out, all of this was happening just as the hipster hangout across the way was closing down.

“For the day, or, like, going out of business?”

What? No.

They just finished the weekly open mic night, for Pete’s sake. The place was hopping! All the residents of the town had gathered to partake in some spoken-word by candlelight.

A young person recited a piece of epic power and profundity, and the audience, dressed in slacks and pressed shirts and beatnik scarfs and glasses, who pretended to give their friends bored, disinterested eye rolls while whispering critical comments under their breath, were actually riveted, so enthralled with the young sycophant's performance they quietly snapped their fingers in time with their own heartbeats.

The background repeated like a cheaply made cartoon, the same doors passed multiple times. They elephant chomped down only a short time after the emotional monologue crescendoed to an ovation-inspiring conclusion.

Do you get the point o’ this whole endeavor, youngin?

“I think so. You’re saying if we are inactive, we will never see the possibilities for improvement or adventure. Whether the elephant chomps down on the bat or the audience sits in silence or erupts in applause, whether or not the meaning of the action has been revealed, it’s our recognition of the importance of the moment which really counts, and we have no foresight as to where our actions will take us.”

What? No. I nearly impressed a member of the homecoming court at that open mic.

The point is: The performer was me!

As the two of us were trying to leave together, arm in arm, probably headed to a night of fumbling adolescent copulation, we witnessed a broken-winged bat tumbling down the throat of a full-grown elephant. That wrinkly grey mess was savage. We shrieked in horror, we covered our eyes. Our buzzing energy was flattened like the earth under the elephant’s dusty feet!

Talk about a mood-killer.

I never saw that person again. They found their own ride home, never returned my calls. I assume they forever associated me with the ugly incident.

“I feel bad for them.”

What? Who cares about them! They went on to marry a circus clown and I ended up entering into a partnership with the person who, upon coupling with me, brought about the birth of one of your parents!

“You mean you got with Grandma? That’s good, right?”

Who? What? No. What makes you assume I’m the male? Grandpa is my name, not my title. Grandpa Chris Demonkovich. Would-Be Poet, Slinger of Yarn, Ivory Poacher.

“So you’re a lady?”

Don’t make assumptions is all I’m saying. Here’s my point, young whippersnapper:

I killed the elephant, opened his stomach, set that bat free on the same night I recited my poem. I’m a good person! But, for some reason, that night set off a chain reaction which led directly to this moment, and I’m none too happy about it! God, inasmuch as I have any concept of them, is punishing me, obviously. My life has been a steady downhill slide away from art and music and beauty and toward violence and disappointment and you! Every moment is worse than the last, this one included.

“What?”

No! You’re awful, grandchild. Just awful. I look at you and all I see is the result of my misfortune.

Aside from the overwhelming monetary wealth I’ve amassed thanks to my unnatural ability to visit my neverending revenge on anarchistic elephants, I’m a pretty unhappy person. But I’ve never written another poem.

“Well, maybe I’ll be able to carry your legacy. You know, appreciate life more than you were able to. Perhaps I’ll become a patron of the arts when I’m spending all your money, your ill-gotten ivory gains, after you are dead!”

Lord, I hope so.

“What? No.”

WOODED LOTS by Amanda Baldeneaux

December 18, 2019

Bess’s grandmother leans a sharp elbow into the worn armrest of her recliner, her chin pointed away from the kitchen chair where Bess sits, signing the contract for Ray, the homecare aid. Her grandmother has lived in the cottage at the nursing home for five years. The cottage lets retirees live independently but connected to the lodge and the cafeteria and the dorms where the older, less-resourceful people live. She doesn’t want to go there.

Outside the cottage, a small slab of patio is littered with sunflower seed shells. Petals of white azalea blossoms, knocked free by the recent rains, cover the concrete like wet sheets fallen from laundry lines. Bess tells her grandmother what time to expect Ray in the morning.

“Who is Ray?” her grandmother pulls the oak lever to recline her feet. Outside, squirrels busy themselves at the bird feeder. The feeder was there when her grandmother moved in, installed by a resident long moved into the lodge or gone. The squirrels split dry corn kernels open with sharp teeth. Birds, perched in the trees, wait their turn at what the squirrels discard into the pine straw beneath.

Bess folds the contract back into the white envelope delivered by Ray. Over lunch, it rained so hard she thought they’d all wash away—the nursing home built in the 1960s. The bird feeder. The battered foxgloves grown in the courtyard garden outside the cafeteria, where Bess wheels her grandmother back and forth to meals twice a day from the nursing home’s hospital wing. This is her grandmother’s first time back in the cottage since the pneumonia set in. Without oxygen, her memory worsened. Bess worries about bringing her back to live here alone. If Ray will be enough. If a biblical flood could wash everything into mud tomorrow.

Today, while the residents ate potato salad and white rolls, tornado warnings flashed on television. Her grandmother ignored them, asking Bess who is Ray over and over.

“Ray will dispense your medicine and wash your clothes twice a week.”

“I don’t need Ray.” But could Bess stay a week longer? Could her son come? Could Bess’s mother?

Two blue jays land on the feeder, the only birds big enough to bully the squirrels. Their feathers are dark, almost black save for the shock of blue striping their tails. Her grandmother used to get cardinals. Robins. Sparrows and blue birds. Warblers. She’d been gone a month in the hospital wing and without seed at the feeder, the birds didn’t come. They’d forgotten about the bird feeder until Bess filled it again, today. The jays are bulky and knock the seeds off the ledge where they will furrow down into the wet soil beneath the pine straw of the forested floor.

Her grandmother chose this cottage because of the forest out back. It rises over a slope off the patio and disappears back into thickets and trees. A resident, long ago, planted iris bulbs along the perimeter, domesticating it. If one doesn’t push through the oak saplings and daffodil shoots and ivy they’d never know that a few hundred yards back runs a fence along the property line, keeping the forest divided, the residents contained. Bears can’t wander across. No deer. Since arriving, Bess has seen box turtles. King snakes. Feral cats and toads that leaped at Bess’s feet when she took a load of her grandmother’s wash from the laundry room after dark. Her grandmother doesn’t want to leave these things to go live in the lodge, away from the woods with views only of mowed courtyards and fountains and pansies and hedges. They have wasp problems, over there. Not enough predators. Bess picked a ladybug off the concrete yesterday and placed it on the stem of a pansy, hoping to save it from wasps. Hoping for aphids. Hoping the red bead of an insect wouldn’t bite her for the effort.

Her grandmother tells Bess she’s come home today. Bess reminds her, “Tomorrow.” Her grandmother nods her head, oh yes. Bess tells her again that Ray is coming to help her. She asks who Ray is, says she doesn’t need help to take her medication. She doesn’t want a man to help wash her clothes. She doesn’t want a stranger inside of her home.

Bess wheels her grandmother outside the cottage, back to the hospital wing. The rubber wheels of the chair and the soles of Bess’s shoes crunch the small shells of garden snails out to eat begonias after the rain. She avoids the worms, stranded on the sidewalk to escape their drowning. Along the cottage’s sidewall, yellow and white honeysuckle flowers line branches like molars on a jaw line.

Bess’s grandmother grew up in a wooded town on an old train stop two hours south of here. She had a sleeping porch for hot nights and pecan trees in the backyard. When Bess was little, she picked wild strawberries in the yard. Her grandmother had a birdfeeder there, too. Cardinals. Bobwhites whistling as they stalked the grass. Spiders hiding under the screened-in, stilted porch.

After her grandfather died, the porch began to lean away from the house and deeper into the dirt, the rusted nails lengthening into sunlight again, millimeter by millimeter. Her grandmother didn’t bother to fix the porch, just continued to let it pull free from the house and sink into the yard.

Her grandmother is prying loose, too. She leans further from the tethers of what she once knew: the names of birds. Bess’s name, exchanged for her mother’s, long dead. She is leaning, popping nails out of the house of her life and sinking into the suctioning soil of age. Into the pine brush. Into the soft mud of a forest that is shrinking, shrinking from shortened fencing, all that was wild left locked out on the opposite side.

INTERVIEW WITH JEFF JACKSON: “HOW DO YOU MAKE ART THAT HAS STAKES WHEN PEOPLE AREN’T PAYING ATTENTION?” with Chris Gugino

December 17, 2019

jeff jackson is a writer/playwright/artist/musician. he lives in charlotte, NC, and sings, writes, and performs with the group julian calendar. in october of last year, he released his second novel, destroy all monsters, which is a beautifully twisted novel with two sides, like a record (literally, you finish reading the first side and then flip the book over and read it from the back cover, returning to the middle of the book).

destroy all monsters concerns an epidemic of musicians being murdered during their performances. there's no tangible link between the victims, their killers, or the method in which said bands are dispatched, save that the bands themselves are all a bit mediocre.

jeff was kind enough to take a few hours out of his schedule to speak with me after the book was released to discuss destroy all monsters, his earlier work, and the challenges of making lasting, impactful art in an atomized culture filled with distractions competing for one's attention. the delays in publication of this interview are all mine, but i hope that this reminds any readers out there who've been considering giving this book a read to do so. just don't go out and kill that one shitty local band. you know the one i'm talking about.

[the following interview has been edited by both myself and jeff for length, context, clarity, and probably some other shit that's got fuck-all to do with you.]

c - i was particularly excited to read this novel, having read mira corpora and novi sad and seeing the jump to—i hate to say—a 'real' publisher.

j - a larger publisher.

c - yeah, moving into working with a major publishing house, as opposed to the sort of punk rock background. so with this, you did shop this book around fairly heavily beforehand?

j - i also shopped mira corpora around heavily before ending up at two dollar radio, and—weirdly for that book—some of the really nice rejections came from big publishers and some of the really dismissive rejections came from indie houses. so with this book i wanted to give it another shot at a major house. it had a long history because i had an agent for mira corpora and she read part of the manuscript for destroy all monsters and REALLY did not like it, and we couldn't find any common ground on it. so we parted ways and i had to find a new agent first. That took a while to find the right person. and then it was a question of sending it out to publishers before FSG finally read it. i was incredibly lucky because it had a number of rejections, but i ended up with my dream house. and I ended up with jeremy davies as editor—he used to work at dalkey archive and is the perfect person for the book. he’s steeped in european literature and rock music and art films. all important threads in destroy all monsters.

c - and you started drafts on this almost ten years ago?

j - well, my notes for it go back over ten years. i didn't start writing it until six years ago, something like that. there's a lot of projects where i'm constantly taking notes and they’re slowly growing and taking side A shape. when i finished the book and was shopping it around for an agent, i started to get haunted by the idea of it being like the A side of a vinyl single or cassette. So i began to wonder what the B side might be, and i started writing it. and FSG actually bought the book not having read the B side.

c - so ‘kill city’ [the B side] was—i hate to say an afterthought, because it feels like such a vital part of the book—but really came up very late in the process?

j - it came very late in the game. the A side, to me, felt complete for a long time, and then i just couldn't shake this idea of the B side. i had a lot of friends who told me that i was crazy writing the B side, and that i was making a difficult book twice as hard to sell. i finished putting a final polish on 'kill city' about two weeks before FSG bought it.

c - wow.

j - so the timing turned out to be really good. when i was initially working on the B side, initially i thought that it could be a stand-alone novella. i thought that maybe it would be like novi sad, a small book that someone else could publish, if necessary.

c - yeah, send it to michael [salerno, australian polymath and head of kiddiepunk] and do a small run of it...

j - yeah, I thought it would be a sister book. but as i was finishing the B side, and the more i was sitting with it and polishing it, i realized it needed to be under the same covers with the A side. the two pieces—the A side ['my dark ages'] and the B side—really formed the complete destroy all monsters and they were far more intertwined than novi sad and mira corpora were.

c - definitely. i really liked how the book read like music: there were a lot of little riffs and lines and themes that got repeated and reshuffled, and sort of brought to the forefront or mixed down, that would come up throughout the book; where you would have little lines that allude to the different shootings, and then once you get into a later section you follow one of the killers into a show and expand on that thought, and the way the little repetitions carry over into the B side. it gives it almost this ghostly quality, i guess?

j - absolutely.

c - it really...it just made for incredibly engrossing reading. i read it through the first time in about six hours; i couldn't put it down.

j - that's great. my goal was to make it as propulsive as possible. even though it is a strange book with a lot of repetitions that keep folding back on themselves, it's also moving ahead.

c - to change tack a little, something i noticed between this one, novi sad and mira corpora, the setting—though it never really explicitly states in either of the first two that they take place in arcadia—the way the scenery is put together with these crumbling post-industrial towns...it pops up a lot throughout your work, and that's not what i imagine charlotte to be like, i guess?

j - well, charlotte's a lot rawer than people think. i moved here from new york city, and a lot of friends were like, 'what's it like living in the country?' meanwhile, i was looking out my window and there's a sixteen-year-old prostitute on the corner who's eight months pregnant and being picked up by johns. she's being pimped by her boyfriend and lives with her family. so there are definitely parts of charlotte that aren't exactly bucolic. but it probably comes from a bunch of different places: i grew up in aruba. behind our house were the ruins of an old hospital and old WWII fortifications where they had gun turrets and a series of rusty pipes that you could walk on through these cactus fields. my parents would let my friends and me run loose for hours at a time and explore all of that. so that sort of decayed environment is familiar to me in a primal way. and then when i lived in NYC, i lived for a number of years in the dumbo neighborhood before it was gentrified, where there were all these ancient warehouses and power stations and cobblestone streets. i would take long walks through this area because that scenery is beautiful to me. but there’s also something that felt right, at least for destroy all monsters, to set it in a town like arcadia, because i think those sorts of cities—those rust belt/post-industrial cities—they tend to create these really tight-knit scenes: music scenes, art scenes, whatever. from places i've visited and friends i've known in places like that.

c - that's exactly what it made me think of: i have a lot of family around buffalo/niagara falls and there used to be a lot of industry there, but now there's just nothing. but there's this amazing, incestuous and tight-knit hardcore scene in buffalo, that, like, 'how the fuck do they have hardcore punk in buffalo?' is the first thought, but they have nothing else to do.

j - yeah, and cleveland in the 1970s was a post-industrial nightmare where their rivers were on fire, and that's where you get pere ubu and devo and the dead boys coming out of an incredible scene because there was nothing else to do, and they took that post-industrial environment and drew upon it to make really creative music. that environment can be really fertile creatively, and it can also feel really constraining, which also felt right as a place to explore after the epidemic in the novel starts.

c - and there's definitely that sort of aspect that i see a lot in smaller punk rock scenes that, 'at the end of the day nobody's paying attention to what we're doing anyway, so just go for it,' right?

j - totally.

c - my awareness of your work came about, really like a lot of my favorite recent artists that i've found over the last eight years or so, from the community around dennis cooper's blog, with people like yourself and michael [salerno] and benedetta [de alessi; illustrator/artist], in paris, and thomas moore and things like that. have aspects of that community been helpful to you in your writing? i know you have a fairly expansive network of people in charlotte and elsewhere to help out.

j - i've been on that blog, on-and-off, since its very early days. it was hugely important to me, especially when i initially moved down to charlotte and was more isolated. the blog turned me on to so many interesting writers, books, and movies, and visual art. Also the people I’ve met, including those who are no longer on the blog, like justin taylor and gregory howard. that community has been really important.

c - oh yeah, i find myself sharing things from there all the time, and i have to tell my friends, like, 'look, i know you don't like his writing and you think it's weird and it scares the crap out of you, but read his blog, because he's turned me on to so much cool stuff.'

j - i found the blog because i read my loose thread, which was the first book of dennis cooper’s that i read, and i loved it so much. i was curious about 'how do you create this?' and it was great to be able to ask him these questions in the comments and he would answer. it was inspiring to be able to talk to a writer at that level and find out what were they thinking about certain literary choices they made.

c - just the fact that he's so open about the process, he demystifies it like, 'yeah, here, this is what you do if you want to write and try to get published.' he almost gives people tutorials on how to get involved with their art and engage with it in a more direct way.

j - yeah, he's super generous. dennis is a complete mensch.

c - yeah, that would be the word i'd use. anyway, i brought that up because something i did notice in destroy all monsters was that stylistically, it moves around a lot. there's a kineticism to it, not necessarily just in the language, but in the fact that there are sections where every couple pages, you're switching narrators, POV, you're doing these little structural/stylistic things that could almost feel like just playing around and having fun, but are executed so well that it keeps you wanting to stay there, and you get to a new section and it's, 'oh, who's he writing about now?' and you're trying to piece that together from the little structural clues. like, i thought the whole section about the boy who woke up late, it took me until almost the end of that to realize that you were writing about one of the main characters. i thought it was about one of the killers.

j - good. yeah, that misdirection is built into it.

c - it reminded me, in the little sleights of hand that occur throughout, and the bipartite narrative—where it switches and you take the characters and reshuffle them—it reminded me of two of my favorite dennis cooper books, being period and the marbled swarm, where similar games are being played throughout the narrative, though his books are so NOT narrative-focused.

j - but there is a propulsiveness to his stuff, too. gregory howard read just the A side, and he said it reminded him of period, which had never occurred to me. but i was deeply flattered, of course.

c - isn't that the fun thing of putting a piece of art into the world and getting others' interpretations on it and going, 'no, you know, i never noticed that, but it's kind of cool'?

j - yeah, definitely. the structural inventions in destroy all monsters were not there to show off, they’re there to make it more propulsive and more immersive and more exciting for the reader. i've had people say it's so experimental, and i guess it is, but all the experimentation is problem solving aimed at making a more pleasurable and immersive experience for the reader.

c - i read it through and thought it was straightforward, almost?

j - until the B side...

c - it was still fairly narrative-driven. but within the workings of that, there's a lot of fun being had and it's that sort of—if it's just experimentation for the purpose of having fun and just fucking with the reader, ultimately, i (as a reader) feel like 'who gives a shit?' but if you do something experimental and bold and you have a great story and great themes behind it (which is the case here), it elevates the work from being just another book to being a truly exciting and original book.

j - thanks. when i was young, i had a theater teacher who drilled into my head that ideally there's no difference between form and content. at the highest level, they are the same thing. and that's definitely something i aim for as much as i can.

c - to kind of go back and say that you've had people tell you it's this really experimental novel, to me, it didn't feel like that and i'm sure to yourself it didn't feel like that, but then again, we come from the background of reading cooper and mallarme and more out-there writers, where most people are used to these single-protagonist, standard narrative things where all the threads are tied up neatly into a little package at the end of the book. this doesn't necessarily leave that, which i really enjoyed.

j - there’s a huge disconnect between experimental fiction and mainstream american fiction. a lot of publishers who just read the A side, which i thought was very straightforward, were freaked out by it, by how odd it was, how different it was. a lot of the experimentation in the book are also deeply embedded. i did try to kind of 'trojan horse' this to a certain extent, to give the book a smooth surface sheen and if you want to notice some of the deeper experimentation that's happening and sink into that, you can. but you can also look past that if you want to.

c - it's not in your face, like, 'look at all this weird shit that I’m doing in this book.' it's there if you want to get in there and actually dissect the mechanics of how the narrative is assembled, but if you don't care about any of that you can just read it straight through and it lends itself well to that.

j - that approach felt right for this story.

c - where mira corpora and novi sad had almost like a ghost-like quality to them—and i'm not really sure even entirely what that says, but at the end of both of those, i felt like i left with more questions than i had answers and definitely more questions than i had going in—with destroy all monsters, it felt when you got to the end of it that it was a good ending point and—something i really liked about it—the book was almost hermetically sealed where it...obviously with the theme of mass killings at concerts, it could be this very timely political screed about gun culture in america, or whatever. but instead it creates this really tight little world where it refers to itself and only itself but without being winking or cloying or annoying and cute about it—it creates this world where it echoes itself throughout the text in a really immersive way. it really felt like for 300-ish pages that 'this is the only world you need to care about right now.'

j - well good, thanks. two of the early reactions: don delillo read it and he said that it reminded him of an ancient folk tale, which was really cool. and then when ben marcus read it, he said that it felt like a clear vision of the future and it felt like a really timely story. they each isolated something that's hopefully happening simultaneously in the book. i was trying to draw on something that's contemporary but also be steeped in rituals and dream logic and an underlying hermetic mythology.

c - yes. something that i really got into, too, was that—especially once you get into the back half of side A—it quits engaging with the epidemic and it starts engaging with the survivors and their aftermaths. and i noticed that a lot of the sort of key events in the story are: they're putting on a show to pay tribute to their friend who was killed at his last show and then they're going out to the woods to sing a song for their two friends who are now dead. [there's a] line in there when xenie and eddie are walking out in the woods and she says 'do you ever feel like the dead feel like they're haunted by the living?' and that line tied the book together for me because so much of it was concerned with these little rituals that we do to mark the absence of someone who's no longer there.

j - and one thing that has not come up in any of the reviews yet is that it's deeply a book about grief. that’s not something i wanted to put on the flap copy. but a friend of mine read it whose mother had passed away not so long ago and he was talking about how xenie's grief felt so real to him. i was really happy to hear that and that he could read it through that lens. hopefully there are a lot of different entry points into the book, depending on how you're coming at it, but i was glad that it was useful for my friend to read it from the grief angle. the A side and the B side offer two different paths to overcoming grief. the characters choose radically different ways: the way xenie chooses to overcome shaun and the way shaun chooses to overcome xenie are very, very different.

c - hers felt more confrontational and his felt more conciliatory.

j - totally. hers is, 'this all needs to be erased.'

c - yes! obliterate all traces and...destroy all monsters! holy shit, i just got the title! [laughs] and i really did love the setting of it. i spent my teenage and early twenties playing in bands, and going to see my friends' bands play, and everyone i knew was in a band. so when [xenie] said the real rebellious thing you can do now is not be in a band—i saw you mention this in another interview—that difference is now that music's all digital: when i had my first jobs in high school, every friday i would hop on the bus and ride over to the university campus because that's where the two cool record stores in town were. i would spend my day just acquiring music, where now i just go on my phone and just 'oh, i've heard good things about those guys, i'll check it out.' and you lose that deep connection in some ways—like, my memory on my phone is maxed out with music, but nine times out of ten i'll start listening to some new album and decide it doesn't grab me and i end up listening to funhouse or exile on main street again.

j - [laughs] right, right. so many of my favorite records were things that i didn't like at first and the only reason i kept listening to them is because i had paid for them and i was determined to get my money's worth.

c - 'this was an import and i am NOT wasting $25.'

j - yeah! like pere ubu's dub housing: at first I was like 'what is this shit?' but i kept playing it because it cost me some serious money and eventually loved it. some of those records took a number of spins before they clicked, but when they did, they also shifted my perception about the possibilities of music. but it wouldn't have happened if i hadn't put all those extra listens into it because i felt invested in it. but now, i'm sure there's records that i streamed and said 'that's pretty good' but never went back to, where if i gave it another five or six listens, something revelatory might happen.

c - the first album that i had that sort of moment with was loveless when i was a freshman or sophomore in high school. and just on first listen i thought—and around the same time, it was them and also jane doe by converge—both had the similar effect on me of 'i don't understand this, i feel like i'm standing in the middle of a tornado,' but the more i listened to it—like, after i got each of those records—i was listening to them constantly on my headphones for like two weeks because i had decided that i didn't get it but i needed to figure it out.

j - i had a similar thing with loveless where i dismissed it at first but i kept coming back to it and finally, when it clicked, i listened to it all the time.

c - i was at school one day and i got up early that day to get high at my friend's house before school, and i was sitting in class with my headphones on pretending to sleep. and i sat up and said 'there are actually songs on this fucking album!' like, once the wash of backwards reverb and feedback started to fade away, you could see the really pop construction of their songs, which then carries to something like destroy all monsters where once you strip away the shifting narratives and the reshuffled characters and repetitions, at its heart it is really a book looking at how people deal with grief and loss.

j - yeah, and that grief and loss is partly, i think, a loss for people, but it's also a sense of loss for the cultural possibility of music meaning something more than it does now. that cultural spark that helped electrify music so that communities could form around certain bands, identities could form around certain bands, that’s mostly missing now. there’s barely a culture of people listening to the same bands anymore.

c - i've definitely noticed that with my friends that have similar taste, i thought. like, we're all into bowie and sonic youth and mbv or whatever, but we'll meet up and recommend new bands to each other and none of our bands are even remotely the same. like, if we each name ten new bands, there might be one match.

j - yeah, it's true. the band i'm has a fairly large age range, and it's amazing how little there is in common—we sometimes don't know a lot of each other’s musical touchstones.

c - it feels like something that's happening more toward the future, where like with my group of friends, there are a lot of us that came of age in the 90s so we all have these similar touchstones and signifiers. but as the culture got more atomized, we're all coming from the same background, we all know fugazi, and the beastie boys, and sleater-kinney, but now it's completely new stuff and we all recommend bands to each other that we're sure no one's gonna get around to listening to.

j - it's an issue across the arts. the book is using music to talk about something larger. one of the questions is: how do you make art that has stakes when people aren't paying attention? it just gets lost in the cultural noise, gets swallowed in the sense of information overload. and how do you make something that isn't just adding to the noise and making the problem worse?

c - i was talking to my mother like a week ago and she was reading—justine bateman just put out memoirs and she was talking about family ties—that's the show she was on, right? anyway, that was this huge cultural phenomenon and fifty million people watched it every week and that was a top-rated show with like a quarter of the population of the country watching it.

j - yeah, the first season of twin peaks the viewership was like thirty million watching david lynch's weird shit. that stuff could move the cultural needle in a way that is just not possible now. i heard kendrick lamar complaining recently about how fast damn. disappeared. and he's not wrong, but if kendrick lamar thinks he’s not getting enough attention, what hope does anyone else have? we're at this crazy phase where stuff is just being consumed and made disposable so quickly, and i think that's happened with music more than anything else. because music can be so quickly devoured, it's been the first casualty. movies are becoming a casualty too, but because they're a little bit longer, because it takes at least ninety minutes to devour a movie versus three minutes, it has a little bit more protection. weirdly, i think books have been somewhat safer from being devoured by the internet just because it takes so long to read a book. with the caveat that the internet has destroyed everyone's attention span and no one reads.

c - i think that might be part of it. i like to hope that we're not turning into a nation of illiterates, but...

j - i hope not too. but i do think, in some ways, that books have benefited from the internet because there's been this information exchange that wasn't around when i was young. because of things like dennis's blog, it's so much easier now to find out about really cool, unusual books and writers. there's a lot of great small presses that are reissuing lost treasures. it's easier to hook into weird stuff that used to be like secret handshakes. you had to know someone who knew this alain robbe-grillet novel or whatever. and that's just not the case anymore. it's easier to disseminate that information in a positive way. the fact that a book is a physical object still means something, too. it's nice that e-book sales keep going down.

c - yeah. like, i can't read stuff on a tablet and i think a lot of people do feel that way. i had a kindle, and it can fit however many thousands of books on there, but...i like having a book.

j - i see the benefit of it if you're someone who's constantly travelling; if you're an artist who's on tour all the time, that's when a kindle starts to make sense. but I don’t like them either. for me, it's important that my novels are nice objects and do something within the physical form. the layout of destroy all monsters was crucial and i worked on it from the early stages of drafting. same thing with mira corpora and novi sad.

c - i really enjoyed novi sad because it was very stripped down. i've hit a point, over the last few years especially, where nothing makes me happier than to see someone put out a great piece of art that has no frills, no fat, they trimmed it down to the bare fucking essentials and just put it out there. it implies ultimate faith in what you've created because instead of putting all these bells and whistles and ballast on it, you put it out there unadorned like, 'yeah, it's only seventy pages. but guess what? there's a lotta shit in that seventy pages.'

j - i like stuff like that too. destroy all monsters looks a lot longer than it is. side A's word count is shorter than mira corpora.

c - that's something i noticed and it reminded me of bret ellis's early work in that respect because it was a lot of short sections that had a really nice cumulative effect where they built on each other but they also kept you reading because they're so short that you go, 'oh yeah, i'll read another section. i can get a couple more pages in.'

j - good, i'm glad it worked that way because i like stuff like that where it's like, 'oh, i'm kinda tired but...I’ll read just a couple more pages.'

c - 'the next chapter's only a page and a half. i can do that.'

j - [laughs]

c - going back to music, i remember like twelve years ago or however long it was, when i would start a band or my friends would start a band and we would all agree that it was great if we all managed to start and stop a song at the same time, like that was a huge thing to be proud of. but then recently some of my friends are making music that i'm not really a fan of and think is mediocre, and i want to support my friends...but i also don't want to aid and abet the spread of sub-commercial mediocrity in this world. and it pushed me away from that in some ways, so when xenie says the true act of rebellion now is not to be in a band because everyone is doing it...

j - there's definitely this idea of silencing yourself as an act of rebellion. that the generous artistic gesture is not to share something. of course, with xenie it's complicated because it comes at a cost. she's maybe a person who shouldn't silence herself, and yet she is. and that's where her dilemma lies. rather than taking the risk of adding to the noise and the mediocrity, she's just gonna cut off that part of herself as an act of rebellion. in a culture of information overload, saying almost nothing is a possible rebellion; in the same way that in a culture of hedonism and overconsumption, straight edge was a protest against that.

c - it's an idea of negation.

j - totally. it’s an open question for the reader how positive of a gesture that actually is.

c - it could be read defensively, but it could also be read as a really succinct 'fuck you.' like, 'yeah, the song in my heart is beautiful, but i'm not gonna let you hear it and nothing you say or do is gonna make me allow you to hear it.'

j - i went to a talk last fall by will oldham. he's been writing new songs and he had no plans to record them. because of streaming and the internet, he feels the contract between the listener and the musician has been broken. people don't listen to his music with the attention he wants, so he's not going to share his music. it was kinda creepy to hear him talk about that, but it was fascinating.

c - that was brought up in the book too, how she has this hard drive full of songs but that the acquiring of the songs themselves became more important than actually listening to the stuff. i mean, i've got apple music on my phone, and there will be days where i'll go through like, 'oh, i haven't heard that. let me add that, and that, and that, that, that...' and if it doesn't [end up] on my playlist that i listen to when i'm sleeping, i might not even get around to playing it.

j - my friend says he's on the 'browse only' netflix plan, because he spends like an hour before bed just adding shows to his queue but not watching anything.

c - i've done that one a lot.

j - me too. i think it's a common thing.

c - or 'oh, so-and-so's recommended this show to me, i should start watching it.' and half an hour later i'm rewatching some marc maron special that i've seen fifty times.

j - right, yeah.

c - in side B, you start engaging with the killings themselves. there's a lot of geographic movement. there's a kineticism to it that just pulled me right in.

j - it took a long time to figure out how to get those killings right. i'm glad that came across.

c - there's that issue where you don't want to glorify it, but you also can't gloss over it since it's the central thrust of the narrative.

j - also, i wanted it to be dramatic but also leave enough room that people could navigate it without feeling numbed out by it. the repetition was important because that's what an epidemic is, this onslaught that keeps happening; but I wanted to do it in a way that the reader doesn't feel traumatized by it but still feels activated and engaged.

c - an epidemic is repetition, so if you look at it on a large scale, it's the same thing happening each time, but zoom in and each person who's affected by that is obviously going to be affected much more deeply.

j - it's a unique experience, yeah.

c - because for them, it's probably the first time they saw someone get killed.

j - hopefully.

c- ideally, yes. [both laugh] i really loved especially, in 'kill city,' the little interludes between the killings in the first section. are those supposed to be different narrators? because it felt like it really shifted around a lot, that there were similar thematic elements, but that it was going between xenie and shaun and even at some points it felt like you were writing from the perspective of one of the killers.

j - you mean like the sections with 'you do this. you do that'? they're all following the same killer. it's pretty subtle but you’re following the first killer and he loops back around to the very first killing. in the north carolina killing, he enters the club and sees this banner and stops to read it, and that makes him feel okay to go inside the VFW hall and start shooting people. and in the 'you' section, you realize that the banner says 'welcome home.' it's another looping back on itself. shaun talks about how xenie kept replaying these scenarios in her mind of what the first killer was like. in my mind—and you can read it a number of different ways –these sections are xenie's imagining of what led up to the first killing. in that opening section, she asks shaun: 'what led up to the killing? what happened before the first shot? there's always something before the beginning.' so this is her imagining that 'beginning before the beginning': what did the killer go through that led him to walk into that VFW hall in north carolina? it's meant to be initially disorienting. It also mirrors of the section of the boy with long hair on Side A, except this kid has no hair. at first you're not exactly sure, and 'how does this relate? where is this in time?' and it's moving in time in a different way than the section it's cross-cutting between, which also echoes the opening of side A.

c - it really struck me right away on the first read, the recursiveness of it. even when it moves forward, it still draws you back like, 'wait, he mentioned that a few pages back.'

j - even the last chapter of side A is in some ways a redrawing of the epidemic—with deer instead of humans. but then in side B, i used 'you' because i also wanted there to be a shift, so there's a lot of second person. and in the middle section of 'kill city,' shaun is addressing xenie as 'you' in his mind. and then the last section is this collective dream that's a plural 'YOU.' the point of view switch is a way to wrench the reader into a different reality: the reality of side B.

c - it's very effective.

j - i had a professor who taught a class on music and rhetoric and he said there are all these forms that musicians put into classical composition, and it doesn't matter whether you can pick them out, that's not the point. the point is that they subconsciously shape how you experience them. so there's a lot of structural devices in destroy all monsters and it doesn't matter if you notice it. but it's hopefully guiding your reading of it regardless.

c - and we kind of talked about that earlier, but it goes back to that thing where it's experimental but without being annoying or in your face about it, and it's a narrative that carries the reader. as a reader, i love nothing more than to put my trust in a storyteller and say 'take me somewhere new.' and this does that. i hate to say you 'play' the reader because it sounds accusatory, but there are those little things that a less close reader or a less well-versed reader in literary theory might not pick up on these things, but they're still there and they're still having that effect and that impact, still pushing forward and coloring how you read the book, even if you don't notice that it's there.

j - right, it's not about noticing. those things are still functioning.

c - and sometimes noticing the mechanics of those things can dull the impact.

j - if it’s too flashy, for sure. that’s why i tried to embed it rather than call attention to it. it's something that you might notice on a second or third read, but ideally not on the first read because you're so immersed in the story and the characters that you're not concerned with the mechanics. it's also important that the book is still an open text: that there's a lot of room for the reader to roam and make their own associations and attach their own feelings and opinions to what happens. it’s not telling you how to feel about events. that's important to me literally. and politically, too.

c - something, for example, that drew me to dennis cooper's work is that he doesn't editorialize. he doesn't tell the reader how to feel or think, he just presents the action.

j - he makes you work for your empathy. the empathy isn't presented in a pat way where you can forget about it. you actually have to earn it and that’s much more powerful. there's so much contemporary american fiction that holds the reader's hand and tells them how to feel at every point. and that alone is politically regressive. regardless of whether the other content is progressive.

c - that you may agree with entirely.

j - exactly. but if you're in that same spot where you don't have to actively think and navigate something for yourself, it's inviting you to go back to sleep. and i think that's a real problem. I’ve tried hard to write books where you have to be an active reader for it to work.

[our interview resumes several days later]

c - anyway. destroy all monsters has, thematically, with the gun violence angle and a large part of the book being about how people process grief, those two realms could very easily slide into sappy, sentimental schmaltz or, on the gun violence end of it, it could turn into this neoliberal screed...did you find yourself trying to push it in directions that would stray from that? did you ever find when you were writing that it risked falling into that trap and had to move the writing?

j - yeah. especially with writing scenes around grief and scenes that are more emotional, it was tough to find the right balance when sometimes these characters weren’t very expressive about their feelings, but the reader needed to understand them. and sometimes the characters were overly-dramatic in their angst and I tried to find ways to undercut that. and there are other times where there are really emotional scenes, and trying to find ways to write them so the emotion came across but it wasn't sentimental.

c - wasn't like a 'hallmark movie of the week.'

j - it was a challenge to find that line and make sure that it was on the right side of it, where it was still being expressive and communicative, but not being lazy and overwrought. with the gun violence—well, it's not just gun violence because there are knives and explosives intentionally in the mix so it won't seem like a sociological examination. as i said, my notes for this go back over ten years. america's a very violent country , and it has been for a very long time. but these mass shootings weren't happening on nearly the scale and with the insane frequency that they're happening now. and we certainly didn't have the government reacting by passing laws that would make it more likely to keep happening. we weren't caught in this vicious cycle that we are now. all that has come to the fore in the past couple of years. after sandy hook, attitudes about shootings changed pretty radically. and then after parkland, they shifted again. and i'd already drafted a fair amount of the book pre-sandy hook. so it was the same challenge i had with mira corpora, which was how to depict violence in a way that it wasn't some gimmick or hook. that the violence and its aftermath had a reality for the characters. and to dramatize its impact but do it in a way that the reader didn't feel like, ‘i can't take this anymore,' and tune out.

c - you don't get that 120 days of sodom desensitization at the end of it.

j - that may be part of what sade's going for, but that's not what i was going for here. i didn't want to desensitize people. just the opposite, in fact. so I used a lot of different strategies for narrating it where that would happen. that took a number of drafts to get working.

c - those sections particularly, especially when you get into 'kill city' and you start going through the epidemic from the killers' perspective[s], there was almost that dry minimalist thing where the violence is described very matter-of-factly, but it was still engaging. the emotional content was foregrounded.

j - part of what's happening in those scenes is that it's narrated from this weird POV where the narrator is almost running alongside the action and trying to tell you what's happening but they don’t have any psychological insight into the killers, and so they’re guessing what the killers might be thinking or about to do. i thought of it in some ways as someone doing a DVD commentary for a movie they're seeing for the first time and having to describe to people what they’re seeing, what’s happening. i tried to get an urgency baked into the prose that way. also, as the killings go along in 'kill city', the moment of violence starts moving further and further off the page until the very last one we don't even meet the killer. they're somewhere in the crowd at the street fair.

c - it goes back to how the book folds back in on itself. i like to stick with the musical theme and say that it feeds back on itself.

j - totally. that's a better way to say it.

c - and the further i got into the book, the little repetitions kept the momentum up for me BECAUSE they were mixed around and shuffled around a bit so that every time you saw them it was different phrases grouped together so they had different impacts.

j - i'm glad that worked. it's always tricky with repetition, how much is enough that you get the feel of the repetition, which i think is really important in dramatizing an epidemic, and then when is something too much. it's such a fine line to walk. i spent a lot of going back and forth figuring out the ideal number. how to present and frame the material in the most effective way.

c - the 'birds' interludes in 'my dark ages'...i don't know if you can hear them in the background, but i keep finches. i have eight of them.

j - ah, i was wondering what that was!

c - but those little vignettes, in a book that has already so many different narrators and shifting points-of-view, were brief but there wasn't a wasted word in them. they still had emotional heft to them. is it florian imagining what his mother would say to him in those situations?

j - that's an interesting question. they could be taken a number of different ways, one of which would be florian imagining his mother. another could be quite literally his mother narrating these sections from beyond the grave.

c - it almost felt to me like—and i don't even know why it got into my head—but you know sometimes when parents will have a terminal illness, and they'll die before their kid gets to grow up with them, so they'll write them letters or leave them a video or something like that...it almost felt like it could've been like a little folder of cards that, even though her death was unexpected: open these when you're older and they'll make sense to you.

j - yeah, I could see that. it's like she's trying to use the birds, talking about the birds to talk to her son about other things, or florian imagines her talking to him, giving him advice about these situations through the birds. there's also this different sense of music—a non-human form. We often attach a certain meaning or emotion to birdsong that may not be there for the birds.

c - it does tie into when xenie is talking about driving and she puts on a song that used to have huge impact for her but now doesn't hold any import. it parallels it from another side of it, that something someone put together and spent a lot of time making—'this is music'—just kind of becomes meaningless.

j - it's such an awful feeling when you revisit something that meant a lot to you and you can't figure out what you liked about it. it just doesn't contain that anymore.

c - where you go back to an album that you were really connected to at a certain age, and it just doesn't speak to you [anymore].

j - i've had that happen with movies and books too. there are certain things i'm almost afraid to revisit...

c - there are a few on my shelf that i don't want to ruin.

j - it also echoes the conversation that xenie and eddie have in the woods where he talks about the album that his father destroyed because it was too negative and it actually wasn't negative enough for him. it couldn't contain the extremity of emotion that he needed it to. i think that's what xenie feels. there's an extremity of experience and emotion she needs that the music isn’t providing her anymore.

c - where she used to be able to hang her feelings on a song and say 'this is me,' now that something in her life has happened that's catastrophic..

j - she feels this before the epidemic happens though. that's what she points out to eddie in the woods, too. this is all before. it's now come horribly true for her, but it starts before.

c - that's right. i hadn't noticed that. we kinda got into, previously, the design of the book and i know you mentioned you were pretty involved with that. now, was that all the way down to picking the fonts even?

j - they picked the font, but i really wanted the design to mimic how i laid it out in the manuscript. and it mostly does mirror how the sections are spaced and broken up. when i'm working on early drafts, i am thinking about the layout and how things look on the page and that is important to me. sometimes the solution to a narrative problem comes through layout. every now and then, a problem that seemed like a story problem is actually a layout problem.

c - you get it set on the page, and then everything comes into focus better.

j - yeah, like thought breakouts of the characters in part two of 'my dark ages' and part two of 'kill city': when i finally figured out how that should be laid out, it finally felt like you're dipping into and out of the thoughts of the characters. like you're getting quick x-rays of florian's mind, or xenie's or shaun's mind.

c - the layouts almost mirror what's going on within each side in that side A is a bit more sprawling and open of a story, kind of expansive and externally-focused, where 'kill city,' other than the 'you' sections, is a lot more inner-focused and more tightly framed, i guess.

j - yeah, it's definitely more tightly framed, it's also more thematically organized. the A side is more organized around a narrative that goes from point A to point C in time, where parts of 'kill city' are more thematically and conceptually linked to each other.

c - but narratively, it's more amorphous.

j - yeah, you have the killings; and then this one night of the funeral; and then the collective dream. they're all related to each other and they overlap, but it's looser. you know, a B side should be a bit more challenging than an A side. The B side also consciously uses 'you' a lot—the second person— so that it feels like you are in a different space.

c - especially when it shifts in that last section, in the dream, from...it's like 'you' as 'we/they' as opposed to 'you' as 'i/you.'

j - exactly.

c - it does that same thing where it almost pushes you to step outside of it for a second.

j - yes, step outside, but hopefully it's also putting the reader more directly inside this dream, which maybe they don't want to inhabit. it's also echoing the dream in 'my dark ages' that florian and xenie share, those dreams of the killings that they have trouble shaking off.

c - when part two of 'kill city' starts to...

j - yeah, when it starts to infect the text. you get little variations on some of what you'll see later. there are a couple of reviews that say like, 'oh, it gets a little baggy with all the variation on these repetitions'—which i get—but the repetitions and the variations in the repetitions are important for those musical reasons like you first mentioned.

c - exactly. what happens in most good pieces of music? they'll find riffs and themes and they will be repeated and a lot of times, they'll be repeated with subtle variations. and that's what’s supposed to be what causes music to stick in your head. it was almost like watching a rock tumble down a hill and create an avalanche; the repetition kept it moving. it felt like reading—i come back to the same thing—it really read like music to me, which was great.

j - that's great. i'm glad that came across. in one of their best songs, mark e smith from the fall advises that we follow the three Rs: repetition, repetition, repetition. i'm a big believer in that.

Destroy All Monsters by Jeff Jackson available here.