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NOW HE SEES SHADOWS by Gregg Williard

March 14, 2019

“Painting has been real eye opening for me. I mean, now I see shadows.”

-George W. Bush

I wanted to serve as an advisor to President Bush and his cabinet. I was 60 and had no qualifications. It would have taken years to move through academia and politics before I had even a remote chance of gaining access, so I decided to go the military route. I’d become a soldier. A soldier of art. When I reached the president and the cabinet all I wanted was to show them a bunch of my favorite books, movies, music and art and hang out with all of them, watch and read stuff and talk, because I believe in the transformative power of art. If Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Cheney and Powell could learn to appreciate painting and fiction and films, especially low budget 1950’s and ‘60’s horror and science fiction and metaphysical noir thrillers (things like Figures in a Landscape or Vanishing Point or even Who’ll Stop the Rain or El Topo or Kiss Me Deadly or Not of This Earth) it would be impossible for them to carry out misguided or malevolent policies and pointless wars.

I was the manager of a movie rental store and too old to enlist. My previous employment was in Mental Health (Art Therapy) and teaching (English as a Second Language). I was and am reasonably fit from walking and climbing, but hate competitive athletics and sports/military culture. I was a Conscientious Objector during Viet Nam and oppose our foreign policy in the Middle East. I read constantly but I am not an academic. I have poor study skills and barely earned a B.A. I’m obsessed with art: painting, books, movies and music. Some of my favorite writers are Fernando Pessoa, Jorge Luis Borges and Raymond Roussel, Flannery O’Conner, Robert Stone, Elizabeth Hardwick, Ben Lerner, Leslie Scalapino; Some of the musicians are Robert Johnson, Tom Waits, Bernard Herrmann, Brian Eno and Arcade Fire; or painters like H.C. Westerman, Pieter Brueghel, Henry Darger, Philip Guston, Charles Burns, Art Spiegelman, Charles Birchfield, Ed Valentine and Fred Valentine, Manuel Ocampo, Shusaku Arakawa; or filmmakers : David Lynch, Guy Madden, Maya Duran, Fritz Lang, Orson Welles, Steve DeJarnett (Miracle Mile), and Fred Wilcox (Forbidden Planet). Besides watching movies or reading or seeing and talking about art and drawing and writing my idea of fun is being left alone with a sketchbook, a notebook, some papermate black medium point pens and a thermos of dark coffee.

But I wanted to be a soldier. It had a lot to do with reading Robert Heinlein as a kid. I grew up devouring his stories of skinny, unpromising kids who find they have a special talent for combat, boxing, martial arts, flying planes, leadership, tolerance for pain or grace under fire. I believed I was meant to be one of these boys or men, and decided it must be true because this belief persisted in the complete absence of any supporting facts or experiences. For example, I discovered on the playground that I was not a natural leader, and never would be. I was not tough. I did not win the respect of my teammates and teachers through sheer spunk, grit and will. I was not the favorite of toughened war vet teachers or stern martial arts instructors because of my great determination and spirit. I was never in a fist fight, or later, a fire fight. I did not have a natural talent for shooting guns, or breaking them down and reassembling them in the dark. In the rain. I joined the Boy Scouts, but never advanced beyond Tenderfoot and quit after 4 months. (I never learned the correct way to tie my scout kerchief). I took up Karate, Judo, Tai Chi, Tai Kwon Do and Aikido but quickly dropped them because of my lack of coordination, panicked resistance to building physical memory and jumpy aversion to discomfort, let alone pain.

So I worked out really hard (High Intensity Interval Turbulence Training), dyed my white hair brown, and paid the kid across the street to make me a fake ID. I managed to squeeze into the National Guard, and then the Regulars. (The recruiting offices had quotas to fill so they were far less discriminating than usual). A female soldier I was close to that likes guns and fighting practiced with me, which helped a little. Real Basic Training was very difficult, not only because of my age but also my lack of coordination, panicked resistance to building physical memory and jumpy aversion to discomfort, let alone pain. Even harder was the lack of privacy. The only time I was left alone for three or four hours with a notebook, sketchbook, black papermate medium point pens and a canteen of coffee was after lights out, and by then I was too tired to draw or write anything. And like in Elementary, Jr. High and High School I was not tough, or a natural leader or a favorite of my platoon. They had only disdain for my jumpy aversion to discomfort let alone pain and my lack of coordination. The guy on the bunk above me said his favorite movie was Starship Troopers, directed by Paul Verhoeven, based on the Heinlein novel. I was immediately relieved, but as we talked, I realized he didn’t think it was an ironic critique of fascist science fiction action films disguised as a fascist science fiction action film at all, but was actually just a science fiction action film, critiquing lazy civilians and intelligent bugs.

“But the officers’ uniforms look just like the Nazis,” I said. His reply: “Have you looked at our helmets lately, dude?”

Because of my writing and art background my female soldier friend thought I’d be a natural for Officer’s Training, or a Psy Ops specialization that would take me off the field, where I seemed to be mostly useless. From a distance I sort of resembled a soldier. But like the Boy Scouts, I couldn’t wait to go inside and be left alone for three or four hours with a notebook, a sketch book, some black medium point papermate pens and dark coffee.

The Specialist tests were difficult. My panicked resistance to building physical memory made me slow at the keyboard. My poor study skills had me scoring too low to even join the C.O.’s secretarial pool.

But the female soldier, now Sgt. Marie Falcone (my girlfriend in art school until she dropped out to join the military) was eager to help. Like I have all my life, I’d rather hang out with girls and women than boys and men. Sex seemed to be the one physical, collaborative activity that I am “good at,” that I can find myself in doing. In basic we did extra field practice off hours with a variety of knives, semi-automatic weapons and grenades. She was an excellent hand-to hand combat teacher, due to her infinite patience and slow, reassuring hand movements. Even when she was simulating breaking my back or crushing my thorax in slow motion (maybe especially then!) I felt a safety and acceptance that eluded me in the barracks with the guys. And one of her favorite movies was Dark City! She’d read the P.O.W. literature, (especially James Stockdale, Epictetus and the stoics) and had wilderness survival and training in S.E.R.E. (Survival, Evasion Resistance and Escape). She could munch on maggots like they were M&M’s. What a great girlfriend!

Later, (and with some doctoring of records by Sgt. Falcone) I managed to pass my exams and combat training requirements. Because of my background as an Art Therapist I was reclassified with a GS-15 in Psychological Evaluations of returning troops. This involved asking soldiers to draw a house, tree and person. Many of the soldiers were on stop loss before rotation back to active duty, and I was to be alert to trees without leaves, and houses on treads. One of the soldiers I interviewed drew a tree on treads, and a house on fire. He wanted a Hor de Combat (or deKON ba – “out of the fight “) ruling. I told him to take the treads off the tree and the fire off the house. He got the ruling. I realized that in my position I could help other soldiers in the same way, especially older ones who had already done multiple tours in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Over the next few months I approved psychiatric exemptions for dozens of stop loss candidates. I found paranoid-schizophrenic diagnostic cues in their projective drawings and tests, and in our private sessions we hung out and talked about, read and watched many movies and books. Another of the soldiers I helped had a father with Washington connections and friends in the Department of Defense. I was offered a posting at the Pentagon as an Intelligence Analyst. I brought along now Captain Falcone as my aide.

Losing my way in the Pentagon came easy because of my panicked resistance to building memory, but Captain Falcone had an excellent sense of direction. We made a good team, and I was recommended for another promotion (with her as my aide). My/Our record reflected a unique melding of combat skills, historical and psychological perspectives and aesthetic sensibility. I was a soldier with fresh ideas. “Not since T.E. Lawrence” sneered a jealous colleague at the Pentagon water cooler as I moved my things out of the small office in the 8th corridor of D Ring to the bigger office in the 7th corridor of C Ring.

From the bigger office we made appointments and prepared reports. I wrote about what I know, and love best: science fiction surreal thriller visionary movies, books and paintings. “It’s like this,” one report began. “It is no accident that Paul Verhoeven is the director of Total Recall and Starship Troopers, the former based on a Philip K. Dick story, and the latter on a novel by Robert Heinlein. The continuum from Heinlein to Dick so perfectly realized in these two films by Verhoeven is the quivering tightrope our foreign policy walks every day.”

I wasn’t able to meet with Cheney but managed to secure time with Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and the President.

Initially they were puzzled by my recommendations: to view a compilation of selected films, read and discuss a stack of paperback books, and listen to music from CDs. They all complained that they were too busy, but I turned to Donald Rumsfeld and said, “Mr. Secretary, when was the last time that you went to a movie, read a book, heard music or saw art that made you say, ‘that is so cool!’” the Def Sec did a squint and scowl into an acrid middle distance that way that he did; the Secretary of State stood at his side but was set aside, that way that he sat; the National Security Advisor (Condoleezza Rice) crossed her arms and glared, that way that she crossed and glared. I got a tart reminder from Dr. Rice that she is a classically trained pianist, and enjoys Dostoyevsky in the original Russian, facts that I knew already and appreciated. She said that Dostoyevsky’s politics were distinctly conservative, and that if he were alive today, he would surely be a supporter of the president. As she spoke her irises hung very high in her eye sockets, exposing the sclera below, possibly displaying the sanpacu condition of acute spiritual distress. Condoleezza probably had a much finer

artistic sensibility than I do, so my single “arty” claim to distinction among the members of the cabinet seemed kind of worthless. She appeared to sense this and interrogated my dyed brown hair with pitiless sanpacu. I soldiered on.

I struggled to frame the fundamental questions in the right way. The questions that, if at least considered, could promote saner foreign and domestic policies. In so many words: how can you love, really Mozart, and still support this president? Why won’t you all at least try reading Philip K. Dick or Franz Kafka or Bruno Schultz or William Gibson, Kelly Link, George Saunders, Rebecca Solnit, H.P.

Lovecraft, Thomas Ligotti? Mr. Secretary of Defense, for the love of (your) God, sit down with some good buttered popcorn and Diet Rite and watch Eraserhead! Or here, how about David Cronenberg’s They Came from Within or Scanners or Videodrome or Existenz ? Surely all of you must notice the vast world of living art, film, literature, music, performance all around you! Do you think all of this stuff is just, like, marginal weirdness that doesn’t have anything to do with the “real” world, or what?

The Secretary of Defense watched me. There was a snap to his voice like those little semaphore flags in the wind. In a tight, tart voice he reminded me that throughout history culture has been one thing, and politics another; that the Nazis loved Wagner, that the Greeks butchered the Melians. He sure knew his history. And of course, he was a real soldier and I was a fraud. But the question remained: if they were so smart, what were they doing doing what they were doing?

On a personal level the President seemed like an OK guy. I felt dizzy with the disconnect. Clearly his niceguyness did not translate into nice, even sane, leadership. I discussed with him as best I could the worlds of culture that surrounded the White House like a great strange sea. “It’s a science fiction/thriller/surreal world, Mr. President,” I said. I talked for a long time about how it feels to really love certain books, poems, paintings. He listened politely and then he said preferred TV, and his favorite book was the Bible. “I appreciate your point of view,” he told me. “But many Americans do not enjoy modern art or space stories. That’s what makes our democracy great. And why the enemies of freedom hate us.”

He didn’t understand, and I don’t understand. Sure, there are creepy people who love Forbidden Planet and Jim Thompson, Ed Wood and William Burroughs, Luis Bunuel and John Ashbery, Edgar Allen Poe and George Pal, Emily Dickinson and Roger Corman, Battlestar Galactica and Things to Come, Denys Wortman, The Day the Earth Stood Still and the music of Harry Partch and Arvo Pärt, and The Clash. But they don’t become the “evil doers,” the right-wing zealots, do they?

NAKED STEW by Michael Graves

March 11, 2019

Today is Saturday, another date with my kitchen floor. While Gram’s famous hot dog stew simmers, I admire the double-mopped laminate that has already been host to four veteran potlucks.

Kurt’s pickup bleats, turning into the driveway. Spears of oak and birch fill the sagging bed. Kurt sees me at the screen door and side grins, his cauliflower ears pink from the chill.

“Floors are dry,” I holler.

He almost tumbles from the cab. “You sure? Want me to drive around the block a few times like last week?”

“Just don’t get shit all over. Please? You’re covered in sawdust.”

Kurt thumps the hood, smirking wildly. “Jesus, Henry! What do you want me to do?” He hops up on the porch.

I smell schnapps, gasoline. I smell Kurt’s smoke-drenched hair.

“Don’t fuck my house up,” I say, eye-smiling.

He stamps off his boots. Wood flecks ping about. He strips his sweatshirt and his under shirt. A pale yellow spotlight of dust quickly surrounds him.

“Ms. May will call the police again,” I say.

Scrap has even nested in Kurt’s crooked trail of navel hair. He unzips his jeans and wrestles them down.

“What are you…?”

“If I take everything off, I can’t make a mess.” He steps from the puddle of denim.

“Unbelievable. Punk." I say and smirk.

With a rude boy grin, Kurt strips off his boxer shorts, faded tan lines agleam. He knocks on the prosthetic arm he calls Bixby. “What about this old bad boy? Want him off too?”

Ms. May’s drapes part. “Get inside,” I say, coughing from my laughter.

When preparing Gram’s hot dog stew, I become steeped in the fixings. Onion, celery, and basil stitch into my flesh for days.

I pass Kurt the thawed bread heels. After chugging a glass of milk, he arches over a large bowl. He slurps and gobbles the brew of discount links.

“I hope you don’t catch cold,” I say.

Kurt glances down at his bare cock. He snickers.

“How was the wood haul?” I say.

“Not bad. Jessie’s chainsaw shit the bed by eleven. That blew. Filled up all our trucks though. I’ll get one more load if it kills me.”

“Channel five said a nor’easter might be on the way.”

“They don’t know shit.” He crushes two heels and begins to smear them with crumb-speckled margarine. “I’m gonna pack our porch, Henry. Biggest wood pile you’ve ever seen. Keep us warm all winter.”

I stare at Kurt’s new eagle tattoo, scabbing on his chest.

“This tastes great,” he tells me. “Best batch, I’d say.”

My entire face crinkles. Immediately, I’m huffing. “I followed her recipe. It should be the same.”

Kurt mimics my sigh in jest. “Yours tastes different.”

“It shouldn’t.”

Shrugging, he says, “But it does. Better maybe. It’s so good, it’s giving me a chub.” Kurt begins to swill the stew loudly, defiantly. He grins, a potato chunk clinging to his lip.

I swat the air.

He says, “Hey…how ‘bout you take off your clothes too? Shouldn’t have to be naked all by my myself.”

Cars stream by, chugging toward Sunday services. Some tap their horns, and we wave with Irish coffee smiles.

Clad in cowhide gloves, I stack wood, row after row, tidy and flush. I hear a pop and then scuffing behind the pile. “What the fuck?”

Kurt bends down and aims his cell phone flashlight into the rear gaps. He kicks the heap thrice. An opossum thrusts out its pointed white face. It lunges. It hisses.

“Jesus Christ!” I vault backwards and drop a wedge of oak.

Kurt cackles, his breath prancing in the frosty air. “I can see a family of ‘em.”

“Don’t get bit.”

“They don’t bite, Henry.”

“Yeah, they do,” I say. “They have teeth, right?”

“She’s just protecting her babies. Anyway, when opossums get really, like really scared, they play dead.”

I shed my gloves. “That fucker will attack me. Like when I’m taking out the trash.”

Kurt shakes his head. He points to the opposite side of the porch. “Let's put the wood over there instead. Move the boot trays, the shovels. I’ll get a tarp or some shit.”

I grind my slipper into the cold slate. “Can’t we scare them away?”

“Naw.” His face softens. “We’ll leave ‘em. They’re just tryin’ to set up shop. Same boat as us.”

PARLIAMENT OF DRUNKARDS by Mbizo Chirasha

March 10, 2019

In previous years, the Mandozas hosted the New Years’ parties. They reared sheep and goats, and they invited the whole village to enjoy roast mutton. There was beer for the elders, but the young ones were relegated to raspberry and fizzy beverages. I learned about balloons and tissues at the Mandoza household. Mandoza himself was once our Father Christmas, until time burned his years into old age.

But to my surprise, the Mandoza homestead this New Year was quiet. It was as if somebody had poured a bucket of ice-water to wet the embers of life in their home. The silence indicated deep secrets behind those concrete walls. The magnetic ears of the village had failed to attract any news from the walled homestead, so no one knew what was happening.

Despite this, this new year boomed to life with cheap firecrackers, sparking the heavens open for blessings. The faint scent of Christmas had vanished, long since fading into the burning heat. The latest music vibrated the entire village. We enjoyed so many assorted meats, their tastes were all as one in our mouths. Fanta and Coca Cola drinks soaked our okra-hardened bellies. We ate English and drank American that day.

Our farting was American. We called it civilized farting.

We hummed Nigerian’s P-Square. We imitated and recited Pidgin. We did everything, said everything, and ate everything. We even sighed in Chinese, as Coke fizzled through our black, soot-tamed nostrils. Cousins from Egoli and our capital city had brought niceties. Such was the merriment. Everyone present was high-over-the-hills with excitement.

Yes, our joyful morning went by with its gossip-beat; the afternoon elapsed with sweet odors of roasted meat and sunset shadows, and then, the once-silent Mandoza took over our night by spewing gunshots, death threats, and insults.

Through the roasted-meat-oiled air, the moon peered over our land, and Mandoza’s wives--Ndaneta, was leading the pack, followed by Ndagura and a whole swarm of children behind them--dove into our merriment. The fearful intruders sardined themselves into the far end of our packed hut. Mandoza’s lips quivered as he glared at them. He refused to blink.

Merry-makers dumped their drinks. The jukebox screeched to silence. Cockroaches scrambled into their closet. Rats followed suit. Children screamed. Dancers packed themselves underneath dinner tables, and some lucky others ducked out behind the hijacker.

Mandoza cuddled his long gun with that devilish grin each of us knew so well. Our murmuring ceased. I heard nothing but the rippling of blood through my heart, although I knew the elders were wishing Mandoza bad omen. Mandoza fired another gunshot, the echo stirring birds from sleep.

The stampede aroused the headman from his sleep. His eyes were blind with sleep and heavy with hangover. He had been dead drunk an hour ago. Now, he lazily scrubbed the sleep off his face. Mandoza was the headman’s closest drinking mate. They were as close as dirt-water and fungi.

Mothers clutched their breasts, and young girls winced and wiped their tears with their armpits as Mandoza pointed a gun at the headman, who froze before tottering and falling softly as a cotton ball. Mandoza clobbered Ndaneta with the back of the gun. She barked like a wounded baboon as he crushed his clenched fist into her terrified face .A shower of blood sprayed from her mouth, and she fell--thud. The acrid stink of urine wafted under our noses.

Mandoza shoved his steel gumboot into Ndagura’s chest. His daughter waved a thunderous, blinding blow that shook pots and mugs around. It landed on his mouth. He stammered a mouthful of threats. His son gave him another surprising scissors-boot to Mandoza’s throat. He lost control, and the gun fell away from him. His eyes drooped, and he stumbled into the silent speakers with a bang.

What happened to cause all this violent commotion? The gossip buzzed around the room. Mandoza’s family had refused him to bring his third wife into the homestead. They had boycotted his New Year, his goat and sheep meat. They denied everything from special food to new dresses. He was infuriated and decided to kill all of them.

Now, the headman gained his strength and grabbed the gun from Mandoza’s daughter. “Chivara, you want to kill the whole village, vomit your anger?” He dragged him outside for some air.

The headman sent out messengers to bring Jokonia and Jokochwa, the headman’s advisers, and the elders would not sleep without answers. The village court gathered with the Mandozas and all interested villagers in attendance. The council of elders sipped from calabashes of sweet frothing brew (it was their custom).

Jokonia was the strictest of headman’s advisers, and now, he wiped splashes of sorghum off his mouth with the back of his hands before calling the court to order. He read from the Book of Rules and instructed Mandoza to rise. Mandoza fixed Satan’s gaze on him, but Jokonia refused to be cowed. Instead: “Speak! What got into your mind? Speak. The elders want to hear your side. Do not waste our time. The villagers are tired of your games.”

“Jokonia I cannot answer anything. You are a tired, corrupt--corr--corrupt--li--lizard.” He spat in Jokonia’s direction. The court rumbled with reluctant laughter. The headman shook his grey head.

It was now toward midnight. He stood up in haste and waved Ndaneta to stand in the box. She dragged herself from her seat, wiping a rivulet of blood off her face. She made a disturbing loud grunt; she was in deep pain. “Baba want to kill us because we refused his new wife. The new lover is young and is a relative. It’s a taboo. Myself and Mainini, we are enough for him.” She heaved defiantly. The packed court let out another collective, muffled laugh. Ndaneta sat, wiping away a storm of tears.

Ndagura and the children also testified, and the village women wept bitterly. Mandoza shouted more delusional threats. He cursed his wives’ mothers, their cats, their poverty, and their donkeys.

Jokochwa, the self-anointed adviser-in-chief, known confidante of the headman, and staunch drunkard yawned thrice before whispering into the headman’s ear. Jokochwa, who drank everything he could get his lips around--crank, malt whiskies, skokian, traditional brew--and had an insatiable craving for meat and cheap gossip, clapped his hands and pulled a cough from the pit of his tobacco-ridden chest. His dirt-coated teeth were only upstaged by his three missing fingers, lost long ago in a robbery tussle.

He stood up to give the final judgment. With a groan, the villagers lost their spirit for a fair call. Jokochwa folded his torn sleeves, as if he wanted to fight; yes, he was good at dampening people’s hopes. The headman made a drunken grin before he nodded to signal agreement.

“Mandoza, for disturbing the celebration and wielding a hunting gun, you are charged with breaking the peace of happy villagers. You must pay five bottles of Chateau Brandy, three gallons of skokian, and three goats tonight, now. The council needs to enjoy and celebrate the remain hours of New Year--” Jokowchwa grinned-- “and your new bride.”

The crowd waited patiently for more in anticipation of further punishment, but to no avail. “Ndaneta, Ndagura, and your puppies, you have two days to pack your belongings and leave the village. We do not keep witches and killers. You can’t go against the head of the family. Mandoza has the right to marry more women as long as he wants.” He cleared his throat, and with that, the court was adjourned.

Although the grannies of the village beat their chests in disbelief, it came to pass that Mandoza later married his concubine. The village enjoyed meat and beer, and soon after that, he reclaimed the title of Father Christmas.

IN PATIENT by Jenn Stroud Rossmann

March 10, 2019

When the IV pump pings to warn of an occlusion, she no longer waits for someone in scrubs to respond; she unkinks the tubing herself. In the hierarchy of beeps the IV occlusion alert is low, outranked by the chirping pulse-Ox monitor and the angry squawk of the bedside fall detection mat. King EKG checkmates them all.

He dislikes her charts and schedules, cringes when she calls the nurses by name and remembers their children and hobbies. Order is a dangerous illusion. He imagines himself on a science fair poster, her little bean sprout in a milk carton. He is in exactly the same position on Monday when the nurse from Friday says, Yes, the beach was lovely, thanks for asking. The beach can go fuck itself.

She has noticed they’re the youngest people here. They are the ward’s doomed lovers: buds severed before blooming and all. Yesterday she saw a patient making her shuffling rounds, hugely pregnant, her belly a prow. He was sleeping when the woman walked by. “Perspective,” she tells him later. “I can’t even imagine.”

His hands and feet are numb, rubbery and distant as if he’d sat on them too long. Barefoot on the sand would probably feel like walking on the moon. Compression boots on his calves perform a programmed sequence of rhythmic squeezes. A gentle hiss accompanies each release. In the time it takes to count to eighty-seven, they will begin squeezing again.

She can imagine, she has envisioned all the worst things. Each prognosis a coin to flip: an 84% chance of five more years leaves 16% of design space. It was her job to create optimized solutions for stakeholder specs, before it was her job to dose him with Ativan and rub his extremities with mint oil for the neuropathy. This is the only time he does not shrink from her touch. He says he feels unlovable this way. But she has already imagined that this may be the only way from now on; this may be the best it will ever be.

Again with the damn peppermint oil. Somebody on one of her message boards must’ve claimed it gave auntie or grandma relief. He hasn’t been online in weeks, but he is tempted to grab her phone to broadcast: The oil is bullshit. Also, forget the antinausea diet, smuggle in burritos. He misses food that wasn’t engineered to be bland.

His first week in the hospital, she was putting away his laundry when she found the ring box. She does not know whether he’d bought it before the diagnosis. She does not know whether she cares.

On the TV mounted in the corner, he watches nature shows. He resisted these – a message board favorite – at first, afraid of zither music and gazelles loping in slow motion. He does not want to be lulled into anything like comfort. Yet he’s compelled by the red foxes taunting a grizzly bear lumbering behind; the squirrel who thinks he’s outsmarted the hawk only to be swooped upon by a thunder of talons and beak.

TOPPLED by Julie Zuckerman

March 7, 2019

The crowds coursing the streets below Marjorie’s apartment cheer and chant, and she hurries downstairs. Withered wives and working girls, wheelchair-bound and beach-bronzed beauties, one of the most spectacular sights she’s seen in her 68 years. They beckon to Marjorie, but she hesitates, grounded in place. Her uneasiness hovers around her like a swarm of midges. The most beaten down have ascended on the capital, together with bejeweled matrons of Madison Avenue, minivan-driving moms, and those in thread-bare, torn coats. With each stride, they discard the delicate attributes absorbed since birth, casting aside mantles of caregiver, nurturer, defender, peacemaker, forgiver, family gluer.

The words Wait! I’m coming stick in her throat. She forces one giant gulp of air into her lungs and steps forward into the surge. With each stride, she is fortified, the cloud of midges thinning. Her guilt and worry float skyward, popping like bubbles.

Like Miriam the prophetess with timbrels in hand, the women flock towards freedom. Their songs scuff away eternities of subjugation and restraint. It’s a spontaneous outpouring of sisterhood that transcends politics and unites them on a chromosomal level; no planning or secret social networks were necessary.

The men, smug in their constructs of superiority, do not see them coming.

This is not the Women’s March of 2017, which was cathartic, yes. But barely a blip in the battle.

A reverberation ripples through the crowd, a breathless, hushed moment, followed by an eruption of thunderous, whooping cheers. Marjorie stands on her tiptoes to see the DC skyline forever changed: the ultimate phallus, the iconic Washington Monument, topples. The mechanics of how this is happening, the intricacies of the organization, or whether a vote was taken are questions she can ask later. It’s a prodigious moment; every neuron in Marjorie is wide awake, electric, prickly with possibilities she’d never imagined.

They swarm the Capitol, the White House, the Supreme Court, the Smithsonians. Once, she revered these institutions, the massive memorials and erections of glory, the cherry blossoms, the reflecting pools. The first text she receives is from her sister: the same thing is happening simultaneously in every state capital and major city around the world. From her daughter, in every place of business and in the armed forces. And from her daughters-in-law, in every home.

Near the war memorials – Vietnam, Korea, and the vainglorious World War II construction – Marjorie experiences a bodily sensation of being rent in two, the Red Sea splitting inside her, painful and cleansing at once.

In the shadow of Lincoln, she weeps with a fierceness that hasn’t flared since her mother’s funeral three decades ago. Today’s torrent is different, a mixture of euphoria and awe, a twinge of exhilarating terror, amazement that life can still surprise in a good way. Someone offers her a tissue, a hug, and takes her by the hand to keep walking.

She is one of the lucky ones – never raped or molested, or subject to overt brutality or degradation due to gender, race or sexual preference. But a lifetime of slights, catcalls, indignation, covert biases, crude jokes, and commands meant to chip away at self-worth and keep men in positions of power are enough to fuel her rage into a colossal conflagration.

Only males under the age of 5 will be spared. Marjorie’s mind flits to her ex – she’s long past hating him, but: hah! – and then to her two grown sons, which is more complicated. With each passing year, she’s understood her sons are average, more takers than givers, molded in their father’s image. Her eldest hounds her to get more exercise. He chucks her zero-fat yogurts, determined to be the arbiter of her health. His younger brother cares more for his cars and gadgets than his children. On occasion, they are kind, but their attempts bring her little comfort. She feels more kinship with her daughters-in-law. With every woman walking beside her. She doesn’t blame her boys for any real evil in the world, but she will not miss them too much.

Once a year, Marjorie will spill out drops of wine with her pinky to remind herself that oppressors and their bystanders also deserve compassion. But now, she closes her eyes and gives thanks she will never be controlled again. The freedom to be fully herself is exquisite; she’d not known the extent of her hunger until today. She tilts her head to the sky and spreads her arms like an eagle, ready to soar.

NILSSON SCHMILSSON by Anthony Sabourin

March 5, 2019

I was outside on my street watching an apartment building on fire. I was watching it with the people who lived in that building, the people who’d left it. At three floors, it wasn’t a big apartment building, but it was a big fire. It was crackling, and flames were shooting out of windows and smoke was filling the night sky.

I looked at everybody. It was nighttime when the fire started, and so you could see these snapshots of how people were living inside their homes. A couple wore rumpled office clothes paired with sweatpants, caught between two routines. There was a guy in a misbuttoned janitor outfit. There was a family with four little kids, crying in mismatched pyjamas. The parents looked lifeless and hollowed out, leaning against each other like dead trees. There was even a guy who looked like Harry Nilsson on the cover of Nilsson Schmilsson, standing lost and gently wasted in a bathrobe. Instead of a hash pipe he was holding this big lamp.

That was the other thing too; people had brought all this stuff with them. But it’s hard to figure out what’s important when you are trying to not die in a fire. Like honey grab that toaster, we need to get out of this fucking building on fire. And then you’re in this rushed procession, everyone wanting to move fast but there’s so many of them that they can only move slow, this urgent slowness, bodies pushed out of hallways like toothpaste, and you’re holding a toaster. Or you grab a box of shit you never unpacked from when you moved in. Or your daughter’s favourite stuffed toy but it’s the wrong one, and now she’s crying on the street and her memories are covered in flames. Outside we were huddled together, we could all feel the warmth.

Finally we heard sirens. A fire truck honked at us because we were all standing in the street and firefighters started to get off and we moved to the crabgrass of the lawns of the row of houses across the street from the building. There was one house where the shutters were drawn though, and it looked like nobody was home. That house was my house. These people were on the street because the building they lived in was on fire. I was here because I wanted to breathe in a new kind of smoke. I was inhaling their lives. The family pictures, the drawers of junk mail, the jars of small change, the piles of unfolded clean laundry, the unworn jewelry passed down from mom, the overdue bills and lost TV remotes, the blankets, the books, the old vcrs, the stuff, all of it smoke rings floating skyward. These people didn’t know that instead of living they’d been gathering kindling.

Another firetruck and a couple of ambulances came, and I got to watch people at work. Some firefighters were spraying the building with water while other firefighters were going into the building. I didn’t know what was happening but it looked coordinated. It made me think about how when you are a firefighter nobody knows when you are doing a bad job. Like there are people who are bad at their jobs everywhere, so there must have been people who were bad at fighting fire. Firefighters with dull axes and weak muscles, firefighters who got lost on the way to a fire, firefighters who dropped old ladies onto the floor like they were heavy groceries - all heroes. As long as you were showing up to the fire, you were doing pretty good. As long as you do did some baseline firefighting shit, low expectations were their own reward.

I had to pay attention now because a quiet came over the crowd. A lull accompanied by craning necks. I looked with them and I saw it; I saw a life being saved.

The front doors of the apartment were being opened, and there was a firefighter cradling a man in his underpants. The man was almost hairless, heavy - his body a series of soft, round shapes folding in on each other. His skin was reddened, splotchy. It looked like the firefighter was carrying a newborn baby, the man was that helpless, and for all of his size he was being carried with such ease and tenderness.

The man was crying, and he was talking to the firefighter. “Please let me die,” he said. “Please let me die.” His sadness was baby-like too. It was pure and unsullied. “Please,” he said. “I want to go back in there, please. Please.” And the man did not protest further as the firefighter carried him to the paramedics, who strapped him down into a gurney. We all watched this.

I had never seen a life saved before!

We stayed to see what would happen next, but in the end the fire just died. The firefighters were turning away people who wanted to go back, and the crowd dispersed, formless - in the end just more smoke, only I no longer wanted to inhale. Watching that man’s life being saved was akin to saving it myself. I felt a fullness. I walked and walked, directionless, heroic in my wandering.

The streets were broken up by dogshit on neighbours’ lawns, by gum dotting the sidewalk, by shards of broken glass, unclaimed garbage, the smell of marijuana from backyards and balconies. There were signs for missing pets - Charlie and Waldo and Blackie, which was the name of a black cat, which was questionable. The sounds of porch conversations and laughter, of hazy bass reverberating through houses, the sounds of nothing, of my footsteps, of crickets. I felt infused with a sense of community.

There was a lawn of knee-high weeds, overgrown from neglect. I saw a letter on the door of this house, and I walked up to the door and read “JANET ITS YOUR NEIGHBOURS PLEASE CUT YOUR GRASS,” and Janet, you wonder, you holy ghost, I hope you never change. Please let me die? And miss Janet cut the lawn?

It was funny how often you could see into the houses. Most windows were closed off, but there were so many left uncurtained, unshuttered, wide open. The green snatches of plants, or of bookshelves, or of unadulterated, unchanged 1970s decor. Of giant flatscreen televisions, shooting out images of big faces mouthing words at each other, of news anchors commenting on the moving pictures in the box adjacent to them, of tiny men playing baseball, of netflix menus. There was also the shock of people - an old man moving in his kitchen, a man and woman putting food into their open mouths, of a woman adjusting a stereo, adjusting a bra. All obstructed, cut off, edited to fit the aspect ratio of windows; the 16:9 of living spaces beamed outwards. Pause - that couple asleep on their couch, crashed and leaning against each other under the glow of a screen paused on the option to “Continue watching.” I stood and thought to myself about how even dog shit left on someone’s lawn was life. Even broken beer bottles on the street came from living. From drinking that beer and making the earth your garbage. I checked my phone, saw angry messages, looked up and saw that the sleeping heads were now awake and looking at me.

Cut to curtains closed ineptly, a man opening the door, coming fast and saying “What the fuck’s your problem?”

I tried to talk about how full of life everything was. How even Janet was trying her best, or not, but it didn’t matter as long as she was still here. I couldn’t think of how to start, so I asked if he heard about the fire. “Fuck you!” he told me. He looked like he was going to punch me so I ran down the street.

I was sweaty and out of breath when I got to a park entrance. I was lost, but I had my phone so I wasn’t really lost. An unused playground gave way to an unused soccer field, and a path cut through the field, leading to a small forested area that was dwarfed by three apartment complexes. The trees swayed, emasculated, and I walked towards them.

It felt nice to not know where I was.

The forest was lit erratically by my phone flashlight. There was a man-made structure, a long sloping tree branch used as the spine for kind of tee-pee made of found branches. I looked inside and there was nothing. I swatted at mosquitoes and thought about living in here. Thought about being a caveman. Watching fire and living in the dirt. Scrawling madness onto walls. There was a crackling of branches and a flash of red, a soft thumping noise, a cardinal twitching on the ground.

The wing was bent obtuse, wrong, and there was more red than just plumage.

The bird was making noises and I was the only one around to hear its song. I didn’t know if it was dying or what. The bird was flapping on the ground but it couldn’t get up. It stopped and was still. I bent down to look at it. “I can save you,” I said.

I held it in my hands and for a moment it did not stir. It was so light. The red in my hands was almost weightless - almost nothing.

I started to get up and what was in my hands bucked and thrashed. The bird started to pick at me and bite, and I dropped it on the ground. It lay there hurt and screaming. I could see now that there was a lot of blood. If the bird was dying I didn’t know if this was a list of grievances or a confession or a final wish. I tried to pick it up again and it bit at me. It hopped on the ground and fell for a final time.

Its squawking died out, finally, and I was able to hold it in my hands once more.

If the bird was dying I didn’t know what to do.

In the dirt of the wooden structure, I dug a tiny hole.

After that I walked home. The shutters were still closed. I slid my key into the lock and opened the door. I turned on the hallway light and my wife appeared by the stairs. She was wearing an old sweatshirt, baggy and stained. She smelled like sleep and milk. Her upper lip was tight and the lines around her mouth formed a sad shape, and she wanted so badly to shout, but she knew she could not. She had to whisper. She had to whisper that I was a lazy husband and a bad father, and where was I, what right did I have to be such a disappointment. This was anger without catharsis. You can slam the curtains shut, but it’s just fluttering air. Her eyes looked so hurt. So tired. So sad. I couldn’t focus on her words anymore, the harsh sibilants that couldn’t rise to the level of a shout. And even though she was careful, there was a crying from upstairs and I was saved. My wife looked at me a final time and floated back up the stairs.

I grabbed a beer from the fridge and drank it in front of the television as sports highlights played in a loop at low volume. The television flickered and when I woke up no light crept through the shutters. I put the bottle on the kitchen counter and I crept up the stairs like a fugitive. Upstairs I opened our daughter’s bedroom door and looked down at our sleeping baby. I picked her up and rocked her in my arms.

I am saving you, I thought.

Please let me die.

I am saving you.

THE WHOLE FLOW by Angie McCullagh

March 5, 2019

I try to become liquid like she told me. I pour myself into heavy-bottomed glasses and over nubby sofas and down rucked, tan chests. I puddle onto the floor and sometimes throw myself into the wind only to splash back on bug-splattered windshields.

To survive, she said, you have to learn to go with it. But my mother’s advice is bad. I learn this when my boy is first diagnosed and I think we can do it, I am flexible, Watch me drain my whole body into his syringes and make him better. I will do anything, anything at all.

The first night in the hospital I settle, like a pond, around his little frame and burble his favorite songs. I don’t sleep, not even for a second. In the morning his dad visits and says to me, you look like shit.

He sits with our boy while I shower in the bathroom with no soap and hold the safety bar to keep from slipping down the drain.

We are back at home where his dad doesn’t live. Wind shakes the walls, roaring that I should’ve prevented my boy’s illness and I dissolve in my own salty tears. It is darkest December, but globules of insulin gleam from needle tips, reflected in multi-colored holiday lights.

I’m hurting him. He yells and cries. I’m so sorry, I say before every poke, my heart pounding like a shaggy, water-logged thing.

After a few months, he stops crying, only bites his bottom lip hard and looks away.

She comes to visit with her tequila in a peroxide bottle and miles of beaded leather wrapped around her wrists. It’s too bad he got sick but you will adjust. Life is fluid.

She is her own undertow and I splash wildly, finding that fight is a solid object to hold onto.

When she watches the boy so I can take a run, then lets his blood sugar drop so low the juice box in his hand shakes as he tries to lift it to his mouth, I tell her to leave.

My new anger is hard and heavy, an anchor that has always been there without my knowing. I feel no ire toward my boy (why would I?) but fury at everything else – his disease, my mother, the man who promised his life to me until things became difficult and sodden and he breast stroked away with hardly a glance backward.

It is now just the boy and me and boxes of a chemical his own body can’t supply and also the beta fish in a bowl I bought to cheer him up. We sit in a small rowboat, bobbing. If you were to pull back from the tiny craft, a sunset pink behind us and a whole gray ocean slippery with fish and other sealife below, we would look like two brightly colored scraps barely tethered by my outrage, which is better, at least, than liquefying and drowning.

PISS by Chad Miller

March 4, 2019

Every time I piss myself, I get the job. Every time. It’s a fact. The first time I pissed myself was in the restroom at the office park with the ring of palm trees, before an interview. Let’s just agree my stream was spirited and leave the cause. Piss ricocheted. I cleaned what I could at the sink.

I got that job back-coding home remodeler websites with a soaked crotch.

I wore gray slacks.

The stain became a black hole the recruiter must have hoped to gaze my dick through. That hope, or is it the smell, that hypnotizes every hiring officer?

Hell, I don’t know.

Every time.

Opie, welcome aboard.

Opie, when can you start?

That coding job.

The arcade job.

Managing here.

It’s like the one time when I was a kid.

A friend and I were chasing his younger sister’s friends. Our car lights interrupted them wrapping their house in toilet paper. I grabbed his floorboard bat. A neighbor with a shotgun in his yard called cops on us.

I caught up to my prankster but did nothing. He was an island boy, homesick probably. We walked backed side-by-side to the house and flashing circus. I used the bat as a cane. We didn’t speak.

Anyway, the police officer yelled at my friend every time I back-talked. The boy was silent, respectful, but I quipped at the cop. His fetish get-up, the baton. I tease more often than I piss—I’m funny with it—but it was setting the officer off.

The boy got the brunt of the cop’s ire and I dodged it all because he dressed like a punk and I look like a television star. Blond hair. Crystal eyes. So lean any muscle I have looks like a bulge I worked after. I wear polos and khakis. My friend dressed like a punk. Bandanna over black spikes. Waffle thermals under a skull tee and cut jean shorts. Flannel tied at his waist, a suburban kilt. Boots that could pin your throat.

I sass a cop without repercussion. I piss myself and get away with it. Even get a job for it. I’m homegrown, homemade. The stank of an all-American boy. I’m scratch-and-sniff TV.

Opie.

That’s my nickname.

Opie.

It’s not one bit a part of my real name.

Opie’s a character from TV.

A small-town sheriff’s kid on fifties TV.

A ginger kid in black and white.

The time I pissed myself at the shitty concert with the sprawling band of wind instruments and chimes, when I got the prepper copy job right at the bar from a stranger, that guy called me Opie without even knowing it was my nickname, that’s how fitting the name is. How fitted.

Everybody loves an Opie.

Every body.

It’s mob mentality.

I one time took a receptionist job away from a clean black girl even though I pissed the CEO—right onto his wingtips while we shook hands—so I know my privilege is messy.

The girl stepped in my pool. Her flats whined to the elevator.

We made awful comments.

This job? This job I pissed myself for almost a day and still got it, with a signing bonus. Didn’t clean myself up. I wasn’t even awake enough to. What’s the point anyway?

People think I’m together even though they know about the pot and the cocaine and stealing alcohol from a couple of jobs, the DUI, the time in jail for possession, for dealing, for hit and run. I hit my father when he wouldn’t hit me. I owe everyone who’s given me anything. I’m very open and honest and write everything down on my applications.

Everyone smells redemption when I walk into a room. They’re intoxicated by the arc they see me on.

Like they’re watching TV.

The fifties sheriff show had other characters. All white, but a fair cast. There was the aunt the widowed sheriff and Opie lived with. Plump. Like she was swinging a cauldron under her housedress. And there was Opie’s teacher, the sheriff’s love interest. And the mailman. There was the barber and monkey-dumb mechanic. And there was a drunk who slept off the worst of it in jail, Otis.

No one calls me Otis though.

I’m not an Otis.

I can’t be. I can’t.

Otis is dumpy.

WE ETERNAL BEINGS by Jody Sperling

March 3, 2019

Mary died earlier this week: went into the hospital for routine foot ulcer debridement—common with diabetics—developed a staph infection, went under for a lung treatment and never woke from the anesthesia. We knew Mary from back in the day. I’d moved to Omaha to live with my grandparents, found Jesus (it’s not what you think) so I sent my buddy to live with them (proselytizers got to be proselytizing). My grandparents prayed before every meal.

Mary was a banker who worked with my buddy in Omaha. Obesity led to her diabetes, which triggered her demise.

Demise. What a word. It sounds too clinical for its purpose. Demise is the word doctors use to justify premature deaths: stillborns, sudden heart attacks, “complications with x,” drug overdoses. Arise rhymes with demise, as in “Arise, Lazarus come out of the grave,” which is what Jesus said to his buddy, dead in the grave four days.

By the time my buddy moved to Omaha to live with my grandparents I was a recovered alcoholic, well on my way to conservative Christianity. Recovered is a loose term, given my troubles in years following, but this isn’t that story.

I’d taken work on a rat and mouse rig in the Uintah Mountains. When my buddy called I requested vacation, because he told me he’d gotten his second DUI. I came down hard on him. “You’re on an arrow’s path to hell,” I said. “You need to repent” (a fancy word for “move to Omaha”). My harsh tone surprised him. The old me had been soft: understanding and compassionate. We talked for a while and I said, “Pack your shit. You’re moving to Omaha.”

The demise of my water pump occurred just outside Big Springs, halfway between Denver and nowhere*. A local repair shop charged me eight hundred: five for towing and three for service. That set me back a ways, but I still can’t remember where all the rest of the money went, because I worked for years in the oil fields. Hemorrhaging cash is almost as common a disease in America as diabetes.

*Rabbit trail? Nowhere might have a secret meaning: “no-where” or “now-here.” Odd insights seem profound when you’re writing alone in a hotel room far from home.

The mechanic had my Blazer hoisted six five feet in the air. There were several five-gallon buckets nearby, all full of Unleaded 85. The smell of gas most closely resembles the flavor of MSG. The mechanic said, “It always happens this way, right after you’ve filled up.”

My grandparents agreed to house my buddy because (a) I talked about him often: what a dear, dear friend, what a good, good guy, what a rough, rough hand he’d been dealt, and probably (b) I angled the whole he’s-close-to-accepting-Jesus-as-his-personal-Lord-and-Savior card, but mostly because (c) I told them how he’d saved my life once (good story for another day).

My buddy got a job at US Bank, he called it “Us Bank,” as in “we,” and that is where he met Mary. Mary in the Bible was the sister of Lazarus. This is not significant outside of the active whirring of my brain to see the connection: a false corollary like so many others.

I had complex feelings toward Mary. On the one hand, I found her funny. She was one of those women whose egos had no bounds. She really believed the world owed her. If there was ever anything wrong at work it was someone else’s fault. If anything good happened, she had made it happen. I am drawn to people with outsized egos. But also, too, Mary had a slight odor, mildewed, washed but not dried, perhaps lusty: Does lust have an odor? If I remember correctly, she brushed her teeth with hydrogen peroxide because she’d heard on some TV doctor show that toothpaste caused brain damage.

My wife’s father recently stopped drinking sodapop because it causes brain damage. Apparently a megastudy found that those who drink twelve ounces of carbonated, sweet beverages a day experience a shrinking of the hippocampus. Don’t bother me to look this up, but I seem to recall that the hippocampus is where emotion lives.

Mary and my buddy and I met one day sometime after midnight at VI off L Street. We drank coffee heavy with cream and ate French Silk Pie. I think highly of France, love silk and adore pie. The three together are, today, the only trinity I care about. Between every bite of pie we drank a cup of coffee, and since we couldn’t eat another bite until our coffee was full, we’d leave our jackets on our chairs to signal we’d return and go outside into the windy cold of Nebraskan November to smoke cigarettes and shiver.

My buddy only ever smoked socially. He could go weeks, even months, without a cigarette and not suffer. Then, in one night he’d smoke a pack—a whole pack—with no consequences. Mary and I were both card-carrying Mentholites.

I briefly worked myself into a two-pack-a-day habit during my stint in the oil fields. I worked with Chris the driller on a two-man, rat and mouse crew. Chris was big in the naturally-born-to-kill kind of way. He was thick everywhere. Thick legs, thick arms, thick neck, thick nose, thick tongue, he was thick, thick. Chris smoked three packs of cigarettes daily. When he wasn’t smoking he hung suspended from a tree by tenterhooks pierced through his shoulder meat. Suspensions create a religious high, they say. Look it up. People do it.

Because Chris smoked so much, I smoked a whole lot more. Odd as it may sound, if I smoked, I couldn’t smell Chris’s smoke, and I’d just get so damn tired of smelling Marb Reds all day long. Smoking was a break from smelling smoke so I smoked and smoked and smoked. That’s how it goes.

I didn’t actually answer when my buddy called me about Mary dying. I was checking into a hotel: I’m on the road this week in Albuquerque for work. When I dropped my bags on the hotel bed and as I was taking a dump, which is a sacred routine that helps cleanse me from the day’s troubles and reorients me to the important matters that lie ahead between end-of-work and time-for-bed, I saw he’d called. I called back and we talked work. Where I go, he goes, so we’re coworkers again which is how we met over a decade ago at a restaurant where he served and I hosted.

I’m the big cheese now, and he’s the little cheese—title-wise—but it’s not that way between us. I rely on his good reputation since he was a referral of mine. The more he succeeds the better I look: if I’ve learned one thing about Christianity, it’s all about appearances.

My buddy just got back from Spain, where he spent a week with his wife. They got free lodging over there through a friend of his. I’ve never traveled abroad. Not really. I spent a day in Juarez many years ago on a church mission trip. My grandparents wanted me to experience Christian Charity and since they footed the rent, what could I say? (That’s not charitable. I wanted to go but for all the wrong reasons. Remind me to tell you that one some other day.)

The kicker is, my buddy’s wife didn’t have a good time in Spain, he tells me, because she didn’t get to call the shots. He says she doesn’t do well when other people are leading and planning. Apparently his wife has a strong personality, he said. “Like you,” he said.

I don’t want to be compared to his wife. She is not on my list of favorite people. I wonder if she’ll need surgery someday. We all need surgery from time to time.

I’ve risen twice from Propofol (since they say the third time’s a charm, I won’t be going under again). The first time I was a baby in need of some kind of urethral correction. I guess I was born with six or eight holes perforating the length of my shaft. The other surgery was to repair my left ear, which heard so well it bled constantly. As a four-year-old I could hear the whispers of the dead, and it kept me awake at night. They said, “Call us out of the grave. We eternal beings. Arise, arise.”

HAVE YOU HEARD THE GOOD NEWS? by Darren DeFrain

February 28, 2019

In spite of my better judgment, I remain on Facebook for that awkward blurring of my professional, personal, and public lives. In that domain, I recently received a friend request from an older relative. Just a glance at this request and I knew it was the same advance-fee scam I’ve encountered a hundred times over; someone had acquired my relative’s likeness, name, and a few scant details. I decided to take the opportunity to create a reply with two primary goals in mind: 1) wasting the offender’s time and 2) creating a sustained and satisfying narrative arc out of the encounter. What resulted was a mixture of fiction writing and Improv. Aside from changing the format to be more “reader friendly”—the dialogue soon involved a third character on a different platform—I made no changes whatsoever to the text.