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ADAM SOLDOFKSY RECOMMENDS: YEEHAW! Novella Round-up

July 23, 2025

The novella is famously “pocket-sized,” and marketed as such, in the relatively rare case when a publisher feels whimsical enough to produce one. Crassly, it is a work of fiction which achieves that mystical, begrudging minimum page length that warrants its nestling between front and back covers all on its own. And we as modern readers (forgive the assumption) respond to it as a physical object the way we respond to almost anything that is a smaller version of something else: with a kind of simple, unintimidated affection, the result of our own enlargement in its presence maybe, with anticipatory amusement, with the hope of fun—but no real expectation of “awe.”Being “fun-sized,” we want it when we want just a little something. Being “pocket-sized,” we keep it on us in case of boredom. It is dwarfed by the tomes on the nightstand. In fact, it has slipped between the mattress and bed frame and is lost—oh well. It does not concuss you when dropped on your head from a height. It is unsalable. It is ineligible for masterwork status.Formally, it is my favorite mode of fiction. And so I want to dispute that the diminutive “la” indicates a minor achievement. That the novella is not an immature form, or a form of modesty, or a running out of steam I hope can be generally accepted. But if not the simple failing to reach, either maturity or for loftier artistic goals, and undertaken with something specific in mind, to achieve something specifically—what then? What is it for?What makes the novella so wonderful, I think, is that it is a prolonged narrative—long enough to lose yourself in—that nonetheless you can read in its entirety, in a reasonable interval, with attention unbroken. You may enjoy it as a whole, and examine it immediately afterwards, with no slippage of memory. Because it remains intact. Because it is “human brain-sized.” It fits us, and on occasion, close to perfectly. To mix metaphors and organs: something smaller would leave you unsatisfied. A portion larger and you risk suffering from overindulgence. It feeds well your hungry eyes. It fills the mind-stomach pleasantly.Speaking of nourishment, that historically the novella has been a vehicle for moralizing is easy enough to understand. A reader can tolerate only so much didacticism (no more than 40 thousand words), after which the book is customarily thrown across the room. This is not the project of all novellas, of course. And modern readers, I imagine, are suspicious of such a project and disinclined to didactic literature announcing itself as such. But is this not a worthy project? Can such a work be a joy?Here are three books publishing this summer that engage with the aforementioned novella rubric, including its “moralizing” aspect (complementary), and which I recommend. That they play so freely in the same territory while maintaining total formal difference from one another also recommends them. They give a sense of the range of the novella form. They are exacting, ambitious, and instructive “smaller” works that mean to be what they are. Fresh, Green Life by Sebastian Castillo (Soft Skull, 2025)Fresh, Green Life is a novel 160 pages in length by Sebastian Castillo. Its time is spent half in examination of the narrator (Sebatián Castillo)’s idyllic, un-idyllic, misguided, haphazard, tender collegiate years as part of a small cohort of philosophy students in the tutelage of their disaffected, lazy, middling, lonely, unclean, full-of-shit, nonetheless better-versed and more advanced Professor, and half in anticipation of a New Year’s Eve reunion, years later, of all previously mentioned, but especially the once unavailable and now divorced Maria, at the aging Professor’s house in suburban Philadelphia. It is a tale told in the language of learning that suspects a gaping emptiness beneath all erudition. Its subject—as portrayed in the readings, musings, speeches, resolutions and vows of Sebatián—is the limits of Moral Philosophy with regards to the possibility of individual human betterment. Via Sebatián we are inclined to wonder: Does the life of contemplation not in-fact result in experience-naivety and lifeforce-crippling inaction? Isn’t there somewhere else a person should focus their efforts, somewhere out in the real world—the gym, for example? And who is all this improvement for anyway? Moral Philosophy may in fact be a trap, and yet Sebatián’s every trial must necessarily run the gauntlet of the philosophic tradition, must come into contact with all the great names, before it can be properly processed or at least buried away. And, uncomfortable or deeply uncomfortable, all improvement must be proved in the end, by presenting oneself before someone else who will form their own judgement, idealized or fucked as they themselves may be in one’s estimation. You will enjoy this novel(la) if you relish confronting delusions great and small, if you love philosophy, if you hate philosophy, if you revel in the language of erudition, if you suspect a gaping emptiness beneath all learning but hope very much to find something there. Patchwork by Tom Comitta (Coffee House Press 2025)The provocation of Patchwork, as with Comitta’s earlier The Nature Book, is supposed to be that it is not “authored” in the traditional sense, but stitched together from hundreds of texts, both obscure and well-known, spanning genres and historical epochs. But a book like this, in principle, shouldn’t trouble readers acquainted with other so-called “experimental” works deploying the technique of decoupage or assemblage. If there is any controversy with regard to The Nature Book, it should be surrounding the fact that it is a novel without any people in it— people being the novel’s primary reason to exist as an art form. As for Patchwork, it is a narrative fully populated with human beings, so many you are meant to lose track. Meet and enjoy them as they quickly vanish into the swirling background. There is a “plot,” and a fetish object to be gone in search of (a snuffbox), which lends itself to allegory if you badly want it to. There is the promise of love and adventure and misadventure, but these occur more as the conscious experience of the delirious effects of cacophonous language rather than via any character whose fictional status must be kept in denial. It is a didactic work insomuch as it hopes to reinforce a reverence for all manner of literary modes of language. Comitta senses that if the spell of their technique is to hold, and their moral be delivered, their book must not go on forever, though it could. Here the novella’s humanizing circumscription/compression dynamic comes to Comitta's aid. (Patchwork is published through Coffee House’s NVLA series). Now, if you are to grant the premise of the jacket copy—that this is a story stitched together “seamlessly”—here is where you will need to apply your goodwill and suspend disbelief. Your level of readerly enjoyment will have an inverse relationship to your level of tight-assed exertion in attempting to hold onto every thread. If you are an enthusiastic reader of John Ashbery—how his writing washes over you, leaving in its tide all manner of glittering linguistic debris—you will have a great time reading Patchwork. If you are one of the few who have read and enjoyed Ted Berrigan’s "western novel" Clear the Range, you will recognize this place and be quite happy here. Information Age by Cora Lewis (Joyland Editions, July 2025)“I work for the newswire, and I cover the economy, plus politics. I’m still getting the rhythm of it,” the narrator of Information Age informs the reader, and adjusting to this “newswire rhythm” is also the reader’s task. Lewis, a journalist when she is not writing fiction, tells her tale in staccato increments of images, dialogue, anecdote, and episode. Interpersonal and neutrally reported scenes, fragments that will amount to private epochs and world-historical events, are related interspersed, undifferentiated in tone or page time. The result is that familiar feeling of onslaught that we are accustomed to from scrolling timelines, but made pleasurable through Lewis’ skill, and because, though relentless and benumbing, we know a novella is taking shape. The narrator’s professional burden is to somehow make coherent news stories from an endless glut of amorphous material. The idea that there can exist a talent for this in certain individuals, “an ear,” begs the question of due vs undue responsibility with regards to those shaping reality for the rest of us. That the journalist might instead be a mere conduit, a mystical model of media, is also considered, if rather skeptically. But the true subject of the book, it seems to me, is the potential impossibility of forming a theory of individual rectitude in an apparently hostile era of technological acceleration, institutional decomposition and soon-expected environmental collapse. Too vast a problem to approach head on, it is wisely dramatized and brought down to scale through the narrator’s varied relationships, the people she knows and doesn’t, their respective predicaments, how they touch the narrator’s life and how they entangle. Add to this modern womanhood. Add the desire for children and their real possibility. Add personal ambition. Add the competing urges to lose and/or find oneself in someone else, in pleasure, to be still or travel, to leave things in the past or drag them with and subject them to imperfection, to act with the conception of a future in mind, to mourn in advance. What possibilities does language offer us? Are we, in so many ways, doomed (by our need for meaning-making)? Did I mention that the book is funny? Well it is at times, and melancholy. And its landscapes and people carefully rendered. You will enjoy this book if you have dissociated in the recent past, if time feels disjointed or has lately become a pleasant or unpleasant blur, if you think about sex, if “you’re experiencing a profound alienation from the production and dissemination of information” but you’re up for reading a novella.

THE BALLOON by Kiddo Cunningham

July 22, 2025

During my dissertation on the history of traveling theatrical acts, I came across a grainy old black-and-white piece of footage from a fair. In the silent reel, too few people hold the ropes of a hot air balloon, intending to keep it grounded. As the balloon takes off, four people continue holding their ropes, lifted off the ground. One by one they release, dropping to the safety of Earth below. Except for one person who holds tight. I was born with a condition of isolation. Drinking didn’t give me a sense of belonging, but it made the affliction tolerable. It gave me a lens of delusion I needed: This is temporary. It muffled what was insufferable.I cling to the rope as the balloon gains height. Departing this planet, legs swinging wildly. The people below gather and scatter. Every moment, I am shocked at how high I am, then I’m perilously higher. On a Tuesday, surrounded by barely-tolerant family, I listen to them read pleas off index cards, voices trembling. It’s supposed to touch me—change me—through the shaming. Instead, I feel more othered than ever. I keep a blank face and endure, quietly stoking my rage. When I finally let go, the fall is very far. Windmilling my arms and pedaling my legs noiselessly. There is grace in these movements; an artificial tranquility imposed by the silence. I hit the ground soundlessly, grainy figures run toward me, the balloon long gone.The readers are done so I take a breath to unleash the violence brewing. Instead, a choking sigh escapes. Bodily relief. Two impossibilities: compound the isolation or give up what made isolation tolerable. Fear of the inevitable forces of gravity that, for some of us, encourage us to hold tighter and escalate the very horrors we fear. I understood this instinct.

MUTUAL by Caroline Porter

July 21, 2025

Amelia-Rose followed first. She even had the audacity to message Francis afterwards, as if following real life acquaintances on Tumblr was normal. Hi Francis! It’s nice to see someone else who is as online as me lol. xoxo—AR Francis freaked, of course. She couldn’t picture Amelia-Rose as a fellow Columbiner, not even as one of the fangirls exclusively in it for horny reasons: the ones who posted crime scene photos of Eric’s body captioned idk hes kinda cute without his face, who posted drawings of a shirtless Dylan Klebold, passably rendered in ballpoint pen—not that Francis thought there was any respectability there, with those types of girls. Amelia-Rose’s blog was Lolita models and gifsets of the Sanrio characters and hard-jawed men who were stranded in a meadow of kawaii. Arrayed in tweed, they pinned squirming schoolgirls beneath them, besmirching their mahogany desks with statutory rape. Those posts were hashtagged with TCC.A multipurpose acronym, two types of girl. Read Francis’ way: True Crime Community. Turned on its head: Teacher Crush Community. Francis ignored Amelia-Rose’s message, but clicked the Follow Back! button. And so they were mutuals. A disclosure of degeneracy: I know you, yes, but you know me too.

***

In the hallways they passed each other like strangers. Francis saw Amelia-Rose exclusively through her peripheral vision. Amelia-Rose took on a diffused quality—pinks and yellows, like the kind of sunset Francis saw in the Sunoco parking-lot where she sometimes sat, cross-legged in a fug of cigarette smoke, on the automatic tire pump.What if I talked to her? Francis thought, but she couldn’t withstand the visual: Amelia-Rose, almost six feet tall with her childishly large hairbows; Francis, in a men’s leather trench coat that dragged across the linoleum floors.Despite this, Amelia-Rose liked her reblog of the boys mugging for the camera, liked her selfie in which she wore Eric’s mirror-lensed sunglasses, liked her 1000 word essay, a painfully comprehensive breakdown of a single line from Eric’s journal. What do you think about when you look at the sky at night, when there's no clouds out and you can see all the stars? Francis reblogged a text post: According to autopsy records, Eric’s heart weighed ten grams less than Dylan’s. Alone in her room, she cried. It was Eric she loved best, after all—his verbosity, his skinny limbs in a constant tap dance of agitation. The visibility of his desperation to be loved, like cracks of light shining through the roof of a condemned building. She shut her eyes and held her hands out, trying to feel the weight of a dead boy’s heart. Above her reblog, she added: when i read this, i cried for real.A message appeared in her inbox. Here if you ever want to talk about anything.She imagined telling her, all the trite things Amelia-Rose would say to try to convince her not to. And what advice could that girl offer? A teenage girl in love with her drama teacher. A girl who had answered, unabashed, the anonymous ask Francis had sent her—answered that her wildest fantasy was to be walking home from school in the pouring rain and see the familiar car on the street. To watch as it slowed, as the passenger window rolled down. To see deliberation play across his face, to watch the break in resolve in real time. To be offered a ride.

***

Do I dare disturb the universe? asked a poem Francis studied in AP English. Do I dare? Do I dare? came into her mind often. That intruding, shameful question. Time to turn back and descend the stair.

***

At night she would play through Eric’s Doom WADs. Bricks. KILLER. Hockey.wad. She liked to clear the level of all the demon hordes and then linger there, floating through that labyrinth he had created over twenty years ago. When she tried to sleep she would see the Doom HUD on the back of her eyelids. 50 ammo, 100% health, 0% armor. She dreamt a military-base maze, an endless turning of corners. Eyes shut, the eyeball flicking back and forth underneath the thin skin of her eyelid, searching for someone that was not there.

***

She did theater tech for the spring musical, Little Shop of Horrors. Amelia-Rose was Audrey. Francis watched from high above in the control booth as she sang her solo, a falsetto belt. I’m his December Bride. He’s Father, he knows best. It was a pity, Francis thought, that Amelia-Rose was so talented and still deemed unworthy of love. Francis trained the spotlight down on her, aim steady as Amelia-Rose danced across the stage. Afterwards when she went to smoke she found Amelia-Rose crouched behind the theater, her mascara in wet trails down her cheeks. Francis didn’t know what to say. As she lit up she watched Amelia-Rose out of the corner of her eye. Francis finished her cigarette in silence, crushing the butt under her combat boot.“Do you want to go to the mall?” Amelia-Rose asked suddenly.Francis had never been to the mall. She didn’t have a car and she wouldn’t have wanted to go even if she could get there. Still, she found herself nodding. Found herself saying, “Yeah, okay.”

***

At Southpoint Mall they threaded in and out of stores, compelled to buy nothing, touch nothing, barely speaking. They ended up on a bench behind the mall beside an abandoned fountain.“I guess we should go home,” Amelia-Rose said eventually.Francis nodded. She stared at the fountain. Inside were statues of children, cast in brass. They were disquieting, malformed, their mouths stretched into grimaces meant to be smiles, their teeth individually rendered. They were placed on raised platforms, and underneath them jets of water were supposed to spout up to give the illusion that they were being blasted into the sky, except someone had turned the jets off a long time ago. The fountain was infested with geese; they splashed in the water and leaked white shit through the children’s hair. What if I walked in? Francis thought. What if I did anything at all? The sun came down a parking-lot orange. A tree branch balanced in the open hands of one of the children. It was brittle and five feet tall. The end branched like a forked tongue thrust into the sky. “Do you ever feel scared to do literally anything?” Francis asked Amelia-Rose.“Sometimes it’s good to be scared,” Amelia-Rose said. After a pause, she continued, “It’s like—I made a move on him today. He was helping me do my makeup, blacking out my eye, and his hands were on my face—I grabbed them and held them against my lips. For a second he stayed there, and I thought maybe…” She looked down, fiddling with her bracelets. “He was nice about it—he said he would ignore it this one time.”Francis walked over to the fountain. When she grabbed the stick, it was almost too much sensation: dirt worming beneath her fingernails; the geese’s honks; the slippage of leaves underfoot; the smell of still water. She turned back to Amelia-Rose. She levelled the stick and looked down its barrel, composing the image just so. A face in the crosshairs. “I could kill him for you,” Francis said.Amelia-Rose laughed as if it were a joke. “You wouldn’t dare.”Francis thought: Watch me. Amelia-Rose grabbed the forked end and pulled. The stick cracked like a wishbone between them, the sound dry and startling. Around them the geese screamed, rose into the air, and fled.

LITTLE ARLO by Billy Irving

July 16, 2025

When she found the babe under her woodpile, it was October and already cold on the mountain. Poor thing shivering under the logs with skin blue and veiny. Eyes bulging and pupilless. She scooped it up and swaddled it in a quilt, one long ago rendered by her own knotted hands, and took care to tuck its thin limbs into the folds of the fabric. Thin limbs that twisted like corkscrew worms. She brought the thing into her cottage to warm by the fire and watched as the heat revived it, brought presence to its eyes, a look of health returning to its cheeks. But its skin remained blue. Its skin would remain blue always.She took right away to calling it—him—Little Arlo. Though there were no discernable parts, none that she could find anyway, she felt that the babe was male. She knew men well. And boys. Had been surrounded by them in a past life, a husband and sons. Isn’t that the nature of the world? To be surrounded by a husband, and sons? Men who were always lingering in her effortful recollections, always too high. The tease of a box on a shelf edge. A husband who melted away in startlingly few years, a hoary, coughing soup. And boys. Boys who were also blue, wore blue, wooly blue that became mud caked, and blood soaked. Artillery. Amputation. Consumption. Dry eyes that stared into the sky and would ask for nothing, plucked out by crows, turned to birthing pits for insects. Push that away because here is a child, lovely and innocent. Here is a child, new and yours. Child, who are you? What do you see?Little Arlo had no interest in bread or vegetables, nor what little salted meat there was, but when she opened a jar of rhubarb jam he began to squirm. She scooped it into his triangular mouth, and he sucked the syrup down and cooed. Black tongue wagged, and she obliged, nearly half the jar, and then the boy slipped into a deep sleep. So wonderful to listen to him breathe those long breaths like that. Her own sleep did not come so easily and had not for years. Intervals of unsatisfying beinglessness punctuated by terror, faceless men in the shadows, drumbeat haunts emanating from within the dry air of her cabin. And then, the ringing of church bells, always church bells. Gentle, impossible, far.In the morning, Old Lady Murray sat on the porch and smoked and oscillated on her rocker, swaddled infant in her arms, and watched across the treeless ridge as Mr. Dalton, the postman, trotted in from the direction of Nimbus, giving a loud “Ahoy,” and a “How do you do, Mrs. Murray? I’ve brought you some preserves,” and “What is that you’ve got in your arms there?”“My new babe, Little Arlo.”“Oh? A new babe, then. Little Arlo, then. That’s—how nice I suppose.”“What did you bring me?”“Oh, just some pear and apple preserves, and some bread and—oh, but perhaps I should have a look at Little Arlo? Just to—and where did you say he came from?”“Better to not. Better to just leave the things on the stoop there. And, well I found him outside under the woodpile. He had such a chill, oh, but he’s nearly convalesced now. A terrific appetite for rhubarb jam, and I’m sure he’ll like pear. My boys, you know my boys, how they loved—my boys, oh, oh, and Mr. Dalton, just leave the things on the stoop there, thank you so dearly!”Mr. Dalton obliged, accustomed to the widow’s occasional episodes, and rested the sack of groceries on the rough boards of her porch. Then, giving a little bow, he spun around and trotted back down the mountain path, tut-tutting and shaking his head, and such a shame, really. The woman having completely lost her senses. Changed from the pragmatic schoolteacher of his youth, that formidable manner, and always that soft generosity beneath. And, of course, remembering that day after the meeting in Appomattox, the boys marching back into town and her sons’ not among that procession of shineless eyes. And the supposed babe, just a bundle of straw? Or a bag of flour? Or maybe something, an animal, an injured opossum. I think I saw the swaddle move.

***

Sad intrigue can spread with epidemic ferocity through small mountain hamlets, especially when carried by the lips of an unabashed gossip. Consider the bed bug, whose colonies can multiply by orders of magnitude on a monthly basis. It was in this way that, over the course of remarkably few days, Mr. Dalton had cultivated a general awareness of Little Arlos’ presence within the town of Nimbus.Gossip. Mr. Dalton felt all right about gossip. He felt that it was his employ and currency, his special talent. Gossip was a little distasteful, yes, but only a little. After all, it was gossip that enabled his charitable visits to the old woman. It was through gossip that, besides a certain prideful, self-serving generosity, shopkeeps justified the handouts they provided on her behalf. Without the extraction, and exchange of gossip, what mail, what food, what human interaction would Mrs. Murray receive? Without gossip, there might be three generations of Little Arlos living in that cabin by now. And frankly, most days there was nothing for Mr. Dalton to report. A remarkably boring person, really, just smoking and rocking in toiled remembrance. A hollowed-out woman in a hollowed-out town, drained of its youth by the undertows of war and industry. Nimbus, the unadaptive. Nimbus, monument to obsolescence. Boom and bust. Vestigial limb of a world whose new language was coal— bituminous and anthracite—was rail, land-rights, incorporation. No space for your people and their bald mountain, their total depletion of hemlock, beech, maple, chestnut, now just black shale and grey sandstone, dramatic, exposed bedrock geometries, brittle cliffs that crumbled away into angular shards, pencil lead thin.The morning was just ending as Mr. Dalton returned to Old Lady Murray’s cottage. He stood for a long time and watched as she teetered forward and back and said nothing. Just a mutual watching. He was struck by the way she held the swaddled object to her chest, her ironic resemblance to the Virgin Mary. “Well, Mrs. Murray, did Little Arlo enjoy his preserves?”“Oh yes! You should have seen him suck it all down. So quick, rabbit quick!”“I’m sure. Say, why don’t you let me hold the wee babe?”“Better to not, Mr. Dalton. He’s asleep in my arms here. Better to let a growing boy sleep, don’t you think?”Mr. Dalton climbed the first steps to the porch, leaning in close. “How about you just pull the swaddle back a bit? I’d be so pleased to have a look at him.”“Don’t come close. You’ll wake the poor thing.”There was a suggestion of embarrassment, a subtle loss of confidence appearing in the wrinkles of his forehead. “Of course, pardon me,” he said, blinking hard. “Goodbye, Mrs. Murray, and take care now. I’ll be seeing you.” Following the mountain path back towards Nimbus, Mr. Dalton crooked his neck around for one last look at the woman. He watched her release a plume of white smoke, which formed a rolling puddle of milk caught in the gentle slope of her awning. Strange mother. Blessed Mother. Recall your own mother, the lines in her face, the way her body had once seemed a landscape. Knees like mountaintops, amazed by the whiteness of the scalp where her black hair parted. Her expansive kindness, without horizon. Her resilience in the face of embarrassing, petulant torments, masculinized rage, the way she protected you with that selfsame body. A body that eroded and became wan, and then just pebbles. Just pebbles and silt. Recall how you found the stony thing that had been your mother at the kitchen table. Recall how you felt relieved.

***

After Sunday worship, during the sharing of joys and concerns, Mr. Dalton stood and reported on certain alarming developments as they pertained to the Little Arlo situation. Most congregants, those vectors of gossip, were already familiar with the story of the so-called new babe, but hearing now how the old woman still clung to the delusion, how she still cared for the mysterious swaddle of indeterminate provenance, this was certainly distressing news. Mr. Dalton listed a number of considerations, chiefly, the health threat—should the swaddle contain an animal, even the carcass of one, the widow could be at risk of injury or infection. Otherwise, say a bag of flour or object of similar inertness, she may incur emotional or spiritual harm, poor woman on the brink as it was.“What if we threw a party?” Suggested Edith Wainbridge, as she often did. If you asked Edith, a party might solve any of life’s problems. “But here, let’s throw a party to celebrate the young babe. All that drink and merrymaking, the dancing, Mrs. Murray would show us. She’d simply have to show us.”It seemed to be a good idea, a way to get many eyes on the swaddle at once. With so many well-meaning supplicants, she’d have to pass the babe around. Right away they began adorning the walls of the adjoining social hall with blue paper streamers, made last minute preparations for cold supper foods and desserts, and diluted the dregs in their liquor bottles. As for the old woman who had not stepped foot in a church since the end of the war, Mr. Dalton tasked himself with relaying the invitation. Once again, climbing the disused summit path, he found her rocking with that swaddled infant in her arms. Sun beams filtered through the trees, then the slats of the awning, then fell upon her face, where a circle of pipe smoke portrayed an almost druidic look.“Oh Arlo, won’t that be fabulous?” She said after Mr. Dalton had disappeared back over the ridgeline. “An entire party in your honor. How befitting, how deserved! My beautiful infant, my wonderful savior.” And there he was, staring at nothing in particular, sphincteric mouth clamping hard around the wooden spoon, the heap of golden apple mush.

***

It had passed well into the evening and very perceptibly the time of night when partygoers begin thinking about their own beds. Jaunty music still filled the social hall, plucked out by the fat-fingered hands of John Miller and John MacLeod, but only Edith Wainbridge, by herself, still flatfooting and stomping on the wriggling boards. The few remaining slices of cake were collapsing on the tray, and the watery liquor was very nearly finished. But still, no one had glimpsed the child, Arlo, who was completely swaddled, not a patch exposed. Nothing could breathe in a swaddle like that. There was no stink either, no reek, but a strange odor if you got close. Something botanical, almost bitter. Not entirely unpleasant.Old Lady Murray remained at the center of it all, holding court from her folding wooden chair, humored through the night by the masses. She sat and told meandering, nothing stories that rushed apart and broke, tumbled over cliffs, formed logic eddies, loops of adoration for sons whom she described with increasingly blurry distinction. And still, the kernel of her former self was present tonight, present for the first time in years. That self-sacrificing woman, teacher of a one-room schoolhouse, mother for many. Mrs. Murray, who nourished her students with stories of a world which would never be theirs. One of great kings and prophets, mathematicians, inventors. Students, who would know only the lives of soldiers, the labor of serfs. Where there were gaps in her droning recollection, partygoers took turns descending upon the old woman, asking to hold the babe, to at least have a glimpse beneath the swaddle. “Better to not.” This was her refrain, without variation. Better for his face to be hers alone. His strange features, his blue flesh. To hold his writhing body, to caress his jawless chin, the undulations of the muscles beneath. Gravel through a hopper, a meager but steady stream of attendees bade farewell and departed, hiding their frustration. Mr. Dalton paced. He noticed the spiral of the party, the unspoken, shared desire to end the night. He held onto one final gambit. It had occurred to him days ago, a means to retrieve Little Arlo, to detain and inspect the swaddled object. But a cruel means. Or at least the aesthetic of cruelty, but beneath that it was genuine, kind-hearted concern. Her wellbeing at the forefront of all things. Yes, this was Mr. Dalton’s intention, the old woman’s wellbeing. Good intentions and, in the end, a good outcome. He was counting on a good outcome. Concern for the old woman’s wellbeing. Genuine, real concern. And curiosity? The desire to know? To see? Admit it, how often you think about her all alone in that sad cottage, just memories, and cloying dreams. Phantoms are real in a place like that. You know all about phantoms, don’t you? Recall your own mother, the whispers in the wind that you can still hear. Didn’t you let your own mother down? The surrogate whom you call Old Lady Murray, the care-drive of a son transposed. To help her. To bring her back. To gawk. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? You voyeur, you pervert. No, no. Genuine concern. Care. Righteous intent. These are the things that matter. These are the truths at the root of your being, the goodness there, the generosity and charity. These are the things you know to be true about yourself. You need these things to be true about yourself.The drunken music faltered now and went quiet. Mr. Dalton looked up. The crowd had thinned, only a handful of supplicants remaining, the most zealous disciples of morbid fascination. The candles flickering in their puddled, dwarfed stumps. The waning of the grey light filtering through thick window glass and the weakening definition of the clouds beyond, which had become a single, soft sheet. And Old Lady Murray, clearly on her way out, moving across the boards towards him, curtsying to the well-wishers as she went. “Mr. Dalton, I think it’s about time for me to be headed home. It’s Little Arlo, you see, the babe needs his rest. And I’m feeling a bit tired myself, to tell the truth.”“I see. Well, come then, let’s walk you back.”“Thank you, but there’s no need. We can manage.”“I insist, allow me to walk you.”“Little Arlo and I can get by on our own. Isn’t that right, wee one?”“Ah, but please just wait a second,” Mr. Dalton said. “I was thinking about the war, you see, remember the war? Yes, yes, of course. See, it just occurred to me, it just hit me suddenly, you see—and I hadn’t realized it when you asked before, all those years ago—but actually, I woke up this morning with the pang of a memory that, yes—yes, I did see your boys. I did know them. We were comrades, don’t you see?”“My boys?”“Yes, I remember them, three of them, yes? I remember that they always asked after their mother. They worried about you, Mrs. Murray, and they always said how lucky they were to be your sons.”“Oh—”“And they asked me to take care of her, should anything happen to them. And something did happen to them, didn’t it? To each of them.”“Oh, my boys. My boys—” Old Lady Murray swayed and gazed miles away, out beyond the plastered walls of the social hall. Out to where her boys might be. Three of them. She saw them face down in the mud, no bubbles blown into opaque, grey puddles. No more holding them, no more feeling the weight of their heads in her lap, comforting them on a journey to a place that did not exist. I cannot hold you. I cannot throw a party—no parties for you, ever. No weddings. Boys in their blue uniforms with shining brass buttons, their eyes which had once been the eyes of children. To hold your heads, to feel the weight of you, to see your faces again. Never. Not since their farewell waves from half-opened train car windows. Not since the plumes of black smoke, white steam shooting geyser-like from heavy, sooty locomotive wheels. The cold, awesome machinery that rotated them around and around again.The old woman took on a look of syncope and crumpled into a nearby chair, still holding Little Arlo, pulling the swaddled infant inwards. The few remaining partygoers fluttered paper fans in her face, held tins of diluted whiskey to her lips. “Oh, pass me the child,” said Edith Wainbridge, leaning in beside her. “Give Little Arlo to me, Mrs. Murray, before you drop him.” Her aching arms suddenly unburdened, the swaddled object lifted up out her lap, empty fingers curling around nothing, pale eyes held shut, wet-lidded.Edith brought the bundle up into her own chest and was surprised by the heft of the thing. Certainly not just a roll of fabric. Too heavy, it seemed, for even an opossum. She felt a definitive movement within the swaddle, a subtle throb and an occasional twitch. There was something alive in here. The remaining partygoers closed in around her, many hands outstretched, many eyes wide and searching. It struck Edith now, a stab of frightening consideration, that this may indeed be a child. And then, with haunting clarity, she noticed that she was rocking the swaddle, gently bouncing it against her clavicle. Mr. Dalton met her confused, startled eyes and held his arms out, as if the child were the sphere of Atlas, a titanic burden which he would accept without complaint. She passed—nearly tossed—the babe to him and then took a seat beside Old Lady Murray, almost as pale herself now. The onlookers shifted their focus to Mr. Dalton as he unwrapped the quilted pupa. How strange to peel back so many layers and then to keep going, the fabric growing damper, more yellowed as he approached its center. And then that smell, at once acrid and appealing, it caused a tingling in his sinuses.Outside, the early evening became dusk. Crepuscular animals stirred in the forested valleys below. But up here on the bald mountain carved up like a rotten molar, up here it was stone silent. Up here, twilight seemed to last for hours—darker than midnight, when the moon casts its image upon all things. Up here, where there was no shade. A century from now, dark nights would be rarer still, but by then, Nimbus would be a ghost. Its buildings devoured by the first pioneer species of ecological succession. The families who had nested in its once lamp-lit homes, long since dispersed and integrated into the larger cities of the region: Charleston, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Huntington, Cincinnati. The last few layers of swaddling were oil-slick and stuck to themselves, audibly peeling away from the surface beneath. Mr. Dalton was the first to see the babe, its bald, blue head, elongate and ambiguous. The sphincter of its mouth, clenching and unclenching. Its huge, dark eyes that reflected but did not blink. And arms, delicate arms. A number of thin arms, but which number? More than two. They twisted and reached, one of them winding around Mr. Dalton’s wrist, an immense strength apparent despite how slender, how gentle. “My Lord! Wha—God, what is it?”He dropped the thing to the floor with a wet thud, where it made the first sound anyone had heard from it. A sound like a puppy’s sigh, more a whimper than a whine. And then silence again. Deep silence. The small crowd of supplicants staring dumb-eyed, something breaking within each of them, something long fermenting at the center of it all, suppressed by the decades of politeness and boredom. They shrieked and pointed, some of them fainting. It was in this commotion that Old Lady Murray awoke, slowly habituating to consciousness, and then upon seeing her child on the ground, leaped up with a throaty, glottal yelp. A mother’s yelp. She dove forward and hefted the child over her shoulder, bounding out into the twilight, heavy double doors swinging shut behind her. Then just the crowd standing baffled, lingering with confused, dumb eyes, the terror of a deer on the interstate. Some of them mumbling, some of them shutting their eyes and shaking their heads.What words are there to describe that which cannot exist? Mr. Dalton was the first to capture and transform the horror—the first to reach desperately for rage. For violence. “Get it! Devil! Get—God, stop!” his voice buzzed in a new, tinny register. “Go get her! Stop her! Devil!” He pushed through the herd and pulled an oil lamp from the wall, sprinting out after the old woman, the others following quickly behind. They armed themselves however they could, cutlery, long-handled collection baskets, heavy-bound hymnals, bottles, their own pocketknives. They ran out into the dusty streets after the old woman. Only Edith Wainbridge remained, locked to her seat.

***

Follow her past the tavern and up the slope of the bald summit. The vision-fade of twilight, the lactic burn, the stiff and frightening arthritic pangs. Little Arlo clings to her now, blank eyes full of knowing, mouth opening and closing in mollusk fashion. “Hold onto me child, you won’t be harmed. I will not let them. Lord knows they will not lay a finger upon you.” And the jeering mob closing in behind, the cloud churning up beneath their footfalls, their mean noises. “Hold on, Little Arlo, cling tight to Momma,” her words spitting out between laborious pants. “They are the devils and you, an angel.” She rushes past her cottage and continues to the other side of the summit, where she hears faint bells ringing out in the gloaming. A soft chime and deeper, brassy harmonies.The mob gains and corners her against the mountain’s far-facing flank, just the steep valley beneath. They form a wide line and choke in, no choice for her but to descend the harsh slope. She has trouble with the steepness of it, the breakaway shale beneath her feet. Her gown catches on a pathetic hemlock fledgling and she comes down hard on her knees, cries out, but does not drop Little Arlo. She does not even flinch to catch herself, arms in a firm cradle as she tumbles end-over-end, rolling down the talus until she crashes against a sandstone boulder. A phosphene flash in her vision as something—many somethings—shatter within. The feeling of warmth beneath skin. “Help her!” Shouts Mr. Dalton, “Get away from it!” The mob clamors down the slope, shards of loose stone bunching up in mounds beneath their feet, the talus spilling down and burying her bloodied legs, pebbles bouncing up into her face. And all through the hurt, the old woman smiles at her child. Little Arlo, still unharmed. Little Arlo, still protected. “Take me to them, Little Arlo. Take me away, please, you angel, you divine thing. If my boys are somewhere, please take me to them. Please, you’ve been there, you’ve seen them, I can tell by the look in your eye. If they are nowhere, I’d rather be nowhere. But they are somewhere, aren’t they? What place is it? Tell me, is it the place where you’re from? I’m not your mother, I know that. I’m not your mother, but I could be. I could show you what it is to have a mother, to have brothers, to be held, to be worried. Please. I’m ready now.”The child does not nod, but closes his eyes, becomes a mess of limbs that stretch out and wrap themselves around the woman. Her arms and legs now bound in blue helixes. The crowd watching in gape-mouthed horror as the child encompasses and subsumes her. Kudzu on a maple tree, the union of two beings. The old woman then rises to her feet as Little Arlo stands up on her behalf, walks for her, moves each of her limbs in his own. He turns her around and sprints down the slope at a full gallop.“My God!” cries Mr. Dalton. “My Lord, God Almighty!” He has no other language for this. His ears ring, a tightness at the base of his neck, blood rushing past his temples. He’s heard stories from the war, strange lights in the night, wounded bodies that emit a green glow and are healed, but nothing like this. His head pounds and his body trembles, shaking without his permission—an angry body with a frothing mouth—the reptile inside him cursing and yelling, grieving for itself. And beneath it all, genuine concern. Genuine guilt. An expanding thought loop that would not cease until his death three years later. The distinctions of memory collapsing, subjects losing their referents. There is a gestalt that precipitates from this soup of recollection: the woman who raised him, the woman who taught him, the woman who bore God. His mouth hangs open as he cries out, “Mother!” “Little Arlo,” says Old Lady Murray, her voice weak now. “I’m ready,” and then her body goes limp inside his. She is carried down the mountain at panicked speeds, eyes closed, smiling, listening to the bells that are so much louder now. The same bells she has heard each night for the last forty years, but never so loud, never so clear as this. And something else, too, something so quiet, interpolated over the percussion. Something like the voices of young men. No words. Only meaning. Little Arlo carries the old woman into a small cave, nestled beneath a curving, gable-like syncline that is etched with glimmering veins of quartzite. Nobody watching as mother and child disappear into the mouth of the Earth. Then there is a sharp green flash and a sound like thunder. Stones break and crash down, burying the entrance. No more cave, no trace ever found.

***

Unseen by anyone out in the deep night, out in the forested isolates that pen the river in, there is a heap of refuse where the waters meet a bend and regurgitate their burden. Here, an opossum searches for her meal. It is bleak, hard winter, when the insects are buried, and berries do not fruit. She eats garbage, bones not stripped of their flesh, whatever smaller creatures have congregated here for the same purpose. She must eat well tonight. Her pouch drags against the ground, sagging under the weight of four babes. She must eat well.

PARROT by László Darvasi, translated from Hungarian by Ági Bori

July 15, 2025

As was his habit, he lay down for an afternoon nap, although next door they were building a church. The sounds of drills, hammers, and other tools kept waking him up. He fumbled his way to the kitchen, drank two glasses of absinthe in quick little swigs, plopped back in the armchair, and stared at the ceiling. Up there, the light was moving back and forth, forming streaks and patches, devouring itself. They were puttering around next door, and he remembered that the foreman had once said to the workers that not all of them would live long enough to see the completion of the church. He was a slim and sinewy man; he smoked while he talked; he lit up a few cigarettes. He watched him from the balcony, then eventually he reached for a cigarette, too. The workers should remember, the foreman explained, that there are sanctuaries and churches whose construction lasted five hundred years. Think of the many churches in the world that are up and running, but they’ll never be finished. They’re not yet finished, but services are already taking place in them. The workers should remember that a church might never be truly finished. And when it is finished, does everyone get there in the end? No. Not everyone gets to the church they plan to go to. Because along the way they get lost, find another church, take a different path, get sick, die.The workers then began to ask questions.“Then why bother building it?”“I don’t know,” the foreman said. “They’re paying us, aren’t they?”They are. That’s true. If they weren’t paying, they would quit for sure. But because they’re paying them, they’re working. Then one of the workers asked a strange question:“Could a prayer be ever finished?!”“Perhaps if it’s genuinely heard,” the foreman replied, but he already regretted saying it.The man thought that once services were being held, he’d go over there to pray too, perhaps get down on his knees, and ask the Lord not to let the bird land on his windowsill anymore. Is that what he really wanted though? The window was open, and if he were to close the window panes, he’d suffocate. The heat was unbearable. At least with the window open, there was a small draft. He got up from the armchair, and looked back to see what kind of imprint his body left behind. He turned the radio on, and the scratchy sounds, emitted with each turn of the button, also sounded like a prayer. He listened to the news. Another catastrophic mine accident somewhere. The hot spell was here to stay. A protest was underway. The man turned the radio off. He drank another glass of absinthe, opened a can of beer, and watched the slowly disappearing brownish foam; by then, the bird was already standing on the windowsill. Truth be told, it usually dirtied it up and, once again, it pooped right there.The men below were puttering around.The bird was the town’s parrot, it flew from window to window, no one knew who its owner was, whose cage it escaped from. Someone might have let him go, shoo, fly away, we don’t want you anymore, bird. He thought it might have stayed around this area because of the construction of the church; maybe it was fascinated by the sounds of drills, chisels, hammers. The temperature was so high that the dripping sweat boiled on the temples. The city was suffocating, windows everywhere were wide open, as if they were human mouths. Large, hungry mouths, breathing in the heat and exhaling human vapor, the scent of dust falling from the leaves of indoor plants, the stale smell of furniture. The curtains, like souls ready to escape their imprisonment, swayed back and forth. The parrot was an exceptionally intelligent being.Its small colorful head tilted left and right, it listened, it eavesdropped. It picked up and learned the intimate whispers and shouts that circulated in each home, then it moved on. In the next home it repeated what it heard earlier. Sometimes the parrot told the man, stay with me.“Stay with me.”“Go away.”“You’re not enough.”“You’re too much.”The parrot whispered, be nice, be nice.“Let’s dance, darling.”The bird acted out how the church was being built. It imitated the drilling, the chiseling, the loud hammering, as though it were an echo. After a while it flew away, the man wiped off the yellow poop from the windowsill, and emptied another glass of absinthe down his gullet. He sat down, stared upward, and gave names to the cracks on the ceiling. He spotted a spider. He might have even dozed off. That’s when the doorbell rang. It was the foreman from the construction site, with a cigarette hanging from his mouth. His face looked tormented. They had exchanged a few words before, back when the construction started. He was now holding a bag in his hand, said hello, and asked to come in for a moment. He had something to say. The man nodded, of course, and stepped aside. The foreman accepted the glass of absinthe and lit up another cigarette. “This is how we pray,” he said “during work.” “We never get to the end of our work, but we pray regardless.”The bag was still in his hand.“I see,” the man nodded. “Did the parrot used to visit you, too?”“I never chased it away. Sometimes I might have even waited for it,” the man nodded.“Do you know what one of my workers said? He said that the bird is the voice of history.”“That might be a bit of an exaggeration,” the man said, and he poured another glass. They clinked their small, but thick glasses.“While we were working on our construction site,” the foreman said, “the bird kept repeating a woman’s name. In your voice. We couldn’t work because of it.”“You couldn’t work because of a name?”The foreman didn’t answer.“It was so ridiculous. The youngsters, the younger workers, they kept laughing,” he said as he wiped his forehead. “Don’t be angry with me, but it couldn’t go on any longer.”“I see,” the man nodded. “Don’t be angry with me, you all.”“Here you go,” the foreman said, and he slowly lowered the bag on the table. He chugged another glass of absinthe and left. He didn’t say goodbye. His steps echoed in the stairway, although during such heat waves stairway noises usually sound muffled. Blood seeped through the brown pastry bag. They must have caught it by hand, and then wrung its neck. The man placed the carcass on the windowsill, right where it pooped a few hours ago, and then, as had been his habit for some time, he began to talk to it.

POCKET UNIVERSE by D.T. Robbins

July 14, 2025

I find a pocket universe in my apartment building. A whole ass other universe two floors below me! On the 23rd floor to be exact. You’d never know it was a pocket universe by looking at it. From the outside, it just looks like another normal door to another normal apartment. The pocket universe feels like it’s made for me. Like its dark energy and matter and various particles all exploded from the nethermost parts of my soul during its creation or my creation, or maybe they happened simultaneously and that’s how love works. The first night that I’m in my pocket universe, I sleep. That’s it. I sleep the best sleep I’ve had in years. No alarms. No construction outside my window. No neighbors fucking so loudly that I get a little jealous but also a little horny. Just the purest form of rest known to man. I wake up to a fresh cup of coffee just the way I like it on the nightstand with a little note that says: Good morning. I love you. At sunset, I walk through the field of black velvet petunias and watch how the rays of light bounce off the petals and bounce upward to illuminate the coming stars and my heart bounces around in my chest and wow wow wow, look at how beautiful everything is!I tell my pocket universe everything: how stupid my boss is, why I chose to wear whatever I chose to wear that particular day, how my diet is/isn’t going, my working theory that anyone who drives a KIA is a bad driver and anyone who drives a BMW is an asshole—everything! My pocket universe listens and laughs and through signs and wonders lets me know if I'm right or if I’m being judgmental. It’s not long until I pack up most of my shit and move into my pocket universe, only going back to my home universe when I need to water my plants or get a haircut or see how the San Diego Padres are doing this season or something. I work remotely, and my pocket universe has great WiFi, so I’m still able to make money even though I don’t have to pay for rent or gas or groceries anymore. My pocket universe provides everything for me free of charge. Nights are spent by the ocean, drinking coffee stouts with the dolphins. Mornings are spent having friendly debates on various topics with the redwood trees and the skyscrapers while scarfing down the best fucking breakfast burritos I’ve ever had. In the fleeting moments, I stare at the sun because here it doesn’t blind you. Here, it illuminates the version of you that you’ve always wanted to be. The version of you you’d always hoped was somewhere inside of you. It shines its light on that part of you like a miracle, and you start to believe.

***

I notice it in the sky first, like slender cracks in glass slowly crawling from one end of the horizon to the other. My pocket universe tries to convince me that everything is fine. That it’s not a big deal, nothing to worry about. The water is next. Once clear and pure, it muddles and is soon overrun with leeches. The sun dims from brilliant gold to a metallic gray. Still, my pocket universe tells me it’s okay. That it will pass soon enough, that it’s just grateful I’m here. I tell it I’m just as grateful. That I love it too. That I love it more than words can express. That no story or song or poem or picture or suicide pact or anything could ever express. That’s when the crimson in my veins turns black. My skin pales as the dark lines stretch along every inch of my body. I lose sight in one eye, and my lungs only take half their normal amount of air. Every breath feels suffocating. “I’m killing you by staying here,” I say. “Maybe I don’t belong here. Maybe I was wrong. What did I do? Why is this happening?”The mountains explode. Fire mushrooms up and rolls out like tidal waves across the canvas of sky, setting my pocket universe itself on fire. Stars crash down around me. My pocket universe whispers in my ear, “I’m so sorry,” and I black out. I’m lying on the floor of the hallway, covered head to toe in ash and soot. The door to my pocket universe expands and retracts as though taking its last breaths. I reach for the doorknob, try to force myself back in. I’m thrown into the air like a fucking rag doll, past the other doors in the hallway that lead to regular apartments and not pocket universes, and into the elevator. The doors slam shut, and I’m sent back to my floor.

***

Every morning and night, I walk past the door that leads to my pocket universe. The cracks in the wood heal in a matter of days, weeks, months until it’s as good as new. I heal, too. But I know I can never go back to my pocket universe. That if I do, it’ll kill us both. For whatever reason. It doesn’t matter, I guess. It just is. Instead, I lie in bed at night and dream of my pocket universe. Of its beauty and its brilliance and its whole ass existence being a miracle. And in my dreams, in my mind, I find a new pocket universe for me and my pocket universe to be together. One that hopefully won’t kill us both.

JITTERBUG JOHNNY by Grey Traynor

July 11, 2025

Jitterbug Johnny made it to the back of a dozen trucks and sports utility vehicles in the form of a sticker: “Jitterbug Johnny 1965-2023 – ‘Drive faster than an eagle takes flight!’” Jitterbug said the phrase any chance he could: before and after taking a shot, getting out of cold above-ground pools, even while receiving the toothiest blow job.However, it was a phrase that bothered some folks, sticking in their ear like a stubborn wad of wax. Did eagles take to flight faster than most other birds, they would wonder, shouldn’t this pithy encouragement have more to do with eagles soaring unparalleled heights rather than the immediacy with which they took off?These were understandable questions to ask of a man who also drove a beat-up sedan that couldn’t reach 30 miles per hour without shuddering and shaking across the land it traversed. And shit cars aside, Jitterbug usually preferred to stumble home most nights, the pounding tread of his unsteady boots his only company at 2:30 AM.After his death, choking on a chicken wing alone in his studio apartment with no curtains and a crunchy carpet that would scare even the bravest set of bare feet, the truly unspectacular mystery of Jitterbug Johnny’s motto that, without realizing it, garnered years of mental estate by those who knew him, rose to the surface, ready to be evaluated.Bored by their regular brews, Jitterbug’s bar buddies, a comingling from two different, dimly-lit establishments, met in an agreed upon abandoned parking lot to speculate over who “Jitterbug Johnny” really was and why he proselytized about driving faster than an eagle takes flight.First, the bar buddies decided to bust down Jitterbug’s front door, a place, they all discovered, they had never been invited back to.Their first batch of clues was the adornments: a Mexican flag on one wall, just to the side of the bulby TV, and, on the other, just above the couch, hung a life-sized poster of Howie Mandel wearing a burgundy suit—official 2007 promo for the show Deal or No Deal.The buddies stopped in their tracks, thankful for the safe, cleanish confines of their work boots traversing across the crackling carpet, their feet inside burdened enough, sore, weary, from working their hauls, their men, and their minds throughout the day.With fewer answers and more questions, the breeze drifting over the felled front door, the bar buddies scratched their beards and polished their bald heads shiny, forgetting why they felt so compelled to come, until the leering face of Howie Mandel sparked a discussion, a speculating as to why Johnny, a live alone bachelor, would have a poster of a sharp-dressed man and not a woman with honeyed hair and cleavage like an overstuffed couch?What, ultimately, they didn’t say (“Johnny was a queer!”), out of reverence for the dead, screamed louder than what they did (“Deal or No Deal? Solid network TV!”)Then the baked-in smell of spicy chicken soup, advancing from the hallway, comforted their searching minds and, together, without further debate, they realized Howie Mandel, at heart, was a stand-up comedian, an uncovered masculine aspect to the poster and the dead man who had tacked it up with three rusty nails and one bobby pin (“Certainly a souvenir from one wild nooner,” the bar buddies nudged each another with a grin.)But the Mexican flag they still cut their eyes at, wanting Jitterbug to be a full-blooded American. That is until one of the buddies, either the one a full inch shorter than the rest or the one who was always “pickin’ his seat,” chimed in, “I remember Jitterbug sayin’ his dad was half Mexican? Or…Maybe…It was his grandfather?”Ah yes, the bar buddies nodded. They too had a half-Mexican father and/or grandpa.The buddies split up, combing through the rest of the apartment, hoping to turn over the right “shell” and gain more clarity, more understanding so they could get back to their respective bars and nod with added certainty whenever someone spoke Jitterbug’s name.Drawers opened, cabinets closed, and fingers of the buddies gripped, tousled, and upturned what they could find only to come up short of filling in the deep gaps of just who all these men had considered a friend.Was Jitterbug the broken comb wedged under the one recliner, not the one with the blood stain but the one that smelled like box? Was he the TV, stuck on the weather channel for a different state? And where was the car manuals or bird ephemera for all that talk of driving eagles and flying cars. What was the saying again, the buddies shrugged, the permeating soup smell now a given, no longer a comfort.Tired, the buddies scratched themselves a final time, resting their other available hand on their hip until that posture felt too feminine and they all quickly shoved their hands in their pockets and left.Back at the bar, a new one, but as divey as the ones they had known, floors sticky, the beer cheap and shitty, the buddies sighed collectively.“Remember the time Johnny chipped his tooth?”Yes, they remembered, their smiles flat and foamy. Jitterbug had gotten blackout drunk and smashed his face into the pinball table just because no one had ever thought to give it a try.“Remember the time Johnny shit his pants?”Yes, that too they remembered until a bar buddy said, “Which time?”They all laughed over their beers, promising they’d learn from Jitterbug’s mistake, stopping at three, rushing to the toilet if they felt any “hot chocolate” coming on.Then a lull settled and the bar buddies noticed the football game blaring from the many screens and the two women playing pool who, yes, did have smaller breasts than they would normally hope for but it would be rude not to chat them up after the next round brought out the courage.It was this kind of casual moment of nothing, before that chicken wing refused to budge, when Jitterbug Johnny would’ve appeared, telling them all to drive faster than an eagle takes flight. The bar buddies acknowledged his absence with back slaps and mug raises. They didn’t have more any information about their dead, beloved friend. And they still didn’t understand his confounding catchphrase, but one thing was clear: you can argue with your boss for sticking you with the night shift, you can argue with your girlfriend on how best to shut that newborn up, but you can’t argue with the dead.“Hear, hear!” The bar buddies cried, clinking their glasses, letting the beer spill over the rim as it pooled on the bar top. “To Jitterbug Johnny!”

SLUMBER PARTY AT THE END OF THE WORLD by Robert Helfst

July 10, 2025

We’re nearly there now - lids grow heavy as the sun sets on our species. It’s bittersweet, sleep’s surrender, a warm blanket wrapping around our aching bodies. It’s better this way, a relief to embrace our conclusion without a coda, to no longer carry on. In the end it wasn’t cancer or rising oceans or mass extinctions or other self-inflicted harms but a deep fatigue that hollowed us until there was nothing left to do but rest, finally, now and forever. One last shared sigh, releasing the weight of our communal sins, and then the comfort of an unending slumber.

NO NAME AND COOL PARTY by Erin Satterthwaite

July 9, 2025

No NameI looked at her picture to see if she was more attractive than me. I looked up her family’s ancestry to see if they had ever owned slaves. They hadn’t; they were quakers. I looked at the picture of my boyfriend and her when they were in Italy together. I had never even been to Italy and he knew this. Yet there he was four years ago eating gelato with her with his eyes closed and a big grin. He probably wouldn’t take me to Italy because I was dull and uncultured. She worked in academia at a fancy university and had degrees that I would never have. I worked as a preschool teacher and everyone thinks I just finger paint all day. I don’t, and we mostly use colored markers anyways. She was born in a city, a really important one. I was born in a town with no name. It did have a name, but it hardly deserved one. She was not prettier than me, but somehow that made it worse. She must be really special while I am just attractive. Being attractive isn’t special. Anyone would date someone attractive because they assume they're good at sex. I am not good at sex; I just lay there. She probably did really kinky stuff. Like finger stuff. I heard ugly girls do that to compensate. She was not actually ugly, but I needed to say that she was. It was all I had. Cool Party I had finally been invited to a cool party. I was wearing a long skirt. I couldn’t drink because I was on antibiotics so I ordered an apple juice at the bar because I thought it would at least look like a beer but the bartender handed me a bottle shaped like an apple. I was wearing a long skirt and drinking apple juice and everyone thought I was Mormon and they hated me. Nobody had said they hated me, but I could assume they did because nobody was coming up and talking to me. The most popular person at the party had invited me. He was talking to everyone else and everyone wanted to talk to him. I was alone in a corner watching a Youtube video on mute, which probably wasn't helping. Then someone came up and began talking to me. He asked about the Youtube video. I told him it was two really funny guys that play video games and he asked if I played video games and I said no because I didn’t play video games, I just liked watching other people do it. He excused himself and walked away. I was jealous of him because he could walk away. I finished my apple juice and went home.

BURIED PATHOLOGIES AND THE ULTIMATE ‘NO PLACE’: An Anti-Interview with Oli Johns by Ryan Raymond Buell

July 8, 2025

How many people will read this interview? Will anyone read it? Will exactly three people read it—the writer interviewed, the editor interviewing, the publisher publishing … before a handful of thumbs sends it scrolling offscreen in their search for more content?—so much to read and digest, to form a perspective on … I can’t. I don’t have time. Just swipe to the bottom and see if it leaves a mark. It’s hard to know if I watched this or imagined it, but there is probably a cyberpunk anime where someone plugs a metal cord into their brainstem, and the data download is so huge blood trickles out their nostrils and they die, right there in their bedroom in front of the computer screen. Given the current size and capability of the human brain it seems impossible to read everything on the Internet. What if someone forced you to? What if you were then made to think deeply on absolutely everything you read? When someone thinks a thought that no one else has ever come close to thinking does the universe expand or become denser? What kind of instrument would be used to measure this? How much would it cost? Would it make living and working in a factory on the moon worth it? These are some of the kinds of questions I wish I had asked. Novelist and blogger Oli Johns refused an interview with me. “Ask me questions without asking any questions,” he said. “Let me answer using only lines from Ubik.” Here is our encounter, which took place via email.RYAN RAYMOND BUELL: Your blog [psychoholosuite.com] recently reached a milestone of ten years. What were your spacetime coordinates when you realized your physical existence would be forfeited for that of Psycho Holosuite? OLI JOHNS: 10 years is a farmer’s choice, my failure to grow corn and lemongrass at the same time and growing it anyway. 10 years. That’s the number I tell people in the market when they ask me how long I’ve been in Hong Kong, 10 not 18 cos 18 seems unreal. 10 years of slowly becoming nothing but a WordPress site. The novels may as well be burnt plastic. My Cantonese is quite decent. Is that what you want? I’m not comfortable with this at all. Glen Runciter is dead. Or is he? Someone died in the explosion orchestrated by the funniest SF writer of his time, a rabid anti-Communist, anti-Lemmist. He’s not dead. He can’t die. Ads recycle all. First story I ever wrote for Psycho Holosuite was about a guy coming back from the dead and becoming Psycho Holosuite. This was a mistake. MistAAAAke. The whole thing. Tsuen bo do hai gai. How do you feel about it as someone who once wanted to Exit Reality, who's been here for five minutes, who is not that supernaturalist?RRB: I feel adversarial about it, it doesn’t matter. I’m here to toe-test the waters for a new high, maybe drift intermittently on a friendly basis, we’ll see. But I appreciate the reference to my namesake. Question two: How does studying languages outside of English contribute to your penchant for reconfiguring small art-shaped swathes of reality? OLI: [To escape feeling too trapped by performance/dadaism, let’s put real stuff in brackets. Is everything going to be a question? [it doesn’t have to be]. My aim is to bury my real feelings amongst a lot of nonsense, most of it snatched from old notes, old work, your work, Ubik [as I said before], language guides, Cantonese soft sci-fi etc.] [let’s be desperate friends, not adversaries.]].: : : :When it comes to language, I’m skimming the pages, looking for another landscape with one mother and one threat. It doesn’t happen that often. My mother just wants to be left alone, for psychological reasons. She says she can speak French but I’ve tested her several times and now she’s gone. If she had stuck around, she would’ve understood that surrealism/absurdism hinges on [ ]. Language learning rides on the wing of that. In Cantonese, the spoken and written are often estranged from each other—you shouldn’t write out that which comes from the throat—so I accept that and shove idioms in. Hand write them like a primary school kid, scan them, remove the background [god willing, if there’s substance to it] and just shovel them into my work. It always makes sense despite this, despite me. To be honest, I’m only really competent in Cantonese, Japanese, French, Farsi, Portuguese, Slovene, Urdu, Swahili and Urdu. Six of those are make-believe. I read a book once. You put a guy from Pakistan in front of me, I’ll forget how to say ‘nothing.’ I can’t speak Urdu. The writing system is beautiful. Can’t speak French either, unlike every single person in the UK. Is this answering the question? Too artificial? At some point, this is going to get annoying and I want to stay on top of that. If you come to live in Hong Kong, locals will say, why aren’t you learning Mandarin? I feel contaminated by my choices. Another language I’m not fluent in is the occult. Sorry, Elytron [ and now [x]].Recently, I’ve started learning Yaqui.It all builds up into several thousand different ways of pretending you’re actually expressing yourself.Me a language?I’ve wanted to say this for a long time. In Perma Neon O, there was a page with an extract from Red Moon [Chinese sci-fi, erratic], fully written out in Chinese by my hand, aligned to the right, opposed by white space. It said something about me that no one will ever understand, even those who understand Chinese. Should I have deleted that?RRB: [I don’t see you as a true adversary. But the tone felt that way to me, which I honestly found exciting. But I agree, desperately colliding friends it is. Right now, the way I see it is that the interview starts with questions for the sake of form [there are also some actual thoughts I genuinely want to ask you about] but eventually your chaotic sense-destroying responses draw me into a helpless dialogue, the questions becoming other ends of an equation, or responses to your outputs, until the typical interview structure is imploded … ] [with this next one feel free to respond with simulations and nothing but, when it feels right I’ll respond in kind … provoking me a little might help with this, maybe by my fifth question I’ll have no choice but to give up asking things] What new genres of literature should be invented? OLI: [Never really thought about this before re: inventing genres].One of the below: modernism but 80’s but soft SF but more absurd but semi-real, something unafraid of aesthetics/faculty of association, prole stuff, my stuff, their stuff, Chinese stuff, xeno-esoterica, or not my stuff, I’m just copying Tyson Bley, though it looks like he’s moved on to shriek music now.I’ve moved locations, those kids were irritating.I’m not copying him, I just say it to ground myself.[Aren’t there enough genres already?]I subbed a beautiful picaresque to Solarpunk Magazine last year about an anarchist alone and miserable in the Kuiper Belt, and they didn’t like it. There’s hope in that. I’ll never sub anything to anyone ever again. Not sure they’re even a magazine. What I really wanna do is just keep scrawling out lines from Cinema II // Deleuze and superimposing them on screenshots from Santa Claws and Alienator and Mystics in Bali.[don’t think I have a good answer to this. Trying to analyse why I’m so uncomfortable in this process/reverting to absurdism. It’s not an interview but feels like it is. I’m afraid [terrified maybe] that one of these lines is gonna be extracted and framed in the promo-box, and without context, my work dies. Almost all work does].Is snuff a genre?Or is it core?Solar-, Cyber-, Modernist, aesthetic, synth-, steam-, hard-, soft-, there’s always a camera, always a Liz Short bisected into...this...kind of real out of artifice yet still not real, not even close.I’m Khleb-punk and here’s my manifesto: ‘Japan In White Guy.’[Karina Bush might be a genre, and that would be the end of her. Leave naming to others. Enjoy anonymity + hope it hurts].[you should keep these bits in, I think it might add something].[People want to be confused]RRB: [your responses are meaty and complicated enough that I feel unable to respond without sounding like a dick…I wonder if saying art dies without context is like needing genre conventions through which to view it, which is maybe why it’s difficult to imagine a new one without falling back on variations of what’s already here.][A lot of your work plays off genre, or uses it as a vehicle for what feels like an [un]selfconsciously permeable mind [yours?] open to any information it encounters, considering rejecting revisiting…maybe the thoughts happening in that mind would make no sense without the context of genre [sci-fi for KRV, Perma Neon O, etc.] but they would still exist as a puzzling artifact made out of typed [and scribbled] thoughts, which they seem to be already.] In your novel KRV, the narrator struggles to imagine utopian societies springing up on the dwarf planets of the Kuiper Belt, while in the far backdrop of the story, the 2019-20 Hong Kong protests are taking place. Bliss shifted into low gear—if we had regressed twenty, maybe thirty years the psychological spacewalks extended in a garish mask. “Please, Mr. Runciter.” Those green tumbled stones. The toaster dissolved as a sullen refrigerator perceived her breasts. [Hadn’t cracked my copy of UBIK for a long while. Feels good.]Utopia translates to ‘no place’—is outer space a suitable no place? OLI: I delayed replying to this [to watch Light Shop—not awful but rooted in melodrama, characters are ‘no thing’—with my wife] and lost about 14 good ideas in the process. Actually, I remember one of them, to lift lines from an interview Jung did about the afterlife just before he died and then doctor them a little. I won’t do that now, seems cheap somehow.Your ‘only shown/visible via existing genre conventions’ is very quantum. I don’t disagree. Why worry about inventing something new when you won’t really understand how it came about, where it originated from? I don’t think about ‘the new’ at all cos I have no marketing arm. Scrawling + scanning + shock collage are nothing new. My stuff is new in that no one’s put things in this exact order before. New is paralysing. New is elasticating. New new new new new noo new. KRV is old-new, basically a lost Barry Malzberg piece, a superior alternate to Galaxies, which I struggled with live in one section of KRV cos it performed itself as a new genre within sci-fi + nowhere else + did not go far or quantum enough. It felt playful, philosophical, not desperate or enraged. The first time I read it I never made it to page 98, the 3 cyborgs bit, which it desperately needed. I said ‘superior’ just now and maybe shouldn’t have, but I need to back myself + KRV is rooted in something real and intimate whereas Galaxies is not. Though parts of it lose me a little, parts of KRV, I mean. Some of the writing in the middle is sloppy, the notes can be repetitive past the line of tolerance etc. Last winter, I hated it in a vague way, from my memory of writing and editing it. This winter, it’s ‘pretty good.’ Does Galaxies loop itself like this? [I read that Malzberg has just died. You can delete this part, if you like. Maybe I’ll go and re-read Galaxies, give it more of a chance. Start on page 98, the 3 cyborgs. Should I? Can you will something to be better than it is? Other writers I respect adore it, adore Malzberg. Adore what exactly?]This is getting close to becoming a de-con-struc.Triton is the ultimate ‘no place’ for me to bury my pathologies on. Most of my work visits there at some point. Not visits, situates. [I didn’t know ‘utopia’ translated literally as ‘no place.’ Is that true? [I just checked, it is]. Does that mean ‘place’ is an innately degraded/degrading thing, cannot have replicators or Picard’s dream state? I could never write a utopia, only the failed attempt at one [due to my miserable psyche]. The Kuiper Belt is so tempting to superimpose that on as there are 10,000+ dwarf planets out there, one for each marginal ideology, and the huge distance gaps between them inconveniences imperialist gunships looking to “monitor” things...but also isolates colonists/private interests that could expand their psychopathy, and this is all make-believe anyway. There’s just something comforting about being on an icy moon away from subject-others who will eventually become object-others when my brain turns on me.Is Triton a genre? De-con-struc?That’s what my thoughts—I’m happy you’re reading Ubik again—look like without genre, probably a pathetic way of diverting fromRRB: [Imagining something that cannot be imagined has its appeal for me, though. Not new for the sake of it, but an actual ‘no place’ waiting to be revealed. [I still have religion in me.]Probably the only way to get there though—even tho it’s not possible—is through old methods newly ordered [ and even then it’s only new in that a baby or a cloud doesn’t exist until you see or give birth to one] … ][who knows what this is at this point, maybe I’ll delete everything except the brackets]I wondered about that, how ‘live’ the process of writing was compared to your parallel existence outside the book. KRV feels like a live blog plotted out via improv while the narrator [his name is Gulag?] is next to incapable of writing anything without endlessly outlining and restructuring his screenplay [his own thoughts] into what ends up feeling like a [maybe] permanent stasis. [VOID ROOM 9]You mention the difficulty of achieving this kind of non-development or regression of character at the end of your de-con-struc of I Saw the TV Glow. Is this where the desperation and rage ends up, forced to live? OLI: RRB: When I first encountered your work, I tried to understand the images. Now, I think I try and let them resonate. But it’s an interesting question, RE: trying to understand. It feels like an important part of your nature as a creator: What’s this guy’s internal monologue like anyway? Must have a non-stop de-con-struc going off all the time—brushing his teeth, chewing plant matter [vegetarian?], drawing spaceships—does he ever get a break? What is the relationship between your writing and your images? Do you see them coming from the same place? Ejaz was my favorite character in KRV. I’m glad he has a press named after him. What kinds of writing [besides notes-only novellas] do they specialize in? [You don’t have to answer any of these. I hope you know.]And lastly, is time travel possible outside of sci-fi? [Don’t worry, I think we’ve crescendoed…just need to find our way to a vanishing point.]OLI: [RE: 50+ Q's: you can always edit them in later, I don't mind].[I’m running out of ideas. Maybe I should try to be more direct, tell you about the time I nearly snapped my arm off while arm-wrestling? Or make up a story about killing a piglet? This is already genuine, I’m not masking—much of—anything].To be honest, I do not 100% understand what a noosign is, or a lectosign, but I still went ahead and used it in several of my novels. Or I did understand it and now I forget. Maybe no one understands it [100%].Talk about discipline?My shot at a cento [Black Hole Cento] had about 27 quotes and only 4 of them could be bothered to fit [into each other].Why would anyone do this to themselves?If I was shit at it, they must be too.I think it was Parmenides who said, people who go to Oxford and Yale are smart in an academic sense but can’t wrap a present properly, can’t interpret Total Recall without being told beforehand what it means by a superior interpreter [same with me and Lost Highway, I had to be led by the hand by KB Toys—Bill Pullman doubles as the devil, Patty Arquette is half-Thai surprise], can’t speak Cantonese, can’t do collage the way I can.[Time travel? I don't know]. I won’t be a pedant and say we’re travelling through time right now, or time is just a construct. I know what you’re asking of me. If it does/can happen, will there be chaos or a collection of master-editors trying to fix all incursions e.g. Timecop. If it can/does happen, it is happening now].Any philosophical insight I possess is purely accidental, I’ve barely read anyone + have no desire to.[I started writing this answer before you sent me the question. I’m sorry for putting us both through this, I thought it was a good idea but now I’m not so sure. Feels like I’m actively draining 2 separate brains. Was gonna mix in lines from interviews by Karina Bush + Gary J. Shipley + others, but now that I’m describing it...][On the other hand, I’m sure there are some good answers in here somewhere, just need to sift out the dirt].[My mood might be bad cos I got a rejection yesterday [my birthday!] from a sci-fi mag I have never read, a mag that pays. I need to make money out of this at some point].[RE: my brain: I know my friends don’t self-analyse/self-castigate like I do, but I assume at least some artists do/did. Don’t you [do it]? I know you said that, when writing Exit Reality, you wanted to disassociate from yourself/reality. Did you stop wanting to do that? Or did you succeed to a certain degree?RRB: [[[[Happy [belated] birthday!]]] I also recently got rejected from a sci-fi mag I have never read [one that pays]—within 24 hours of submitting, too. It felt refreshing to not have to wait six months, though.]Most of my writer friends are neurotic as hell. I’m no different. But your work seems unique in that those self-analyses and -castigations are almost a stand-in for narrative or a protagonist. That may not be the most accurate characterization of all your writing [I haven’t read everything], but it’s a mode that seems effortless, natural to you.I can imagine a novel from you that pushes this tendency to such extremes as to becomeutopic. [I feel like you’re kind of on fire at this point, I wanna give the black hole room to expand.]RE: money making: Would you take a job [well-paying] in which neuro and computer scientists study and map your consciousness while you do nothing but consume and create art, but their research helps addict billions of unborn children to destructive technologies? [This can be the last question[s].]OLI: The TV had receded back a long way; he found himself confronted by a dark, wood-cabinet, Atwater-Kent, tuned radio-frequency oldtime AM radio, complete with antenna and ground wires. God in heaven, he said to himself, appalled, elated. Just one more answer to try and hold it all together. But why hadn’t the TV set reverted instead to formless metals and plastics? I just remembered, a reporter for Ming Bo [Newspaper in HK] interviewed me about 16 years ago. Those, after all, were its constituents; it had been constructed out of them, not out of an earlier radio. He’d found a copy of The Atheism Jab [a collection of not very good short stories, my first stab at writing] in a local info-shop [now long gone] and wanted to know why someone would do that. Perhaps this weirdly verified a discarded ancient philosophy, that of Plato’s idea objects, the universals which, in each class, were real. Can’t picture what I said to him, it was too far back, but he did say afterwards that I sounded angry. The form TV set had been a template imposed as successor to other templates, like the procession of frames in a movie sequence. I hope I don’t sound that way today. Prior forms, he reflected, must carry on an invisible, residual life in every object. I hope I’ve managed to hide it a little, at least, or bury it deep inside the de-con-strucs. The past is latent, is submerged, but still there, capable of rising to the surface once the later imprinting unfortunately—and against ordinary experience—vanishes. Or it could be that I don’t hope that. The man contains—not the boy—but earlier men, he thought. Anger should drive me. History began a long time ago. Shouldn’t it?[Yes, UBIK, again. Without design. I randomly flicked, first time, to page 139 and the words were already there, awkwardly perfect. This is the satan-wave of experimentalism, I believe].Was the sci-fi mag [that rejected you] Clarkesworld? They have a fast turnaround. I must’ve been ‘rejected within 2 days’ around 50 times for them. I’m pretty sure I’ve tried everything, every type of story. You’ll never get in there, comrade. You'll never get past their network of AI elves. You = WE.[btw, I said I hadn’t read that other SF mag [that I got rejected from], but I do read stories sometimes, to see what kind of standard they’re looking for, that I can later fail to emulate. I liked one Clarkesworld story, by Kij Johnson, ‘SPAR’ [not the supermarket]. The rest-...I don’t want to rant. Just wish they’d loosen their guidelines a bit, or hire my mum as a first reader]. I'm an anarchist, I would never sign up to anything large scale.I'm an anarchist, I would never sign up to anything large scale.I'm an anarchist, I would never sign up to anything scaly.I'm an anarchist, I would never sex up anything large scale.As an anarchist, I would never sign up to anything large scale.I'm the Bye Bye Man, I would never sign up to anything large scale.I'm an antichrist, I would never sign up to anything large scale.I'm an anarchist, I would never sign up to anything like this.I'm an anarchist, I would never sign up to anything large scale.I love kids and they love me, the more unborn the better.If this is the end then thanks cos I would never speak like this in real life. No one would ask me.[RE: UBIK + random page: thinking back a bit, it wasn't that random, I knew the latter half of the book would have parts where objects and the environment started to regress to an earlier form, and I aimed for roughly that area. Within that, it was random [my second flick - the first didn't go deep enough]. Perhaps a neat example of my "method" overall]]]].[Ubik is great to read, I miss books like this]