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PASSION by Melissa Ostrom

March 16, 2022

Passion turned thirteen in the middle of July, and when the first light of this day, this special day, woke her and sweetened the darkness like milk stirred into coffee, Passion divided like a cell, turned into two Passions, a watching Passion, a watched Passion. Passion sensed Passion, keenly and with great interest. Herself. Her self.

Passion thought, Here curls Passion on her side, under a worn sheet, her gaze turned to the paling window. The curve of her hip is slight. The arm hugging the pillow is slim. And there rises the sun. Pay attention, Passion, Passion ordered. Smell the world through the screen, the sour of the mowed grass, the wild candy of Mom’s lilies. This is your day.

Passion, so seeable. Passion, worth seeing. Thirteen, thirteen, Passion rejoiced, and threw off the sheet and raced downstairs.

All day, she enjoyed this significant otherness, this double-selfness. She sat at the kitchen table and ate the strawberries, everbearing berries her mother had gathered from the garden for her, just for her, and Passion thought, this is how Passion appears relishing small berries, this is how Passion looks with fingers reddened with juice.

When she burst outside, the wind caught her nightgown and whipped it around her. She ran under the clothesline, let a billowing skirt sweep her face, fragrantly, coolly, and marveled, Passion is thirteen. Does she look it, do I look it?

When she swam in the pond with her brother and sister, she decided, Passion swims with fierce strokes. Tadpoles, dragonflies, watch out, beware. When she heard the report of a rifle, the boom, boom from the woods, she treaded the murky water and saw herself as the sad star in a movie about a hunter who shoots too close to a clearing, the bullet that reaches a swimmer, the Passion who dies at thirteen. She made herself cry a little, moved by this movie. Then she pictured herself crying and wished she had a mirror, so she could study how she looked.

Later, she sat at the picnic table in her damp suit, her white towel wrapped around her like a wet dress, while her family sang the birthday song. Happy birthday, dear Passion, happy birthday to me! She ate her marble cake with chocolate frosting and acknowledged, Passion loves chocolate. She glanced over her shoulder toward the woods. She wondered if the hunter was still in there, hidden by the trees. Was he watching?

Not once did she relate to the hunter. Not once did she think, perhaps, Passion is a hunter, hunting herself. Not once did she suspect Passion could betray Passion and become the enemy under her skin, biding her time, armed with self-loathing, accompanied by the miserable dogs of uncertainty and shame.

Not until she was much older would she remember the time before this time, the freedom before the snare of self, the cruel captivity of consciousness. Oh, that easy before, when she didn’t think of herself as somebody out there but simply was a self, a self who simply was. When Passion didn’t care who cared, when Passion didn’t see who saw. When Passion was a cool flame in the world.

THEY CAN LIVE WITHOUT FLIES by Michael Seymour Blake

March 14, 2022

She lay huddled and naked in bed, her skin a grayish black. Her brittle hair broke off at the slightest touch. I rested my head on her rigid body, hearing nothing. I inhaled—a dull, mossy smell. I called Dad.

He came over right away. He tapped Mom a few times, then knocked on her like he was knocking on a door. He placed his ear against her open lips.

“Get me a flashlight.”

I brought him one. He shined light into her mouth.

“What do you see?”

He grabbed a cigarette from the pack in his back pocket. He lit it and took a drag.

She stopped eating last month. Wouldn’t leave the bedroom. Dark, bark-like patches grew over her skin. I rubbed lotion on her arms and hands and it was like running my fingers across cement. I called the doctor.

“Give it some time. Things have a way of working themselves out.”

“We will have to bury her,” Dad said.

“Where?”

“Backyard.”

“What?”

“Backyard.”

“We’re going to bury Mom in the backyard?”

Thick amber tears oozed down Dad’s cheeks and landed in my hair. He lifted Mom from the bed and we went to the backyard. We found two shovels in the shed and plunged them into the earth and the sun was hot on our shoulders. I could feel the syrupy tears melting on my scalp. We worked in silence until the hole grew seven feet deep.

Dad placed Mom in the hole. I stood there watching with dirt in my shoes. A flower had sprouted from the blackness of her mouth, a little thing with dewy white petals surrounding a soft, yellow head.

“Ain’t that something,” Dad said.

Two nights ago, Mom had asked me to lay next to her. I stood in the doorway. I said, “You’re stronger than this,” which I really wanted to be true. ”I’ll bring you some tea, then I’m going out.”

Mom blinked like a lazy cat. I went out and walked around until I got tired.

I stared at the flower and thought about how I never brought Mom that tea. I expected to sink into the earth. I tried to think of someone to call. No one came to mind.

“Did Mom have any friends?” I asked.

Dad said, “I think so, a while ago.”

He seemed taller somehow. He lit another cigarette and rested on his shovel. His swollen knuckles looked like brown lichen. A thin golden film shimmered on his cheeks. He started to speak but a voice came from above.

“What happened?”

It was the next door neighbor leaning out her window.

“Mom died sometime during the night,” I said.

The neighbor looked at the sky and squinted. “What a sin.”

She closed the window.

Years ago, Dad gave me a Venus flytrap. A green so bright I thought it glowed. He told me to leave it near my window.

“Doesn’t it eat bugs?” Mom asked.

“Flies,” Dad said.

“What if there aren’t any flies?”

“They can live without flies.”

After two months, the plant shriveled up. I’d never seen its mouth close while it lived, and it hung open still in death. I touched its withered lobe with my pinky and the lobe cracked off.

Mom asked if I’d been watering it.

“Once a week,” I said.

She stuck her finger in the dusty soil and turned back to me, eyebrows raised.

I began to cry.

“Come here,” she said, arms open wide for a hug.

Dad found the plant in the garbage that night. “Guess it needed flies after all,” he said.

I climbed out of the hole while Dad knelt down to admire the flower, his massive frame like a smoking meteorite resting in an impact crater. I went inside and filled a kettle with water from the sink. I ran my fingers over the old apron Mom hung in the kitchen, but never wore. It belonged to her mother and the cotton felt soft and smelled like a home should smell. I grabbed a tea bag from the tin and tossed it in a mug. I watched Dad through the widow. He swatted at some gnats. I wanted to call out to him, but what would I say? “Hello Dad! I see you standing there in the backyard, swatting at gnats. Hello!”

The teapot whistled.

I grabbed a second tea bag and mug.

I returned to the backyard with the steaming mugs and found a tree where our hole had been. A thick green vine spiraled around its mammoth trunk. Those same white flowers grew from the vine. I did not see Dad. I walked to the front yard. His car was still in the driveway. I circled round it, expecting him to magically appear inside. I looked at Mom’s house with its stained eggshell siding and asphalt shingles. “Hello house,” I said. “I see you standing there.”

I went back and stood under the tree. A white flower fell into one of the mugs. I placed that mug down and sat in the shade and sipped tea.

After my last mouthful, I poured Dad’s tea in the dry dirt and watched the ground drink it up. It felt good to nourish something. The neighbor appeared at the window again. She regarded the tree from behind the glass, mouthed something, and was gone.

I looked back at the tree. It had doubled in size. Some white flowers were lying in a rapidly-rotting pile a few feet away. There was a faint smell of cigarettes and sulfur.

I sat there for a few hours as the festering pile of flowers grew. It felt like there was a heap of sopping towels inside my chest.

When it was dark I walked to the moonlit mound of organic rot and dug a tunnel into the middle where it was warm. The mustiness and dull smell of bad eggs comforted me. I think I slept for a long time. When I awoke, I opened my mouth. I tasted the decaying matter surrounding me and it was good. I feasted and went back to sleep.

My eyes opened. I climbed through what remained of the moldering heap until I felt the sun on my face. I stretched the translucent wings which had sprouted from my back. I groomed myself, licking the coarse hairs covering my arms and rubbing them over my bulbous body. I flapped my wings, a new and beautiful feeling. I rose up past the house. I rose until the house was the size of a heart below me. I passed through the clouds, higher and higher.

I reached the top of the tree, where the twisting green vine merged with the trunk to create vast open lobes surrounded with long green cilia. I circled above the glistening, red mouth. It looked vaguely like some strange and hungry organ. My bloated body, full with partially digested plant matter, made me feel like a giant, bristly grape. Scattered around the distant landscape were more of these strange growths. Some open, some closed.

I descended, landing on a sticky lobe. There was a throbbing power beneath my feet that could crush a house into dust. Trigger-hairs gently swayed in the wind. I knew how they worked—you touch one of these and the whole thing snaps shut faster than you could think. The hairs were scattered all around. A nursery of saplings. “Hello,” I said. “I see you.”

I reached out.

POTATO NECK by Genevieve Jagger

March 11, 2022

She isn’t the most beautiful woman I have ever seen but I haven’t seen a woman in eight months or more and am turning, quickly, to dust. By haven’t seen a woman I mean haven’t seen Leanne, though either way it’s hot sand, glass and friction. It’s a wonder my cabin doesn’t go up in flames, everything made of wood as it is, working on myself at night as I do. It would only take one spark.

She is sitting out on a small mound of grass that I think of as the stoop, her back turned to me. It faces a dirty strip of road that leads to a potholed road that leads to a regular road that leads to the motorway. Here there are the caravan cabins, as I have come to think of them, given their oblong shape, their tendency to live where the caravans pitch. It’s autumn now. Gales of leaves, holidays over, wind a growing penetration. Almost all the cabins are empty. Caravans all dragged out of sight.

She’s wearing a dress that looks like a potato sack, but I realise it’s supposed to be that way. Despite its form, stiff and consuming, it has an honesty of colour which tells me it is brand new. Simple haircut. No shorts. Goosebumps surely. I squint.

The wind disguises the click of the door, so she doesn’t hear me coming. She is focussed on the maple tree in the grove just in front of her. It spits seeds to the ground like helicopters crashing. She watches their blades as they twirl. I am focussed on the back of her head, her short hair – mousy brown turning peroxide dead at the ends. Another helicopter bombs to the ground, only to be blown up to the sky again. Disaster here is bright. It plays constantly, on loop.

‘Ahoy’ I call, unsocialised. There is an owl who spends the nights screaming in my chimney. The blunt confusion of the sound has obliterated many things.

Potato Neck turns. ‘You,’ she says, and I get a proper look.

Freckly skin. Short eyelashes. Her features gnarled and dented. Intense. Almost troll-like, honestly. Her nose is a language I don’t understand. It has a mole. Not necessarily on it, but beside it. Around it. An ominous darkness, in the crevice of her nose and cheek. It pulls at my pupils like a black hole.

‘Me?’ I ask.

She nods, playing with the fringe of her sack. ‘I was just about to come over and ask you something.’ She points to the cabin beside mine. ‘We’re neighbours.’

‘Right.’

‘But I can’t really think of how to say it.’

‘Okay.’

‘I think I’m going to put it bluntly. You seem like maybe you wouldn’t mind.’

‘Alright.’

‘It’s just that I have a bit of a habit…’

I accidentally tune her out. She turns and bends in the middle, reaches down to the stoop and returns with a new look in her eye. Her irises are a heinous pale blue; the skin beneath them yellowed; her hands are lavender; the bold bones of her knuckles, harsh pink; her palms are open and somehow… green.

Potato Neck is covered in goosebumps. I look down and realise she is holding the biggest jar of weed I have seen in my life.

‘… so, please don’t think I want to tell you this, I promise you, I hate this, but I just have to know – Do you have any tobacco? And does your stove have a light?’

The air waits and hangs. Prematurely begins to slow. I nod.

‘Yeah. Follow me.’

I set the jar down on the coffee table. It’s the only table I have, and the only thing that differs my cabin from the others. Sitting low on the floorboards, in front of the two-seater sofa, and the fireplace I’ve never lit. It’s oval shaped, made of strong mahogany and embellished round the edges. Bright little birdies painted in gold. It was Leanne’s and I took it when I left.

‘Oh my fucking god,’ Potato Neck says, staring at the jars, standing on my rug.

‘I know.’

‘They look good.’

They look weird because they look like siblings. Glass-eyed. Gleaming. Matching orange lids on their heads. Identical, in size, shape and amour, perfectly opposite in every other way. Her jar, sweaty, reeking and ripe. It taints the air. Mine, weathered, old, and brown – dry like everything else.

‘Why do you keep it like that?’ she asks.

‘I buy it in bulk, and I hate the plastic packet. The pictures of lungs. The guy with the throat.’

‘Is yours a Rossini’s jar?’

‘Sorry?’

She’s pointing.

‘The lid. Pasta sauce. Rossini’s, no?’

‘No.’

Potato Neck is slumped into my sofa and I am standing in front of her.

‘What then?’

I start: ‘I used to work in a sweet shop, part time. I took home some bonbons,’ but she speaks over my final word.

‘Ash, I think we need to roll a spliff.’

I ask her, ‘Sorry, how do you know my name?’

But she’s gone. Already moved on. To the jars, to pinching and mixing. A pack of papers appearing from seemingly nowhere. Her sack has no pockets. No bra straps, so no way for her to hold things like Leanne. It isn’t until later when I am lying in my single bed and my head feels like the concept of a plum and my hands like two spiders who love me in turns, that I realise actually, they were probably mine.

One of us has one thing, and the other has the other, and neither of us has both. We live in holiday homes in Scotland, where summer is irregular, near a loch that is not Loch Lomond. October when it rains can be lonely. Circumstance makes life feel miraculous.

It has been ten months, ten, not eight, since I have seen anyone without pork breath and an Adam’s apple. My friend, Barry, lives next to a big supermarket, about forty minutes away. He brings me goods on a three-week rotation because I don’t know how to drive a car. Groceries, tobacco, a hell of a lot of soup. When Leanne’s heart froze and I went away, Barry offered to do the drops – because Barry is a good friend that way.

I do not know why Potato Neck is here. I ask and she doesn’t tell me.

The green tint sets in. The cherry glow at the end of a joint, the harsh vibrance of my burning throat – these things come, and they never leave. Everything that we do is either pre-smoke, post-smoke or during. My memory works without beginnings or ends.

The world falls out of its tight and inscrutable order.

The door slams open. Potato Neck tramps out from the bathroom, aghast. That distance, from the tiled square of shower, toilet, sink, to the part outside the door, dubbed ‘hallway’, is tiny. Still, she makes it look like a stride.

‘What?’ I say. I have a banana in my upturned palms, and I am impressed by its skin, velveteen, and stunned by the strange weight of it. You are a fruit, I think, and giggle. Potato Neck is wearing pyjama shorts patterned with watermelon seeds and my t-shirt, but I don’t know how. She doesn’t like to stay over. It has a bat on it. I ask her, ‘Did you take that?’

‘There’s a spot on my tit.’

‘Wha-at?’

‘A spot on my tit. A pimple on my breast.’

‘You’re telling me about your breast?’

She swipes me over the back of the head as she walks back into the living room, crossing the wires on the ground. I don’t know why I brought it with me, but I have a Gamecube here. A bunch of games. Even two controllers. We’re playing right now. I forgot that’s what we’re doing. She asked me – can we play your Gamecube?

‘Ash.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Can you not be a weird fucking man for a moment.’

But I’m not distracted about her breasts. I’m distracted about the whole world. This is all new to me. This flavour in my mouth. Not unfriendly. Like spoons and bitter leaves. I didn’t realise how fucking huge a thought could be. I didn’t realise how much space there is between any two things. I am walking down a long hall of mirrors, shooting myself the finger guns and there’s one million of me, finger-gunning back. Potato Neck is still talking about her breast.

‘What’s wrong with your breast?’

She huffs. I’m leaning a little far to the left.

‘It has a spot.’

‘So?’

‘It’s a boob. I’ve never had a spot on my boob before.’

‘You can get spots everywhere. No one ever told you you can get spots everywhere?’

‘No. No one ever gave me the tit spot talk. I thought it was cancer. Then I popped it.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘Oh, sure.’

Potato Neck crushes me at Mario Kart, whizzing around corners, dropping bananas as Toad. I thought she would have chosen someone more like Bowser, on account of her eyebrows, but what is that supposed to mean? I was right at least that she doesn’t play Peach. I’m Luigi but I’m not doing well. I’m finally catching up to the conversation we’ve just had. There is no outfit in which Potato Neck has breasts and so I think of them like a washing board. One single raspberry smooshed through slanted sides. She’s lapped me now, whizzing round the track without needing to control. She’s waiting. Has been waiting for a while.

Blood flows down my face. From the wound on my head to the corner of my mouth, as if I am both drink and straw. Potato Neck is touching the sweat on my back.

‘I think you’ve cut your spine.’

‘And my head?’

‘Obviously your head.’

We were sitting down on the stoop having our morning first when I said: We sit down here every day. Why don’t we go and sit up there? And Potato Neck grinned like I’d finally managed to be interesting. She stood up in her gummy sandals, put the joint to hold in her mouth. ‘You’re right,’ she said and climbed up the maple like a monkey.

I stayed sat for a moment, trying to look up her limp purple skirt. I thought I saw stripes, exactly like this pair of boxers I own, but I checked and I’m wearing those.

‘You hit every branch.’

‘I know.’

Potato Neck helps me back to the stoop. Her hands are stained green from moss.

‘It’s funny because I had a dream like this as well.’

‘I’m not interested in your dreams.’

‘Except it wasn’t me. It was you that fell, and I had to carry you. I had goat legs.’

The stoop rises up beneath us. Potato Neck puts the cardboard roach back into my mouth. It’s made from a jaffa cake box. Blood pools, ruins my clothes. She sets fire to the ashy end. I feel like a cowboy. I tell her.

Potato Neck doesn’t respond.

I push the bitter end into the dirt of the ground and discover that I am woozy – but like two kinds of woozy that rub on each other. My thumb reaches out to hold the hem of her sack. I recover but it leaves a rusty stain.

‘What have you got? I’d kill for pizza.’

Potato Neck’s hands in my cereal box.

‘I don’t know. I don’t really use the fridge.’

‘Let me have a look.’

I’m zoned out on the sofa, legs dangling over the side. I’m having a waking nap. I haven’t had one in a long time which is weird because I used to have them always. Lying on Leanne’s loft bed, where the light had to bend to meet the ceiling. It was so nice up there, with all her stuffed animals, lined up like a marching band. My favourite was the elephant with the knob shaped nose – his name was Brian. Leanne herself could be gone for hours.

Potato Neck stomps into the kitchen, cupboard bang, bang, banging as she roots through each one thrice.

‘You don’t have basil?’

‘I don’t have fucking pepper.’

‘Fair point.’

Sometimes Brian would stare at me when I wanked in Leanne’s bed. He looked like he understood. The rest I’d have to pluck by their scrawny necks and turn to face the wall. Leanne had this duck with mean little eyes, like he always had something to think. I was fond of Brian though.

‘I keep finding bruises all over my body,’ Potato Neck says. It’s true. I’ve been spotting them too. Rotten blooms all over her toothpick legs.

‘Are you clumsy?’

‘I don’t think so.’

She is.

She is clearing the table around me, bringing plates, knives, forks, water in a tumbler because I don’t own a jug. She takes our bonbon and Rossini’s jars and puts them on the windowsill. They look redundant and therefore purposeful. Like old lady potpourri.

‘Sit up.’

Dinner is presented, made broadly of tortillas, found in the back of the cupboard; half a tube of tomato puree spread across the top. And what would be a pizza without grated cheese? It oozes slowly. A tranquilising vision. Potato Neck sets down a bowl of scabs.

‘For toppings. You don’t have any vegetables and I figure scratchings are still pork. I thought they should be optional.’

‘Thank you,’ I say.

She is wearing a bright red turtleneck and some ratty jogging bottoms. We sprinkle our pizzas liberally with scabs. I fold my first slice and put it whole into my mouth.

‘Uh fuh-hin luh fooh.’

‘You love me?’ she nips, sparkling.

‘Uh luh FOOH! FOOH!’

Potato Neck leans over and pokes the big bulge in my cheek. She tilts her slice above her head and the toppings go sliding into her mouth.

‘When did you buy cheese?’

She shakes her head.

‘It was in that fridge you don’t use.’

My jaw stops.

‘This is my cheese?’

‘Well, yeah. I mean, I didn’t think you’d care.’

My stomach and my mouth separate. I can taste so much fat and suddenly the foulness of the pork. It’s in my teeth. Coated like sand on the inside of my cheeks. That cheese has been there longer than I have, wrapped in cellophane, condensation growing, lit up by the fridge bulb. Behind a thin veil of plastic, I have been watching the mould. It blooms and then it sweats. I gag.

Potato Neck watches me. ‘What’s your fucking problem?’

‘I can’t eat that.’

‘It’s cheese. It ages. I cut the mould off.’

‘Jesus Christ.’

I stand and the cabin is a boat. Stumble drunkenly from dining room to hall.

‘Pussy,’ she mutters, as I shut the bathroom door.

When the smoke is inside of my body, nausea becomes an abstract thing. A thing that is held by my body but not is my body, not anymore. It’s stronger, more competent at ripping down my defences – but it can be spoken to. Persuaded. I wet my face and the excess drips onto my jeans. Yank them down and then fold in the middle. My asshole puckers and puckers and cannot shit. In front of the toilet there is a mirror. Desire has darkened my eyes.

The most beautiful thing I’ve ever eaten is Leanne’s custard tart. Her own warped recipe. It tasted only of nutmeg and eggs. The feeble hope of an erection helps to lever the ache of my bowels.

‘You’re fucking disgusting,’ I murmur, and wipe.

When she does stay, she’s awake before I am. Hands dipping from jar to paper to jar.

‘That owl is a fucking cunt.’

One night we listen to the same album three times in a row because it is very good. Potato Neck makes us go top to tail because she wants to lie on the bed. She lights up and gets ash all over my blankets.

‘Are you a lesbian?’ I ask her.

‘Excuse me?’

‘I’m just wondering.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. I thought maybe I was getting a… vibe.’

‘Do you hate women?’

‘Whoa.’

‘You’d fucking love it if I was a lesbian.’

‘I didn’t mean to ask.’

Potato Neck sits up. She’s sitting on my pillow. A song is playing now that an hour ago we almost cried at.

‘Ash, you know I’m not even remotely attracted to you, don’t you?’

I don’t know why she feels the need to say that. I turn my head in disgust.

‘What is it?’ she asks.

‘Your feet.’

We’re walking back to the cabin from the stoop and all of life is flashes and frames, strung out like the film of a film. Dirt road. Shaking tree. My shoes. The memory of Leanne’s ass, like a heart with a hole. A helicopter lands safely on my shoulder. I am looking into the night shadow of Potato Neck’s mole and at none of the space around it.

She grabs onto my wrist.

‘Don’t grab me. I might throw up.’

She grabs anyway. Drops.

I ask, ‘Are you okay?’

She’s crouching on the floor. On the slidey wooden step before the door of my cabin. She’s clinging to my leg.

‘Are you okay? I’m gonna fall.’

She doesn’t listen. Soles skidding.

‘No, seriously.’

Is she crying? I yelp, ‘Potato Neck, stand up.’

She looks up. Eyes tearless except for laughter.

‘Potato Neck?!’ she shrieks.

I don’t understand what’s funny. I shove through the unlocked door.

‘I need to lie on the floorboards.’

My knees collapse to the floor. Body flopping. Potato Neck crawls over and hangs directly above my head while I try to look up at the ceiling.

‘Potato Neck? What does that even mean? Poh-tay-toe Neck.’

Her hazy pupils have turned her eyes into eight balls.

I ignore her. ‘What were you laughing at?’ I whine.

‘Every time you smoke – you shit, or you puke. I think you’ve got IBS. Are you crying?’

‘No!’ I am. I’m crying.

‘Do you have chocolate?’ she asks.

‘No. I don’t know how to breathe.’

‘Stay on the floor.’

And then she abandons me. Sprints away, leaving the front door open. I rip my socks off, sobbing now, and the cool air soothes the soles of my feet – but something about that comfort is devastating to me. My body is confused and hard again. Leanne, Leanne, Leanne. Drinking vodka ginger, heavy on the ginger. Kneading me when I needed her. Now I can’t get anything out. Now I’m stuffed up and rancid. And when I try to think of her voice, I think wub, wub, wub and when I want to cum, I can’t. Was I so terrible? Potato Neck reappears with something purple in her freakishly small hand. Shining, crackling wrapper stripped easily to reveal the treat. Chocolate. Dairy milk. She kneels and drops a piece into my mouth.

I ask her, indistinctly ‘Will you sleep on the sofa?’

Potato Neck shakes her head no, but says, ‘fine.’

It’s late. I wake halfway, disoriented, inside a cloud that is not soft like hamster fur, but nauseating like smoke. They’re thick in the haze together. The heavy rub of a man’s voice reveals the needling crack of Potato Neck’s.

‘But why do you do that? Why pay for him like that? You could rent the place out and do anything. I don’t get it.’

It makes sense to me that she is saying these words.

‘I know – but it’s Ash. I’d do anything for that man. We’re like brothers.’

‘There’s no one I’d do that for.’

‘What about Francis?’

The sound of her sack, mid-shuffle. ‘Hmph.’

‘He’d do it for me,’ he says, ‘You have to be that person if you ever want someone to give you good back. That’s how that shit goes, you know?’

‘Still.’

‘You don’t understand Ash. I don’t care how long you’ve spent with him. Around me he’s open, but he’s a little wimp around women.’

‘Maybe that’s the problem.’

‘Well, how about this? One time, I got my drink spiked at this weird disco night we went to. I was on the light-up dance floor when this wave hit me. I couldn’t breathe. All this shit was coming up through my nose. I had a panic attack that felt like a stroke. But Ash was on it. Holding me up. He saw it before I did. Didn’t miss a beat.’

Sounds of smoking, passing, smoking.

‘Then – right as we’re about to leave, his neck swivels and he turns like some fucking hawk to this table by the door. There’s a man with his fingers in a drink. Same drink as mine: pink lady cocktail. I think – makes sense. Who the fuck is trying to spike me? The cunt was having his second try.’

He takes a deep and shuddering breath. ‘You know what Ash did?’

‘What?’

‘Ash punched him in the face. Lights out. Goodnight. Bye bye. So, if it wasn’t for him then me and that girl could have died. That’s who Ash is at his centre.’

He reaches down and fondly pats my foot.

‘But, Barry…’ she says. The words wince with frustration. I never get to know what that thought was going to be. Instead, she tells a story of her own, about the day I fell out a tree, about blood and smoke and how I looked something like a cowboy.

She says, ‘You know. That didn’t really touch the sides for me. All the tobacco, I think. Shall I just roll a straight blunt?’

And without questioning her reasoning I fall back asleep. In the morning, she, and the weed, are gone. She does not leave me a note.

Alright, in fairness, it isn’t like I haven’t noticed her. Of course, I have – as disturbing as she is. I put my hand on her leg.

We were sitting in her cabin at the time, the only time I went. Waiting to smell this candle she had. The wax was the pale morning blue of her sack. It was scented A Calm & Quiet Place.

‘Where did you get the dress that looks like that?’

Her sofa was the same as mine, but she fit more easily into it. Her hands a little pile in her lap. Fingers heaped indelicately. Scraps.

Potato Neck watched the wick of the candle.

‘Do you mean the colour?’

‘I do.’

‘I don’t remember.’

I nodded. The air wanted us to stay so still, and we did. Shoulders pressed together.

‘You must have gotten it from somewhere. It looks new.’

‘Maybe it was my sister’s. She gives me clothes all the time.’

‘You have a sister?’

‘I have three.’

‘Oh. I’m an only child.’

‘That makes sense.’

What else? She didn’t keep her clothes on the floor, so nothing for me to see there. She didn’t have a TV. There were some books, but no titles I recognised. I didn’t use her bathroom because I couldn’t work out how to say I wanted to. She didn’t care about stuffed animals. Her bed sheets were cream. There was a candle and a constant creak.

‘If I knew how to fix pipes, I would help you with that.’

‘My pipes are fine.’

‘They don’t whine like that if they’re fine.’

Potato Neck smiled, but with scrutiny. She considered me for a moment.

‘I’ll show you.’

She stood and led me round the sofa, up the hall and into the nook that was the bedroom. Beside the bed she had shoved a little table, dingy and covered in stickers peeled off. Atop the table, a bright red tray... white grate, spinning wheel. Hamster cage.

I gasped like a small boy, sat down and then stood up from her bed.

‘Can I sit?’

‘You can.’

She knelt and ran a nail along the grate. The hamster came running. His fur was the softest grey, not like smoke, but like a cloud. His ears, brown and speckled, were made of a skin so thin so you could see the veins within like tiny purple rivers. She opened the door. He climbed into her palms.

‘He has petal ears,’ I said.

‘His name is Tomahawk.’

‘Tomahawk!’

Tomahawk traversed Potato Neck’s fingers as if they were rungs on a ladder. He had bean paws and they clung to her wrist. His nose twitched and it made his whiskers vibrate. Before I could ask to, I was holding him.

‘He has the biggest balls I’ve ever seen! His fur!’

‘Now smell him.’

I cupped Tomahawk tentatively under the bum, lifted him up to my nose. I inhaled. Like printer paper and corn. I inhaled again. Tomahawk walked into my sleeve.

'You’ve kept him a secret,’ I grinned.

‘He’s mine,’ Potato Neck said – and she didn’t look pretty, but she looked something else instead. Can a girl be handsome? I had something of an urge to touch her, since we started smoking all the time, but I also had urges to touch everything. We faced each other. Cross legged on a military-style single bed. Tomahawk emerged from the hem of my jumper.

‘That’s my crotch, Little Tommo. Come here.’

I put my open hand on Potato Neck’s thigh, then left it there, upturned. Tomahawk crawled off. I left it there longer. Potato Neck gazed at her son. Beneath the sagging neck of her jumper, she was wearing my t-shirt again.

‘Ash,’ she said.

I moved my hand.

‘How do you afford to be here?’

I sniffed, ‘I used to work really hard.’

But it didn’t feel like the end of the question.

We stayed there with Tomahawk for a long time, passing him back and forth. Eventually the scent of peace had warmed to the air. Eventually we were tired of each other. We turned the lights on to destroy the flickering darkness. I walked back to my cabin alone.

All at once we’re running low on marijuana.

The tobacco levels are steady, but the weed is just powder. She’s crying. There’s a bloody tampon floating high in my toilet, too. When Leanne’s monthly came around, she would sob until I brought her chips and cheese. Earlier, I accidentally stubbed my toe and had to spend an hour in bed. I understand.

I go outside and ring up Barry, climbing up onto my roof for signal. I haven’t spoken to him in a while. I tell him only what I need to.

‘I’ve got you. I’ve got you. Dude, that’s so cool you’re making friends. I saw Leanne with her girlfriend the other day. I was like, oh what the fuck – dyke from hell! They were buying lottery tickets.’

‘That’s cool. Listen, I also need something else. Do you still know that guy, Dean?’

‘Man. Dean’s in the fucking Emirates. I know Kyle now. He’s alright. Good man. We play Warcraft sometimes. I place my orders on there. Right in the middle of Thunderbluff!’

Barry laughs at himself and it widens the phone line. A throaty friendly sound. I look inside my chimney and find a nest with three eggs.

I tell him my order. I tell him exactly how much.

Barry whistles in awe. His cheek and his stubble are close in my ear.

‘Fuck, Ash. Man, you’re living in the woods.’

Potato Neck emerges with me when Barry arrives in his big red van. He parks, making dust on the drive, outside of her cabin instead of mine. He drags open the door and my groceries appear, along with two stacks of flat boxes. They smell strongly of barbecue sauce.

Potato Neck leaps on them. ‘Oh my god, I love you.’

Her eyes are red from the J’s of the day. She’s wearing her potato sack – rusty thumbprint slightly darker on the hem. Her neck looks just as inhuman as it did when we first met. I’m proud, but then she looks up.

‘Barry!’

‘Phoebe!’

They’re hugging.

‘How’s Arthur? How’s Katie?’

‘They’re great. They’re living with Arthur’s dad. He’s a mountaineer. He helps with their business. Katie started taking her t-shirt thing seriously.’

‘Good for her!’

I am standing with two grocery bags, one in each hand. They’re filled with soup cans and again he has only chosen tomato.

‘You two know each other,’ I say.

Potato Neck shrugs, body floppy and happy. She explains, ‘Out of touch friends.’

Barry wraps her up in bear hug number two. She seems perfectly contented in his sweat.

Leanne’s table is moved so the pizza boxes can be laid like a tapestry. For some reason, I didn’t think that Barry would stay for dinner. He’s raking through my cupboards now and the wood sounds ugly and thin.

‘Where’s the spirits?’ he asks.

‘Don’t have any.’

‘Shit. Not even beer? Not even poof juice?’

Potato Neck emerges from the bathroom, grins momentarily at the pizza on the floor. ‘No alcohol. Only weed. And don’t call it ‘poof juice’. She collects the jars from the windowsill. ‘Do you want me to roll? It’s tight for three but I can manage.’

I stare at Barry hard until he catches my drift, and his eyes light up.

‘Actually, Phoebe… me and Ash got you a gift.’

He points drastically to one unpacked bag. I can see the orange lid. Potato Neck shrieks.

Barry’s jar is poorly washed, still scummed with smears of tomato – but it is packed. Full to the fucking brim. Barry knows what Rossini’s is. Barry knows Kyle.

We eat pizza in three sessions across the course of the night. We each smoke our own massive blunt, and then another, and maybe another. Barry says don’t worry, I won’t drive, I’ll sleep on your floor, I’ll borrow a pair of your underpants. I want to say, ‘you wouldn’t fit them’, but I can’t because she’ll think I’m a leaching cunt. She probably already does – she knows by now that this cabin isn’t mine. I barely even rent it because Barry is a philanthropist. I didn’t tell her as such, but it makes sense that she’d figure it out.

I don’t know why but I’m not in the mood tonight for some big, fun thing like this. I feel frigid, uncomfortable, covered in goosebumps. None of my tokes seem to go all the way through. Barry and Potato Neck talk sporadically about the people that both of them know and I deduce, through listening, that they once worked in some Mexican place together – and that means Barry has probably once spoken about her to me. Potato Neck nudges for a story but I don’t have one. I tell her that he never mentioned a Phoebe and Barry says, ‘I definitely did.’ I have been sitting in one position on the floor for a very long time and I realise I’m scared to move from it. I’m cold and my organs ache. Conversation is wandering probably towards Leanne. My eyes are closed and my head is by the leg of her table.

I make a decision to give up and pass out.

Most days I wish it was tomorrow.

I have IBS. The jars are still nearly full. Somehow the first comes last. Potato Neck demands a walk.

She dons my trousers, my jumper and my second pair of boots, pausing at the door to take my good coat. We press out across the turning dirt. Down to the forest and the spitting maple tree. It’s a helicopter elephant graveyard.

I point.

‘It’s a helicopter elephant graveyard.’

She snorts at me. ‘Feeling good?’

I nod a lot.

She says, ‘I’m glad.’

‘Woods are kind of spooky though.’

I look up and the sky is only an inch away from black and that means it is still blue. The night air is sweet down my stained throat. The moon is gripped by the trees, empty-handed. Wet leaves have been falling for weeks. They’re wadding under my shoes. Potato Neck’s hands look almost like the bare trees, but softer. Less spindly. Not spiderlike.

‘Little arms,’ I say.

‘Are you alright?’

‘I’m dizzy.’

She puts her hands on me. Steers me to the ground.

‘Sit in the mulch,’ she orders.

‘If I needed to vomit, would you judge me?’

‘No.’

‘Weed makes you sick too?’

‘No.’ But she says it kindly.

I keel over, getting mud up my wrists, gripping sopping handfuls of leaves for their coldness. My body heaves but I don’t let it puke. Instead, a negotiation. I’m in the foetal position. Here. In this random patch of land, somewhere nowhere. Previously inconsiderable. Who knew that could happen? The nausea passes and I grin up at the moon, grin up at the whole sky and at all the tall trunks that occupy it, but especially the moon.

I’m so stoned.

Above me, Potato Neck laughs. ‘You’ll get over it.’

I DON’T GET HOW ANYTHING WORKS ANYMORE: a conversation between Tyler Dempsey and KKUURRTT

March 10, 2022

TYLER DEMPSEY: Going to a music festival ten years after you didn't like going to them in the first place. And, just not being able to get that feeling you could back then. Understanding from now on it's a memory unreachable. I've never read a book that used this location/theme combination. Did you come up with that, you bastard?

KKUURRTT: Hahaha I mean I wrote like three versions of this location before I found the theme of chasing a memory unreachable and they were all just pure fucking trash. 10K word false starts that will never see the light of day. Like, look at how fun this thing is wow. But don’t people already kind of know what is fun for them? One day something just clicked, the first line of the book really, the idea of a character being over this thing he claims to still treasure and it all just worked from there.

So, the location was there the whole time, but the theme came later. I don’t know if that’s the most effective way to write, but I always just start with an inkling and then let it develop on its own. When you write, do you outline, do you plan? Is theme x location a concern?

I’m more in love with this idea of ‘having fun,’ than having my chain yanked tight in anticipation of anything providing it.

Easier said than done but I love the ethos. I hate when I forget this kind of shit and settle into some caveman brain kind of shit, existing on survival mode that doesn’t even apply to this situation I find myself in.

An older friend (97) said the trick to not blowing his head off was being sincerely interested seeing what his brain might think next. I would blow my book’s head off if it didn’t offer results I didn’t anticipate. Heard common burnout, in nonfiction, comes after the research stage. Like, your brain worked through whatever made it interesting.

Bye.

But if you don’t take notes. Just let it swirl around. It’ll remain interesting and sustain the marathon of book writing.

The biggest points will stick. The others, the brain’s ass will shit out.

I’ve never gotten past the research part of a research-heavy project. Collapse under the weight of more and more and did I do enough? The only research I let myself do now is in-the-moment kind of stuff. Even then sometimes I just use a [placeholder] and come back on the rewrite. Maybe I’m a fuck research except for that of a life lived kind of guy. I guess that’s what they mean by writing what you know. Not like in any “this is the only way” sort of way. More like, why not use the tools you already have?

I never know what’s about to happen in front of the blinking vertical-line on my screen. A character worth chasing presents a melody to me. The longer I mine it–see where the particular combination of tones leads them–the more image chips out of the marble. A novel I wrote last winter was an exception. Dreamt it. Then had a sense of urgency to get it down. A crime novel set in a fictional, Midwestern town. Realized once I started I needed a map/character outlines/other shit I hate.

Power for you to be able to pull this off. Glad there was benefit in map/character/outline. Some people only write that way and I wish I could. My brain just gets bored by this process and starts acting out against itself. Self-sabotage my entire life any time someone told me what to do—and that includes me. It’s fucked.

Hope I never do it again. Was it scary writing a book that spans only a few days? Or did it allow you to settle in on the line-level. I gotta be honest—I don't read a lot of Twitter-writers engaging a reader like this—you're actually funny.

The schedule kept grounding me. Always pulled me back to a timetable, even if of my own creation. Otherwise I have the nature to get lost in my diatribes, rather than being in the moment. Time isn’t real when you’re on drugs, so it’s like all really fast or really slow and it didn’t have to be 10 pages = an hour or some shit. Just as much as I wanted to hyperfocus or not. But time kept pulling me out of musings or philosophy or high-speak and into narrative. And even though there’s not much of a narrative, days passing became a sort of replacement narrative. The original version was five days instead of four, but I worked with an editor who helped me pull back slightly. There’s something infinitely relatable about just a weekend. Who hasn’t had one of some comparative nature? I don’t want to call it a bender, but yeah… eventually there is a return to normalcy.

Thanks for the compliment on being funny. I feel like such an asshole when people on twitter are like “are there any actual funny books,” and I’m like ahem… Are there any other books that make you laugh? Are we supposed to laugh while reading fiction?

Agree. The weekend works on many levels. It’s juuuuust long enough. But not too.

Wasn’t wired for drugs. Even in my 20’s. After 3/4 days I needed 48-hours to grind my teeth in soft lighting. Felt strung out toward the end of your book. Seriously, I wouldn’t say it’s a ‘difficult’ book, but it’s not as easy as railing coke.

It’s just not sustainable. I feel like people think “I’m just a drug guy,” and sure I’ll advocate for experimentation all day, but the book is also very clearly trying to come to terms with the notion that maybe this isn’t the best. Feeling strung out by the end of the book was by design. I got strung out writing it. Too much of a good thing…

Being stuck in a cosmically-unpleasant situation like your narrator hits different. Like watching, Seinfeld, or something.

Funny’s hard. Which is why your book’s refreshing. Zac Smith tickles me in an intellectual way. I see his ‘flex,’ if you could say he has one, as subversive. Very: don’t look at me, but please, please look. He’s phenomenal. Stuart Buck’s recent novel, Hypnopony, made me laugh.

Lots of writers seem to be doing similar, highly-cerebral comedy. Aimed at a writerly-audience—Cavin, Sam Pink, et al.

LOL on Zac. His writing definitely has a flex. I see the look at me/don’t look at me kind of thing, but I also think it transcends even beyond that. I can’t wait to see what Zac is writing in thirty years. Cavin and Sam, I’ll ride or die on both of their writings. Haven’t read a page I haven’t loved. I need to read Hypnopony, fuck.

We love seeing people get what they deserve. As the situation becomes more a mockery of itself, tension builds, almost in the way horror operates—even minor situations are imbued with oh-shit-what’s-gonna-happen feels. Being one step away from a k-hole…

Just putting people in worse and worse situations. And drugs make that even easier. Like I knew a k-hole and a bad trip were incoming, but I had to save them for the right moment. Tension and release. I love horror movies, but can’t really fuck with horror fiction. Guess I’m more inclined to let comedy be my horror. Same kind of visceral reaction… just horrible shit happening to people. Except here, it’s funny.

Roland’s musings act like an adjacent narrative, then SNAP back into the flow of what's going on at the festival. And, because the paces (like, how they say people in different cities walk different speeds) aren't aligned with one another in each narrative, there's a pleasing warble when the reader gets to pull off that merge. Like nailing a simple trick. An ollie. You still feel good.

The musings to narrative snap IS exactly what I was going for, something that could balance interiority and presence in physical space simultaneously. I really appreciate you comparing it to an ollie. There’s an excitement to it, even if it’s simple. The author who inspired this stylistic effort most is probably Henry Miller. But his obsessions are more fucking-influenced than mine.

It’s just the way my brain works and I couldn’t do anything else if I wanted. How do you translate your thoughts to the page? Do you silence some and let others through? I’m sure everybody’s process is different, but mine is 100% apparent on the page.

Agree, everything’s on the page. Henry Miller, haven’t read him. What book/s operate/s similarly?

Sexus, Plexus, and Nexus and Tropic of Cancer/Capricorn are all too long and the magic trick wears off well before you’re done. The books of his that get it most right in my opinion are Quiet Days in Clichy and Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, but I like to read Miller more for tone and style than narrative anyway. Can pick it up, read 50 pages, and put it down for six months. I haven’t read everything, nor do I really intend to.

I translate my thoughts to the page in a murderous sprint. Most of what’s left, after editing, is propelling plot.

I DO try to reward in craft-y ways. Another reason I’m drawn to your work, I’m sure. My novel, Consumption, switches narrators each chapter, so it has that ollie-reward. Readers get to know narrators/voices, and don’t need fancy bells and whistles, like me saying who’s talking, to know who’s talking. Writers who pull this off, I see as magicians.

I had a screenwriting teacher when I was 18/19 tell me—as nice as she could—that all my characters sounded exactly alike—like me. Probably why I just tend to write in first person present. I have a lot of ideas that need close narrative distance to multiple people, and I always feel incapable.

Do you write on drugs?

Write high, edit sober…? No, write sober, make stranger/sillier high, edit sober.

It’s occasional. Like a pass or a paragraph. Moreso I let music guide me. Obviously I was listening to a lot of house music when I was writing this. Just 2 hour set after 2 hour set, putting me in that forward momentum. Though, music depends on the project. I write a lot to the Grateful Dead and Kanye. Right now the thing I’m working on is Aphex Twin. We’ve been talking music in the DMs. Do you use music to write? Does it change?

Music’s huge. It’s a daily necessity. I struggle with mental health and can only get by off the music in my head a few days before I need a massive aural-assault from the outside to set me straight. I use music to check whether what I’m writing/reading is good. If it can’t compete with mid-volume background noise for my attention, it probably isn’t.

I’m going to start using that as a litmus test for both things I’m writing myself and also reading. Nothing worse than reading the same sentence over and over. Can music focus me away from my phone? Here’s hoping. If not, trash it.

What were your favorite tropes to riff? Aurora? The druggies/dealers? So many prepackaged images, you could really go crazy there and I found myself able to catch up, even if I got lost for a second. Kind of BLE-URBG'ing myself back into the scene.

There’s this total visual overload at a festival, and I did my best to capture it, but I don’t know if that is even possible through prose—especially as someone who largely lays off of description.

I think my favorite tropes were describing one or two people in passing: the viking men or the guy in a suit or the couple out of basic raver monthly. Find a way to cut them down to size with a half a phrase rather than a full description. So much going on that it always felt like a flash of this and a twist of that would work. I feel zen in a situation of overstimulation, but it’s impossible to catch all of the details.

Had a poetry professor say we write about our obsessions, and I definitely got some out with this book. Might try to avoid drugs in the future. Try and come at it from a different angle. Do you have obsessions that refuse to leave your writing?

I had fun writing Crime. The one I enjoyed most, though, was the Californian. Already Dead was the first book I read that made me want to write that trope. Lived in the Bay Area for a few years. Made me realize these unique cultures—the Bostonian, Californian, New Orleanian, the Southerner, the Appalachian–naturally brought so much to the fiction table. That book has such real characters. Have you read it? One of Denis Johnson’s lesser-knowns.

There’s something so cool about California lit. It has the ability to be a million different things to a million different people. Such thematic differences between say Good at Drugs and Body High, which are the only recent California drug novels of my recent memory. I’ve only read Jesus’ Son and Largesse of the Sea Maiden, but Johnson is a king, so I can’t see why this wouldn’t be as well.

Read the plot summary and it was an instantaneous cop:

Can’t wait.

Awesome. Body High floored me.

Obsession is an obsession. I riff origins, often. Surreal seems pervasive. Thinking of Brian Evenson, Stephen Graham Jones, etc., here.

Hell yeah. You ever watch any De Palma movies? I feel like he nails this.

I haven’t. Sounds like something I should pirate.

I imagine if anything my career throughline will be music more-so than drugs. This is my rockstar shit… fictionalizing rock star shit. Honestly, the only thing Dave Chappelle has ever said that was of any interest to me was in his Block Party movie directed by Michel Gondry: “Every comic wants to be a musician. Every musician thinks they're funny. It's a very strange relationship that we have. Some musicians are funny. Some comedians can play.”

I’m neither, but writing both.

Good at Drugs is about belonging. Or not. Didn't realize how whored-out-for-community every facet of festivals sadly broadcasts itself being—sunglasses/face-paint/glowsticks, groupthink, I-knew-about-this-band, yoga. The only similar trying-this-hard-but-failing-sortacommunity I can think of is the Writing one. Do you mind talking some on your own sense of alienation? What, if anything, have you gotten from the writing community in making this book? How’d you come by the Anwyll blurb?

Welfare is so so good, so I just shot him an email and he dug it. Felt really quite fortunate. I still feel like I owe him, but I don't know how or what…? The communities can be very similar, except doing drugs with people is definitely this bonding experience and I’m pretty sure I was the only person at AWP on acid that year. I got my MFA and felt like an outsider because I didn’t write in literary or genre stylings. In fact, all of the people I bonded with (aside from the wonderful Tex Gresham) were poets. People that were obsessed with language more than plot. God, the first piece I wrote for that program was about an open-mic comic who goes on stage and melts as performance art. In retrospect, it felt like out of the gate I was like “fuck your workshop.” When I found this literary community I felt that I belonged. A bunch of weirdos who took writing seriously and sometimes even let themselves have fun with it. I think with time I started to see the false trappings here just like the festival-community, but I’ve made good friends in both. You’ve just got to weed through the bullshit.

Or slide into the DMs. I read Newspaper Drumsticks when you posted it as a pdf months back and I liked it but I didn’t say anything. I’m glad you reached out to me and started talking rap music.

But maybe the bullshit is just the timeline and we all really need to get to know each other in person better. Maybe there is value in things like AWP or writing retreats. I don’t know. I’ve been at this too short of a time to be jaded. I’m glad we met. The internet itself is alienating, even though it has this great power of bringing people together. Maybe it’s all about finding your niche and being satisfied with it? From the phrasing “trying-this-hard-but-failing-sortacommunity” it seems like you’re feeling alienated. Is that the case?

The Timeline’s a big table. Everything’s picked over. Or, like, the apples and shit laid around deflate if you bite em. I’m too new to be jaded, too. But, you're right. Everything requires bullshit-combing. Hearing you say you liked my book is awesome. It’s nice hearing anything. Most of what I read hits the way it sounds a lot of the stuff in your MFA did. Like, a completely different sport, or something.

I don’t know why sometimes telling another person that I liked what they did feels like the hardest thing in the world. We really are fucking weird creatures.

For sure. Still haven’t found a ‘community.’ X-R-A-Y is the closest thing. Reading there has been huge. A few individuals respond to my thing. And, you know, I see writerly groups on Twitter connecting, and I’m happy for them.

Don’t know what people think about my circle on their timeline.

I used to wish people would understand me. But, that didn’t work.

What we’re circling—maybe—is work? Like, you can’t expect community to come on, like you crushed it up, loaded it in a bong, and sprinkled DMT on top. Your efforts usually end with the message never answered.

But, that isn’t the point.

Or is it the point entirely? Are we having a conversation (partially) to embolden other writers who feel without community to start talking? Two Writers Talking—a new series on [wherever this ends up getting published].

I hope.

Good at Drugs feels like it needed to be written. For you. To set down a thing that once buzzed and felt special. A book literally millions of seemingly 'normal' people, who flashback every time they sip orange juice, would love. Do you get a sense it's reaching readers? Can you envision a way writers might hustle in the future to reach niche-but-adjacent audiences?

Yes yes. The people that are reading it are feeling a connection even if they don’t have that direct experience and that’s definitely exciting to me. A solid amount of people have bought it, but I believe it’s just sitting there on most people’s shelves. I appreciate everyone who tweets about books they love. Obviously indie literature lives or dies by buzz. I don’t think this book has connected with ravers quite yet. Like there are hundreds of thousands of people who do drugs and go see live dance music, but getting this book into their hands has proven to be a challenge. I believe the right DJ gets their hands on it and posts about it and it’s like, game on. I didn’t write this for a niche, but I wish that niche would have the desire to support it. There aren’t many novels about the rave. I figured I could be at least one of the ones that matters. But maybe I was barking up the wrong niche and it’s only those adjacent that will come out with the hell yeahs and the high fives.

I think the answer about hustling to a niche is just authenticity. Write about what you love and it’ll show. I’d love to read your rap writing. Do you have any? If someone were really into watching twitch streamers, I’m sure they could write a really great book about watching twitch streams. I think readers are fundamentally interested in what other people are interested in. How do you get non-readers to read? Fuck if I know.

Like, have you read Convenience Store Woman? Literally shut off my phone every night to read about convenience stores.

No, but this is exactly what I’m talking about. I think we all have those interests, even if we struggle to see them through the fog.

Interesting, you think it’s sitting on shelves unread.

You mentioned Tex, and I thought of him while reading. Yours doesn’t match his epic, page-number-wise. But, mentioned yours requires work. I see that requirement being antithetical to what (most) indie publishers are pushing and people are reading these days—the bite-sized novel. There will always be readers for harder works, but maybe the breed is thinning?

Tex was really important in validating this book for me. He read an earlier draft and gave me the confidence that readers—and not just ravers—would like it. That it had a universality in its fiber. But then again, I think the people that are coming to it are appreciating that it’s got some heft to it. That it feels like a traditional novel in many ways, and is not just bite-sized (even though I like the bite-sized as much as the next guy). I know that the heft and sprawling epicness is definitely part of what I appreciate about Sunflower. Like, oh, wow, yeah, okay. That book might not get the love it deserves in Tex’s lifetime, but it is a masterpiece, and I hope some future society is able to look back on it as the postmodern classic it is.

Recently, I had a rapper cosign Newspaper Drumsticks. While my Amazon rank soared, I was like—wow, the rap community is a niche for prison-writing. How a writer domino-effects into several large, otherwise unattainable audiences is something I’m very interested in.

For fucking sure. Doesn’t it all feel like a goddamn fucking mystery sometimes? Like I don’t think I get how anything works anymore.

Thanks for saying you’d love to read some rap-writing. Pretty sure the last thing Rap needs is a white guy named Tyler. I’ll keep sounding the whistle about what I think needs more ears, and flooding DMs with playlists.

We started here by the way:

Tyler’s got the ear that’s for sure. Maybe you just write about being a white guy named Tyler who likes Rap. A playlist creation obsession…

I could slay that book. Hear you're writing now. Can you talk about it?

I’m doing this thing where I write three to four microfictions a week. I’m going to keep at this for the entire year of 2022. From there, see what my obsessions are and try to find a collection within that. Other than my collaborative novel with Tex Gresham, Easy Rider II: Sleazy Driver, coming out this Spring, I might hold off on publishing for a while. It feels like a three year cycle is healthy. I want people to want me. This book still has buzz to build. I have some other bigger projects in the pipeline that I want to keep close to the vest, but I will tell you that I’m terrified of writing a second novel. It already feels like I forgot how to do that thing I just did. Humbling as hell.

What have you got coming? Tell us about Tyler’s ’22.

I’m writing a novel. About halfway done. Still no clue what it will look like. But, want to experiment with self-publishing? See what it feels like to have control? What difference, if any, I feel with sales?

We’re putting out the co-written book ourselves. Through an imprint, but ultimately the same steps as self-publishing. We can compare notes when it’s all said and done.

That’d be awesome. Thanks. Keeping close tabs on what rappers are doing to push numbers…might try getting weird, start some writing feuds.

Let’s go you fuckin piece of shit motherfucker.

I’m a dawg and you a pussy you eat cat food.

Definitely finishing the novel I mentioned. Who knows? Might finish a second poetry collection by year’s end. Want to write a pulp novel. Maybe under a pseudonym.

Uhhhh.

More of these? I like this. Feels genuine. Unlike reviews/blurbs, which can feel like having a stranger’s dick/cat in your mouth. You can’t even see their face. IF this gets published. Maybe someone will skrrt in my DMs? Maybe, I’ll start interviewing rappers?

I think we’re onto something.

Consuming nothing but interactions, right? I’m hungry. Thanks for talking. Making me feel less alone.

You too, my man. Love a situation like this. To break down the borders we have in our heads and talk it out with someone we might not have otherwise. Can’t be beat. Peace.

FACTS OF LIFE by Laetitia Keok

March 9, 2022

Male emperor penguins protect their eggs from the harsh Antarctic elements by balancing them on their feet.

When I tell you this, you lift me up and balance me on your feet. I am four and weigh nothing. You are a mountain of a man. With my tiny feet stacked atop your larger feet, you hold my hands and start taking wide, steady steps. We pass the balcony, and I feel the warmth of sunlight as it filters through the glass door to fall onto our bodies. Our shadows dance on the floor tiles like puppets. Then, I am flying. Past my mother’s old room that is now my aunt’s. Woosh. Past the cot that my baby sister is sleeping in. Woosh. And I am not afraid of falling—it doesn’t even cross my mind. We waddle across the living room, my cousins cheering softly in the background. Soon I am yelling directions, “停！转左！等！转右！” and we are zigzagging around the sofa and the stool and the bright red toy car that I have long outgrown, but that you’d fixed anyway. I keep my eyes on the floor—I am your guide, telling you to swerve to avoid the cracks in the floor, to turn at the right corners. When I look up, there is light everywhere—the room melts away and we are in Antarctica, inventing our own little penguin waltz. It is a long time before I am willing to walk on my own again, and I tell everyone this is how I learnt to do it: safe in your arms, fearless.

Only I am not fearless yet. I am six and it is my first day of primary school. You walk me to the gate, but I refuse to go in. I am afraid of the sickly cream-coloured walls and the pillars thicker than the width of both our bodies. But mostly I am afraid for you to leave. “Let’s walk for a bit more before I go in,” I say. “One more round, before you have to go.” You shake your head, but let me lead you to the zebra crossing and then back to the bus stop across the school compound. We circle the bush with the small white flowers once, then twice. You say “最后一次”, but we circle it another time. I cling onto your shirt sleeve. When you finally get me to step through the school gates, the walls and the pillars meld into a blur in my eyes. I am crying. I am reaching for your hand and grabbing air. I am begging for one more round, and always one more round.

Even as a child I knew to ask for more time.

There’s a line in Terese Marie Mailhot’s heart berries that says “Time seems measured by grief and anticipatory grief”.

The summer I spent chasing all 311 episodes of 《天下父母心》 with you was also the summer I realised you were not invincible. A light in the house had blown a fuse, and you were going to change it. I helped you get a ladder from the storeroom, and as I watched you climb it, I was terrified. I could not shake off an image of you falling. I imagined all the bones you could break, and all the hard edges that could break you. In my mind, I heard the dull crack of your spine, your neck, your hips. I let you get to the third rung, then made you get off. As I scaled the ladder in your place, you smiled and said, “Qi, see? Isn’t this easy? It’s good to learn now, I won’t be here forever to do it, you know.” I knew. I knew before you said it and it made me afraid.

At night, fifteen minutes into episode 201, you dozed off. As I watched the glow of the television tint your skin a ghostly purple, I traced the rise and fall of your chest and braced for the hitch in your breath, but there was none.

In so many ways, I have already grieved you.

In Parkinson's disease, certain nerve cells in the brain gradually break down or die. Early signs may be mild and go unnoticed.

At first, we do not notice the tremors. Then, they are all we see—you, earthquaking into yourself.

Here is how a body forgets itself: everything you can no longer bite into, the stiff of your feet, the hunch of your back, the tremble of your arms. You have always been quiet, but you no longer talk during meals because you’d choke if you did. You blink less. Your stride narrows.

Once, when I asked you how you’d lost half of your middle finger on your right hand, you told me you had been peeling an apple, when you’d accidentally sliced it off. I was fascinated. I thumbed the almost smooth ridge of skin that pulled itself over your remaining knuckle. “Did it make things frustrating?” I asked. “Like you suddenly couldn’t do so many things?” You ruffled my hair, chuckled, and said no, you’d just decided you didn’t need that finger.

But you will need your body, and you will not have it. It will no longer feel like yours. You will have trouble swallowing, talking, walking. You will need a wheelchair. I cannot imagine it, but you will grow unsteady. This time, there will be things you can no longer do.

There is no known cure for Parkinson’s. It is a disease that is chronic and worsens over time.

The day you are admitted, I see my mother cry for the first time in years. I learn we are all afraid—there is no such thing as fearless. She had woken me up in the morning before going to you. After she left, I sat in bed, and time swelled all around me. I had slept through it. You were in pain and I had slept through it. You were in pain and I should have felt it, somehow. Except I hadn’t. And I had slept through it all.

When I was younger, to correct my posture, my mother made me stand up straight against the kitchen wall. “Hold it for sixty seconds”, she would say. You laughed and counted the seconds with me.

Now, I count with you as you relearn your hands, finger first. One, thumb to index finger. Two, thumb to (half a) middle finger. Three, thumb to ring finger. Four, thumb to pinkie. I show you how to make a fist and unfurl it. Now, you memorise the motions to stand up safely, and I watch as it takes you multiple tries. I watch you learn to move sideways to navigate space, “like a crab”, you say. We waddle across the living room—I am your guide. I remind you to not look down, to take larger strides—“往前看，大步一点”. When I feel the ridges of the anti-slip mat in the bathroom dig into the soles of my feet, I know it must hurt for you, too, and learn you are a patient man.

Your body forgets, but mine remembers. I remember it all. Your feet, warm under mine. Your hands, always gentle. I remember that day, from years ago, when we walked eleven blocks and two traffic lights to pick my cousin up from kindergarten. I had slipped my hand into yours and thought, how I will miss you when you are gone.

BIRTHDAY PRESENTS by Gary Fincke

March 7, 2022

Sixth: Her Reborn Baby Doll

Her promised sister, it wasn’t, but her mother had selected the model featuring the optional beating heart and carried the gift-wrapped baby home bundled in a blanket as if sleet had begun to slant from a terrible sky. “What will you name her?” her mother said.

“Bernadine,” the girl whispered, knowing not to say Darla, as she felt the doll’s heart pulse against her body. As soon as she kissed its face, she packed away her other dolls like winter clothes. But one morning, only four months later, when she pressed her ear on Bernadine’s small chest, she heard silence. Her mother said, “Even these babies have a spring that can stick.” The girl placed her fingers upon Bernadine’s wrist, listening to its small, demanding quiet. She didn’t cry until her mother left the room.

Seventh: Chatty Cathy

First, perfectly timed, Cathy said, “Now you have a friend.” For a week, the girl loved pulling Cathy’s string to hear “I love you.” When her new school was lonely and scary, Cathy, as if she knew, told her, “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

Sometimes, though, the girl had to tug the string ten times to hear Cathy tell her what she needed to hear. Sometimes more. One evening she wouldn’t say, “I love you.” Instead, four times in a row, she said, “Take me with you.” The girl pulled harder, but Cathy kept whining. She pulled so hard that Cathy, at last, wouldn’t talk. Like she wasn’t her friend after all. Like she never would be again.

Eighth: Wedding Day Midge

“Barbie’s friend, Midge Hadley, is getting married,” her mother said. The girl marched Midge down an aisle she made of a wide white ribbon. All of her old dolls sat on either side and stared like they were jealous. None of them had ever had a special day. The girl didn’t have any boy dolls, but she could imagine who would marry Midge, a boy who was taller and had the same smile, a boy who stood as straight as Midge with hair so much the same texture that he looked as if he might be her brother.

Ninth: Happy Family Midge

Happy Family Midge had such a fat belly that the girl barely recognized her. “Midge has been married a while,” her mother said. “She’s in the family way.”

The girl said nothing. She stared at Midge’s swollen plastic belly until her mother tapped it and said “Pull.” When the girl tugged, the belly lifted off in her hand and she found a baby curled in Midge’s plastic womb. “Now you can dress her,” her mother said. “See, there are things for your new sweetheart to wear.”

As the girl unwrapped those tiny clothes, her mother handed her a second box. “Now there’s a husband who won’t leave,” she said. “Now there will be two children because there’s an older brother named Ryan.”

Tenth: Her Breastfeeding Doll…

The package had one large-print sentence: “Because you shouldn’t have to wait until you have breasts before you start breastfeeding.” After the girl read it twice, she asked her mother to leave. “Of course,” her mother said, and the girl cuddled her child to her skinny chest. She examined herself in her mirror. She guided the small mouth to each nipple as if her breasts would bloom. At last, she lifted the flowered bra from the box and strapped it on. Two of those flowers would welcome that baby to suck, its mouth fitted perfectly as a lesson. She waited to sense her child’s hunger. There were fierce secrets that mothers knew. Lips and hands will want you. Tongues and teeth. She pressed her baby to a flower.

Eleventh: Her Look-Alike Doll

After her mother selected the photo most flattering to form the doll’s pliant face, the girl recognized her infant self. She gazed at that familiar baby, its small, resilient body. All night, as she slept with herself, she dreamt of shrinking. She asked to be photographed. She asked again, and among those faces, she looked for the one that would always best fit the body she was terrified to lose. One morning she crawled inside the closet where everything too small to wear was stored. She whimpered with her forgotten voice, stuffed two fingers into her mouth and sucked on those toys to keep from screaming.

OUTING by Serkan Görkemli

March 4, 2022

By the time I show up for our weekly outing on Thursday evening, my friend Yaprak has already ordered the first bottle of red wine. We’re meeting on the patio of Büyük Truva Oteli, one of the oldest and most expensive hotels on the shore of the Dardanelles in downtown Çanakkale in northwestern Turkey.

She beckons me with her left hand to our quiet corner. Her right hand puts out one of the many cigarettes she has already smoked. The night is young, and I’ve brought two packs of Camels just in case. I’m a little late, and I already know what she’ll say.

“Enis, where the fuck have you been, you ibne?” she says and laughs.

Yaprak’s the only one who can call me a fag. The only one I’d let.

“Didn’t you have enough of your new boyfriend’s dick yet?” she whispers. Her whispering is another person’s talking.

I look around to see if anyone has heard her. I’ve tried telling her not to be so loud when she says such things, to no avail.

“Have you had enough of Mehmet’s yet?” I ask.

I’ve been dating my boyfriend for only two months. She and Mehmet have been together for almost six months now.

“Well, his, yes. Dick in general, hell no,” she says and shakes an empty plastic bottle at the waiter for more water.

A few mezes—feta cheese, shepherd’s salad, stuffed grape leaves and pepper, moussaka, and sautéed liver—are laid out on the table for our all-night noshing. She pours wine into my glass and drops the bottle into an ice bucket, which is sweating rivulets that seep into the white tablecloth. In the July heat, we like even our red wine cold.

“Trouble in paradise?”

“No, it’s just… Things change, you know.”

She’s being vague, but I get it. We’re both forty-five and have yet to settle down. Neither of us remembers how many men have passed through our lives, she as a two-time divorcee who dates to find her next husband and me as a gey man who can only date because I cannot get married. Yet our hearts, encrusted with heartbreak, both real and imagined, still have room for a teenager’s excitement about a new beginning and a mid-lifer’s hope that it’ll be different this time.

“Siktir et, let’s drink to boyfriends past and present,” she says.

Yaprak’s cursing like a sailor contrasts with her rather delicate name, which means “leaf.” She’s been like that since we first met in high school, except now she has the life experience to back it up. She’s the only child of one of Çanakkale’s most prominent families—her father is the head of the Chamber of Commerce and her mother’s a lawyer—and she’s an accomplished architect who is not beholden to anyone, so she can speak her mind. She’s what my guy friends and I call taşaklı kadın, a woman with balls.

I laugh and raise my glass, “To boyfriends. May we never run out of them.”

“Amin,” she says, gulps down the last of her wine, and immediately sips from her water. “Drink, drink, drink,” she says, gesturing to my sweating glass of water, and gets up. “I’ve got to pee.”

We’ll be prodding one another like loving yet annoying mothers throughout the night to drink plenty of water amid the summer heat to avoid a massive hangover in the morning.

This restaurant is one of the best places in Çanakkale to view the sunset. I take it all in: couples strolling arm-in-arm, parents dragging behind kids preoccupied with Maraș ice cream in one hand and trailing a balloon from the other, and groups of young men smoking or roughhousing on the promenade of the Dardanelles.

Further down the promenade on our side of the strait, the fake behemoth of a Trojan horse built for the Hollywood movie broods as it towers over those strolling by. Hard to believe that Brad Pitt hid in it, and that it came all the way from America. The historic site of Troy is about a half-hour car ride from the city center. Naturally, the downtown Büyük Truva Oteli we’re drinking at tonight is pompously named after it: The Big Troy Hotel. Cheap plaster reliefs depicting war scenes with soldiers, horses, and chariots adorn the inside of the building. Ah, the star-crossed lovers: Paris who abducted Helen, “the face that launched a thousand ships,” and Achilles—Brad Pitt—and his male companion Patroclus—Garrett … Somebody. And the carnage and the heartbreak that ensued. I’ve seen the film in English with Turkish subtitles.

My gaze shifts to the clientele populating the nearby tables in the garden restaurant: businessmen in suits probably discussing the vagaries of the economy; their sun-kissed wives or mistresses with perfectly coiffed hair and revealing blouses debating the merits of the dishes and the drinks they ordered; and foreign tourists in T-shirts and jeans imbibing rakı, indulging in mezes, and taking selfies in the waning sunlight. I wonder if there are any gey men in the crowd. Occasional eye contact might offer a clue, but I can’t be sure or take the risk of finding out. I’d check Hornet, the gey dating app popular since Turkey’s Grindr ban a few years ago, on my iPhone, but I’ve promised Yaprak, and myself, to give my current boyfriend a serious shot, so I squash the urge by emptying my wine glass and taking a long drag on my cigarette. The combination of smoke, wine, and heat makes my head spin, so I hydrate. Yaprak would approve.

“Allah’ım, we didn’t even say a proper merhaba! How boy-crazy are we? Come, give me a hug!”

As we embrace, her low-cut orange summer dress, printed with red hibiscuses, shimmers in the sun. She’s wearing Ambre Solaire bronzing sunblock with coconut oil. Her hair is in a ponytail, the sides of her head wetted with water to cool down and keep stray hairs in place. And of course, her sunglasses are glued to her face, never to come off until after sunset in the summer. Like she always says, she’s a woman of a certain age, so she needs to take care of her skin, especially around the eyes.

“You look great and smell delicious,” I say.

“Thank you. So do you. I like that baby beard you got going,” she says as she runs her index finger down the side of my face. “How’re things? How’re you?”

“Iyiyim, I just moved to my new office at school, and started reading up on policies and protocols. Necessary evil.”

“Oh yes, Mr. Vice Principal. Congrats again! Çin çin.”

We clink and drink to my promotion one more time.

“How do you like it so far?”

“It’s nice. Bigger office with a better view of the schoolyard. It’s quiet at the moment, and I’m excited about not teaching. But it’ll be crazy soon enough—I need to handle detentions and more parents, of course.”

“Ah, parents are the worst,” she says and laughs.

“I wish all parents were like you, canım. How’s Jale?”

Jale, her fourteen-year-old daughter and only child, who attends the middle school where I work, came out as lesbian a few weeks ago.

“She’s good. We’re learning new things every day.”

“Like what?”

“Vocabulary, people, questions. All of it.”

“Care to elaborate?” I light a cigarette and pass it to her. I light another for myself.

“Thanks, şeker.” She takes a long drag and exhales sideways before she speaks. “She’s been staying up late and reading stuff online.”

I raise my eyebrows.

“It’s not what you think. I’m not spying on her. She told me herself.”

“Okay, what did she tell you about?”

“Well, words. Lots of them. When we were growing up, it was just heteroseksüel, transseksüel, and homoseksüel. Now, it’s panseksüel, nabinary, baç. Who knows how many more—fuck, I feel like I’m being dragged under by a riptide of words.”

“Umm, yeah, I know some of those words. And don’t forget biseksüel.”

“Of course. How could I? When Jale first came out, I thought she was confused or biseksüel—I mean she’s so young, how could she know for sure?”

“Yes, I remember that. You hoped so, so that she’d have a way out.”

She purses her lips. I can’t see her eyes behind her shades.

“You know I accept my child and will support her no matter what. I just want her to be happy.”

“I know, I know,” I say, “I’ll drink to that.” We drink again. “So, what else have you learned about?”

“One day, I’m a heteroseksüel, and the next day, I’m a sapioseksüel. Who knew?”

“What?”

“See, even you don’t know it. And you call yourself gey!”

“Shall I return my gey card, Madam?”

“It means I’m attracted to intelligence.”

“Not to worry then. You’re still heterosexual.”

She gives me the middle finger and continues, “It’s true. I’ve only married and slept with intelligent guys. Et kafalılar turn me off.”

“What about Mehmet?”

Her boyfriend didn’t go to college.

“Come on, Enis, there’re plenty of meatheads with college degrees.”

“True. Ah, the meatheads, they don’t get enough credit either way. They may not be marriage material, but they have a different set of skills. Maybe you shouldn’t date to marry for a change?”

“The old me would say I’m too old for that shit, but the new me screams who the hell knows!?”

“I like the new you.” I raise my glass, and we drink the remaining wine in our glasses.

She refills us and smokes. She leaves her cigarette in her mouth, wrinkling her nose and squinting from the smoke as she says, “I mean how do I know I’m heteroseksüel? I might be biseksüel. I’ve married both guys I fell in love with, as soon as they reciprocated. Maybe I’ve never met the right woman.”

“Well, it’s not that changeable. I can tell you that. You’d know by now, even if you’ve never slept with a woman.”

“How’re you so sure? Is there a test or something that I’m not aware of?”

“Yes, it’s called the head-turn test. For me, it’s always been about who makes my head turn on the street. That’s always been guys. Even when I was in denial.”

“What’s your type, again? I forgot how you put it.”

“Broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped guys get me going.”

“So, a model. Every man’s dream, gey or straight. How original.”

I poke my tongue at her.

“How can you be so sure? You haven’t always been with such guys.”

“My point exactly. Where’re they now?”

She stops for a moment. More wine. “Fine. What do you think about panseksüellik?”

“What’s that?”

“Your gey card, please, Beyefendi?” She extends her hand, palm up.

I pretend to get it from my wallet and hand it to her. She throws my imaginary gey card over her shoulder toward a table of all-male bankers behind her. The waiter had forgotten to remove the Rezervasyon: Akbank sign from the table. One of them looks our way. Did my card hit him?

“Bullseye. I think the cute, tall guy at the table behind you caught it.”

She turns around to look before I tell her not to. She turns back and licks her lips.

“Ahem. Now that my uninformed gayness is out of the way, let me guess: Panseksüel means someone who likes everyone?”

She giggles. “Let me educate you, Mr. Vice Principal. One of Jale’s friends is panseksüel and loves a house. Jale just told me.”

“What? You mean like getting off at the thought of a beautiful villa or something?”

“Yes.”

“You’re joking!”

“No, I’m not. Jale has a lot of LeGeBeTe friends, and she told me that one of them is a panseksüel in that way.”

“Uh, that’d be a fetish. I think they’re making a fool out of you.”

“Who’s being narrow-minded now?” She crosses her arms and raises an eyebrow.

I don’t respond immediately. I top off our glasses and empty the bottle. She looks around for the waiter and flags him.

I’m amused and surprised by her confusion. How could an intelligent person who draws plans for the interior of high-rise buildings all over the world for an American firm be so confused about matters of sexuality? Is she, or are we, already drunk? My mind drifts to the world outside Çanakkale; on the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall in America, Onur Yürüyüşü, the Pride Parade, is banned in Ankara, Istanbul, Izmir, Antalya, and Mersin. My Twitter feed tells me that even in America, ignorant homofobikler are in power. Yaprak is certainly more open-minded than my parents, who’ve known about me for more than a decade now. What’s the big deal if she’s a little confused—and drunk at the moment? I decide to go with the flow and not irritate her further. I make a mental note to look up panseksüellik later.

“Tamam, I promise to be more open-minded if I can get my gey card back.”

“You’ll get it in the mail in seven to ten business days. Call 1-800-031-6969 to activate when you receive it.”

“Teşekkürler, Madam. What other words have you learned?”

“Nabinary,” she says timidly.

“Not male or female?”

“Yes. This is the one that bothers me the most. Jale says that maybe she is nabinary.”

“So what?”

“If she’s not a man or a woman, what is she?”

“Nabinary. You need to free your mind.” I can’t help it.

She grabs the bottle from the metal bucket with a clang, jostling some ice water onto the table, and fills our glasses to the brim. She puts it back with another clang, splashing more water. She takes off her sunglasses and puts them in front of her. The sun has yet to fully set.

“Please no joking. This one hurts my heart.” She puts her hand on her bosom and tears up. “We can say ‘nabinary’ back and forth between us, but the world is cruel, and I want my child to be happy.” She dabs her eyes with her pink cloth napkin.

“I’m sorry,” I say and hold her free hand. “You’ve been a great mother—a Gezi Park annesi. You went all the way to Istanbul for the protests. You’ve made yourself an activist. How many women are there like you in this country?”

“Please don’t call me a Gezi annesi. It reminds me of mothers whose children have been injured with tear gas canisters and plastic bullets. Or even killed. And it’s gotten worse.”

“Fine, but Jale is lucky to have a mom who accepts and loves her.”

“I don’t know how to protect her. She wants to go to the unofficial Onur Yürüyüșü gathering in Izmir or Istanbul next year. I could take her, but the thought of her experiencing gas and bullets during her first parade kills me.”

“Well, maybe you shouldn’t go until you feel it’s safe.”

She sighs. “But really, when is it going to be safe?”

“I don’t know, but things will probably get worse before they get better.”

“That’s what I was thinking, too.”

“You’ve got to tell her that.”

“I agree, but just the fact that I need to tell her that hurts.”

“Maalesef.” I get up, pull my chair next to hers, and sit, putting my arm around her. “I mean what I said: You’re doing a lot just by being there for Jale. In the few weeks since she came out, you’ve come a long way, light years farther than my parents, who keep quiet and act like everything is the same.” I look away to quell the ache stirring in my chest. “All you can do is be there for her and let her find her own way. Like we all had to do. You can’t control the world.”

She nods and kisses me on the cheek. I give her a hug before returning to my side of the table, and propose a toast, “To mothers like you.”

“To friends like you,” she says and drinks. “While we’re on the subject, Jale has been chatting with Aslı, this older girl, online.”

“How much older?”

“Jale says she’s sixteen. And she wants to meet her. Enis, you should talk to Jale.”

“What about?”

“Well, you’re a normal gey, not like my friend Tamer from college.”

“Normal gey?” I scoff. “What’s wrong with Tamer?”

“Nothing, really, he’s just very flamboyant and sleeps around. As if that’s his life’s goal. You know the type. I want Jale to have a more wholesome influence in her life. Not become a barfly.”

“Well, I was once like him. Is that how you thought about me then?”

“Come on, you and Tamer are not the same.”

“Her neyse.” There are more important matters than Tamer. “As I told you before, Jale shouldn’t know about me yet.”

“About that,” she says and simpers.

“You told her, didn’t you?”

“I had to. And she was so excited about it. If you were in my shoes, you would want her to have someone to talk to, wouldn’t you?”

I can’t believe she played the mother card. I take a deep breath, rub my face with both hands as if it’s the end of a prayer, and exhale. I finish off what remains of yet another glass of wine despite a sudden wave of nausea.

My head spins as I stumble toward the men’s room inside the hotel. I realize the sun has fully set. The night is upon us, and the darkness that drapes the Dardanelles in the distance makes it look like it’s been snatched away, leaving an abyss in its place.

As I squeeze out the last few drops of urine, I smolder at Yaprak’s reckless behavior. I zip up, wash my hands, and check my hair. I have a short haircut that butches me up. Summer freckles on my face. I see a fledgling pimple on the side of my head. How did I miss it? I feel a pinprick of pain as I squeeze it. It’s now a puffy pink spot. I splash my face with cool water.

As I’m about to leave the restroom, one of the Akbank men enters. He looks at me. I nod. He doesn’t nod back. Does he know about me? Did he hear us talk? I pull down the collar of my T-shirt with my index finger. The sun might be out for the night, but it’s still hot.

When I step back outdoors, I feel all eyes are on me. I walk through the flotsam of tables carefully to avoid stumbling and drawing more attention to myself. Yaprak is laughing and gesturing as she chats with the tall businessman from the Akbank table. Has she told him about me? I get why her chatting with random men bothers her boyfriend Mehmet. They stop talking, and she turns back to our table just before I arrive.

“Are you alright? You seem flushed. Drink water.”

“Is it that obvious? I just popped a pimple.”

“Iğrenç,” she winces.

“I’ll tell you what’s gross. Your outing me to Jale, a child.”

“Come on,” she says, “You know her. She looks up to you. And she knows not to tell.”

I lean forward and glare at her. “You want me fired?”

“I’ll make sure she won’t tell anyone.”

“Let’s hope she’s not as trusting of people as you are.”

“You’ve always been like this.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s like when we dated in high school. You didn’t want anyone to know. Honestly, I never understood it.”

“It’s not the same. It didn’t feel right. It wasn’t right.”

“So, it still doesn’t feel right?”

“Don’t you dare.” I pound the table.

“Calm down. No more wine for you,” she says and puts on a smile. Tencere dibin kara, seninki benden kara—pot calling the kettle’s bottom sooty.

I pour myself another glass of wine. I light a Camel. I make a point of offering her neither. She gives me a sheepish look and fills her own glass. We’re determined to drown it all in red.

“Look, I’m sorry,” she says. “You’ve known her since she was a baby. She won’t tell. I promise.”

“We’ll see. Maybe she already has.” I’m determined not to let her off the hook that easy. “And make sure you don’t blab about her, either.”

“I know how to protect my child. Don’t lecture me on parenting.”

“I just want to make sure you understand. We’re not characters in the Yaprak show of open-mindedness.”

“Siktir git,” she says loudly enough to turn several heads our way. She pushes her chair back and stands up unsteadily.

I’ve finally gotten a rise out of her, so I pile on. “See, this is what you heterolar don’t get.” I shake my cigarette-holding right hand at her. “You don’t walk in kuir shoes, so you don’t get to tell. Got it?”

She’d storm into the hotel except she’s drunk. She turns around slowly and walks as if she is an old lady with leg problems. I don’t go after her. For the moment, I want her to feel bad. When she finally reaches the building, she grabs the arm of the waiter at the door and holds onto it as she speaks to him. It looks like she needs support to stand up, but I know her. I bet she ordered another bottle of red.

While Yaprak pouts in the restroom, I pull out my iPhone and call her boyfriend Mehmet.

“Who’s this?” an unfamiliar voice on the other end asks.

Shit, I misdialed. It’s the new, other Mehmet, the school janitor, in my contacts. I was told to save his number for building-related emergencies.

“I’m sorry, I dialed the wrong number,” I say, trying not to slur my words.

He hangs up without saying anything. Fortunately, he doesn’t have my number yet.

The waiter brings a bottle of Kavaklıdere Yakut. Yaprak is definitely coming back.

I squint at my phone as if I’m nearsighted or really old and can barely pick out the names. I navigate to the two Mehmets in my contacts. No last names. I tap each Mehmet with my fingertip to view their numbers. Not that I memorized them. Who does that these days? Mehmet the janitor lives near the school, and I know my work area code, so I call the other one.

“Nooldu?” he says. No greeting, no warmth, no nothing. He’s always like that with me, as if I’m not man enough for him.

“Yaprak,” I say and can’t find the words, like I’m intimidated by him all of a sudden.

“Is she okay?”

I hear music and people talking loudly in the background.

“She’s okay. Where are you?”

“Eceabat.”

A half-hour ferry ride away, on the other side of the Dardanelles. He lives there, born and raised, and owns a furniture store. They met when Yaprak was doing pro bono consulting for a family friend there. I don’t know what Yaprak sees in him. He doesn’t have a college degree, and he reminds me of my dad sometimes. He is a typical man in the way he neglects her.

“What’re you up to?” I ask.

“Hanging out. Entertaining some guests.”

“Anyone I know?”

“You don’t know them. Why’s she not calling me herself? Put her on.”

Bossy. Maybe that’s what she likes about him. That, or he has a big dick.

Which he does. She told me herself.

“She’s just drunk and in the restroom. You know how she gets.”

“Of course, what else,” he mutters.

Maybe there really is trouble in paradise.

“Can you come get her?”

“At this hour? Not sure. And my guests.”

“We argued a little.”

He ignores that bit of information because he knows how we get when we drink together.

“Hold on, I’m checking the summer ferry schedule.”

He won’t make it. I already knew that.

“It’s past midnight. I missed it. The next one is at 2 am,” he says.

“No worries. I’ll see what I can do. I’ll text you if we need you. Görüşürüz.”

I see that Yaprak is on her way back. As she approaches, I tally the signs of drunkenness. Her face is flushed, her hair is somewhat disheveled, even though she probably put in some effort to keep it together, and one of the spaghetti straps of her orange dress has fallen below her shoulder.

“Who were you talking to?”

“Mehmet.”

“Why, did he call you?

“No, I called him.”

“Why?”

“Well, you’re too drunk, and as your boyfriend, he should come and take care of you.”

“What the fuck, Enis?”

“What?” I feign ignorance.

“You know.” She holds her forehead like she’s received news of death. Dramatic.

“Why are you coming between me and my boyfriend?” she asks.

“I’m not.”

“Yes, you are. He doesn’t want me to drink, and you call him and tell him that I’m drunk.”

“Well, I didn’t know that.”

“Now you do. Stay the fuck out of my relationship.” She’s ready to pounce on me like a lioness.

We are quiet for a minute and drink from the Yakut I’ve poured for both of us.

“I know what you’re doing,” she continues. “You’re still mad at me, so you step over me and call my boyfriend.”

That’s exactly it. “I don’t know where you’re getting that.”

“Allah kahretsin, stop playing games!” She’s the one pounding the table this time. Her other strap falls. I reach out to pull it over her shoulder. She cringes and slaps my hand. “Don’t touch me.”

“Tamam, tamam, I’m sorry,” I say, “I’m just drunk.”

She leans back and takes a deep breath. “Have I ever come between you and your boyfriends? Did I call Alpay when he was fucking around behind your back, and you knew it?”

“What’s my ex have to do with this?” I ask. We’re experts at pushing each other’s buttons.

“It wasn’t easy for me to see you being disrespected, but I’ve never disrespected you. I expect the same.”

She literally held my hand through that debacle and many others since.

“I said I’m sorry. What else do you want me to do?”

“Call Mehmet back and tell him that I don’t need him. Now.”

I dial Mehmet and am about to tell him exactly that when the sleepy and angry voice of the school janitor says, “Brother, you misdialed again. Stop calling me!” He hangs up.

I start giggling and almost fall off my chair.

“What’s so funny?” Yaprak asks.

“Hold on, I’ll tell you. Let me call your Mehmet first.”

“My Mehmet?”

I hold my index finger up at her as I dial Mehmet. I tell him we don’t need him.

He says, “Tamam,” and hangs up.

I tell Yaprak about misdialing the janitor twice. I get the giggles again, which makes Yaprak smile in spite of herself. Her smile is encouraging. Maybe she’ll forgive me. I get up and put my arm around her. She doesn’t move, except for turning her head sideways and offering me her cheek. I give her a peck on the cheek. As I move back to my seat, my head is spinning.

We avoid eye contact and don’t say anything for several minutes. The late-night sea breeze exhales through the emptying patio.

I rub my eyes and say, “We shouldn’t have ordered this last bottle. It’s so late. And I have a morning meeting.”

“You can leave,” she says, “I want to stay a bit more and finish the Yakut.”

She’s still sore from our altercation. I am, too, and it doesn’t feel right to leave her drinking alone, but I need to go home. “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” she says, “I’ll take a cab.”

We both took the bus here today so that we could drink as much as we wanted.

“Call me if you need me.”

“I will.” She doesn’t get up, so I go to her, kiss her on the cheek again, and say hoşçakal.

As I stumble out of the restaurant and shuffle through the hotel, I fumble for my wallet and apartment keys to make sure I have them. I hail a cab at the front entrance.

Once on my way, I sit back and enjoy the cool night breeze caressing my face and gliding through my hair.

Then I remember my mental note about looking up panseksüellik. I Google it: “Pansexuality, or omnisexuality, is the sexual, romantic, or emotional attraction toward people regardless of their sex or gender identity.”

Interesting. I return my iPhone to my pocket and lean back. My mind drifts to Yaprak and myself: in high school, when we were mere kids trying to fit the mold; in college, when she studied in Istanbul and I in Izmir, but we stayed in touch and became even closer after I came out; and now, after so many years and so many boyfriends. She’s family.

I pull out my phone and text her that I’ll speak with Jale, followed by two emojis: a heart and a hug. I add the Wikipedia link to my favorites; it could be handy when I talk to Jale.

When I arrive at my apartment, I take off my clothes and set my alarm so that I can wake up and check on Yaprak in an hour. Just as I’m falling asleep, I hear the faint ping of an arriving text. I squint at my phone and make out her text: “Teşekkürler, I knew you would!” followed by her signature trio of emojis I cherish: a rock star, a middle finger, and a kiss.

AFTER NOT LEAVING THE HOUSE FOR THREE DAYS by Quinn Forlini

March 2, 2022

Anna’s mother convinces her to go for a walk. The weather’s getting warmer. Anna feels like she’s been living inside a tunnel, or an artery.

She’s thirteen. Last week she dyed her hair purple from a box at the drugstore and it’s ugly. She pulls her hair into a ponytail, feeling the roughness as it passes through her fingers from the cheap dye. Her mother tried to warn her, and that made her want it more.

Her mother reminds her for the seventh time that it’s a bit chilly out, so at the last second, Anna grabs her dad’s black hoodie from the hook in the front hall where it’s sat untouched for months and lets it bury her body. She’s glad she’s so lost in it, no hint of shape, just darkness. She digs her hands into the front pocket so they disappear.

She follows her mother down the driveway, shuffling her feet and looking at the ground. Her mom talks and she barely listens. She looks up at her mother’s dark sunglasses that are too big for her face and the sweatshirt she has tied around her waist. She examines her mother’s body as it moves against the crumpled knot of sleeves clustered at her belly. The empty arms swing against her thighs like an awkward gift bow. Her mother is slightly overweight, enough that it makes Anna wonder: Will that happen to me? She looks back at the ground, imagining her bleak future as her body becomes filled like a grocery bag a clerk is doing a bad job packing. Her mother talks on and on, her left hand gesturing for emphasis as if the words weren’t enough. Not that Anna’s listening. Not that she has any idea what her mom is saying.

She doesn’t know how long they’re going to walk. One strip of sidewalk becomes another, and she wishes she’d asked before they left, made it part of the bargain. She doesn’t want to ask now because she doesn’t want to sound like she’s complaining. She has an intense desire to complain all the time lately, and she’s fighting it as much as she can. That’s why she’s here, sullenly dragging herself along on this walk, even though all she wants to do is get lost in reality TV for hours and not talk to anyone. But she hates this desire almost as much as she desires it.

Anna knows there was a time when this walk would’ve felt easier, when talking to her mother would’ve been all she wanted. Now she speaks one word at a time only when she has to. She hates how hard everything has become, even things that used to seem simple, like putting on socks.

Her mother mentions that maybe they should start heading back because of the sky. Anna tunes back into her mother’s words, their familiar pattern of concern. She feels annoyance spring in her at how easily her mother becomes deterred, even though Anna didn’t want to go on this walk in the first place. She looks up at the sky and notices how quickly it’s shifting from blue to overcast. She finds herself pulled into it like a movie. She wishes she knew what her mother had been talking about all this time, but she can’t ask, or she’d have to admit she was ignoring her. Was it something about work? A friend? Her therapist? The sky feels like it’s folding in on itself. The grayness makes it feel closer. Anna’s warm, and it feels novel and miraculous that she can do something about this. She pulls the hoodie over her head, releases her body from it, and ties the bulky sleeves around her waist like her mother. They bob forward together, cumbersome with all this bulky fabric spilling around them.

At the crosswalk they stop and look both ways together, only her mother looks left first while she looks right, so they’re looking at each other, and they laugh because they almost bump noses. Then her mother looks the other way at the line of cars coming and Anna watches the back of her mother’s neck snap in place like a lioness, and she’s flooded with this feeling of knowing she can’t ever know how much her mother has done for her and would do for her, and what it felt like to be held by her for the first time, body to body and nothing else, and the feeling is disappearing, like the blue in the sky, like the morning, like this walk, and she wants to hold onto the feeling because it is angular in a way that makes life seem possible and even tolerable.

She feels this desperate need to cling to it, to the feeling, and she wants to hug her mother from the side, just a quick squeeze, as if that could make this all stand still, as if that could show her mother all that she wanted to show. It’s all she can do, and even though the feeling is already feeling like a dream she just woke up from that’s drifting back into an unknown place, she knows that, like a dream, it was intense and real when it was there and couldn’t be described with words but maybe with the colors red and grey or the touch of her mother’s skin. But before Anna can reach out her arms, her mother’s head snaps back and her mother’s body is launching off the curb and into the crosswalk as she says, Hurry up, let’s go, let’s cross the street while we still can.

FIGHT VIDEOS 1-3 by Julian Castronovo

February 28, 2022

The babysitter Bunny put me in the basement and locked the door. It was an old basement, a cellar. There was a torn up floral sofa and a boiler and a window that looked out at the bottom of a hole. The hole was maybe four feet deep and was lined with pieces of wood that kept it from collapsing into itself. I walked over and looked up through it. The sky was dark yellow. I went and sat on the sofa and watched videos of fat people slapping each other hard in the face. Then I heard a loud car pull into the driveway. Bunny went to the front door and opened it for someone, a boy. They talked and laughed and moved around the house for a while. Then there was a thump directly above my head and I knew they were doing those things on the kitchen floor. I pictured Bunny on her back with her legs up by her head. I got on the floor and tried to lay in the same position perfectly beneath her. I listened to her breathing hard and whimpering. Outside a tornado siren started to scream but I felt safe and cold. I imagined the dark storm twisting across the plain and pulling the house from the foundation and ripping it into a million pieces. I imagined Bunny helicoptering limp and in blue panties through the sky and landing in a field three miles away. And once it was quiet I would climb the stairs and step cautiously out and walk through the wet rubble like an orphan. But then I imagined a different scenario. I would go up the stairs expecting ruin and waste but the door would open into a house I had never seen before, one belonging to some other people, some different family. The house would be perfectly intact, perfectly still and undisturbed. Maybe it has a beautiful smell, maybe it has a robot vacuum disc charging itself in a corner. But it doesn’t really matter if the strange house is nice or clean or fancy. It only matters that it isn’t mine.

II.

The first thing in the world was sadness.

For a long time it was the only thing. There was no division or firmament or earth and sky and so there was just sadness in all directions like a sea. Eventually, however, from it there rose little islands. They were covered in nice soft moss and there were animals upon them. The animals were stupid animals and they did not feel sadness. Instead they roamed around eating fruit and sleeping beneath the new sun you put there for them. The animals lived and multiplied and died many times over. But, in due course, there were certain among them born especially pale and grotesque. Such was the beginning of mankind. Each person emerged into this world weeping and weeping too was how they left it. They built houses from mud and straw and inside those houses they would sit in the twisting candlelight and whisper sadly of how the world seemed to grow larger with each day.

After many years, however, people grew ignorant of sadness. They invented love and war and fun little games. They became vapid and cruel and the entire course of human history proceeded thenceforth. Still there were, of course, occasionally individuals to whom the new diagrams of living seemed senseless and disturbing. Such unfortunate souls were regarded with pity and disgust and sometimes too they were beat to death with sticks for entertainment. But that was long ago. The events and happenings have since occurred at their somewhat irregular but expected rate. There were civilizations and great pieces of art; there were mysterious inventions and moments of strange coincidence; there were grand celebrations and those who danced high upon the crumbling parapets. And though there seemed at times a progression or “pattern” to these things, it is, we know, incorrect to assume them bound by any such logic. If one were to propose a picture in the non-abstract, say, of the general course of history, perhaps a more accurate view would be that of a child distractedly tying small loops and bows in a string. By this we mean to suggest only that things happen not because they must but simply because can, because they give one something to do, and that in this absence of some masterful “plan” perhaps what matters is simply that for each of us there is someone who, accidental and divine, ties us in knots.

For instance, once there was a girl who very much resembled you, Aiko, because she was long and slender and shiny like a wet dog. One day she was walking down Orchard street with a silk ribbon in her hair. The air was warm and the girl was texting lots of people with a sense of pleasant indifference. A boy, ugly and violently in love, walked along with her. Or, rather, he was walking slightly behind her, following with his eyes as the ribbon ahead disappeared and emerged like a delicate little lure in a river of heads.

Did the distance between them grow? Yes, see it now, ever widening. The boy began to feel a small sense of amorous panic because of this and he considered walking more quickly. The girl appeared not to notice the gap and indeed she seemed to have forgotten him altogether. As he continued to watch her move away he was struck by the sensation that everything around him had begun to rearrange itself as to better speak her absence. Had she, he was thus led to wonder, created the world like this especially for him? Indeed it was she who had created it. That much was clear. Who else, after all, could’ve made the islands rise as they did, could’ve made the candlelight dance so upon the sepulcher walls, could’ve made the angels whisper as they do? And if not for him then for whom? Yes, in his tiny pattering heart the boy knew it was he, sole beneficiary of this vast and unbroken field of sadness. And despite brief time he had shared in her company, he knew that it would be wrong or profane, even, to try to further collapse the distance between himself and his creator. All of this was making the boy feel hungover and alone and sort of floaty. Then he stopped walking and threw up a little blood in a patch of dirt and nobody stopped to look.

III.

There once was a totally unremarkable man who walked in the woods and with a stream of his piss bore a deep hole in a bank of snow. He thought about how some animal like a deer might come lick it up for salt and he felt sort of useful and happy. Then he zipped up his pants continued along a path until it became lost in a stand of spindly trees. The world seemed to him prematurely dark and his fingers were cold. He turned around, began to follow his tracks toward his car. His bootprints had been half-buried in new snow and so they were small and shallow, as if they’d been made by the feet of a child. The man was therefore struck by the impression that over his brief journey some important change had occurred in his being or that he was slightly older than he had been when, for example, he peed, which he was. He came out of the woods and crossed the parking area. He opened his car door, watched this action unfold in slow-motion from a displaced viewpoint that seemed to be “hovering slightly” above his head. Sitting in the driver’s seat, he turned on the heat and made and unmade his hands into fists. He looked at his phone. The phone showed its lock screen. The man fogged the glass with his breath and rubbed it with his sleeve. He tried to approximate his face with his face. This proved eventually successful, the phone opened with a cute clicky sound and immediately it displayed a picture of a young woman with really huge perky tits. The man blinked at the photo like a stupid idiot for several seconds and then remembered that he’d been looking at it when he’d last used his phone. He thumbed away from it and then he read a text from Mary Catherine, who he’d assumed to be napping but was evidently awake and wondering where he’d gone. He was on his way home, he wrote back, and, as he began to travel at what he felt to be a “furious” pace, the totally unremarkable man experienced a rush of clarity in anticipation of being near to her. Sure, there remained some sense of terror or horrible unease folded in him, but he knew, as sometimes one does, how the simple proximity of the person he loved would keep it balanced and tight, like, say, a little piece of origami.

CAN’T DIE IN PORTLAND, MAINE by Scott Laudati

February 25, 2022

It was summer everywhere but Portland, Maine. From Brooklyn to Portsmouth road crews sat along I-95 and stared longingly into the finality of their existence. This was it. The winters too cold and the summers too hot. Fall was spoken about with the nostalgia of an old folk song, and spring, of course, ran shorter than a rainy weekend. The crews spent the entirety of these uncomfortable months working on the sides of roads while everyone sped by on their way to somewhere better, or worse. The only time the two groups interacted was when a motorist fell asleep and drove over the short wall of orange cones. “At least we have a job,” one hardhat probably said to the other. And none of them ever walked into traffic; they never even thought about it. But Seal thought about it as he drove past those crews on his way straight north from New York City. In fact, it was all he thought about. Of his existence. Of walking into traffic and freeing himself from the nightmare of being a man.

Seal liked Portland because he never sweat there. It was the beginning of June when he drove by the 7-11 on Congress Street and parked his car behind Longfellow Square. He stopped to play a game of pinball in a laundromat then walked down to Casco Bay. He saw a few crabs running in the muck left behind by a receding tide. He smelled his favorite smell: the chopped bait used in lobster traps—a rotting stink caked into the wooden hulls of lobster boats and imbedded deep beneath the nails of watermen—a stink that grew stronger as their boats headed back to the docks after a day at sea. And he saw his favorite bird: the black backed gull, almost the size of a pelican. Dozens of them gathered and erupted with long calls just as returning lobster boats became visible. The gulls sailed down on the docks with singular focus, arguing for prime spots where a few scraps might get tossed their way.

Yes, Seal liked Portland. He didn’t like kids and their fat parents bumbling around complaining about the price of lobster rolls. Or how they waited in line for hours to try French fries dipped in duck grease. Or how his serenity was continually broken by car horns and idiots screwing up the simple crosswalk directions in ways only tourists can. But all in all, he thought Portland was probably his favorite city.

Seal didn’t know why he cared about having a favorite city. He was 35 and totally broke; a feat he couldn’t quite understand being that his whole previous year had been spent under piers in Brooklyn rebuilding dock pilings. And when he tried, he couldn’t really remember anything from that time. He wanted to. He wanted to explain to everyone the way your hands feel in January when seawater gets under your gloves. The real maddening blind rage your body goes into when you can feel parts of it dying for $22 an hour. He wanted to tell them that quitting was the only sane thing to do in an insane world. But nobody actually cares about anyone else, so he didn’t bother. And he was thinking about that last winter now and it didn’t seem like it had really been him who’d gone through it. What did his mind do while he hit concrete with a hammer 40 hours a week, week after week? He had no idea. He could remember his ex-girlfriends. His priests. The people he’d once called his best friends. The moment when it all stopped being possible and everything just morphed into varying levels of impossible. What was the point? Did he ever really have a chance?

Now 35 years had gone by. A whole lifetime and nothing to show for it.

He stepped into the water of Casco Bay—the freezing water, replenished daily with new freezing water brought down by the Labrador Current from Halifax and beyond. He cursed but he was committed. After all, it was the same familiar cold he’d known on those days floating under the piers that finally brought him to this. The days spent soaking wet, icicles growing off his clothes and weighing him down like his limbs were the branches of an old tree, sailing into the eternal blackness of a pit whose middle saw no light, the sounds of a city above muffled and rounded out into some inaudible animal roar, like he was sailing around the Congo itself, but caught there in the real heart of darkness, seeing no more than the radius of his headlamp, or occasionally when a hose or machine exploded unexpectedly he might get a second to see his surroundings until the fireball or a fountain of sparks arched into the river, plummeting his world back into the unimaginable desert of darkness again.

Yes. He was going to kill himself one way or the other. It’ll be a better world without me, he thought, one less loser consuming the dwindling water supply. He was up to his neck now. Well, here we go. He took one last breath as a commotion began up on a dock—a high New England dock that had to account for the 30-foot swing between tides. He turned to look and saw the same crowd who just before had been ruining his peace with stupid human moments like: “See how fat I look? That’s a terrible picture, take another one!” and their dad or boyfriend grumbled that this wasn’t what they’d spent all year working for, but still, feeling obligated to prove to their friends watching on the internet that their lives were perfect, repositioned themselves for a more professional stance, and hoped somehow that through a filter or maybe God’s love this next picture would suffice, and they wouldn’t have to endure any more berating in front of the other tourists.

But now they all pointed at Seal, screaming, “HELP.”

That was when he saw a dog, thrashing wildly under the dock, being bounced against barnacle covered pier legs and letting out a fading yelp with each hit. Seal hated people, all people, on some days even his own mother, but he loved dogs, all dogs, and he didn’t hesitate a second before swimming madly to the drowning creature.

Blood seeped out of the dog and thickened the surrounding water like a chemical spill. Barnacles worse than serrated knives attacked their bodies and Seal took a good sticking as he caught up to the dog. It was a big pit bull, probably the king of many dog parks, but it submitted immediately into his arms, and paddled the best it could, not just to assist, but because it was a good dog, and it didn’t want to be a burden to anyone, even upon its possible death.

But it did not die. Seal got the dog up onto the beach and saw that the wounds were basically superficial. The dog was exhausted more than anything else, and after a few seconds of heavy panting his tail began to wag like a toy coming back to life. “You’re a good dog,” Seal said, and patted the dog’s stomach to reassure him. It was a beautiful moment. Man and dog lying there under the fading summer sun. Blessed with this Maine shore. A savior and a life saved. Nothing could mean more than this.

A blonde girl with a tattoo above her eyebrow and a shirt that said “PUSSY IS THE POWER” slid down the embankment toward them like a skier with no skis. “Cornwall. Cornwall, my poor doggy,” she said. “Is he ok?”

“He’s ok,” Seal said. “He is what he’s supposed to be—a good dog.”

“I can’t believe you were out in the water already. If you hadn’t been there Cornwall would be dead. You’re a hero. You saved my dog’s life. It’s a miracle.”

Was it a miracle? If he hadn’t decided to kill himself once and for all, about seven hours ago in Brooklyn, he never would’ve driven here, he never would’ve gotten into the cold water, and Cornwall would be a floating snack bar filling the stomach of every crab and seagull in the bay. Was this fate? His life now had meaning. He was a man who’d found his moment. For the first time not marginalized by circumstance and bad luck. I am The Peoples’ Champ, he thought, I am indeed a hero.

Then the girl started sobbing and put her head against Seal’s chest. The pandemic was over but he realized it had been a year since a woman touched him, and he liked it. She pulled her head away and apologized for the wet mess of her face, but she didn’t really sound sorry and he thought she looked pretty good.

“We’re catching an REI Line out of here in an hour and heading back to Asheville,” she said.

“Ohhhh, you’re a gutterpunk.” He pointed at the tattoo on her face. “That makes sense. You don’t smell like a gutterpunk, though.”

“Have you ever done it?”

“No.”

“Come with us.”

“I can’t.”

“You have to! There’s a zoo we’ll pass in New Jersey. They have hyenas and you can feed them popcorn. Have you ever fed popcorn to a hyena?”

“That does sound pretty good. But I was supposed to kill myself. I only stopped to save your dog.”

“Come to the popcorn zoo with me. You can’t kill yourself now. That would be absurd. And I’ll feel responsible.”

She was right. It did seem ridiculous now. Seal’s life had gone from completely meaningless to almost the guarantee that he was going to get laid if he could just hang on a little while longer. I can always kill myself tomorrow, he thought.

They left the beach hand in hand and the dog never strayed more than a foot away. They crossed Munjoy Hill and she lay down in the street in front of the lighthouse and told Seal to take a picture of her from an angle that made the lighthouse look like an erection growing from her crotch. Then they went down to the railyard and sat in the weeds.

“If you can count the bolts in the wheel, it means the train is going slow enough for you to jump on,” she said. “I’ll go first. When I get on, you toss Cornwall up to me, then climb up.”

A freight train that had to be two miles long crawled by. They waited for the engine car to follow a bend out of view and sat silently while the oil cars followed one by one. Eventually the boxcars were up.

“Let’s go,” she said.

She threw her bag into an open boxcar and it disappeared inside. Then she put both of her hands on its floor and hoisted herself up.

“Ok,” she said. “Get ready, Cornwall.”

Seal and Cornwall were slow trotting along with the speed of the train. She laid on her stomach and extended both hands out from the boxcar. Cornwall was pretty seasoned at this and basically jumped up and landed in her arms. Once the dog got situated, she reached her arms out for Seal. He was ready. Suddenly a big jolt jerked the train back and forth and then it started to speed up.

“Hurry,” she said.

Seal started to fall behind. His feet slipped on gravel laid along the side of the tracks and made a full sprint impossible. Do it, he said to himself, you’ve got one shot at this.

He lunged at the open door. Both of his hands slapped the floor next to the girl and her dog, but there was nothing to grip. For a second it looked like he had it but then his hands started to slide and the momentum of gravity pulled his lower half under the train. Then he was on the ground. He saw his legs bounce limply between the bottom of the train and the tracks before they disappeared out the other side. He looked at the open boxcar, growing further away, and her face, her beautiful face decaying into some kind of horror, etched into the last seconds of his memory. And the dog, too. Cornwall’s mouth moved in vicious agony, teeth bared and unforgiving, barking with no sound.

Will the hyenas get enough popcorn tonight? he wondered. Will they go to bed hungry?