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TO RIDER STRONG by Jade Hidle

August 16, 2021

You won’t remember me. It’s been twenty-nine years since my last letter.

I always did my homework alone, because my mother didn’t know enough English to help. I always finished it early, so that I could watch you on Boy Meets World. Your gapped-tooth mischievous grin, your chokers, your hair-flipping. I knew bad boys at school, but we didn’t have any like you. You were a white bad boy, which is a good bad boy. And you made being wounded look so cool.

I thought you would understand and that you would then elevate me to your level, turn my hurt into cool too.

So I took risks for you. There had just been another shooting in our housing project when I asked my mom if I could walk to the store by myself. I think she only said yes because it was just a domestic dispute, which is not a term in the Vietnamese that I grew up with.

I followed her advice to walk like I knew where I was going, as if I was up to urgent business, even if I felt scared or got lost. No eye contact. That invites people to kidnap you, she’d warned. I passed the landlord’s office where I’d perform stories to get extended grace periods on the rent check. I passed the laundromat where I played boat in the rolling carts and collected empty boxes of single-use dryer sheets to make beds for my toys that I took extra good care of so as not to seem ungrateful to her passing refugee glares.

I hurried past the TCBY frozen yogurt shop where my mom and I met my dad when he picked me up on his weekends; she didn’t want him coming to our door anymore. Her new boyfriend was jealous and resentful that my dad was white. Like you. Maybe he will be jealous of you, too.

I made it to the Lucky’s supermarket that greeted me with the swish of automated doors and a gust of air conditioning. I felt fancy. Maybe that’s why I didn’t stoop to steal you on the cover of Tiger Beat Magazine. Maybe it’s because my mom told me that when she, at the same age I was when I fell in love with you, tried to steal an apple from the market but was interrupted by Viet Cong spraying bullets. One killed her neighbor who dropped dead in front of her where she hid in a drainage ditch. I can still hear the thud. As kids do, she thought that everything bad that happened was because of her. So I paid for the Tiger Beat with money I’d found or saved from lost teeth.

I paid, but I still felt ashamed. She’d always taught me not to flush my pee in order to save money on the water bill, and here I was spending money on magazines. I slipped the magazine under my shirt and into my outgrown waistband as I walked up the stairs to our unit. She zeroed in on my paper-flat stomach immediately. I hurried to the bedroom she and I shared, and for some reason she let me go.

When she was home, I’d sit in the closet where I usually pretended that my dolls faced catastrophic forces of nature, barely surviving. Here, I organized toys so that I appeared to be doing something while I daydreamed of you, whom I protected from the worst of my imagination. Daydreaming was a risk too, a waste of time, I’d been shown. When she was gone, I pulled the magazine out from under our mattress or in between the volumes of books my dad sent me—anywhere I thought she wouldn’t look and find you, this desire I had outside of her. I stared at your pictures until my vision blurred you into movement—winking, beckoning—whatever I thought romantic gestures were at nine years old.

When the pages were worn enough for me to start flipping through the rest of the magazine, I discovered addresses in the back. There were P.O. boxes of agencies where readers—I—could write letters to teen heartthrobs—you, the good bad white boy.

I wrote you a letter. It started out normal enough. I mimicked niceties about your show. You’re a really good actor. Then I conflated you and your character. I felt bad that your dad isn’t around. Then it got sad fast. I wrote to you about how stressful it was to be poor and not have enough money to help my mom out because she was always stressed and that’s why a part of me didn’t want to help her, which makes me feel guilty, and then she brings these boyfriends over—I miss my dad as much as you, or Shawn, did on the show—because I know she hopes they will pay some of our bills, but that means more time my mom spends away from me, and that is good and bad. Even though we can’t understand each other, we’re all the other has.

I held onto the letter for days. I was afraid to send it because then you’d know me—you’d know her—better than anybody. I didn’t tell anyone anything. I didn’t think anything I had to say was important, but here I was putting it all in rainbow Bic ink and getting all congested from tearing up but holding it in.

When she found the magazine, Mom said she always wanted a kid who was famous.

So I decided to send the letter. My dad worked at the post office, so I always had holiday stamps. I mailed a Christmas stamp to you in the summer.

It wasn’t until fall that you responded. My hands trembled as I sliced open the envelope imprinted with more postal ink than you’d think it would take to get a letter from the nice part of LA to our part of LA. There was a lot of possibility in that moment. I’d hoped that you’d read every word and grow a crush on me too, not because I was suffering, but because of how I wrote about it, how I was surviving it.

You responded with merely a signed photograph.

I knew it was fake too. My mom had shown me how to tell the difference when I had to sign some documents for her. You’d had some assistant open my letter, unfold my life in ink, and stamp your signature on a black-and-white picture of you perched on the type of stool that I imagine they have in acting classes. You treated me the same as everyone else who wrote you a letter. I sat in the closet with my hurt and the photograph, barely surviving.

I’d told my dad when I wrote the letter—not what was in it—but just that I had. I told him I used one of the stamps he gave me. He said it was cool, and I remember feeling better about it, then. My dad, after all, was the one who showed me movies and shows and music and taught me to love all of it. But something in me must have known that parental “cool” was just to cover up concern about this kid’s new phase of writing fat letters to strangers. I must have known, at some level, that no one thought what I was doing was “cool,” certainly not you. I must have known because I burned the next letter I wrote to you with a match from my mom’s fishbowl collection of matchbooks from restaurants her boyfriends took her to.

I never wrote back to you, never bothered to even Google you (when that became a thing), until now. I’m telling people that I’m writing all these letters to people who I know have forgotten me—I’m sure now, child star, that you never even saw my letter, never saw my name—so that my daughters won’t forget me. But I think what I’m really doing is trying to remember myself. So, I guess, in a way, I’m always writing back to you.

BOY CRAZY by Lauren Barbato

August 13, 2021

The young married women at the conference upstate agree that it’s nice to be around someone so boy crazy. That’s how they say it: boy crazy.

The young married women help you flirt with Ben, the writer from Seattle via Georgia. They accompany you to the pricey cocktail bar downtown and conveniently leave early. Ben walks you down a sleepy street with few lights to your tiny cabin rental. You show each other your tattoos as mosquitos nibble your ankles.

In three years, you’ll be married, the young married women say. We want to come to the wedding.

***

Lawrence returns from his school-sponsored trip to France and says I love you. No, he doesn’t say it; he writes it on college-ruled paper. The note is tucked inside a black beret wrapped in a plastic Kmart bag.

You read this note on the bus, scrunched in the corner of the three-seater as your two best friends chat about the fight that broke out in gym class. You read the words a second, third, fourth time and flick your hoop earrings. From your seat, you can see Lawrence walking to his bus. Triumphant. You read the words a fifth, sixth, seventh time and memorize the way the L curls at the bottom, how the v attaches itself to the e.

You tell Lawrence the next day that he’s just your friend. You say it just like that: Just my friend.

Your grandmother spots Lawrence after Christmas Eve Mass. While standing in front of baby Jesus in the manger, she asks, Why don’t you give Lawrence a kiss? You turn away from her and baby Jesus and Lawrence, who still follows you around sometimes, almost reluctantly.

Roman is your first real kiss, three years later. The next year, you fuck his best friend on a camping trip in the Pine Barrens.

I want to punch him, Roman says. You sip beers by the community pool, your ankles rolling in the water. The best friend takes ten years to say, I’m sorry, but we’ll get to that.

Tyler is an architect-in-training who you meet the first week of college. You don’t want to let anyone know that you can’t remember your first kiss. It may have been on the quad, or the mosaic-tiled bench outside the library, or one of the lumpy red leather couches in the corner of the late-night coffee shop. You bring Hershey bars and cappuccinos to his windowless art studio; he leaves animated marginalia in all your paperbacks. You sleep next to each other for nine months but don’t sleep together.

You make out with the best friend when Tyler is in Italy with his family, leaving you at home for the summer in the suburbs. The best friend takes you to the park at midnight, where you kick off your rubber flip flops and crawl into the plastic tunnel connecting the twisty slide to the monkey bars. You find yourself on top of him in the tunnel, your tank top rolled to the waist. All you do is kiss. The best friend says he feels guilty, but you still don’t know why.

In this version, you are the cheater and you don’t believe it.

You choose not to believe it.

Scott likes to straddle your body and put himself in your mouth. He pushes you against a wall during junior year and leaves you there, still and silent. You get in your car and drive west on Pico Boulevard to wander around a mall with no money. You meet a Russian man in a coffee shop and accept an invitation to his Westside apartment.

You wake up with bruises lining your inner thighs. You take the long way home, driving south on the PCH until you end up in a biker bar at the edge of Orange County. Your friends don’t call or look for you because this is what you always do. You’re always out with a boy, they say when you return to the apartment smelling like stale popcorn and Marlboro Reds. This is just how you are.

Scott calls you the next morning, asks you out for lunch, but he never says he’s sorry. You break up with him at your spot, the Indian buffet on Vermont, and walk four blocks in the wrong direction.

In this version, you read Madame Bovary for class and cry when she swallows the rat poison.

You fuck the best friend on the floor of his parents’ basement. He’s twenty-five now and lives with his girlfriend. You’ve recently turned twenty-one. Rug burns coat your knees. The best friend opens the back door to smoke a joint. He tells you he’s applying to law schools in Los Angeles. You nap on blankets and throw pillows until 6 a.m. and when you wake, you think of Los Angeles.

You think you might love him if he lets you.

You forget the part where he’s in love with someone else.

The best friend never comes to Los Angeles, which is something you should’ve known. You spend the summer in the Southern California sun, writing some very strange flash fiction that contains the phrase foreign moths. What are they, these foreign moths? Tourists on autopilot? You say something potentially interesting, potentially cliché, about desire. That it needs to be replenished. You are a foreign moth spiraling with desire.

You don’t want to be a foreign moth.

The next trip home, you don’t see the best friend, who texts you constantly even though he’s with his girlfriend and her family. He’s always tied up with something. On Christmas Eve, you chain-smoke in your parents’ basement and find a photograph of your grandmother, dated 1946. She looks like a Polish Lauren Bacall. She looks like a woman who would have said, I love you to many boys and left them in the morning.

A boy cums on your chest and tells you to leave.

A boy lifts you up, props you against a wall.

A boy kisses your roommate but follows you to your bed. This boy says you’re sweet.

This boy refuses to leave.

Erik texts you while you’re naked in Ted’s bed. He writes something about your nipple hair, how you should trim it for the next guy. He only texts you now to keep track of your movements on that short stretch of highway between Los Angeles and Long Beach. You throw your phone onto the floor and smile when Ted enters the room with a glass of whiskey.

In this version, you are twenty-two with a man twelve years your senior. You like to think you are in love with him.

She knows she is in love with him.

He knows he is not in love with her.

You have to text Erik when you accidentally make a baby, and when you accidentally make a baby, there are no congratulations. When Ted finds out, he’s relieved it’s not his. He leaves town on holiday two days before your abortion.

Erik drives you to the appointment, watches you pass through the clinic’s wide metal doors. He roams the nearby strip malls as a counselor presses you about your boys. You say you’ve slept with twenty, maybe. You say you’re the eighth woman Erik has gotten pregnant, definitely.

He is a bad boy, the counselor says.

And you are a nice girl.

You think about Ted often when you’re with John, the Ph.D. student. You get a job in Beverly Hills and drive past Ted’s house in Culver City. You think about him at the movies, during Oscar season. He texts you one night and invites you to the karaoke bar across from the Sony lot. You say you can’t, you need more notice, but you do not say you’re living with John. You know Ted understands.

He keeps inviting you.

In this version, you are not the cheater but you’re wondering.

You do the right thing and you’re conflicted.

Don’t be a foreign moth, you think. Be a butterfly.

But you still feel like a foreign moth, fluttering on an enclosed, darkened porch.

The summer between L.A. and Boston, the best friend kisses you on the empty Shore boardwalk at midnight. It lingers, it’s gentle, and that’s all it is. He mentions breaking up with his girlfriend; you don’t mention John. The best friend drives you to your parents’ house and follows you up the driveway. You kiss his cheek. Thank you, you say. Good luck with everything.

In this version, you’re the cheater but you’re not the only one.

You think it may work this time.

In Boston, you live with John in a one-bedroom apartment in a narrow brownstone on the north slope of Beacon Hill. You fuck John for the first time in six months. Two hours later, in your work cubicle, rubbing your thighs in those scratchy wool slacks, you reread the email from the best friend, who’s in Paris.

Smoking a cigarette on a balcony and thinking of you.

You visit Roman at the MIT radio station, where he hosts a late-night show that plays only Scandinavian electro-pop. He tells you the best friend got engaged in Paris. You walk along the Charles on the Cambridge side, view the jagged Boston skyline for the first time, and decline calls from the best friend.

You fuck Leo in his tiny room on the third floor of a Victorian house in Jamaica Plain. It’s easy to lie to John about this as you—still new to Boston—are really into making friends: a work friend, a girl friend, a just-a-friend friend.

You lie to John for three more weeks, and you only tell him because he finds you, still in your tights and sheer pink shirtdress, on the stiff Ikea couch. A pillow covers your face. John asks if you are okay. Have you ever cried in front of him before?

In this version, you are the cheater and it did work.

You are the cheater and you’re sorry.

Really, you’re relieved.

Leo likes that you’re taken. He moves in shortly after you move into your Brighton studio. He goes through your phone one morning, finds a stray text from Ted. He curses you, curses Ted.

Hey, Ted texts, how’s life?

Leo notices that you’ve changed all your passwords. He says I love you with a high-pitched inflection. He questions his love for you or, really, he is questioning yours.

The best friend texts you constantly. He thinks about you sucking his dick at work. He thinks about fucking you on the copier. You make me so fucking hard, he writes.

So hot, you write back.

You file unemployment benefits and wonder about everywhere else you could live. A studio in Brooklyn or Jersey City, commuting to a cushy media job in the city. You’re tired of Leo, who throws up all along Commonwealth Avenue as you drag him home each night.

You travel to Paris and a Frenchman pulls you into the doorway of an unlit Montmartre storefront. His name, you can’t remember. Damien? Guillaume? He guides you by the elbow toward the main boulevard, past the Cafe des Deux Moulins, the Amelie cafe, where he bought you beer and asked if you were an American Evangeliste. He whispers je t’aime je t’aime je t’aime. Oh, these Frenchmen. How much, you think, they sound like Leo. How much, you think, they move like the best friend.

A boy wants you to cum for him.

A boy wants you to cum on this dick.

A boy grabs your throat, covers your mouth.

A boy hooks his fingers past your bottom teeth. Take it, he says, and you bite down.

You travel to L.A. because you’ve decided that you may love Scott. You tell him this as you stumble across Hyperion Avenue toward a comedy club where Scott is performing. Scott tells you it means a lot, but he never says it back.

Ted texts you six days before his wedding: Hi, how’s life? Ted is marrying a woman in Connecticut. A woman his own age. You know this because you Googled him the other month.

She likes to think he is in love with her.

She knows he is not in love with her.

You lean against the popcorn-textured sides of Scott’s balcony and count the Our Lady of Guadalupes dotting front stoops. You know you can circle these streets forever: Fig, Avenue 50, Sunset Boulevard. Remember, when it used to be Vermont, Hoover, Adams? You could circle these streets for decades without ever claiming them.

Ted doesn’t respond to your text message. How long will you keep waiting?

You delete his number; Scott’s too.

You move to North Jersey, sign up for an online dating profile, and date people you’ll never see again. Hi, you say, how are you? The coffee’s not that strong here, is that a Brooklyn thing? You ask them about their profiles, how they said they were looking for someone who wears cute, not boring, underwear. Are boy shorts too boring? What about gray cotton briefs? Do you prefer nylon and lace? You don’t own any matching sets, shop mostly at Marshall’s and TJ Maxx. Thank you for calling me pretty, you say, but you wouldn’t like my underwear.

A boy wants to hear I love you.

A boy wants to cum with you.

A boy says, Be happy, you deserve it.

That boy wants to make you bleed.

***

You drive Ben to New York City. It rains, and you forgot an umbrella, and your white cotton dress, embroidered with gold and bronze lizards, quickly becomes soaked. Ben buys you a hot dog and you wait out the summer storm beneath a canopy of scaffolding. You’re sure he can see your mismatched bra and panties through your cotton dress, which now clings to your thighs.

Post-storm, you take Ben to the Strand, where you press against him in the corner of the book stacks. You show each other the books you’ve read and always wanted to read. You wander the Village, pointing at million-dollar brownstones. The city is sweaty and hazy but twilight still breaks through, coating the Hudson in pink dust. Now you and Ben are sitting on the railing, scoping out boats, and you try to remember all of this so one day you can say I had this moment and it was romantic in all the textbook ways.

You never get that kiss: The thing you thought you wanted.

Ben sends you a book, and you send him one back. You write a cheesy note, something about being students of light, which you stole from another, better writer. You hope he doesn’t judge your marginalia, which you once thought was clever but now just seems silly.

You go to a friend’s wedding and drink Chardonnay alone on a steep hill overlooking lower Manhattan. Why don’t you invite Ben? Your mother had asked. But Ben is still searching for a job in Seattle and besides, a teacher once told you don’t put all your eggs in one basket. That teacher never wanted you to get married.

Sometimes, you still text Ben fragments of poems or a quote you really like. There are always buzzwords like weight and distortion. There’s always one about sadness and memory and the color blue.

On the way home from the wedding, you drive north on Route 35, trace the rolling hills along the shore. You pull over at WaWa, throw up in a parking-lot shrub, and buy a soft, salty pretzel.

Now you date a man named Hector. You hope he never buys you a beret. He doesn’t write I love you, but he says it. A little too soon. You don’t say it back for another month.

A little too soon.

And things with Hector are good. You fall asleep like old married couples, open books at your sides. You wake like new lovers. It’s comfortable and exciting and you think, maybe you’re doing this right.

You meet Ben at another conference. The conference is in Washington, D.C., where the best friend lives. On the drive down, you think about texting the best friend, even though you haven’t talked in over two years. You don’t want to see him, but you like the idea of seeing him.

The last time you saw the best friend, you were in D.C. for yet another conference, this time during the heart of summer. You meet the best friend at a sports bar in Tarrytown, where he introduces you to Bri. The best friend is getting married in six weeks, and Bri is not his fiancee. Bri talks in the plural, everything is a we, and you sip your beer slowly to curb a smile as she tells you about their plans to go kayaking in the fall and snowboarding in the winter.

Oh really?

You take the best friend onto the smoking patio and tell him he’s in trouble—a line you always wanted to say to a cheating man. The best friend explains that Bri had his abortion last March. He drove her to the clinic and paid for the procedure. You are, briefly, jealous. I’m sorry, the best friend finally says.

Oh really?

On that Amtrak ride back to Jersey, you keep a running list of cities you cannot travel to: Los Angeles, Paris, Boston, D.C.

But now you are traveling to D.C., driving south on I-95, and something tells you to text Ben. You bump into him at the convention center later that day. He’s shaved his beard, gotten new tortoiseshell glasses. He looks thinner and healthier. You know he is scanning your weight gain, the purple circles swelling under your eyes, your gray hairs sticking up like twisted wire. He listens to everything you say, laughs when you know he shouldn’t. He’s being polite.

Your friend says Ben has a good way about him.

You know you said it too soon.

Ben invites you for drinks in Logan Circle and your knees touch beneath the table—a habit, not an accident. You never mention Hector. You want to kiss him, but something about the way Ben holds himself signals that he knows. He gives you two hugs and makes plans for the next day.

In this version, you are not the cheater and you’re wistful.

You are awake at 2 a.m. in the hotel lobby, sipping a Manhattan diluted from ice.

You are waiting four hours for the hotel Starbucks to open.

You scroll through Facebook on your phone and see random remembrances to a man you met only several times.

Breck wanted to produce your movie, or so he said, back when you were twenty-three. He invites you to a mid-priced Mexican restaurant on La Brea to talk shop. He loves your script, your personality, and your eyes. He has three sons and a fiancée. He gets you drunk off margaritas. You aren’t sure if he read your script.

Now his friends are posting articles from an Arkansas news source: Man found dead after falling through fence at a construction site. Victim stopped twelve times for public intoxication since 2009.

You pause your scrolling. You had no idea about his drinking, about all these different Brecks. You could be cliché. You could say we never know another person. That, in the end, we’re just ourselves.

You text Ben goodbye and drive back to New Jersey.

In the spring, Hector stands behind you each night at the bar but never says a word. He retracts his I love yous. He lies on your couch with his forearms pressed over his eyes. This is not enough, he says. He needs more sex. He needs it every night.

Should this really be that complicated?

Hector accuses you of flirting at the bar. He yells at you in front of his friends, who laugh as you trip on your way out. He follows you home but doesn’t speak. You shout at him. What are you shouting? You fall fifty feet from your front door, into an asphalt pit that was once a sunken basketball court or, maybe, a shallow public pool.

Leave me alone.

Why are you crying?

And on the pavement, in this shallow pool or pit or whatever it is, you think of Breck. You like to think this is different; the nouns and pronouns have changed. Woman falls into asphalt pit at Newark apartment complex. Woman chips tooth, bleeds from lip. You like to think that in this version, you are not yourself.

Leave me alone.

Hector leaves you alone.

And a boy no longer follows you home. A boy no longer wants you to cum on his dick.

A boy no longer makes you scream.

A boy lets go, and so does another, and another.

A boy no longer covers your mouth, but Shush, the boys still say.

Shush.

STRAWBERRY by James Jacob Hatfield

August 12, 2021

It’s not because I have Alzheimer’s, I’ve always been like this. The most fun I get nowadays is when I find things I lost.

But I do remember her journal is underneath the couch. Before I’d never think to read her journal. But now that she’s gone I’d better retrieve it or else I’d forget about her completely.

Reaching under our couch is like sticking your hand into that ominous hole in the wall of a cave. Feeling for a lever. Pencils. Dog toys. Remotes. Items that are sorely missed only when they’re needed. And are treasured only for the moments after they’re found and used. Then start their journey on being lost again. My hand grazes the profile edge of a gun trigger and my heart makes an excited lurch into my sinuses.

Henry appears and says there’s some strawberries in the kitchen. My lips get cold.

Henry is on the opposite side of the island in the kitchen that we’re standing in now. He looks at me and rolls his lips in and tries to smile.

Henry holds the pseudosmile. Points to his lips.

I hear a noise resembling a yawn and realize it’s my own voice going “Huh?”

“You have something on your lips.” Henry says.

One lick and my tongue detects strawberries. I’m allergic, I think. Something happens when I eat something. Pretty sure it’s strawberries.

My hand keeps sending food to my mouth.

“What are you doing here, Henry?” I ask.

Henry leans his lower back against the counter. Presses his palms down to push up his shoulders and does that little head shake that says “I dunno.”

Henry, he hasn’t aged a day since we left for college. Dresses the same too. Tight black hoodie. One time right before graduation I almost killed him. I think it’s what galvanized our friendship. If you go down Lake Wheeler Road, past some of the old monstrous farmer estates, you’ll see an enormous oak tree with a huge patch of bark damaged like a gorilla is covered with hair except its chest. A blemish made by Henry and me. My Volkswagen Golf got wrapped around it. It was a manual. Diesel. I guess I got distracted. Didn’t keep my eyes on the road. Because I couldn’t. Mainly because it wouldn’t stop moving. God, I loved that car.

“I don’t remember what I did today.” I tell Henry in my kitchen.

“Funeral.” Henry says.

“Whose?”

“Don’t know. Didn’t go. But you seemed real upset about it.” Henry says.

I’m trying to forget something that’s begging to be remembered, from some other realm or reality. I know when I’m forgetting because my mind goes blank and all I see is a dream of a silhouette. There’s shape and there’s sound but nothing distinct. I pull up my hand and see the bottom of the strawberry I was eating.

Strawberries … are yummy … it’s a green hat with the pale, uneatable part of the berry pinched between my fingers. It looks like bloodstained brain matter on the back of the head of someone who swallowed the business end of a revolver.

I feel self-conscious and look up to see if Henry notices I’m taking too long and acting weird.

“Wait. Hey Henry, did you say funeral?” I shout.

My heart horse-kicks my ribs and there’s a heat of color funneling behind my eyes. I erupt from within. As if pixelated light was exploding out of my body. That’s why the gun felt so delicious. There’s an electric freedom in knowing I don’t have to stay alive if I don’t want to.

“What?” Henry says as he came out of the downstairs bathroom.

My fight-or-flight senses tear out the back of my head, like a bunch of wires unplugged in one violent yank. I suddenly have no needs.

The birds chime in the wind while watching the unique angle of the sun this good Earth gives us every single day … man, this is how I should have spent all my time … God, I feel weird. Is this what it is to be present? Am I dying? I can’t remember what my wife Irene looked like but … or was it Iris? Irene-Iris. Ireneiris. Yeah. That was her name. She was my wife. This is getting worse really quick. If I don’t get a hold of my thoughts I’ll forget about her forever. The microwave clock says it’s two on the dot. How many more hours until I can go to bed and not feel worried? Where’s Ireneiris? Where’s Henry?

“Henry!”

“What? I’m right here.”

It sounds as if he is saying it right into my ear, but he’s standing at the back of the property. I spot him as a dot through the window above the kitchen sink. I still feel weird. I need my ears to pop. It’s two forty-seven on the microwave.

“Let’s walk.” Henry says. His words tickle and vibrate my ear bones.

It’s still the afternoon, but grey storm clouds have formed. The temperature drops a couple. The wind is stale and humid. I touch the back of my head and feel nothing. Henry’s been quiet while we’ve been walking. I want to ask if we took drugs but won’t. Because if he says no that would mean I’m actually going crazy. Bad thought. Bad thought.

Calm down. Breath normal. You’re not going to feel like this forever.

Henry pivots right on Lake Wheeler Road. He looks like he’s wearing eye shadow.

“Henry, have you been eating?” I ask.

“No, man.” Henry whispers. Then folds his arms and shivers. He sounds irritated like I should have already known that. Like I forgot something.

I see him stumble. And it starts to rain. And he does this performance dance piece: falls, then gets up halfway, then slips, then repeat. I pull him up by the shoulders. And his tight black hoodie unanchored from his body which was no longer there. In the distance I hear the sounds of metallic bone-folding chaos drenched in diesel. There’s my Golf. Bad thought. Manual. Bad thought. Two door. Slouched like a wet towel around the tree’s trunk. Bad thought. Police car. Bad thought. Paramedics run right past me like I’m not even there. I remember this.

Past and present tense became one another like water washes water. I’m witnessing my own memories.

I try to peek over and see what my younger self looked like but my mind can’t process it. The area where my face should be is a warped blind spot. I see the EMTs moving a crash test dummy with a wig with hair styled like Henry’s. The cop takes the crash test dummy and puts it in the trunk of his squad car and leaves. Henry emerged from behind the tree when everyone else left. He waved me over as he turned around.

Everything past the tree is desolate. Lifetimes pass. Parched and exhausted, I’m following Henry on my hands and knees crawling through the desert. I see a mirage of a tiny dancing city appearing out of red canyons in the distance. Henry ventured forward. I give up and collapse.

I shout at Henry, but he doesn’t hear me. As he walks away his footprints immediately filled in with red desert sand. My insides wretch at the thought of open casket funerals. Ireneiris requested no cosmetic changes to her appearance for her funeral. The further the distance between Henry and me grew, the more I felt a separation not unlike a spirit and a body divorcing. Either he or I were fading away. The elusive Other being forgotten. I must be hallucinating, or dying.

With my knees in the sand and the figure of the figment of Henry eroding in the blowing curtain of sand. I only felt brief relief in knowing what is impossible. Lost in the transiency of spirits who are everactive. Now I desire only clarity.

I need to be with her again in some form. I need to go home.

I turn toward the tiny dancing oasis in the sunset, away from Henry. The city on the dune turned out to be a bunch of whack jobs living in tents in the middle of the desert. And what they drew from their wells may look like water, but last time I checked water shouldn’t smell like mangy rotten dog dick and have an iridescent shimmer. The first time I drank it I passed out. Then I shot myself in a scary dream and woke up feeling selfish. So I drank it a second time.

And I dreamt I was back in my childhood backyard. It was the time of day where the bottom of the sky was a rosy peach neon exploding up above faint magenta. My favorite weather. Paradise.

And I felt a soft voice taze me: Enter through! The door of the morning mist to the afterbirth of defined things. This is where you go. A cold wet field damp with sky.

And I whip around. The voice chimes and sparkles with dew. And I whip around. The memory of the cold dew is sharp on my feet. Standing still, I let my body heat melt the water which allows me to acclimate to this terrestrial plain. That excitement of combing an expensive rug with your toes. Borderline orgasm; euphoria. The world compresses into a tube-like shape that I am ushered through. It’s as if I’m walking through the shoot of a playground slide, as if my world is forming around me each step and Longleaf Pines start springing out of the sand dunes until desert and forest are one. I remember this city. I have a house here with my wife.

Oh God. Irene? … Iris? … I really … I miss her more than I can handle. The moment she left this world I could feel my life being sucked away. And as if that thought was a magic spell, I’m in my living room with feet freezing cold and clammy.

I feel lost in my own house.

I shuffle, barely lifting my feet on the carpet.

It’s like her spirit disintegrated into every corner of every wall in this house. Every blemish, every unfolded blanket, every mismatched coffee mug. Everything.

I don’t know how I can live like this. All freedom curdles into a demand for sacrifice. It feels like someone else’s bad thoughts got planted in my head.

I reach underneath the couch. Feel for something heavy.

With the gun in my hand, I roll my wrist like I’m opening a book to point it at my face. Look down.

And I realize what I’m really holding on to.

I let the pages of her journal fall open into my hands. There are words written across the middle in her script. Damn. She’s good.

It says “Keep going.”

And it all clicks. I was never alive and never will

be dead. I do not exist but I feel like I do. And I

disassemble at an atomic level clearing the

psychic real estate required to lay back

and suffer the natural exitance of my natural flesh. It was

an honor and a privilege to love you.

GAY BROMANCE 2011: TROUBLE IN PARADISE EDITION by Unity

August 11, 2021

After a five-month stint as an unpaid “gardening intern” at the Tennessee trans sex cult compound outside Smithville, after a month or so helping my sister catch painted buntings for science in the ruralest part of backwoods South Carolina, and, finally, after a month’s worth of dogsitting, also for my sister, in beautiful coastal Wilmington, NC, I went back to New York. Forrest, Hannah and Zibby picked me up in Baby Scribbla, Forrest’s antique Mercedes Benz – his first, to my knowledge, but certainly not last. The car couldn’t shift into fifth and so we skirted the Interstate wherever possible and traveled instead up the Blue Ridge Parkway. We stopped at all the scenic overlooks and weird backcountry convenience stores where Humpty Dumpty-looking fellers in overalls sold hunks of random meat, VHS tapes and white paper bushel bags of the most exquisite peaches you’ve ever tasted. The scenic overlooks were my favorite because inevitably after we’d pulled over and gotten out to check the view, a giant tour bus would arrive. A hundred fat fanny-packed tourists would pile out, gazing out over the majestic mountains and valleys through the screens of their iPads, snapping a hundred photos no one would ever see before piling back on the bus the way they came, never once stopping to actually look at anything. Forrest and I cracked each other up doing impressions of the iPad people while Hannah and Zibby sat on Baby Scribbla’s hood strumming a ukulele and wailing out folk tunes.

Back in Brooklyn, I crashed at Alex’s apartment ‘till I wore out my welcome with the roommates, then at Mel’s on the couch ‘till I wore out my welcome with the roommates there, too. Finally, I gave in and got some jobs, one at Choice Greene, a snooty Pratt-area cheese shop run by a horrible Frenchman and his snobby wife, and one at the Evolution Store in Soho. Evolution was where all the crusty queers worked at the time hawking butterflies, crystals, fossils and human skulls for Bill, the owner, who looked and acted exactly like a skull, and who wore a skull hoodie every day I saw him: a skull in a skull shop wearing a skull shirt. Jared Leto came in and bought a skull one time. You can only buy a skull in New York State if you’re a medical professional with a license number, so he had his mother—who’s a registered nurse—fill out the paperwork for him. Leto was super friendly, by the way, one of the nicest celebs who came in. Johnny Depp? Charming. Kelly Ripa? Vivacious. Anne Hathaway? Total bitch. Just joking, she was nice, too. Actually, the only really bad customer I remember was this woman who tried to return a do-it-yourself anatomical plastic model of a human heart she’d bought for her toddler. The item wasn’t designed for kids and she was mad because she thought it was when she bought it, so she wanted to return it, but she didn’t even bring the whole model back, or the box it came in, just random plastic pieces of it in her purse. We told her there were no refunds anyway and she got really mad. As she was yelling and screaming at us, her toddler, who she had left by the store’s entrance, started lifting $30 ostrich eggs over its head and smashing them on the floor. It was like the child was her little id, the physical manifestation of her Karenistic caterwauling.

I feel bad for NYC kids sometimes. Lately, when I’ve visited the city, I’m struck by how miserable everybody looks. When you go on the subway it’s like all these people are stuck in some horrible video game they can’t escape from, and they don’t even know why they’re playing. And their kids are precocious and preternaturally gifted at everything and speak like angry, sad grown-ups, because angry, sad grown-up is the only language they’ve ever heard spoken. The lady didn’t pay for any of the smashed ostrich eggs, by the way. She backed out of the store shaking her fist at us, and vowing to “write a letter to the company.” “What company?” said Amanda, the assistant manager. We all shrugged. “This company, I guess,” said Eric.

Eric got me the job at Evolution. How to describe our relationship? We were way closer than friends, but while we never had sex, we jacked off together once or twice while watching pre-AIDS French porno movies we found out about from Dennis Cooper books, and we cuddled and slept together. Just sleeping though, no sex, like I said. It was almost like we were bros, straight friends, but also kids, like how every straight guy has a story about how when he was a kid his friend tried to get him to touch his penis, except you know half those stories actually involved something more mutual, something so many of us guys—straight or gay or closeted or whatever—are afraid to vocalize still, even now in 2021. Why is that?

Eric and I hung out at work every day and got drunk together every night. We’d drink from a Jameson bottle in a brown paper bag as we walked to the Boiler Room to play pool. Sometimes we’d hook up with guys we met at the bars—separately—, but I always wound up back in his bed, his arms wrapped tightly around me, both of us snoring and sweating out whiskey and tobacco sweat into the stained white sheets. In the mornings he would boil eggs and pork buns to take to work and we’d ride our bikes over one of the bridgesI don’t even remember which one – and by the time we got to work we’d be disgusting and sweaty, just like all the other employees. One day Bill got fed up with how gross we all were and made us change into Evolution Store skull T-shirts and spray ourselves with horrible deodorant. I’m actually mortified to think how rarely I changed my socks in those days. I do remember one time they got so crusty it actually hurt to wear them and I had to race to American Apparel before work to spend $17 on a new pair, and I was so upset I’d spent so much money on one pair of fucking stripey socks. And now those socks are gone, and American Apparel’s gone, and what was I even so upset about? P.S. My feet smell way better now than they did, in case anyone’s wondering.

Eric was there for me when shit hit the fan with Ben, he was there when I got thrown out of the Cock for throwing my drink at Ben after Ben called me a faggot. Actually he got thrown out of the Cock right after I did as he tried to hit Ben after I threw my drink at Ben after Ben called me a faggot. I don’t know if I was ever there for him in quite the same way as he was for me. I wasn’t really there for anybody in those days, not even myself. We got into a huge fight about something when we were drunk. The fight might have been about anything. I don’t remember any of it, just that it happened. Our relationship was the kind that had to burn out. One of those ticking time bombs, you know? We were both Libras, both blonde, both with those blue eyes, crazy blue eyes like Australian shepherds have. There was no way it could’ve lasted more than a few months. We were too close. You can’t get that close to someone, it’s like Icarus flying too close to the Sun, but the Sun is each other, but also just your reflection, and you crash into it, you crash through it, and burn each other up, and cut each other up with the pieces of glass the broken mirror left behind.

I saw Eric once or twice after that but it was like the spell was broken. Our rapport was stunted, it was like he was a different person, or maybe I was, or we both were. Like we’d collectively been one person before, and then painfully separated, a double-yolked egg split down the middle during boiling, too hot to touch, too cracked to re-cohere. After I’d lived in Chicago a couple of weeks, I woke up one morning to Eric standing at the door to my bedroom. He was visiting my roommate Ector, who he used to date. We ate pizza puffs and went to see Star Trek in the AMC River East 21, my favorite multiplex in town. It was fine. The movie, the pizza puff. Eric. It was all fine. But it wasn’t the same.

Last I heard, he’d been traveling around the country alone and had run out of money while staying at a motel in the desert somewhere, and the motel had hired him to be its handyman or maintenance guy or something in exchange for rent on a room. When I heard that at first I thought it sounded so sad, but upon recent reassessment I’ve decided it sounds like something very close to living the dream. I’m planning on going back to school to become a plumber soon. What kind of a guy can’t fix a toilet, you know? Maybe once I’ve graduated I’ll go looking for Eric at his desert motel. Maybe we’ll fix toilets together for an afternoon and share a beer and a smoke and reminisce about the good old days. Maybe we’ll make some better days yet, better than the ones that came before. Maybe the best is yet to come. Maybe.

SIMPLE ANSWERS TO ESSENCE QUESTIONS AT THE INTERNATIONAL PAPERWEIGHT FESTIVAL by Pat Foran

August 10, 2021

Long before the wildness of fire engulfed their town, and well after self-winding watches had become a thing, the townspeople thought of themselves as a simple people who enjoyed simple pleasures.

They saw light in paper moons and love in the soft ridges of the infinite arrowing of the universal “recycling” logo. They believed in paper planes and in the notion of shared paper routes. They spent their evenings pressing paper roses between the pages of 1959 Buick Le Sabre brochures.

The townspeople took particular pride in the International Paperweight Festival they hosted each summer in the paper mill parking lot. The pigs-in-blankets delivered to festival goers via origami blimp. The newspaper-hatted fortune teller who told onion-skin truths in songs she composed on the spot. All those paperweight appreciators. All those paperweights. In one place.

Then things, doing what things do, got hard.

Demand for the printed word declined precipitously. Publishers stopped buying paper. The paper mill lost customers. The townspeople lost jobs. Homes. Pets. Spouses.

It even got hard to put themselves in current context. Their self-winding watches got cute and played tricks with time. In addition to being a literal question, What time is it? became a symbolic one.

It got hard, very hard, for the townspeople to continue to see themselves as a simple people. To enjoy their simple pleasures.

It got hard, very hard, for them to see light. Or love. Or to believe.

And when the fingers of fire touched their crepe-paper town, reaching and then curling around the papier-mâché Ferris wheel spinning in the paper mill parking lot, the townspeople felt like giving up. They also had questions.

What is happening? said the town rumor control czar.

Where even are we? said the town cartographer.

Who even are we? said the town cryer.

What time is it? said the town horologist.

You’re asking me? the fortune teller asked-sang-said, hustling to her festival booth near the smoldering Ferris wheel. Okay, the Soothsayer, as they say, is REAL in.

The townspeople tagged along. The evening sun did, too. The sky pulled up a chair. The wild fire, sitting in a gondola atop the now-not-spinning wheel, lent an ear. The fortune teller cleared her throat and began to sing:

What in hell is happening, you say,Like Donald Sutherland says in that anything-but-simple 'Ordinary People' wayWhat's happening NOW, like Raj and Rerun say,Is the next beginning, the next new day.

Cheering, the evening sun slid on the spectrum from red-yellow to yellow-green. The townspeople leaned in for a closer listen.

And where are we now? It’s not where we were—it’s not where we will be or even where we ARE, the fortune teller sang, adding something mostly inaudible about paper moons, gift-wrapped stars and pigs-in-blankets. If anything, where we are is no-where, children, she sang.

Laughing, the sky unearthed the “Welcome to Our Town” sign and presented it to the town cartographer as if it were a paper rose.

The fortune teller unfolded her newspaper hat and rapped the news:

Who even are we? Who even, even?

This self-examined life? Who even, even?

Light and love and logos, even?

Recycle what? Recycle this

Infinite what? Infinite this

Get off it, get with it, get over yourselves

Put paper-pressed evenings back on the shelves

(next to the urns containing Ferris wheel ashes, of course)

Swooping down from the motionless spinning wheel, the wild fire high-fived the fortune teller, who didn’t miss a beat:

What time is it, what time it is

Anything more is all show biz

Ditch your self-winding watches

Ditch your Le Sabre swatches

Ditch your pretty-to-think-so simple pleasures

Hug something a bit harder to measure

Hug this regenerative burnHug these songs you’ve learned

Hug the possible, the *if* ‘til its eyes fillEmbrace this moment now or you never will

The townspeople turned to watch the wild fire, which had spread to the paper mill and the International Paperweight Festival museum. All those paperweights, imperiled. In danger of not being appreciated.

Embrace what now? cried the town cryer.

Embrace ‘next’! Don’t let these paperweights hold you down! the fortune teller trilled. Let them go! And let yourselves go. Let this moment lift you—up, like those popsters sing, where we belong.

Hey—don’t spread THAT one around, said the town rumor control czar.

As the festival museum burned, the paperweights paraded, single file, toward the next town. Leaving their pigs-in-blankets behind, the origami blimps navigated the confettied sky. Paper planes carrying self-winding watches sailed into the evening sun. Under a paper moon, the wild fire celebrated the swirl of infinity and the possibility of resurrected love in the soft ridges of ruin.

PLUCKERS by Amanda Anderson

August 9, 2021

I was in the bathroom that fateful day, my butt cheek hoisted up in one hand, tweezers zeroing in on the mole with the other, when my boyfriend walked in. His eyebrows pinched together in disapproval. He asked me what I was doing. I stuttered, searching for a more attractive explanation, then finally told him I was plucking the hair out of the mole on my ass. He asked cheerfully if he could step in and take over. I handed him the tweezers, glad he wasn’t repulsed, only to see a sizable boner emerge in his pants.

And so a monthly trend was born. But it wasn’t that many months before the sizable boner went floppy noodle and the boyfriend began bemoaning the boredom of his life and our relationship. He suggested we were lacking another dimension. Life was short, he said. People are dead. Who? I asked. People, he said. We couldn’t spend what little time we had like this. Like this? Like just waking up and doing shit and going to bed. Being under the impression that this man was my last chance for love, I agreed with a sultry, ok.

This agreement resulted in a number of surprises. First, the new dimension was not a woman, but a man. Second, that man was there for a hair-plucking session. Obviously I was hesitant. I’d been plucking that thing alone in bathrooms for years because it was disgusting. To now find it a point of sexual interest was more than a little disconcerting. But to be embarrassed is not particularly sexy, so I smiled coyly and bent over the edge of the bed.

Eventually, the plucker changed and changed and changed again, and we began to charge a fee. I was accustomed to it by this time, and able to reduce my other job hours. It was a specialized fetish, the sort of thing for which you can charge a lot of money. A rather large waiting list formed. So long in fact, that after a time, the pluckers were asked to submit applications. We received up to 200 applications a month which included age, first name, occupation, hobbies (my boyfriend’s request). Referrals were preferred. So, once a month a lucky candidate was allowed to pluck the single dark hair out of the mole on my ass.

Then my boyfriend took off with a cowboy from Vermont whose hobbies included drinking milk and bringing joy to those around him. He did not provide any references. I didn’t think there were cowboys in Vermont. Which is why I thought we chose him—wasn’t this man funny and interesting, saying he brought joy, drank milk and was a cowboy from Vermont. But it was true. He was a cowboy, and he lived in Vermont. I also didn’t know that this was what my boyfriend had been looking for all his life.

Now I was left alone with my only means of support being a stranger entering my home under potentially dangerous circumstances. But I didn’t care. I was hopeless. In despair. The kind of despair that happens when the boyfriend you thought was your last chance for love and life is gone. So the first choice I made alone was the most dangerous I could muster: a doctor. Anyone who claimed to be a doctor was not a doctor, but someone who daydreams of death and dying, of perfecting a particular kind of violence.

The doctor arrived in a white lab coat with a black bag, the kind of bag doctors carried when they came to the sick at their homes. Had my boyfriend been there, he would have requested the doctor leave the bag outside. The doctor was rather handsome. Which had historically been a bad sign. Handsome men, it seems, believe their handsomeness puts an acceptable shine on savagery. A voice in my head strongly advised against letting him in. It doesn’t matter how much you hate your life, it said (I heard the low chime of fear which warmed my head), you don’t want to be sliced up and thrown in a dumpster with your head and hands in a different bag from your legs. But I’d received a postcard that day from the boyfriend. A cartoon skeleton wearing a wide-brimmed sombrero sat at the base of a cactus, his elbow resting on his knee. But It’s A Dry Heat, the arching caption said, ARIZONA. The boyfriend’s handwriting, appearing as crowded cuneiform marks, overran the open space on the back—across and over, up and around, cleaving the edges of the card. The doctor and his bag were welcomed inside with a kind yet sensuous smile.

He started in right away. Sighed as he put his bag down, slumped into the living room chair uninvited. He asked for water. Sighed again. I tipped my ass in his direction, asked him in a low voice if he was ready to get started. He took in a seven second breath before telling me things have really been hard for him lately. So many people sick and dying. Men his age are jumping off buildings. Brand new buildings that were meant to be architectural wonders now tainted reminders of mortality. Every day he drove by on his way to work and cursed the man who jumped to his death. Then pitied him. Then cursed him. He finished his water, held up the glass for me to take away and began to cry. Then he pounded his fist on the coffee table. I would understand, he said, once I was his age and your balls and chin start to sag and everyone is jumping off buildings and not inviting you to parties. He let out a low, pitiful noise and put his head in his hands. Then screamed at me to get him a drink. I brought him another glass of water. He looked up at me with a jutted jaw. A drink, he said.

I brought him a whiskey which he gripped like a candle in a church vigil. While he continued whining with his eyes closed I went into the hallway and opened his bag. There were six pairs of socks and a candy bar. I had no idea what this man wanted.

When I got back to where he was sitting he looked at me with bloodshot eyes and asked if I knew what he was saying. I nodded. He shook the empty glass at me, asked me to get him a pair of fresh socks from his bag before asking if I knew what it was like to go through life as a man with overly sweaty feet. I shook my head. He nestled deeper into the chair.

He eventually requested the candy bar and a third pair of socks. After I handed the candy to him he asked if I knew what it was like to go through life as a man who gets faint from low blood sugar. I shook my head. He frowned, then informed me through his teeth that some people think getting tired from low blood sugar isn’t very manly. I told him that sounded very difficult. He nodded and tore into the candy like his life depended on it.

After a few hours, I found the courage to tap on my wrist, apologize, and tell him our time was up. He got up quicker than a drunk man normally would. Melted chocolate ringed his mouth. I stood my ground. He reached into his back pocket. Then pulled out an enormous roll of money, licked his finger and peeled off the bills, licked his finger again for the tip. By far the most money I’d ever made on a visit.

I locked the door behind him and went to the bathroom and threw up. The mole hair turned gray shortly after. Then I bought a scalpel and removed the thing myself.

“STORMS OF ENTHUSIASM” by Michael Seymour Blake

August 7, 2021

…

NOVELS_IM_GOING_TO_WRITE.DOCX by Aatif Rashid

August 6, 2021

Space Battles (1999)
- Like Star Wars, but from the perspective of a ten-year-old kid. He has a sword and a laser gun, and he and his friend save the galaxy from a group of evil aliens.
Space Battles II (2000)
- Sequel to Space Battles I. The kid is now eleven, and he saves the galaxy again from an even bigger group of aliens.
Space Battles III (2001)
- Sequel to Space Battles I and Space Battles II. The kid is now twelve, and he and his friend have a falling out. The first group of aliens comes back, though, so they reconcile in order to save the galaxy again.
The Lord of the Scepter (2002)
- An epic fantasy set in a Lord of the Rings style world where Dwarves, Elves, Humans, and Wizards battle over a magical scepter. The main character is a fourteen-year-old elf who’s secretly the son of the Elf king and will one day inherit the throne.
Sacrifices (2004)
- A dark dystopian novel set in a world where humans are regularly sacrificed by a tyrannical government to keep the population stable, and about a group of teenage revolutionaries who try to overthrow the system. The main character is a fifteen-year-old guy who leads the group. There’s a girl in the group too, and he’s in love with her but doesn’t want to admit it.
A World of Kingdoms (2005)
- A dark, epic fantasy novel set on a continent of warring kingdoms, about a group of children whose parents are killed and who have to make their way through the dangerous world. The main character is the oldest in the family, a sixteen-year-old who’s studying to be a mage. At one point, he meets a girl, the daughter of one of the kings, and they fall in love even though she’s engaged to another prince.
Untitled High School Coming of Age Story (2007)
- A nerdy high school kid in a small suburban town falls in with a new group of friends and experiences the wonders of drugs, sex, and partying. He also falls in love with a girl in his grade, a dark-haired, half-Asian girl, super smart, into literature and art like him, but they break up after she decides to go to college in New York instead of U.C. Berkeley, where he’s going. When this happens, it’s late at night, and they’re sitting in a car in the Safeway parking lot, and he feels like crying but tries his hardest not to. They try to have sex one last time in the backseat, but it’s awkward and he doesn’t feel like it, and so they just lie in each other’s arms on the felt seat, and he listens to her heartbeat, and he wonders if he’ll ever feel this way about someone again.
Untitled Edgy College Novel (2010)
- An experimental novel about a kid from a suburb who comes to college and finds a new group of cool artsy friends. Make sure it has a cool, hipster vibe, everyone saying ironic things, drinking PBR, smoking European cigarettes, talking about Jean Baudrillard and Michel Foucault.
- The novel shouldn’t really have a plot, but maybe make it center on a romance between the main guy and a girl—a cool, blonde girl who studies French and Art History and wants to be a writer too. They have lots of sex, but then get bored of each other and wander into increasingly separate, dissolute pursuits, and maybe after a few years, after they’ve been humbled in some way and feel low and down, they meet each other again on the quad in Berkeley, maybe she’s smoking a cigarette and he’s holding a Thomas Pynchon novel under his arm, and they reminisce about the good times they had and how it had been a lot of fun and how they miss those days, before saying goodbye and never seeing each other again.
The Postmodern Prometheus (2011)
- A novel about a twenty-two-year-old guy who’s just graduated college and is traveling through Asia on some money he’s saved up. Each chapter should be set in a different city, and instead of focusing on plot, make it more about the vibe, the people he meets, the bars he drinks at, the clubs he goes to, the women he sleeps with, interspersed with his reflections on art and history.
- He’s also a writer, so maybe make the frame of the book a novel he’s writing (maybe make super meta so it’s the book we’re reading). Ultimately, it should be about the main character finding himself and feeling a sense of fulfillment.
The Boomerang Generation (2013)
- After failing to find a job, a young man moves back in with his parents in the California suburb where he grew up. He reconnects with old high school friends, all of whom are likewise unemployed and depressed, and they drink a lot at the town’s one bar, or else play old video games (mainly Super Smash Brothers on N64) in one of their basements. Make it about generational listlessness, and have the main character reflect on the socioeconomic forces that have led him to become such a failure.
- The style should be terse, with short sentences, and a spare, Hemingway rhythm to match the lifelessness he feels inside.
Untitled Multigenerational Family Saga (2014)
- A novel about three generations of a Pakistani-American family. Start with grandfather’s generation in British India: they’re part of the nationalist movement, they witness Partition, etc. Then move on to parents’ generation: born into an independent Pakistan, immigrate to America, struggle, work hard, become doctors and engineers, etc. Finally, my generation: ungrateful, shitty kids who fail to live up to their parents’ expectations and fail to make anything of themselves in America. End with the eldest son of the family living at home after college, twenty-five years old and working as a waiter for minimum wage.
- Make it all an ironic commentary on the American Dream and subvert the tropes of the optimistic American immigrant story.
Untitled Campus Novel Satire (2016)
- A novel set at a low-ranked creative writing MFA program that follows a group of fiction writers struggling to make Art (make sure to capitalize it whenever they say it). Satirize their pretensions by highlighting the massive gap between their literary ideals (David Foster Wallace, etc.) and their own work, which is middling and subpar. Also, make fun of the teachers, who don’t really seem happy either. Above all, try and get at the feeling that literary success is impossible in late capitalism, that no one reads books anymore, and that these fiction writers are like easel painters or classical musicians trying to work with outdated forms.
- At some point, the main character should have a meeting with an agent in New York. The meeting doesn’t go well—he’s out of his depth, fails to make an impression, and thus loses what he feels like was his one chance.
Untitled Millennial Love Story (2018)
- A novel about two young people living in New York who meet at a party and start dating. He’s a twenty-nine-year-old (unpublished) writer and a part-time bartender, and she’s a twenty-four-year-old actress trying to make it in theater. They fall in love and grow close, but after a few years, they start to drift apart, mostly because he’s very depressed about his writing, how it’s not going anywhere, and how the dreams he had in childhood seem so far away now. Every day he wakes up and feels like a failure, and this rubs off on her, because she’s a little younger than him and still optimistic about things and doesn’t share his exhausting nihilism. Eventually, she leaves for Paris to be in a friend’s indie movie, and he gets an email a few weeks later saying they should break up and that she’s been seeing Emile (the indie director friend) for about a month now. He’s sitting in their shared apartment, a tiny studio in Queens, and when he hears the news, he throws his laptop at the wall and then goes out and buys a bottle of whiskey and drinks it from a paper bag while walking around the city, before returning home, masturbating to some porn (something demeaning probably, like a man getting choked and slapped and maybe even pissed on), and then passing out on his couch.
The Solitary City (2019)
- A first-person, autofiction novel about a failed thirty-year-old writer living by himself in New York City. Aside from working as a bartender to try and make ends meet, he takes long walks, reflects on the city’s buildings and history, occasionally sees art shows and readings put on by his friends, smokes and drinks a lot, sits in cafes and tries to write. He’s estranged from his parents, who tell him he has to get a real job and get his life together, and his attempts at relationships always go nowhere, as he feels no connection at all with the people he meets. He starts to resent his own generation, and he wishes he lived in an earlier time, in the 1960s, or the 1920s, or the 1890s, when people still read books and the world was still exciting.
Confessions (2020)
- As the COVID-19 pandemic sweeps across the world, a thirty-one-year-old man comes down with symptoms and is admitted to the hospital. Even though he’s young, he’s smoked and drank a lot throughout his short life, so he’s not in great health, and the virus affects him severely. He has to be hooked up to a ventilator, and he feels pain all over his body, his chest, his arms, his back, and especially his head. Worst of all, his vision gets so blurry that he can’t read books—the text gets jumbled and he can’t make sense of it, as if he’s dyslexic. He tries listening to audiobooks, but the sound from his headphones makes his headache unbearable. And so he finds himself in a literature-less state. It may be the first time since he was a child that he hasn’t been reading a book. When he is lucid, he spends his hours thinking, about his life and what it meant and whether he accomplished the things he wanted. He contacts his parents, but they’re not allowed to come and see him for fear of contamination, so he has to talk to them on Zoom. His mother is crying, and while his father tries to smile and keep things optimistic and talk to him about books and “what he’s been writing,” he can see even in his eyes despair hiding behind the cheery disposition. He texts his ex-girlfriend, and she sends her condolences, and they even chat once over Zoom. She’s no longer seeing Emile the director, and she’s living in New York again, and he feels a sense of pain in his chest when he sees her face on the screen lit up by light from a window behind her, like the one in their old apartment. It might be COVID-induced synesthesia, but he feels like he can smell her hair again, feel her skin against his, her body through the sheets whenever he would wake up in the morning, the taste of coffee on her lips when he kissed her in their kitchen. Eventually, he’s left to himself, in the darkening hospital room, the beeping of machines of the older patients nearby, the distant sound of a nurse sighing in the hallway. He thinks about his failed writing career, all those novels he wanted to write but never finished. He imagines one final novel, something earnest and authentic that could justify his existence. He doesn’t know what style he’d write it in—postmodern, realist, dystopian, autoficion—and he doesn’t even know which events it would include, who the characters would be, how the plot would unfold. Still, he has a profound sense of it, a burning presence at the edges of his vision, and he knows that if he could write it, it would be absolutely perfect—everything he’d sought to capture since he first came up with Space Battles back in 1999, a representation that solved the riddle of literary mimesis, a document, ultimately, of what it had meant to him to be alive. The last scene before he dies would be him reaching out at something with his aching hand.

SHAGGING FLIES IN BALLARD by Alexandrine Ogundimu

August 5, 2021

I resolve to confess my feelings on Saturday. You take me to the batting cage up in Mountlake Terrace but the machines are so awful they eat our tokens and give us nothing back, no high-arching softballs or baseball bullets. I would never say anything because I am meek and unmasculine but you get a refund because you are handsome and friendly and always get what you want and I am jealous—of your confidence and looks and talents and physicality and how much sex you have.

There’s a bucket of baseballs in your trunk so we drive to a park in Ballard and grab the bats and bucket and I’m way out of shape and can’t pitch for shit. You whack more than a few out into the home run range and we shag them together and take turns, pitcher and hitter, the innuendo not lost on me though you are oblivious to it, as I admire your form and feel a certain kind of carefree peace and joy, just two guys hitting baseballs, and it makes me wish you were my boyfriend in a way I find embarrassing, and I will tell you, hyper-straight you, college-baseball-player you, writer you, talented-in-more-than-every-way you.

This isn’t the right moment to say anything because it’s too perfect, as if I have already gotten exactly what I want, and having had it, there is no reason for me to seek it.

We catch the Mariners game at a pizza place and you drink a beer while I drink a Diet Coke because I’m scared of what comes out of me while I’m drunk. You ask me how the date with that guy went and I say Fine when it wasn’t fine because he wasn’t you, and I don’t care unless I care and you make me care in spite of myself.

We lock eyes as you say Yeah, just fine? And your voice is so warm and your eyes are crystal, your Henley revealing just a bit of your chest and I am an animal, my higher functions suspended even as I can feel your thoughts move, and I realize that this is my moment, my time to confess, and as I prepare the words Zunino blasts one and the bar goes wild and we high-five and really is it worth it to complicate a friendship when it’s so much easier to let your heart break.

EVERY DAY IMAGINE DROWNING by Melanie Carlstad

August 4, 2021

I was at work holding onto a trowel and my father wasn’t dead. I argued this point to my colleague, Mary Anne, who was afraid of worms.

Here’s the gist, Mary Anne, I said. We are at work. We are gardening. You are afraid of the worms writhing between your fingers, and on top of that, my dad isn’t dead.

Mary Anne screamed. There was nothing else to do but scream about the ringed pink flesh of the worms.

Everything was drippy from yesterday’s rain. The juniper bush and the ivy leaves strangling it dripped on us. Our feet sank in the wet dirt. We had long hours, so we filled them with talk.

My parents are in an unhappy marriage, but they’re alive and well, Mary Anne said.

Mine aren’t like that, I said. They’re in a happy marriage and ailing slowly.Your dad is all done ailing, said Mary Anne. He’s dead.

I laughed and laughed. The juniper bush dripped, and I deadheaded the agapanthus. We talked about parking lots, hungry children with shiny eyes, and how the sun drowned every evening when it set over the bay. We could see it gasping above the waterline from the hill where we gardened.

Imagine drowning every day! Mary Anne said. We were crouched around the birdbath, hunting for crabgrass. With the rain, it had inched its way through networks of other plants, infiltrating their systems. I had to extract the crabgrass but not the poppies. I didn’t like poppies very much, but we had to preserve them. Our supervisor came out to check on us sometimes.

There’s a dead possum in the green bin, she said when she came out. Please take care of it.

I went to the green bin and kicked it onto its side. Dirty water dribbled out of the corner, wadded-up bundles of weeds slumped at the mouth of the bin, and underneath them I saw a beady eyeball surrounded by fur. I retreated, walking backwards while staring at the eye.

Mary Anne was still under the bird bath. I was starting to resent her for moving so slowly. She picked at crabgrass with a sense of leisure and twirled ivy like long hair when she ripped it out of the juniper.

There’s no dead possum in the green bin, I told her. There’s a possum in there alright, but it’s alive and well, just playing dead until it can make its getaway.

It had better go quick, Mary Anne said. She wrapped her hand around the neck of an invasive plant and yanked it out of the ground. She saw the worms intertwined with the torn roots and flung them away, sending specks of dirt onto my eyelids and cheeks. The sun was getting ready to drown, which meant we had to fill the green bin and clean up. The juniper still dripped on us while we tossed piles of weeds into the bin, which had no possum anymore but was full of new dead things.

This story was published in print only with the title “Worms” in Pratt’s literary magazine, Ubiquitous, in 2018.