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ROBERT KLOSS on film with Rebecca Gransden

January 11, 2022

Can you talk about the influence film has had on your writing?

A lot of my writing is me trying to translate aspects of film to my work. Various shots, sounds, atmosphere. Using film as a basis, rather than say using reality as a basis, or other books as a basis, means starting with another artist’s aestheticized version of the world. What I see in my mind when writing then is framed, lighted, shot, so on, like certain scenes or moments from films I admire. Then I try to translate it. The silences, black and white faces, gusting wind of Antonioni or Kurosawa, for instance. 

The impossibility of it is sometimes frustrating, almost painfully so. But the impossibility of it is also why I allow myself to do it—the failed translation allows it become something closer to my own.  

What directors, film movements, or particular actors have been an influence?

Filmmakers who are particularly good at sliding between reality and dream have shaped my writing: Wong Kar-wai, Carl TH Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman, David Lynch, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Andrei Tarkovsky, Werner Herzog, Paul Thomas Anderson. There are others I’m leaving out, but those have been the big ones over the years. 

Are there films that are reliable for inspiring your creativity?

I don’t think so. I wish I could count on tapping into something whenever I need a burst. But I need things to happen more organically, more surprisingly. I can’t impose upon a film in that way or impose upon my process in that way. It has to emerge. 

Have you ever made a film? If so, has the process of doing that had an influence on your writing?

I have not. For a long while I wanted to, really wanted to, because film seemed to embody more closely what I wanted to achieve in writing. At one time I think I could have done it. My brain now works so differently than it used to. I’m not sure if it’s aging or what. It takes me so long to muddle through. Things don’t occur to me like they used to. I can’t see them as clearly. It takes me so long to get anywhere. I have to fail, fail, fail, fail before something takes hold. There’s no vision, no certainty, no direction. 

Can you give some film recommendations for those who have liked your writing?

I’ll give a list of some films that I admire that I haven’t mentioned. Mostly recent favorites. Most anything else by these directors would work as well.   

Zama (Martel), High Life (Denis), Personal Shopper (Assayas), Decasia (Morrison), The Wolf House (Leon and Cocina), Horse Money (Costa), The White Ribbon (Haneke), The Favourite (Lanthimos), The Lighthouse (Eggers)

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THE SHAPELESS by Gregory T. Janetka

January 10, 2022

When they told her how the body had been found thirty feet from the road by prisoners who were scouring the gutter for trash, the only thing she could think to ask was if there was any way to save his sperm. The police did their best to express their regret in broken English but she didn't hear a word, lost as she was in the minute details of DNA harvesting. Months had passed since then, or was it years? Maybe it was yesterday, who could tell? His body's blueprint might be gone from this earth but in its absence came flashes of body parts throughout the apartment: a forearm in the refrigerator, a jaw bone on the nightstand, a left leg—no longer able to support its own weight—crumpled up on the closet floor.

Neither had wanted a baby but the dream of reanimation, of scraping blood from the overgrown grass where he fell, only grew stronger. This life—escaping their country, building something new, traveling unsettled and joyful, burning bright and leaving their bloodlines to die—it was all they ever wanted. Their plans, never codified beyond such romantic ideals, were filled in as the need arose. When there was nowhere to live they bartered for an apartment, when they ran out of money they took the first jobs they were qualified for—he as a courier, her an English teacher. He enjoyed learning the city and surrounding towns on his bike, but hers was a hollow means to a paycheck. None of her coworkers had any higher ambition, any dream, any reason to live here other than survival. But to be fair, inspiration was a useless quality when students wanted nothing beyond a basic proficiency in the language that had come to dominate their own.

#

“Donorcycle.” 

That's what the nurses called it, at least until they learned she was an American. After that, they didn't speak at all. 

"Another donorcycle accident..." 

She looked up the phrase. It wasn't a mistranslation but slang, a term to denote the propensity of healthy young men with healthy young organs to die riding motorcycles. It was a phrase accompanied by an eye roll that easily wrote off his entire life.

News of his death brought no word from home. 

Home. 

It was as silly a term as donorcycle. Home was where she came from, where she'd been stuck, like a bus terminal. With nowhere else to go she remained in the one-bedroom apartment, unsure where she'd find the next index finger, shoulder, or vertebrae, while his scent grew weaker and weaker.

#

Drowning out the silent apartment with an indecipherable TV soap opera, she lit the stove, put oil in the pan, and dropped in a dozen shishito peppers. It was the last thing she expected to find in a market in the Madrid countryside. One in ten was hot, they said, like Russian roulette. 

Tossing the plastic bag into the trash she watched it fall on a fresh, pink human kidney that sat precariously atop a pile of torn junk mail and broken egg shells. Thinking nothing of it, she closed the lid as the doorbell rang. Every knock, every noise might be him—they never did let her see the body—but would he appear standing tall, his 6′ 3″ frame looming over her with the comfort and safety it brought? Or would it be the pile of mannequin parts that were left by the roadside? 

At the door was neither, but rather a perfect circle that looked as if it were cut out of wax paper, hovering in midair. It moved forward with no deliberate speed, disappearing when it came into contact with her chest. As it hit, she felt the coarse sand of the Jersey shore beneath her toes, smelled the nitrite-rich, overcooked hot dogs of the boardwalk. Nothing else appeared and she closed the door.

The peppers popped and screamed, filling the place with choking black smoke. She removed the pan, turned off the gas, and threw open the small window high above the couch. Despite being hundreds of miles inland, salt air roared into the room. The sand beneath her feet shuddered at the taste and turned to mud, bringing with it the smell of fresh tar baking in suburban sunlight. She fell to the ground and rolled in the substance like a happy baby pig, unaware of its future. As the brown-black mess seeped into her skin she thrashed about, searching the muck for hidden body parts as if on a game show. Finding none, she fell onto her back, exhausted, and listened as the sound of crashing waves filled her ears. A rectangular column of water squeezed through the window like Playdoh, hung suspended for a moment, then rained down. It stank of dead fish and tasted like iced tea. Her belly full, she extracted herself and closed the window.

She stirred the peppers and watched the legs of oil skirt the edges of the pan. Grabbing one by the stem she bit down and her mouth swelled with heat and spice. When her throat hollered for relief she grabbed a second pepper. One by one she made quick work of the dozen, every one hotter than the last. Sweat poured from her forehead, armpits, and under her breasts. 

#

The heat subsided, the smoke dissipated, and the water dried. Seated at the desk she stared past the blank computer screen to the space where a nothingness planted and grew fruit, colorless, tasteless and unsatisfying. She took out her phone and dialed his number—still disconnected. It would be reassigned one day. Feeling her belly, she dialed another number and walked outside. The stars, filled with lightning, pulsed as if in a power surge.

"Hello?"

"Hi mom."

"Dena. What is it?"

"Mom...I'm pregnant."

"Pregnant? What do you mean pregnant? Who could possibly be the father?"

"Everyone. Everyone in the whole world. Everyone who ever was and ever will be. Isn't it grand?"

Before her mother could answer she threw the phone to the sky. As it climbed and climbed she felt her belly again and watched as the phone joined the stars.

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SQUAT STANDS by Richie Smith

January 7, 2022

The high school gym was filled with jocks and weight lifters and I didn’t fit in with any of them. People like Irving Ackerman, the strongest Jewish kid in the school. 

Irving didn’t know me. I lifted the lowest level of weights, but I resolved to change this. I was going to work out to grow big and strong.

I found a body building program in the back of a comic book.

“Universal Body Building” had the logo of a muscle man hugging a sexy woman and promised to send me weekly lessons which would transform me into a hunk of muscle.

In order to start the program, I needed squat stands. 

“Dad, can you buy me squat stands?” I asked the next morning at breakfast.

 “Squat stands are expensive,” he said, biting into his English muffin. He drank dark liquid that wasn’t coffee. He didn’t understand the importance of body building, but by the time he finished eating, he realized I was disappointed.

“Maybe you can have squat stands for Hanukah,” he said when he got home later that night. “I’ll see if Dan Lurie has them.”

Dan Lurie was a bodybuilder with a retail store in Canarsie.

“Can we get the stands tonight?” I asked, as if squats were a life-saving intervention.

It was the last night of Hanukah, 6:15 PM on a weeknight and the store closed at seven.

For some reason, perhaps guilt, my father agreed and we sped on the Belt Parkway to Dan Lurie, weaving in and out of lanes at a high speed so I could get squat stands.

Unlike the shining stainless steel squat stands I had seen in various gyms and at school, these squat stands were flat black with square bases that rattled on our uneven basement floor.

I started the Universal Body Building Program, but couldn’t keep up with the lessons or the twelve dollar monthly payments. Even though I had squat stands, I still had weak quads, and soon, I also had a collection agency coming after me.

I did squats for a few more weeks on my own and then moved on to smoking pot instead.

I spent school days getting high, but I still wanted to get strong. I still had a man crush on Irving Ackerman, now a senior and possibly the strongest Jew in the world. He was musclebound from all the furniture he lifted at his father’s store: Ackerman’s Eclectic Antiques, one of the famous high school dozen that could bench press the entire rack. He gave up wrestling to become a body builder.

Sometimes I followed Ackerman in school. I admired his Herculean walk, the wide lats and bulky thighs that never allowed him to bring his arms or legs together. He seemed the perfect person to lift weights with, if only I could get him to notice me. 

My only hope to gain favor with Ackerman was a scaly one-eyed kid with a limp named Gallo, who hobbled alongside Ackerman like a pilot fish. Gallo also happened to sell pot, so one day when I was buying a joint, I asked if he ever lifted weights with Ackerman.

Gallo looked at me sideways, compensating for his glass eye. “We lift all the time, man.”

Gallo didn’t seem muscular but he was tough. “You want to lift with me? You’re not going to be able to lift with Irving until you bulk up a little.”

I hesitated, not wanting to be alone with Gallo, but I realized this was probably my only chance.

“I’ll lift with you,” I said. “You have weights?”

“Of course I got weights. I got lots of weights. More than you can ever lift.”

“Should I come over after school?”

“Sure, come the fuck over. If you don’t mind cat piss. I got cat piss all over the basement. That’s where the weights are.”

“I’m allergic to cats,” I said thinking about the horrible smell of cat piss and Gallo actually looked pissed although I couldn’t tell if he was looking at me. He was one of the few people I knew who would actually look better with an eye patch.

“You got weights?” he said finally.

“Yeah, I have weights but I don’t know if there’s enough for you. How much you lift?”

“I lift lots. What you got?”

“I don’t know, maybe one sixty.”

“That’s weak. Smith, you’re pretty fucking weak.”

“I got squat stands.”

“I’ll be over at three,” he said.

After school, Gallo showed up at my house in a leather jacket reeking of pot. His dress shirt underneath was unbuttoned to reveal a gigantic metallic cross. He limped across our foyer in sweatpants without underwear.

I introduced Gallo to my mother and he winked at her with his glass eye.

I showed him the weights in the basement.

“Vinyl weights? That’s so weak, Smith. But I like the squat stands. Fucking Dan Lurie. You know, he was supposed to be Lou Ferrigno’s understudy for the Incredible Hulk.”

“Cool. You ready to lift?”

“I need a ruler,” Gallo said. “I gotta measure the handgrip position and make sure it’s even on both sides.”

“Richid can I speak to you?”

I hated being interrupted by my mother.”

“Mom, do we have a ruler?”

“Richid. Come upstairs.”

I left Gallo behind to set up the weights and went upstairs.

“I don’t like the looks of that kid,” my mother said.

“Mom, stop judging my friends.”

She handed me an envelope. “You also have mail from a collection agency.” 

I lifted weights with Gallo for over an hour and we didn’t lift much. After each set we had to wait while he painstakingly measured the distance between hand positions on the bar.

“You don’t want it uneven, otherwise one arm will be stronger than the other,” he said.

I didn’t criticize Gallo, but I had watched Irving Ackerman lift and it only took him a minute between sets. Maybe that’s why Irving was huge and Gallo wasn’t.

I decided this would be the last time we would lift together but Gallo called me the next night and the night after and every day asked if we would lift after school. My mother continued to complain that he was a creepy kid and a bad influence, and despite all the lifting I never got any bigger because we spent most of the time measuring our hand positions. I was afraid to tell Gallo to stop calling me, so I went along with it until one night when he called, instead of asking me to lift, he asked if I wanted to go to a party.

I said yes but made the mistake of telling my parents.

“You’re not going to a party with that kid,” my mother said at the dinner table.

My father grabbed another lamb chop. “Which kid?” 

“The kid with the weights,” said my mother.

“You mean the kid that comes over every day? The kid with the cross and the glass eye who refuses to wear a jock strap?”

“Yeah. That kid.”

“That kid means trouble. Forget about it.”

 “That kid is best friends with Irving Ackerman,” I said. 

Everyone knew Irving. At least everyone Jewish did.

“Irving’s huge,” said my father. 

“That gentile kid doesn’t look like an athlete,” said my mother.

“Irving’s an athlete,” said my father. “He’s a wrestler. He doesn’t have collection agencies coming after him. I don’t want you going to any parties. Have the party here.”

“No way,” I said and stormed away from the table. 

But, I thought about it. If I had a party, Irving Ackerman would most certainly come, and he would see my squat stands. Hopefully he would be impressed.

“I’m having the party at my place,” I told Gallo the next day. We were on the exit ramp where the cool people in school smoked cigarettes. I didn’t smoke cigarettes but speaking with Gallo gave me an excuse to hang out there. 

“You think people will come?” I asked, but I was really referring to Irving Ackerman.

Gallo blew smoke out of his mouth sideways, in the opposite direction of his drifting glass eye. “People might come,” he said. “Will your parents be home?”

“Of course not,” I said, preparing for the argument with my parents.

“We have to be home,” said my father. “Otherwise it’s illegal for you to have a party.”

I knew this wasn’t true.

“We promise not to bother you,” said my mother.

“I just have to warn you,” I said. “Some of the kids smoke cigarettes, and there may be beer there.”

“We weren’t born yesterday,” said my father. “Just use common sense.”

Unlike the parties these kids were used to, I presumed my house was different. I had “a finished basement.” They were used to sitting around on bridge chairs next to an oil burner.

I set up the stereo I earned as a gift after my Bar Mitzvah, with the turntable on top and the 8-track cassette player. 

My mother wanted to hang crepe paper decorations. I nixed that.

“It’s a party for cool people,” I said. “Not a sweet-sixteen.”

I was delighted to see how quickly the tough kids swarmed in. Soon it was smoky, loud and crowded.

At the peak of the party, and fashionably late, Irving Ackerman arrived with Gallo limping down the stairs behind him.

Irving Ackerman saw everyone guzzling Rolling Rock and Miller light. He saw the bucket of Alabama Slammers I mixed in a garbage can as well as Theresa Milliken vomiting into a paper bag in the corner of my basement. Immediately he smiled.

Gallo pointed at my squat stands and Irving nodded his approval.

I handed Irving a beer and he shook my hand.

I blasted Emerson Lake and Palmer.

“Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends. We’re so glad you could attend come inside come inside.”

 Joey, the biggest burnout in the class, asked Gallo to watch his beer while he was taking a pee.

Gallo nodded, placing the bottle on the table next to him. “Yeah, I’ll keep my eye on it,” he said with a laugh, and reached to yank out his glass eye—but Irving stopped him.

Doors slammed.

People made out. Everyone smoked weed. There were joints and pipes and even a bong.

Joey switched on Black Sabbath, sandwiching his head with my Bar Mitzvah speakers blasting Iron Man into each ear.

Things spiraled out of control.

The smell of pot drifted up through our wilting ceiling.

People fought to get into the small basement bathroom pounding on the aluminum shower and it sounded like thunder.

In the laundry room, someone made a torch out of a can of Wizard toilet spray, singeing my mother’s negligee.

Kids carved their initials in the bathroom door. Someone shellacked my father’s college pennant. Foam rubber torn from our couch rained like confetti.

Out of desperation, I went upstairs to seek advice from my parents.

“What the hell’s going on down there?” asked my father. “Are people smoking marijuana?”

“I’m not sure,” I lied. “Maybe.”

“Everyone has to leave now.”

“I can’t just ask everyone to split,” I said. “It’s the middle of a party.” 

“They’re destroying our house.”

Ending the party seemed very uncool, but I knew my parents were right.

“If you don’t ask them to leave,” my father said, “I will.”

My mother shrugged. “Just tell them someone called the police.” 

“Yes,” said my father, “the cops are on the way.”

I spread the word.

“The pigs are onto us,” said Gallo. “Party’s over.” He and Irving were the first to leave.

Eventually everyone was gone, except for Tomlinson, a short, shy kid still hiding in our cedar closet. My mother dragged him out by the ears.

The basement simmered like a crater after a mortar blast.

That Monday after the party I was kind of popular at school. I had trashed my entire basement and supposedly the cops visited. Apparently this met the very definition of a cool party.

I hung out with the smokers on the exit ramp between periods and some of the cool people even acknowledged me.

A car screeched in the distance, tires shredding over asphalt and Gallo pulled up in his souped up Camaro. The passenger window lowered and Irving Ackerman waved me over, tan and handsome in sunglasses. Up close, the leather of his jacket was soft and grainy, a much higher quality than Gallo’s. He was drinking a beer.

“Great party, Smith,” he said. 

A compliment from Irving Ackerman.

“Thanks for coming,” I said. “It was a cool time.”

“Very cool,” said Ackerman. “Here,” he said. “Finish the beer. We should lift sometime.”

“That would be great,” I said holding the beer as the car screeched away and for the first time in a while, I felt oddly victorious, even invincible. 

But fifteen minutes later I was suspended for the possession of alcohol on school property; suspended for holding a beer handed to me by the one kid I truly idolized.

And three months after that, Gallo was on the local news, arrested for trying to steal a safe from our elementary school.

I never lifted with Ackerman. A year later I left for college and my parents gave away the squat stands.

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CALCULUS by Calvin Westra

January 5, 2022

Last to first, his girlfriend dumped him, he did not get the job, his accent sailed out the window of my car, and he sneezed harder than I’d ever seen before.

It was an incredible sneeze, the kind that has you spitting and slobbering over the windshield, catching your breath, feeling like something knocked the wind out of you.

We watched as the accent flapped over the median, through oncoming traffic, and off among the tumbleweeds.

I said, “Is that what I think it is?”

And he said, “Yeah, that’s right. My accent.”

It was a horrible accent and I’d never before heard him speak without it. It was like he was trying to imitate some British politician or celebrity or it was like he was trying to imitate someone who imitated a British politician or celebrity.

If he got too excited it went all over the place. He’d be telling a joke and out of nowhere he was John Cleese on research chemicals.

But I had never heard him speak without it so I had kind of thought it was real.

We pulled to the shoulder and searched for the accent but it was a windy day and it was clearly not coming back.

“That accent is long gone, bro,” I said and he told me he couldn’t do the job interview without it.

I told him the airport Starbucks probably would not care if he didn’t have an accent. I told him he might even be better off without it.

I didn’t have to tell him how important getting this job was because, like me, he had been wiping his ass with old magazine pages for weeks. But I told him anyway and I reminded him that earning a paycheck would mean returning to the world of luxury, of on-demand toilet paper.

He had gotten up early that morning, before the sun had dragged itself out, and he had been slamming all of our vodka and referring to it as “morning vodka.”

He had also smoked the last of our weed, taking massive hits out of the ice cream maker he had fashioned into a bong.

On top of that, we had pooled all of our change and used it to buy almost a gallon of gas.

And here we were, on the side of the highway, considering turning back.

He somehow knew he wouldn’t get the job but I didn’t believe him so I drove him to the interview anyway.

He was right, he didn’t get the job. He swore to me his whole life was over now, without the accent.

Next his girlfriend dumped him.

She called him mid afternoon the next day and told him she wanted to take a break. The last few times she had been at our apartment she had complained about things like how we didn’t have toilet paper or that he smelled pretty bad and wouldn’t ever shower, even when she hinted at it politely. He smelled like old socks (her words), ground beef (my words), and weed (objective).

“It’s the accent,” he told me. His eyes were huge and wet and red. He stared a thousand miles into the future and explained to me that without the accent all he would ever be to people was his stutter, his GED, his greasy hair, his inability to read social nuances, and so on.

He told me that I could not fathom all the things he knew about Calculus, while I sat at the desk we shared, trying to fill out my own job applications.

Hand to God, brother, I know unfa-fa-fathomable things, is exactly what he said and how he said it.

He had this job application on the desk and it had little boxes for your education: where you went, the years you went there, your graduation date, and your major. In hard to read cursive he had written his high school major as Calculus.

In reality, he never finished high school. He had dropped out because “it was just fights and bullshit.” If you didn’t want to eat shit every day you got your GED and that’s what he did.

Since I had first moved in with him, he had spent every afternoon scaring up weed at the park.

It took him all day but he could show up with whatever change he found in the couch cushions and hustle people for stems and seeds, for residue, for whatever. He would huddle over park benches and playground equipment waiting for people to pass him by. As soon as someone neared him a disconnected sentence would shoot from his mouth and straight into the mind of the person.

He could say anything he wanted. He didn’t even know what he was saying. But words slipped past his crooked and broken teeth and fluttered on the breeze, gently rocking and waving through the air until they found the right angle to slip into some bystander’s brain.

And what do you know, sure enough, that person had come to the park specifically to buy whatever stems and bullshit he was trying to sell for ten dollars or they had crossed town specifically to sell him whatever random shit weed excess they might have in a baggy somewhere on their person, for whatever change he was offering.

People served him for whatever pennies and nickels he was holding in his outstretched hand. People bought whatever weed-adjacent garbage he was offering at whatever price he named. He could talk the sun into orbiting the earth, so long as he didn’t think about it too much.

Back at the apartment, we smoked whatever he had scavenged. His fingers always spilling out of his hoodie holding “one last roach” that formed from the dust in his pockets.

“You can’t even fathom all the things I know about Calculus,” he says. He holds accumulated quantities. We smoke the weed his patience buys.

First to last, he explains to me he needs to get his accent back and then he’ll get a job and then he’ll win over his now ex-girlfriend.

He calls her, briefly manic, to tell her how he is going to track the accent down, somehow inhale it back into his being. But she never returns the calls.

He turns depressive, withdraws, sits quietly with the ice cream maker in his lap, inhaling forever and then trying to talk to me about the accent with a lung and a half of smoke tumbling out as he does.

He draws imperceptible lines between how hard he sneezed and the way the hiring manager fixated on his GED. He stuttered too much, he admits, but only because he was nervous, only because he couldn’t stop thinking about his accent jerking around in the breeze like an abandoned bag, like a helium balloon wrestled free of a toddler’s grip.

He explains scientifically how all this bullshit is because of the accent or its absence and if I have questions, he says he isn’t explaining it well, the words just aren’t there. But there is truth, he promises me, to what he is saying.

It’s the accent’s fault or the mad winds that propelled its send off.

Those mad winds or the gods who sent them.

Those gods or maybe us, the bastards who named the gods. If he doesn’t think too hard while he explains, it makes a sense too perfect for me to even write.

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HOT SAUCE GLOW by Jody Rae

January 3, 2022

Is it true we’ll spend the next nine months across worn-down Neapolitan-chocolate-brown carpet that we tell ourselves we’ll cover with a rug, but never do? The cinder block walls are painted dried vanilla ice cream on warm pavement. Like a wound that won’t heal, the thick drapes won’t close all the way and they bleed a strawberry sunset over Wide Open Spaces, an autumn-tinged campus and the regal-yet-defunct Boise train depot. 

For a split second, I think you are giving me the cold shoulder when I come home from class and you are asleep with your eyes open and, yes, it is creepy. We never get enough sleep. Like a toxic love affair, we fight sleep and we crave it and we wrestle it and we yearn for it and we abandon it, and when we succumb to its gentle arms we never want to leave it again. 

How many nights will we spend under this popcorn asbestos ceiling that we drove thumb tacks into to secure our twinkle lights, talking late and vowing to hold each other fiercely accountable for the lives we want? Powerless to the sparkle lurking between shadows, we will go astray, wander into intersections and stumble into gutters, eventually finding our way back to what we wanted all along.

Will we remember the wall-mounted phone with the spiral cord you deformed while twisting it around your fingers, drunk-dialing your crushes and defending your Scottish name in a rapidly fading Canadian accent. Grayg? Trayv? 

There is a long line of boys outside our door for you, but before you go out on weekends, you leave sticky notes for yourself on the phone: Don’t Call [Current Crush]. And when you come home from the parties, you rip off the sticky note and crumple it in your hand while dialing. 

Will you ever remember taking the trash out? There is a garbage shoot down the hall, and I think, seven floors high, what a ride. We are very bad at taking out the trash, but we’ll get much, much better. 

You eat tacos from the top-down as opposed to coming in from the side. While earnestly and sincerely discussing angels and ghost theology, there is Jack in the Box hot sauce staining the corners of your mouth in an upward arc. While you speak, leaning close to my face, I think of the Joker. Years from now, I’ll learn about the Black Dahlia murder, and I’ll know exactly what a Glasgow smile looks like. Well, you are Scottish, after all. I’ll recognize the description of the image without needing to look it up online (don’t Google it). It’s Jack in the Box hot sauce without a napkin.

While I neatly arrange items on my desk like a still life painting, your desk displays unfolded laundered underwear, a case of diet coke, stray spiral notebooks and highlighters, Kraft Easy Mac dinners, and text books that never move all semester (they don’t need to). You wake before dawn to run stadiums with your soccer team, then come home to write a Women's Studies paper the night before it’s due. You’ll get an A.

We’ll tell each other a lot of things, but one thing I never tell you is that time I saw your crush at a party, cornered him on the beer-slick stairway, and threatened: “Heyyyyy, so good to see you, [Redacted]. Hey, listen if you ever Steal Her Sunshine I swear to god I’ll [redacted] and your mother will cry when she sees what I’ve done to you,” and his face went slack and, yes, it was creepy of me, but y’all hooked up anyway, and as far as I know he had zero power to steal your sunshine so, as far as I know, he remains intact to this day. 

One night, religious visitors three doors down come in to stage what looks like an intervention for our friend in the next room. They speak quietly, kneeling on the Neapolitan chocolate carpet, while we strain to listen over our homework. You twist your hair between your fingers, sigh, and open a package of Oreos. “Should I do it?” you ask. I nod, not knowing what “it” might be, but knowing you should absolutely do whatever “it” is. You scrape Oreo cream onto your fingers and step into the other room where our friend is being held hostage by prayer warriors. With a straight face and steady voice, you hold out your hand and say to our friend, “Um. Josh stopped by to say hi, and wanted to give you this.” 

I nearly pee myself. The prayer warriors think we’re on crack, that’s how hard we’re laughing. You fasten a bra over your eyes, blinding yourself, and hop like a cricket through the hallway, knocking the wall-mounted phone off the wall. “WE’RE NOT ON CRACK!” you yell. The prayer warriors leave soon after, tiptoeing past as we wheeze and writhe over the chocolate ice cream floor. Our friend comes over to our side and says, “You’re dead for that,” and snags an Oreo.

These will be the happiest nights of my first eighteen years of life — this pocket of acceptance I can come home to, in between classes and meals and study labs. You say you love my red Hurley hoodie, so I’ll ship it to you someday. I’ll sip hot cocoa in a navy waffle knit maxi-skirt, rolled low at my belly, and in that moment you’ll startle and say that I remind you of a beloved Aunt. I will wish for time travel again and again over the next decade, if only to go back to that dingy, cozy laugh haven.

At a toga party, we wear matching sheets covered in blue and gray stars over jeans and tshirts, and a stocky football player mistakes us for junior highers. “Fuck you! Fuck you!” you yell at the offensive lineman who will be accused of rape soon. I laugh hysterically because I can’t fathom becoming an adult, plus my mouth is filled with braces and my hair is braided. Let’s go, girls.

Spring break that year, you come home with me to Santa Cruz. My mom drives us all over, and we wind up in Carmel-by-the-Sea, where we shriek at $1500 tshirts and then pretend we already own one. At a drugstore, we wait in line to buy Advil or something when you sigh and ask me, “When does Daddy want the Jag back?”. I say five. It is 4:50. A smartly-dressed, gray-haired woman ushers us to the front of the line so we won’t get in trouble with our fake father. We quickly pay and race to the parking lot, ducking in our seats while yelling for my mom to “just drive” her Toyota Tercel like a getaway car. That night, we watch “Brokedown Palace”, and I, for shit and all glory, would one hundred percent sell myself out to release you from a Thai prison, no matter the charge or sentence. Later, my mom says, “She’s just so witty”. How does one become so witty?

This was your idea: We’re with Holly in the drive-thru line at a flagship JBX, remember that bullshit?. Boise is such a hot drive-thru market, we warrant a hipster analog Jack in the Box, I’m so sure. Yet here we are, waiting so long, creeping toward the speaker box like a car full of would-be “SAW” victims. “How many tacos? Hello? Hello!” You’re out cold, sound asleep, a serene smile plastered across your glowing face.

Is it true that I won’t laugh this hard for another eight years? Yes. 

You always wanted to have two little girls. You have their names picked out. I always wanted to read a newspaper in my writer’s bungalow among mature trees, with eclectic throw pillows and a large hanging star lantern. 

We are very good at manifesting.

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STORYTIME by Robyn Blocker

December 31, 2021

What’s up, beautiful people?

So y’all know how when you type the first couple letters of an email address and a list of contacts pops up—all the ones that start with that letter? 

Like, imagine it’s “D” for Dave, the guy you’re hooking up with. Not Hot Dave with the boat or Quik Lube Dave with the ink, but the Dave whose brother OD’d back in ’99 at the rock pit behind the Big House. Right, Sad Dave. The Dave you send naked pictures to as an inside-joke cue that you want to buy from him. (Rumor alert! It was Pollie Carsen that gave Sad Dave’s brother that heroin!)  

Tonight you’re on the edge. You’ve deprived yourself of spontaneous self-destruction for eighty-nine days and can’t take another minute of good choices that only feel good because they’re hard. You ache to raise hell you’re too old for: to bust windows and noses, floor pedals, run reds, blaze bowls, break hearts, tag bridges and burn them and screw in the ashes. 

You’re gonna send Sad Dave some spank bank selfies, so you type “D,” but here’s what happens: since you’re always trying to do ten tasks at once to keep your mind off wonderful things that’ll kill you, you somehow get the cursor positioned one contact name below Dave’s, on the email of your daughter, the YouTube influencer who’s gotten big telling stories about her life, her day, her peeps, her fam, her world, and the social injustices in it. People love her for her self-awareness, her willingness to own her flaws, her unending desire to do the painful dirty work of fixing them.

Like Dave, her name starts with D. You were seventeen, still a silly romantic, when you had D’Laynie, and you wanted all your future kids to be D’s just like their daddy. He was not named Dave, but you’ve forbidden yourself from speaking his name ‘cause it’ll make you think of him, and that’ll make you cry. (Rumor alert! Pollie Carsen gave D-Boy herpes and smoked his first two child support checks before he died in a 4-car pileup on I-35!)   

You think, Hoooo girl, do NOT send those pics to D’Laynie. Think she hates you now? Just wait. You start to fix your error, to click UP back to Dave’s name. But of all the bad choices you could make right now, he’s the familiar one. What you want is to shut your eyes, squeeze your nose, and cannonball down into a moment whose depth you cannot gauge from this height. 

You close your eyes and click a name. Open eyes, but don’t look at who’s getting the pictures. Just SEND.  

You’ve maybe just bashed your life out on a new kind of rock bottom, and you feel more alive than you have in months. You sit back, take a selfie, delete it. Habit. (Your grandma Belle-Ruth always asks, “Who you trying to erase, girl?”) Finish your Diet Coke,  gargle, go to bed. And before sleep comes, think, There’s 90 days clean again, Pollie Carsen. Aren’t you getting tired of starting over?

*

Late morning. Wake up. Shit’s hit the fan. Four missed calls from Belle-Ruth. One voicemail. She says, “Pollie, honey, did you… say… something to D’Laynie? She’s gone and made a…You know what? Just come over.”

 Heart pounding, you check your inbox. Nothing. For one moment, you think the pics went to Sad Dave after all. You check your Sent mail. Wrong. She got them. 

You go to D’Laynie’s YouTube page. She has 100K subscribers and a new profile pic, a dramatic ¾ silhouette of herself on the balcony of the Austin apartment she shares with two friends. Looking good: sunlight glowing on honey-golden skin. Tall and twiggy. Red lips, teeth perfect. Cold-shoulder white blouse and huge, yellow-mirrored shades. Great hair. His hair, his general look. No shit. As if your radioactive redheadedness could have elbowed its way past D-Boy’s black curls. Recessive genes, you think. Recessive. Recede. Back away. Back away from your baby in every way and stay far, far away.

What happened was this: you fucked up bigly. Hid meth in her diapers, left her alone while you partied. Shit like that. 

When your mom adopted her and kicked you out, you went on a grand couch-surfing tour of all the drug dens in the county. At some point, you realized, Shit, this is bad! Got clean.  Moved in with your grandma Belle-Ruth out in the sticks. Realized, Shit, I’m a mother! Presented sober self to mom and begged to see D’Laynie. Got permission. Freaked out. Showed up high to special arranged lunch. Permission revoked. Got clean again. Finally got lunch with D’Laynie, but by this time she was old enough to give you THE most devastating burns to grace the air this side of the former Mason Dixon Line. (Girl already had a way with words!) Got unclean, the dirtiest of uncleans. Belle-Ruth said, Get clean, darling. You said, Not this time, B.R. Went to your mom’s house, pointed a gun at her in the kitchen and strongly suggested she give you money, not realizing D’Laynie was hiding in the bathroom with the house phone, adding a real doozy to the list of bad moments involving her mess of a mama. 

There’s more, but it’s a rinse-and-repeat-for-fifteen-years kind of thing, if you get me?

So look. Here’s where we stand now: When anyone asks, you say you’ve seen, like, three of D’Laynie’s videos. Hey, you’re not some estranged-daughter-stalker weirdo! And hey, who’s got that kind of free time, right? Hah hah!

Straight talk, though? You are that stalker weirdo, you do have that kind of free time, and you’ve watched every woke public service announcement, storytime, and social commentary D’Laynie ever made until you could imagine how it’d be to chill with her on a couch in an alternate reality where you never screwed up: girl-talk, green smoothies, yoga, and a general veneer of intimacy so foreign to you that you can only insert it in your fantasies through symbols: y’all get the same color nail polish by accident; you know when she’s due for a period, an oil change, a new boyfriend, a new girlfriend, another round of under-eye filler (“Storytime: Yes I’m Vain, Yes I’m Working On It, Until Then I No Longer Look Exhausted.”)

Two weeks ago, upon discovering just how much time you spend watching D’Laynie’s videos, Belle-Ruth suggested you take a two-week break from online stalking (“Not healthy, honey.”) Now it occurs to you that the beginning of your D’Laynie withdrawal coincided with the beginning of a steep increase in reckless behavior: skipping brushing. Not checking if you got your house keys before you go out to your car. Unprotected sex with Sad Dave. Sending nudes to your daughter. 

D’Laynie’s posted four new videos since the last time you lurked: “I’m a Feminist but I’m Trying to Get Thicc;” “Storytime: My Indian Trip Showed Me I Was a Materialistic Brat”; “Storytime: I Adopted a Rescue Dog!;” and “Storytime: My Mother.” 

Your heart: one half plummets with shame, the other soars with unexpected hope. You’ve thrown an explosive at your daughter, and if nothing else, it’s blasted a hole in your irrelevance to her.

Pace. Breathe. Push play on “Storytime: My Mother,” and there’s your girl frowning at her lap in devastating silence, face scrubbed, eyelids naked and pallid, hair wrapped in a green silk scarf. Night face. Vulnerability face. God, you’ve missed her face. Voice husky with feeling, she goes: “Yeah, I…don’t even know how to start this one…” and cuts and tries again. 

It’s 22.36 minutes long. You watch it all. Belle-Ruth calls you twice. Decline. Decline. All your attention is balanced on this moment. You’re absorbed in the words D’Laynie is choosing for your story: “Small town, infamous juvenile delinquent, teen mother, high school dropout, substance abuse, constantly in jail or rehab, self-destructive, scary, broken promises, a parasite, a liar, a leech on my great-grandmother, pathetic…”

Her anger sings from the screen. She holds nothing back: all your antics and trespasses. But for whatever reason, she’s chosen not to mention the most recent terrible thing you’ve done: your body: her inbox. And she finishes the story with this: I want to forgive her, and I will one day, but not yet. And when I do, it will be for me, not for her.

You try to remind yourself that this is not good. This is a screwup. This is endgame kind of shit, and yet you still have the perverse sense that it’s a beginning. D’Laynie’s either thinking about you right now or trying hard to push you out of her mind. This is more than you’ve had with her since the long-ago days when you could have had everything. Fuck, man, this is something.

*

Three minutes later, you’re rounding off onto the gravel drive of the Big House, a red brick testament to old money that finds its way to you only in the conditional drops and driblets that Belle-Ruth’s good sense allows. With more money, you’d be dead. With less, panhandling up in town at the V.A. hospital, the Baptist Church, the Quik Lube, Buck’s BBQ.

A portion of these Carsen driblets finances your pick-up, another portion the single-wide trailer you live in a quarter mile behind the Big House. Your trailer’s next to a cluster of sun-bleached rocks and the lake where, twenty years ago, thirty teenagers drank and smoked and swam for your eighteenth birthday while Sad Dave’s brother laid down in the bed of his F-150 and never woke up. 

 Belle-Ruth’s sitting up on the balcony that runs the length of the second floor, hand shading eyes, batwing sleeve hanging down to her hips. She’s as skinny as you yet favors voluminous, gauzy tunics that billow, float, and alight on her bones with the deliberation of a butterfly landing on a barbed wire fence. “It’s the Pisces in me,” she always says of her fluttering clothes. To this, you always reply, “You old ho! How’d you fit a Pisces in there?” Gets her every time. 

At the kitchen table, you and Belle-Ruth break the silence at the same moment. 

You: “So, I watched it.”

 Belle-Ruth: “Did you see it?” 

“Jinx!” you say.

Belle-Ruth waits for more. When nothing comes, she smacks her little pink lips and sets down her coffee cup. “Pollie, why’d D’Laynie just up and make that out of the blue? What put you on her mind?” 

You meet Belle-Ruth’s eyes and shrug. “Beats me. Maybe she saw an Amtrak go off rail and hit a bus and was like, ‘Hey! Speaking of trainwrecks…’”

“Hey, now, none of that,” Belle Ruth says. She fixes her sleeve, which has flopped up inside-out over her elbow like the ear of a hound, and frowns. “You didn’t say anything to her?” 

“In response?”

“Beforehand.”

“Nuh-uh.” You take a big sip of coffee to wash down this bullshit. “Maybe she just needed to vent. Maybe the pain was building up in her and went kaboom last night.”

Belle-Ruth’s pink lips pucker into an angry little bubblegum-like wad. “Hell, honey, that pain was at the bottom of her lake. She dredged it up herself for the Internet for some thumbs up.” She shakes her head. “I gotta say, I’m disappointed. First that stupid tattoo, now this.”

You fix breakfast while Belle-Ruth takes her shower. When the food’s on the table, you take out your phone and check the comments on “Storytime: My Mother.” The most recent are:

 “Incredible how one of the kindest humans on earth came from a selfish bitch.”

“Your mother is a narcissist.” 

 “Hugs to you, D’L! You are SO strong! Anytime you forget just remember you ARE NOT LIKE HER.”

“Forget her. Some people are just toxic, and if healthy people try to love them, they get poisoned.”  

D’Laynie’s pinned her own comment to the top of the scroll: gratitude for everyone’s kind words and a call on her fans to donate to a substance abuse research institute. 

You close the app. Something’s trying to get your attention. It’s in your head, positioned right behind your conscious thoughts at pervy proximity. You know what it is, and that’s why you won’t turn your full attention to it. You take a selfie and delete it. Maybe Belle-Ruth’s right. Maybe your selfies are a thing, like you’re trying to delete more than pictures. Or maybe you’re just trying to see what the universe, your sole and constant audience, sees whenever you pretend to ignore the thing in your head that wants you to look directly at it. The wanting.

In her video “Storytime: How I Learned to Stop Feeling Superior for Being Agnostic,” D’Laynie concluded, “What I believe, and this is just my belief, okay? Is that the universe, God, or whatever you’re called upon to name it, is deaf. It doesn’t hear prayers, thoughts, hopes, or wishes. It only sees the effects of what we do and say to other people on Earth. Get it? Doing and saying are how we petition the universe. So please, leave a comment and tell me: what are you doing on Earth, and why are you doing this?” 

What are you doing? You’re digging up the number for D’Laynie you’ve had buried deep in your phone for years—the number you filched once from Belle-Ruth’s handwritten contact book and never dialed. 

You’re hitting Call on the number, and you’re waiting and shaking. The third ring gives way to an electronic screech and an out of service notice.

Now what are you doing? You’re starting an email to Sad Dave. (No texts on days he’s got his kid.)  Lifting your shirt, unclasping your bra, taking a pic of your boobs. 

Why are you doing this? Because the gravity is strong around the old rabbit hole. 

You never send the email because a clatter of rolling thumps and a scream comes from the direction of the stairs. You run for the sound, and there’s poor little Belle-Ruth sprawled on the landing, groaning terribly, face twisted in pain, ankle fractured.

*

 Standing outside the open door of Belle-Ruth’s hospital room, you overhear your mom advise her to recover in a nursing home, where she’ll be taken care of by “good, trained people who know what they’re doing.” 

Belle-Ruth will have none of that. “Pollie will do just fine, thank you.”

“Pollie?” your mom’s voice brays in a tone suggesting they aren’t talking about the same person. “Pollie will cook? Clean?” She lowers her voice. “Not steal your painkillers?”

A blue-scrubbed nurse walks by in the corridor where you’re lurking. You recognize her from high school, and judging from her uh-oh look, she obviously recognizes you—the  “most likely” for all unprintable yearbookisms. 

“Hey, how you doing?” you say. 

She shakes her head and keeps walking. 

When Belle-Ruth gets discharged, you move into the Big House with her. Note to self, you think on your first night. Don’t steal painkillers.

You first shacked up here at seventeen, after your dad threw a suitcase at you while your mom swung a bawling D’Laynie up on her hip and screamed, “Go break your grandmother’s heart now that you’re done with ours!” 

Back then, you chose the bedroom at the very end of the hall so that Belle-Ruth wouldn’t smell your cigarettes. And if she ever got the inclination to eavesdrop on your phone calls, it’d be a lonnnnng walk from her room to yours—plenty of time for her to rethink her lack of trust in you. But now, this room reminds you too much of things that’ll ruin your life since you spent so much time here thinking of them, and this reminding immediately leads to a reflexive wanting. So this time, you choose the room that was your mom’s when she was a kid. The one you never entered, since it made you think of her. 

You’re lying in your bed in this clean, safe space one afternoon, taking and erasing selfies and debating whether or not to start re-stalking D’Laynie, when you hear the crunch of tires on gravel. You step out on the balcony and glimpse a blue hybrid wending through the tree-lined drive. 

Outside, you start down the sidewalk, passing rose trellis, birdbath, pissing-boy fountain, and the rusted remains of your childhood swimming pool—a repurposed cattle trough.

One rear door of the visitor’s car is open. A shadow moves in the backseat. At your approach, the shadow backs out and becomes a leggy girl in mom jeans and a vintage college-logo sweatshirt. She bends to flick a grasshopper off her leg, and you see that one side of her head is shaved to display a tiny tattoo of the words “Nothing but the Truth” on the scalp above her ear. 

“D’Laynie,” you say.

She turns to you, and your own reflection, fishbowl-distorted, peers out from the lenses of her yellow-mirrored sunglasses. 

Right when normal people would hug, you and your daughter square off and face each other across seven feet of deaf, watchful universe, kicking the silence back and forth with stony game faces. The spring air is neither hot nor cold, the sun’s effect a treat for Texans: blinding bright but not hot. “Yankee Sunshine,” Belle-Ruth calls it.  You never notice weather unless it’s extreme, but today, in this charged silence, the neutrality is screaming.

 D’Laynie finally tilts her head back. “’Sup, Pollie?” she says with an ironic I-don’t-really-say-words like ‘sup’ intonation.

“Hey,” you croak. “Why aren’t you in school?” 

D’Laynie winces and looks up at the sky, like Sky, can you believe this idiot? “Spring break?” she says. “Hello?”

“Ah, right. Well, what you doing way out here, girl?”

 “I want to say hi to GG.  Plus, Destiny needs to stretch her legs.”

Destiny needs to…Are you supposed to know what that means? Is it an allusion to your past, some poetic way to call a truce? You stare. D’Laynie gestures to the backseat. You look inside. Huddled on the floor as far from the open door as possible is a small white mop of a dog with an orange ribbon stuck to the front of its collar.

 “Hi, fwuffbucket!” you coo. The dog raises sad, guilty eyes, trembles, whimpers, tries to turn and bops her head against the door. You step away, look at D’Laynie, twist your body into an apology.

D’Laynie takes off her sunglasses, rolls her eyes, and says, “Nah, it’s fine. Everything scares her. That’s her thing.” 

*

 It takes D’Laynie a while to coax Destiny from the car. The trick is accomplished with a strategic combination of treats and ignoring. 

Entering the Big House is a blur in your memory. While D’Laynie and Belle-Ruth hug and greet, you step back and recede from the scene like a Victorian servant.

By the time D’Laynie is next to Belle-Ruth on the pull-out in the downstairs living room, telling her about the rescuing of dogs, you’re cross-legged on the floor getting sniffed up by Destiny. 

“And like, obviously, my followers are super supportive and motivating,” D’Laynie says. She frowns and scratches her head. “Wow. Okay. So I’m suddenly hearing how creepy that sounds. ‘My followers.’” 

“It sure does,” Belle-Ruth says, “but it’s not your fault that’s what they’re called, honey.” 

D’Laynie takes out her phone and starts typing. “Sorry, gimme a sec. Want to make a note about that.” 

“What’s the orange ribbon for on the collar?” asks Belle-Ruth.

 D’Laynie glances from her screen over to Destiny. “Oh,” she says, still typing, “that’s for awareness of at-risk-animals. She’s had so much trauma. Her first owners were these assholes who would hit her and kick her and stuff.” She finishes typing and puts the phone down. “Sorry, rude,” she says. “Yeah, then she had puppies, and they separated her from them too soon, and she got super anxious and would pee everywhere. Then she went to this guy who’s, like, all about rehabbing traumatized dogs. She got comfortable with him, but his boyfriend moved in, and Destiny was like ‘yeah nah, you suck’ and bit him when he was giving her food.”

Destiny is sitting now, gazing up at you. You think to her, Is this true? Do you bite the hands of the people who feed you?

 “Then she went to this lady who takes in lots of rescues,” D’Laynie goes on, “but they never accepted her in their pack for some reason, and she got really depressed and anxious and started nipping and destroying stuff, so back to the shelter. She got good again, but, you know, a lot of people aren’t comfortable adopting a dog with that kind of history. When I got her, she was on the Kill List.”

You cock your head at Destiny, think to her, Kill List sucks, don’t it, baby girl? She puts a paw on your knee, like Girl, don’t I know it?

 “Is that how she got her name?” Belle-Ruth asks. “‘Destiny?’”

“Ugh. I know,” D’Laynie says. “It sounds like a stripper name. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But that’s the name she knows, so I kept it. Hah. Not that it’s getting me any points. She’s never even jumped in my lap, dude. Not once. And she’s a lap dog. Sometimes she won’t even eat when I’m in the same room as her.”

“Aw, give it more time,” Belle-Ruth says. “What’s it been? A month?”

D’Laynie nods and frowns. “Yeah. Whatever, you know? My friend’s dog didn’t warm up to him for like, a year.”

You pipe up from your corner: “I was this close to naming you ‘Destiny.’” 

Everyone turns to you, even Destiny herself, who’d been engaged in a butt-scratch. You’re holding one hand up, index finger and thumb nearly touching. “Heads D’Laynie,” you say, “tails Destiny.”

Belle-Ruth squawks a laugh. 

D’Laynie yells, “Dude, no! I would never forgive you!” 

“It actually came up tails,” you add, “but I like to give fate a run for its money.”

D’Laynie pulls a pillow over her head, falls forward, face-plants into it charmingly, and gives a muffled scream. Destiny does not like that shit at all. She yelps and runs from the room like there’s a fire under her furry little ass. 

*

Lemme just say: the Big House is not the kind of place where you want to lose a tiny, freaked-out dog. Lotsa ins. Lotsa unders.

Destiny’s not in the downstairs bathroom; not under the kitchen, dining room, or pool tables, in the music room under the piano, in your late grandpa’s old office, or the laundry room.

“Upstairs, then,” you say, and D’Laynie’s expression darkens. 

“I forgot how huge this place is,” she says, following you up, adding in a softer voice, “You know, considering there are people in Hong Kong literally living in cages, it’s almost obscene.”

You have no clue what to say to this. “Destiny!” you call out. 

Destiny’s not under Belle-Ruth’s bed, the table with her sewing machine, or in the piles of wispy Piscean fabrics in the corner. Not in the attached bath, any of the bedrooms or closets on the back-facing side of the house, or the room that was yours twenty years ago, its carpet still littered with cigarette burns. You’re bending, stooping, crawling on all fours, craning neck. You’re invested. Not since hide-and-seek with your cousins have you searched so hard for something wholesome. An adventure—just you and D’Laynie! Today, you’re going to be by her side at the happy moment she finds her lost dog. From now on, every memory of the relief she’s about to feel will be associated with you. You’re shaking with giddiness, one dog away from bursting into laughter.

What’s weird is how D’Laynie talks nonstop as you search, remarking on even the unremarkable with the blasé fluency of a real estate agent high on cough syrup. “This room’s pretty except, ugh, drapes and ruffles everywhere, come on, GG, let’s exit the ‘80s, and ah, a bathroom that smells like Chanel No. 5 and ancient rolls of toilet paper. Leaving ruffles, we find ourselves in oh, look, it’s a Mad Men set.” 

At one point, she stops and interrupts this syrupy tour with an exclamation: “Where is she? This is seriously annoying!” It becomes plain as day to you that you’re the sole explorer on this mommy/daughter quest—your companion was never feeling it.

As you and D’Laynie enter your bedroom, the final unturned stone, you see what has happened and what will happen: your distracted ass left the balcony door ajar earlier. D’Laynie will find Destiny out there, gather her up, and leave. And nothing will be changed. Something epic was supposed to happen on this dog search but didn’t. Maybe it needed more time. Maybe one of you missed a cue, dropped a line. Or maybe one of you, sensing a portal to connection, bricked it up with words. 

Following D’Laynie out the balcony door, you think, Please, God, give me more time with her. The universe doesn’t hear prayers, though; it only sees what we do. What you do as you walk onto the balcony is turn the inside lock when pulling the door shut. You haven’t touched that lock in years. You don’t ask yourself which direction locks and which unlocks, don’t pause to test it. Maybe you’ll be lucky. Don’t pause to wonder whether locked or unlocked is lucky.

Destiny’s sitting on the far edge of the balcony, gazing at the pastures beyond like she’s considering buying the place. When D’Laynie approaches, she raises her hackles and growls. 

“Whoa. Okay, baby girl,” D’Laynie says. But her eyes don’t say okay baby girl to you. They say, Well fuck you, too, dog. “Gonna get her treats,” she says, and heads for the door. 

You put your hands on the rail, shut your eyes, flinch when you hear the clunk of the unyielding handle behind you. The sound reminds you of being handcuffed—not in the fun way. You wonder what is wrong with you, what possessed you, what did you expect?  

 “Uh. Pollie?” D’Laynie says. 

You try the handle yourself as if there’s some trick to it, then try the doors of the other two front-facing bedrooms. All locked.

*

So we’re waiting, right? And D’Laynie’s pacing at wedding procession speed. Step . . . swing arms . . . step. This gives her plenty of time at non-talking-distance from you. Eventually, at the opposite end of the balcony, she starts her favorite yoga flow from that video she uploaded last winter with her fitness friend. You watch from the other end, mirror neurons firing hard. You’ve followed along to that workout a million times. 

When her phone rings, D’Laynie leaps out of warrior pose and answers it. 

“Billy Reese!” Belle-Ruth, breathless, triumphant, announces over speaker. “Just got to the feed store over in town but’ll swing by here on his way home. Hot damn, I’m good. Second person I called!”

“How long?” D’Laynie asks.

“Oh. An hour, maybe?”

D’Laynie raises her head to the balcony roof and groans. “Dude, there’s nobody close?”

A pause.

“You . . .  are . . . welcome,” Belle-Ruth says, and oh shit, you hear it—tension, compaction, the mama-bear-in-the-box winding up. 

D’Laynie laughs. “Sorry. Thank you! It’s just what are we supposed to do out here for an hour?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Belle-Ruth answers in a sarcastic little tune. “Maybe chat? It’s not like you and your mother don’t have anything to talk about.”

“That’s interesting,” D’Laynie says, examining her fingernails. “And just what are we supposed to talk about?” 

“She saw the video, honey. Storytime. And believe me, I get it. She has not been an angel.” 

“Oh my God,” D’Laynie mouths, rolling her eyes. 

“But your mother’s trying to turn her life around, and putting the worst parts of her out there for the world like that so total strangers can kick her? Nuh-uh. Completely uncalled for.”

“GG, you ‘re cutting out,” says D’Laynie, her voice tight. “Can’t hear you. Call you back later.” She ends the call, tilts her head back, crosses her arms, and gives you a vinegary grin. “Uncalled for, huh?” 

 “I know,” you say. “I know.”

“For the record, I have nothing to say to you, there’s nothing I want to hear from you, and I’m not sorry for the video.”

“I know. You shouldn’t be. I deserved it.”

She makes an exasperated sound and flips her palm up. “It wasn’t for you. It wasn’t some punishment. It had nothing to do with you. It just happened to be about you.”

You nod. “I know.”

“Would you stop saying that?”

Destiny is zig-zagging across the balcony, button nose glued to the concrete. You sit in a deck chair and watch her stubby tail bloop back and forth in enjoyment of invisible ecstacies. “I just want you to know—” you begin.

D’Laynie claps loudly, and Destiny flinches. “Nope. Not happening,” she says. Her eyes are wide and locked to yours, mouth alternating between a grin and a grimace. The clap, you realize, was for you. You feel an anger you don’t have the right to feel, so you drop it and stomp it into ashes. 

“What’s not happening?” you ask.

“You and I are not talking.”

“So why did you come today?” you ask. “You knew I was here, right?”

D’Laynie looks like she’s trying to keep the lid on a wild laugh. “Yesssss, Pollie, yesssss. And that is the point. You really think people can trust you? Like people can just believe you’re not, like, I don’t know, getting high and trashing the house and begging GG not to say anything about it?” 

You’re offended, but you can’t be, so you’re not. You’re disappointed in your daughter’s meanness to you, but you can’t be, so you’re not. You’re sad that her on-screen persona is for everybody but you, sad you don’t count as an audience. Sad that the decisions you’ve made, even the ones you had no say in, have rendered you voiceless. You can be sad. Nobody minds you feeling sad. What you can’t do (because you did it too many times before, exploited it, manipulated and gaslit with it) is allow yourself the luxury of crying.

So you just nod and say, “Okay, well, that’s understandable. That’s fair.” 

Then this happens: Destiny zips past D’Laynie, jumps into your lap, and starts spinning out a comfy spot on your thighs. 

“Oh, come on!” D’Laynie says. “Seriously?” She puts her hands under Destiny’s belly and starts to lift (which you can tell right away is a big, big mistake, but you say nothing because your brain’s too busy learning what it feels like to be trusted this much). Destiny snarls and growls, flailing, enraged, squirming like she’s caught on a hook. D’Laynie, stunned by the reaction, holds her at arm’s length until Destiny manages one good twist that brings her jaws within snapping distance of D’Laynie’s skin. 

D’Laynie screams, drops Destiny back into your lap, and slaps the dog’s rump hard. Destiny’s response is a cry so angry, offended, and disappointed that you can almost feel it resonating in your own throat, a proxy for your disallowed feelings. 

Destiny scrambles up your body, climbing like you’re a cliff wall, claws scratching your chest. You don’t mind. You welcome it. This is the pain chain: You hurt D’Laynie, so D’Laynie hurt Destiny, so Destiny hurts you.  

When Destiny’s muzzle is next to your ear, you stroke her fur and tell her it’s okay. Her orange ribbon is coming loose. Don’t fix it. Let D’Laynie notice it and see it as symbolic and feel punished by it.

D’Laynie has backed away. She breathes fast in choppy bursts. “I am so sorry,” she whispers. “I don’t know why I did that. I swear I have never, ever done that.”

You raise your eyebrows, and D’Laynie shakes her head as if the brows had spoken. She raises her arms up over her head, guilty hands open wide, eyes pouring. “How could I do that? What is wrong with me? Why did I do that?”

There I am in her, you think. You want to wound her, just a little. 

 “Because you’ve done everything right,” you say, “everything you were supposed to, but she still doesn’t like you, and that pisses you off.”

“No,” D’Laynie says. There’s more fight in this word than is warranted, and you know that you were right. She has been punished. 

Speak her language, you think now. You can do it, you’ve seen every upload. You know exactly who she wants to be. “You’re not used to not being liked,” you say, “because you’re an honest-to-God amazing person who gets treated like one most of the time. But this dog’s giving you insane shade that probably feels pretty personal, so it’s screwing with your self-esteem and your mental health.”

For a second, she looks like she’s about to tell you you’re an idiot, but instead drops to the ground and buries her face in her hands. “Oh my God,” she says. She cries a little, then laughs a little about the crying. She raises her head, wipes her face, says, “You’re actually right, dude. How are you actually right? Like, how did you know that?”

You know how, but you don’t tell her—not then, at least. You know because Destiny’s a creature in stories, and so are you, and there’s nothing more enraging than a difficult character who doesn’t understand they burned out the audience long ago—that it’s time to end happy now so that everyone who rooted and fought for them through all that drama gets the warm fuzzies they deserve. 

Instead of answering, you say, “You should give her to somebody else.”

 “I can’t,” she answers into the back of her hand. “She’s been dicked around too much already.” 

“Hey, if this is how it is between you two, keeping her may be dicking her around, too.”

“But I can’t just tell everybody, ‘Oh, I’m gonna adopt this dog. This is the right thing to do, and I’m gonna do it,’ and then say, ‘Oh, never mind! It sucked. It was too hard.’ Do you have any idea how that would look? Like, what kind of message would that send to everybody?” She rubs a hand through her hair slowly, thinking, and adds, “Plus, like, that poor dog.”

You’re about to ask, Who is ‘everybody?’ Who’s looking? but then remember there are thousands of everybodies for D’Laynie, countless souls who get off on watching her be an amazing human being. 

Out on the road ahead, the red pick-up truck of Billy Reese, your rescuer, is moving toward the Big House turn-in.

“I’ll tell you what you do,” you say. 

*

The sun just set. D’Laynie still has an hour-long drive ahead, but she had to charge her cell. Now she’s walking around Belle-Ruth’s kitchen positioning items, reconsidering, shifting them an inch to the left or right: Destiny’s leash and harness heaped nonchalantly on the kitchen table (but not so nonchalantly that you couldn’t recognize them for what they are in a single glance); bag of dog food in a corner of Belle-Ruth’s pantry, label conveniently smoothed out and readable; Destiny in her plush bed in the middle of the kitchen floor—obviously not the bed’s forever-space, but suitable for the opening montage of what needs to be D’Laynie’s most powerful, transcendent, realest storytime ever—the live-streamed tale of how two scared, struggling, at-risk souls found comfort and courage in each other, and how, without even trying to, they showed the world they belonged together. 

You wheel Belle-Ruth over to a spot that will be off-camera. “Sure you wanna do this?” she asks. She’s looking at you, but it’s D’Laynie who answers:

“Oh, absolutely. It’s best when the feels are still steaming.” She unplugs her phone from the charger, licks her lips. “Ready, P?” she asks—voice encouraging, eyes a little worried. Maybe she knew Belle-Ruth was talking to you and didn’t want you to have time to consider take-backs.

You nod. “Ready.”

She counts down from three and hits Record. You and Belle-Ruth stay hidden as D’Laynie walks softly around the kitchen, silent, camera taking in everything dog-related. Good stuff. You can feel the mystery already. 

When she’s got it all, D’Laynie sets the phone on top of a coffee can, sits at the kitchen table, smiles, waves with both hands, and says,

“What is up, my beautiful people? What you just saw is not my kitchen, but yes, that is my dog, Destiny. You guys will not believe what has happened! I . . . have got a story . . . for you. Where do I even start? Um, okay. First, you guys know it’s spring break . . .”

While D’Laynie goes on, you start thinking about stories, how people always fuss about finding the true one. As if every situation’s got one real version out there the universe accepts as gospel. As if there aren’t different interpretations, different storytellers, villains becoming heroes and funny parts becoming sad parts with a single switch of perspective.

As if the universe listens to stories at all and doesn’t just stare at our hands and hearts, like, Hey, creature, what are you doing, and why?   

“ . . . and then I got locked on a balcony in the middle of nowhere for an hour and a half with Destiny and Pollie. Y’all already know Destiny. Well, this . . . is Pollie.” 

On cue, you walk into the shot, sit down next to D’Laynie, and wave. But your heart sinks: you barely recognize yourself. You look no different than usual, yet you look so wrong on your daughter’s screen. Why are you next to her? What did you do? What the hell is this? Whatever it is, you can’t hold onto it. Too much. Too soon. Something in you will fuck this up or die trying. You need the familiar, a return to status quo, despite the horrors that live there. 

In the last moments before your story begins, you know exactly what you’ll do when you finish telling it: text Dave some skin.

It’s okay. Maybe you won’t open the bag. Maybe you’ll just hold it. 

You’d never just hold it.

Oh, no. Are you doing this again? You’re gonna do this again. 

Please, please, please, universe, leave me a comment and tell me not to do this again. 

“Pollie!” D’Laynie says, turning to you, sparkling with forgiveness. “What do you want to say to all the beautiful people out there?”

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SCHOOL OF HARD KNOX: A Conversation with DuVay Knox by Charlene Elsby

December 30, 2021

DuVay Knox is the author of Soul Collector (Creative Onion, 2021) and The Pussy Detective (Clash Books, forthcoming 2022). In his author bio, he writes, “I cum outta The South, by way of Louisiana and Tennessee… RUMOR has it I was born from The last Nut in My Daddys Sack. And came into this world when HE came. Needless to say/My Birth was Traumatic. Thus, I arrived here with an Attitude. The Doctor Slapped Me and I slapped Him Back. And So my Journey began. To Find Myself.”

I received an advance copy of The Pussy Detective from Clash Books. Within the pages upon pages of unabashed pussy appreciation, I found a portrait of a man devoted to mitigating the damage done to people by other people (and the desperation of those who would turn to such a stranger, when it seems all hope is lost.)

This interview was conducted as an email exchange in December 2021.

Charlene Elsby: Mr. Knox, your publications to date include Soul Collector and The Pussy Detective. Now it might be reductive to say your topics are sex and death, but the themes are definitely there. What I'm wondering about is the spiritual aspect, as it seems that within your work, sex and death are both conduits to a kind of beyond. Is there another realm behind our material world, and how and when can we access that?

DuVay Knox: Deep Q. Butt yeah DEATH is sho nuff another REALM. And when it cums to SEX the FRENCH say, in particular, dat The ORGASM is LE PETIT MORT aka The LITTLE DEATH. Having been a SEX ESCORT in Europe, among otha countries, Sex continues to play a part in mah Books. Especially the TRAUMA dat often accompanies COPULATION as part of a RELATIONSHIP dat SOURS—Or as a result of ABUSE. Meanwhile, much of mah life was like growing up in a WAR ZONE where I lost many of mah FRIENDS & RELATIVES To DEATH. And they were always wondering WHY? Why were these peeple TAKEN frum them? So much of mah WRITING is a NOVELISTIC attempt to address this issue.

CE: Deep answer. That was actually something I was planning to ask you about—that when I read The Pussy Detective, I was surprised to find the voice was so empathetic. I don't think it would spoil the book to talk about the reason the narrator gives for why women seek out the skills of the narrator. (Their pussy lost its magic on account of some bad man). It seems to me like you've had some really influential women in your life. Now that I'm thinking about it, I don't recall a single other male character with whom your character carries on a conversation, or who factors into the story significantly—not counting that fuck Greasy, of course. It's almost like you've got a source on women's psychology on the inside. Care to comment?

DK: Hmmmm. Had a good relationship wit mah Mama. Plus, I was married for 25-plus years (not all good....butt STILL we hung in there and did what we had to do). Then too: I slung dick as an escort for a number of years round Europe as a young man in the AIR FORCE. So I have spent many nites jes LISTENING to women. So much of the PUSSY DETECTIVE was based on THOSE S/experiences: what they talked about in regards to men folk. Imma good listener (so I have been tole).

CE: I have some quotations underlined, just because they remind me of various things I've read in philosophy. There's this mention of the pineal gland, which Descartes said was the source of thoughts, and which you identify as connected to the clitoris (which is the gateway to a woman's subconsciousness). Then there's a "SACRED HYSTERIA no womayne shood ever Sexperience--UNLESS she is giving dat thang up to the RITE muthafucka." And the idea that "KARMA Is Also a SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASE." You talk about majick, demons and gods. It looks to me like you've got a consistent and coherent spirituality that informs the whole theory of the book--and the ritual that Reverend Daddy Hoodoo conducts on Abysinnia. Are these beliefs to live by, or just part of a fiction?

DK: Years ago, back in the late 70s, when I started studying the CLITORIS (cuz I wanted 2 B thoro when it came to fucking) I came across the info bout the CLIT being konnected to the PINEAL GLAND it cumpletely changed how I viewed SEX and WOMMIN. And especially DESCARTES along wit NIETZCHE/OSHO & PASCAL BEVERY RANDOLPH informed mah SEXUAL PHILOSOPHY. For example, Nietzsche stressed the importance of FRIENDSHIP over LOVE. Dat made an impression. The NAZIS really took his shit outta context. And OSHO was the guru of FREE LOVE "butt" always noted dat it had responsibilities. That led one day to mee writing the quote: KARMA KAN BE A SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASE dat I explain in da book.

Add all this 2 da fack dat I grew up in da Life of HOODOO (New Orleans/Mississippi) and SEX MAJICK/DEMONS & GODS of the REALMS where destined 2 B a part of mah life. So yes I LIVE BY THIS (and THESE) thangs. They R not jes lip service. I view SEX as a GATEWAY to HIGHER REALMS via RITUAL (wich is how I was taught to view it). So yes: I draw frum these aspecks 2 pull them into mah FICTION.

CE: I did a quick search through the digital copy of The Pussy Detective and found that you use the word "pussy" 113 times, but you also use "puss eye" 17 times. I think I understand these two concepts, but for those who haven't read the book yet, could you explain what the difference is?

DK: PUSS EYE was jes mah DADDY'S funny name to take da Sting outta dat werd. Southern slang if u will. So dat was kinda an honorarium to him.

CE: So you've been around a while—on the planet, I mean. But you've just started publishing. I want to know how that happened. There's a hint in your Pussy Detective dedication that there are two women who "never let me forget that I could write something folks would wanna read if I really put my mind to it." In your previous life, were you not writing (or not writing something folks would want to read)?

DK: Yeah-i been round da block a lil skeet taste. I wasn't publishing tho cuz I was bizzy writing as a freelance journalist for many of the Top Hiphop-Rap publications in the country/copywriting for ad agencies and doing standup comedy (werking wit a lotta Names in dat world including DAVE CHAPPELLE, CHRIS ROCK, BILL HICKS, NORM MACDONALD, DANA CARVEY and many others .... even almost had a job writing jokes for the CONAN O'BRIEN show). Butt I left standup comedy cuz dat particular hollywood industry is such a beast & slimy. 

I Slowly came to da thought of a writing a book after countless peeps telling me I should do it. A lotta dat encouragement came frum SLAM POETRY contests I useta compete in. AND da 2 women dat I hint at. Im kinda a Polygamist and have 2 Ladies in mah life hoo have been krucial and kritikal to mah success. Their motivation is what ultimately pushed me to git da books outta me and onto da page. In fack: MADAME X is based on one of them.

CE: How did you become acquainted with Marjorie Steele over at Creative Onion (who published Soul Collector) and then with Clash Books?

DK: Meanwile-I met MARJORIE STEELE when I was writing on MEDIUM round 2016-17. I was using da platform to write JOKES and SATIRE as well as SHORT STORIES and she took a liking to mah flow. She was one of mah most devoted followers. Later she tole me she was working on heading up her own PUBLISHING COMPANY and wanted to git mah shit out to the world. Tole her I was IN. She kept her werd. And on top of dat she is just damn good peeple. And GOOD PEEPLE in this Industry (let alone the werld) are hard 2 find. I will always be thankful 2 her for giving me a chance. Because where others were scared of mah RAWNESS she allowed me 2 B Unfiltered (which is the basis of mah Standup: rude/raw/offensive). She has never been afraid of mah FOUL MOUTH ways (profanity is mah 2nd Language).

CE: In the Soul Collector, the narrator collects souls, while in The Pussy Detective, the narrator finds lost pussies. I can picture both your books being episodic, i.e., they're both open to being serialized. Are you working on a sequel? (If so, can you give us any hints?)

DK: True dat. I wrote dem EPISODICALLY. Especially da SOUL COLLECTOR. I like mah TV/Movies da same way. I tend 2 think VISUALLY in da vein of COMICBOOKS when I write. I like dat old skool CLIFFHANGERS stile of writing/serialized shit (ala DICKENS). So yeah--im werking on SEQUELS for both books. Maybe simply The SOUL COLLECTOR #2 and/or the PUSSY DETECTIVE RIDES AGAIN (since he was always in his car going 2 rescue PUSS EYE).

CE: Finally, maybe you could tell me a little bit about Black Pulp Fiction Publishing House. What's your intention with that venture? What can we expect in the near future?

DK: BLACK PULP FICTION PUBLISHING HOUSE is jes mah attempt to resurrect a form/stile of writing dat deserves mo respeck than it has gotten. I think mah writing falls sumwhere between (altho inspired by) ICEBERG SLIM and GEORGE JACKSON wit nods to ZORA NEALE HURSTON & GAYL JONES (4 peeple hoo influenced mah own flow). 

Im also concentrating on re-introducing the koncept of short novels (novelettes) as I think peeps are tired of LONG ass novels. I know i hate books that mo than 200 pages (maybe dats mah ADHD). To dat end books Im writing/publishing will fall into the old skool POCKETBOOK size of 4x6 or 4x7 and not over 150 pages. Having been in advertising I think psychologically peeps are subjeck to buying a book they kan simply putt in their pocket/purse. It gives dem the feeling dat writing wont be a chore. The age of the DOORSTOPPER book is over. Meanwile: JAMES PATTERON is alretty on this trend wit his BOOKSHOTS series. A lotta of those books are 100 pages or Less. And Im heah 4 it.

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THE DOGS WENT BACK ON ALL FOURS by Evelyn Winters

December 29, 2021

The man went out to get the mail. He opened the mailbox and looked inside. There were envelopes and a magazine. The magazine was Gourmet. It was a monthly for his wife, but his wife was dead. The periodical people probably didn’t know she died. If they do find out will they cancel her subscription? he wondered.

The night’s air was brisk and clear. Walking weather. The street was quiet.

He was one of those sad men you see walking around with their eyes on the pavement. Trudged in the rain. Trudged under the sun. Dragging his feet. But now that his wife was dead he held his head high constantly alert, on the lookout for her whereabouts. There were times he swore he saw her sitting in a tree or hang-gliding above in the open sky, but it always turned out to be various breeds of birds: ravens, owls, songbirds, woodpeckers, vultures.

The man had an urge to bring the magazine to his wife, even if she turned out to be a bird. He crossed the street, straight ahead to the sidewalk. The street lamps gave intermittent light. Enough for him to read a few sentences. It was a cooking magazine. His wife used to cook the most amazing meals: Boeuf Bourguignon, Bouillabaisse, Crêpes Suzette, and always with gobbles of red wine.

The man imagined the writer of the articles to be his wife. Every published word was hers. He read as he walked, sometimes sticking his hand out to pull a leaf off a tree or pluck a rose from a rose bush.

Around midnight the neighborhood dogs began to follow him. They were nice, but had that look, as if they could turn into something completely different than Dog, perhaps another species altogether. The dogs spread out from sidewalk to sidewalk.

While walking (now in the middle of the street) he thought about his wife’s flat feet. She liked to put her big feet in the air when making love. He’d hitch her ankles over his shoulders and go to work.

“This is your job,” she’d say. “Fulltime.”

“Could use some benefits,” he’d say. “A 401k.”

“You can have it all!” she’d say, “Direct deposit.”

For mysterious reasons this sort of banter made them climax at the same time, every time.

As a kid the man was known for breaking things: lamps, windows, mirrors. But also other stuff like woodstove pipes, globes, doorknobs, and once he broke a piano key. He kept that key in his underwear drawer. He never got around to telling his wife why he kept it.

The man broke off a branch of a maple tree and busted a mailbox.

“I haven’t broken anything in so long,” said the man. “Feels good.”

Every time a mailbox fell the dogs would yelp.

The man decided to take the On Ramp to the highway. There wasn’t much traffic, but every so often a car would slowly swerve back and forth behind the dogs until ambling off the exit in defeat. The man didn’t care about drivers, he was on a mission to find his dead wife.

“She’s probably swimming in a clear blue ocean,” he said. “She loved to swim.” Then he closed his eyes and pictured her big flippers kicking the water behind her.

The man began walking on all fours.

“When you’re as broken as me you can walk on all fours,” he said. “Mind as well.”

He looked behind him and noticed the dogs up on their hind legs. When the man stood the dogs went back on all fours as if to rebalance the universe.

***

Around two in the morning a woman his height, his build, his exact gait, came beside and matched him stride for stride. Her hair was short like his. She was thin, but wore a yellow sun dress. Her breasts were on the smaller side.

“There you are,” he said. She looked like his cousin, Rosina. “I haven’t seen you since Christmas at Noni’s!”

“You used to look under my dress,” she said.

“It was the point of the game.”

“Those days are long gone,” she said, flicking his earlobe.

“God,” he said. “It’s like looking into the mirror.”

“Should we switch places?” she asked. “Just to see what would happen.”

“I’m in favor. Anyway, it seems like the right time to take a turn.”

The highway veered left. He looked behind him. The dogs’ tongues were out, panting.

At mile marker fifteen they traded clothes. He stepped into her dress and had her tie the string in the back.

“I’ve always wanted help getting in and out of my clothes.”

“It gets old,” said Rosina. “Believe me.”

He admitted (to himself) that the dress felt alright, kinda good at first, but then a little too free? Actually, he wasn’t sure how he felt about it.

After Rosina cinched up the leather belt and snapped the brass buckle she took EXIT 115 toward Lewisville.

“So long cuz,” she said. “Till next time.”

***

The man kept on, and at some point during the long journey became Female.

Also, and oddly, when she (the man) looked behind her the dogs had transformed into cats. Or perhaps the dogs gave up and some cats replaced the dogs? It’s impossible to know for sure, he thought.

The woman in the yellow sundress kept on, dead set on finding her wife.

She reached in her back pocket for the magazine but since she didn’t have a pocket she found only the soft curve of her ass. The magazine ended up being rolled up in her cleavage. She didn’t remember having breasts and certainly wouldn’t have thought to place a magazine there, but she pulled it out anyway wondering what else could be in this issue.

Music began to play upon opening the magazine. Big band music, Glen Miller style. When she closed the pages the music cut off.

When the music played the street lamps brightened and hummed as if they were getting turned on, sexually. When she closed it the street lamps grew dim and depressed as if they got their feelings hurt or their balls chopped off.

“Balls?” she said. “Penis and balls and all that man stuff. No thank you.”

She folded the magazine four ways and stuffed it in her panties.

She didn’t hate cats, but was surprised that cats were following her, since she always thought herself a dog person.

“My wife liked cats,” she said to the cats.

“Cats cats cats,” said the cats. But turns out they were little children in cat costumes.

***

Once they reached the end of the world the children giggled no more. She grabbed the chain link fence that served as the last obstacle and gazed out into the black abyss.

The children climbed the fence and leaped in shouting “Cats! Cats! Cats!”

Instead of falling they hovered over the darkness and began to shrink: children to toddlers, toddlers to babies, babies to fetuses, until there was nothing at all. She knew, she just knew, those kids were her unborn children. She began to weep with the realization of the unfair life. Some of her tears dropped and ran down the front of her dress.

After calming herself, she reached into her panties and pulled out the magazine. She read the first recipe: two parts radio, a pinch of Canada, a dash of moon, and a drizzle of lug nuts.

“Oh, I remember that one,” said a pretty voice coming from the abyss. “Delicious.”

“I found you,” said the woman in a yellow dress.

“Remember how I used to put my feet on your shoulders.”

“I miss your big feet.”

“I can see that.”

She looked down and saw her manhood restored and pitching a tent inside the yellow dress. And then from the abyss, a hand reached through the fence and up his dress, grabbing hold. She began to work it back and forth like she did when they were young.

“There it is!” he said. He stretched over the fence and took hold of her left breast.

“You always liked the left one best!” she said.

“I love it all,” but when he went to reach further toward her sweet center (where she liked him to rub just so), he felt her hand grab his wrist.

“If you go there,” she warned, “you’ll never be able to go back.”

He thought about all the things he broke when he was young: eight ball, lawn mower, sky light, hat rack, white chalk, sun flower, and the piano key still stuck in his underwear drawer.

“Where will I go?” he said.

“You’ll see,” she said, and giggled.

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SEAN KILPATRICK on film with Rebecca Gransden

December 28, 2021
What film, or films, made a deep impression on you as a youth? Which films felt transgressive back then? Were you secretive about watching them? Would you say any of these films defined your formative years? Can you talk about the influence film has had on your writing?By some superannuated lapse in parental bargaining, a ten-year-old-me was allowed to view Reservoir Dogs and Menace II Society. Using an online source, I’d already printed both scripts on half-pages with a nineties printer. One particularly sadistic week of basketball camp and I felt nowhere ingratiated with the world outside my VHS player. To compound the problem, I’d recently learned how to jizz. Expanding one’s taste from that list of homages, the influences of these influences (beholding From Dusk Till Dawn in a theater) cemented the era. Gnostic steroid demon gunmen flipping through stylized ballets (John Woo) and iconic machine slashers endlessly stalking girls were refined into the grunge of Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer and Confessions of a Serial Killer back to back. Strange Days was social commentary (though this film, of course, is something hard to process nowadays: far beyond message, style over message) and SFW philosophy. Midnight Express and Little Odessa ripped people’s tongues out, showing how process should commence. Love and a 45, Judgement Night, and Coldblooded proved the influence of influenced influencers could also influence (particularly Leary’s performance). In one glorious, preadolescent swill, I downed local hero Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy, Bava’s Demons, Van Bebber’s Deadbeat at Dawn, and Giovinazzo’s Combat Shock, retro sleaze masterpieces, and continued slurping Welles’s beautifully manic take on The Trial, and the cold brutality of Haneke’s Funny Games, funk atop craft.Very often film is one of the ways we first come into contact with a world outside that of our direct experience. Which films introduced you to areas of life away from the familiar circumstances you grew up in?The industrial ghettoes that sparked David Lynch’s genius were a relatable surrounding, but how far he took that inspiration into a separate creative world felt integral. Richard Linklater is the complete opposite of my purview, but is undeniably iconic and inspiring, especially back when. The international canon filled in the rest of the planet with all I cared to view of it. Finding Angel Dust at Blockbuster, the work of Tarkovsky, the exciting, riveting Kurosawa, (a hell of a snow day home from school watching) The Dollars Trilogy and the exhilarating The Young Poisoner’s Handbook, the claustrophobic Polanski classics, and for tropical tourism: Cannibal Holocaust and Make Them Die Slowly. The Forbidden Zone in place of fables.Do you use film as a prompt or direct motivation for your writing? What directors, film movements, or particular actors have been an influence? Have you ever made a film?I saw the two best meta cinema on cinema masterworks of the nineties quite young: Living in Oblivion and In the Soup (seconded by Contempt and Day for Night). I decided to pursue script writing and attended this cheap workshop downtown Detroit ran by a minor production assistant from one Spike Lee film. He wrote the word “weak” on my teenage script, which I appreciate, but he followed that up with zero useful advice. Though his spit on the page was perhaps relevant preparation for writing (had had that before, and daily now — my own), he’d have done better taking a shotgun to my lap in that regard. All of Kinski (chiefly what Herzog unlocked), Terrence Stamp in Fellini’s Toby Dammit, alongside the end of Imamura’s The Pornographers — actors going sublime and achieving a moment beyond presence. Lately, what Mickey Reece and Joel Potrykus manage to wrought against these artless times almost lets me experience optimism. I tried, and meagerly try, to make films, the hardest undertaking of an art form possible.Are there films you associate with a particular time in your life, or a specific writing project?Detroit is shit for art. But once there was an abandoned grade school in the Cass Corridor, pre-gentrification, called The Burton Theater: matinees amid the ruin, shock art projects decorating (everyone hates those now), plastic bags spider-webbed throughout the building, attached to a urinal handle so that the whole building shivered like an entity when you flushed). I saw Trash Humpers, a cut of Häxan (I’d only dug the Burroughs version) with accompaniment by the band Wolf Eyes in an auditorium sans air conditioning — seeing the screen through a heat haze mirage. Crispin Glover came and presented his wild films, standing stock still in a tiny destroyed closet between showings, addressing each fan in one on one sessions (I stammered with unexpected fear through mine, not realizing he’d deign an individual conference with everyone). Right about then, just as I saved up to join (what was, to me, a very pricey inner-sanctum membership), the yuppie boomer landlord (who gleefully rode atop toy trains) evicted the programmers and took over, switching the schedule to tripe such as Love, Actually during Christmastime. A local source of inspiration appropriately cut short at its height.Thinking about the places you’ve lived, are there any environments that are cinematic? Have you lived anywhere that has been regularly depicted onscreen? If so, has this had an influence on your perception of the place, or how you’ve depicted it in any of your writings?Jarmusch’s longshot landscapes met with People Under the Stairs and Fresh, Tetsuo: Iron Man and all the blasted hellscapes of Mad Max wannabes make me homesick. My old car is briefly featured in 8 Mile, sorry to say. Leaving Las Vegas evokes hopeless alcoholic dads punching the wall next to our child heads. But writers are supposed to be overly erect about the working class because utilitarianism is this country’s shiniest lie. (Many of today’s unintentional autogynephiles (re: all millennial men) could use some physical abuse, I admit.)Are there films you regularly return to, and do you know why?There is a type of film enjoyed on first viewing, but you brushed by it without dwelling, only to realize later the level of supreme art that went momentarily underappreciated. I often return to Kill List in awe, Kontroll (saw when released, holds up amazingly), Miracle Mile (describe this film to someone beat for beat, almost as mesmerizing as watching it), Branded to Kill (flawless, beautiful), and especially The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which I saw young enough to relish, to be broken further into film by, in fact, yet it took seeing it on a big screen, and many, many wonderful times over (it truly gets better with each viewing, grows in you) to comprehend the insane confluence of intensity captured on camera (dinner scene, etc.). Do you have any lines of film dialogue you regularly use in your daily life? Are there individual scenes that stay with you?The Coen brothers demand reenactment. I feel ran over deep into the beach like in Mike Hodge’s Pulp. I perform How to Get Ahead in Advertising aloud each night. I am nearly always issuing coffin mumbles from the end of The Vanishing. The depraved eighties overkill set pieces in An American Werewolf in London, Invasion USA, and Action Jackson are my manifesto.What films have roused a visceral reaction in you?The rowdy turns in The Caller had at me. Attack the Gas Station rallies the viewer. Pretty Persuasion and Dirty Pictures predicting the cultural future are eloquent. Alan Clarke and his influence on The War Zone and Nil by Mouth, Henry Becque-esque reality cruelty gets my goat. The expansive The Telephone Box shit my shit out, the bottleneck tightness of The Guilty as well. Wake in Fright is ultra real, the film of our age, a millennial sludge trap ouroboros. Killing the nude woman with pop guns in Munich seems far more perverse than the filmmaker knew, a demonic scene. Rec 2 is the most vicious roller coaster jump scare experience I’ve had in a theater. Putney Swope is the foremost American comedy. Green Knight had me viscerally verklempt about how much potential it wasted. People at the theater were pulling their seats up in a rage, screeching far scarier noises than this weak millennial take on the legend could muster (I sense the director, so technically gifted, has never been hurt, one notch too abstract, but close, Black Death did the heavy montage literary ending better). The Grey is a more classic, but far greater disguised genre thing really about accepting death. When The Grey pissed stupid people off, I agreed with it, not them.  Are there films that are reliable for inspiring your creativity? When a genre subverts itself well: Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, a secret treat. Upgrade is the best action film comment on millennials. Seeing Riley Stearns’s work, and others like Resolution and Luz released in the last few years, is heartening. There will always be a Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, The Corndog Man, Baxter, Habit, Underground, La Haine, The Ugly, The Cell, Seven (films that had no business being so good), sneaking way above every decade’s typical crap (we gotta hunt for them harder now). Maxx, Aeon Flux, and Ren and Stimpy formed my first artistic sensibilities. I Never Left the White Room back to The Last House on Dead End Street (and Watkins’s nonsensical, hyper-retro art pornos), the bottomless, pointless sadism of The House on the Edge of the Park and Hitch-Hike — perfecto.Which of your writings would adapt most successfully to film?Marat / Sade would be the only path to trying. Nobody’s gonna build me a Deadwood set. All for naught and just about impossible. Can you give some film recommendations for those who have liked your writing?My genealogy could start with tracking down the legendary Salo at fourteen, then later seeing Possession after realizing relationships aren’t nice. Man Bites Dog was formative, along with The Hitcher (throat slit Eric Red’s gnostic demon killers: this, Cohen and Tate and Near Dark) and von Trier. Bertrand Blier’s early work was huge to me, and the pinku genre, including The Embryo Hunts in Secret. Miike’s dozen absurd masterpieces after high school, Angel Heart before. Peter Greenaway and the uncanny ending of Twentynine Palms, both ideal, but closer to scope of potential for me might be something approaching an Alan Resnick short, maybe The Signal (2007) if I got lottery lucky. The Eric Wareheim video for that Tobacco song is one of the best shorts I’ve seen (and the superb videos for Liars’s “Plaster Casts of Everything” (innovative rear projection), Rone’s “Bye Bye Macadam” (with its Joe Frank-esque electrical cult worship) Lorn’s “Acid Rain”, Jonathan Bree’s “You’re So Cool”, Oneohtrix Point Never’s “Sticky Drama” (demented Salute Your Shorts), Liam Lynch, the Feral House zeitgeist of Longmont Potion Castle and Francis E. Dec’s Worldwide Gangster Computer God, the abstruse oddities Charles Carroll is up to, glad that Sam Hyde prospers), ditto the simplistic, impeccable bit Cronenberg did (“they sense the threat”) for his book release (he should stick to film). Pig was a recent masterpiece of refinement, a classical tour de force that I’m incapable of, but appreciate (am a Vampire’s Kiss guy). I’d reach for the genius of Killing of a Sacred Deer, paced to Little Murders, cut like Chinese Roulette, Hal Hartley blocking, as ferine as Kite, Aster’s short C’est La Vie acted by the girls of a Walerian Borowczyk flick (trauma of Blind Beast, Lady in a Cage, Onibaba, or the sensuality of Survey Map of a Paradise Lost and In the Realm of the Senses), writing with a Sword of Doom ability to clear a room, but falling flat once Mifune challenges — most likely I’d end up with Trailer Town. I’m okay with that.
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