Archives

LUKE by Sam Berman

August 11, 2025

He was known as the best guitar player in the United States. Maybe the world. I didn’t know; I’d never met him. Luke. I had friends who knew him, had seen him play in the French Quarter, or they themselves had jammed with him in one of those hill houses in San Francisco when he was part-timing as a tour guide in Ghirardelli Square. They attested to his skill. His virtuosity. The word “singularity” was used. “Heaven sent,” got thrown around. I was told outside a restaurant that there was a girl in Morocco who was “nearly his equal.” Close

OTTERS AND TIGERS by John Jodzio

August 7, 2025

I work part-time at a dry cleaners, but I’m mostly known for posting cute videos of otters that make people smile. Most people thank me for my work by liking and sharing my videos but some people, like two or three a month, ask me to post videos of otters having sex. When I tell them I don’t post lewd otter content, these people usually say mean things about my penis. For instance, how it’s microscopic. Or how it’s bent like a Russian sickle. Or how it smells like pot roast. If I could brush these comments off I would,

JUST ANOTHER FRIDAY by Stefanie K. Yang

August 6, 2025

When Gary died, nobody mourned—not even his siblings. Everyone agreed he lived like a ghost, practically invisible and emerging only when absolutely necessary. He had no children and accomplished very little. He wouldn’t be missed. Like many before him, Gary simply ceased to exist while time and the universe continued on. Yet, for a brief moment, Gary mattered. Gary was murdered. He was killed in his own home in his own bathtub on a Thursday evening between nine- and ten-o’-clock. The most conspicuous evidence was his severed leg. The killer left it in his bathtub in a shallow pool of

CHRISTOPHER ZEISCHEGG’S ‘THE MAGICIAN’ reviewed by Chloe Pingeon

August 5, 2025

There is a nightmarish quality to Christopher Zeischegg’s The Magician. I read the book twice, the first time through the haze of an all nighter—sleep deprivation and sleep paralysis hastening my descent into the blur of self destruction and bodily decay that the narrative presents. “Just a thing inside your body that won’t listen to your head,” a malignant acquaintance tells the narrator early in the novel, as a prescription of sorts for the root of all his problems. At dawn, this rings true. This distance between body and self, judgment and subconscious, good and evil, is perhaps the root

BIG STEVE HID WATER BOTTLES OF PISS BENEATH HIS BED by Matti Ben-Lev

August 4, 2025

He was used to being homeless. He was used to sleeping in his car in Philly parking lots. Once, he picked up a Tinder date, drove her 3 hours from Baltimore to Philly, rode around looking for his ex-girlfriend, didn’t find her, and only told his date the truth about his ex and why they drove to Philly on the car ride back. I don’t remember how she responded, but I think they went out a few more times. Big Steve unrolled cigarettes, made a bong out of a water bottle and a pen, hit tobacco out the window of

CAUSE AND EFFECT by Claire Hanlon

July 31, 2025

When the birds burst up and out from the sidewalk grass in front of my car as I’m driving home from the store on Mother’s Day, and I think: how beautiful! as the unexpected blue of their wings flash before me, and then: oh no! did I hit them?—it’s a near thing, a miracle: I miss them, just. Because the birds live, when I arrive home and honk to let my family know I’m back, let’s go, and my husband emerges, he does not stare perplexedly at the bumper of our newly-purchased SUV. And, because the birds are both still

PRAYER BREAKFAST by Emma Ensley

July 30, 2025

I knew that downloading music was illegal, but my dad was the one who showed me how to do it, so I didn’t worry too much. I still prayed at night for God to forgive me, just in case. *** The Australian’s username was koala_rocks47 and he was thirty-two, though I didn’t know that yet. I was eleven and three-quarters. I’d found the John Mayer fan forum through a Google search after Drew read the lyrics to “Why Georgia” in Literature class, during our poetry unit. “am I living it right?” over and over again, while his hands shook. I

HAUNT ATTACK: DENNIS COOPER AND ZAC FARLEY ON ‘ROOM TEMPERATURE’ by Jack Skelley

July 29, 2025

Room Temperature is the latest film collaboration by Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley. It focuses on a family-run, amateur haunted house and was shot on location in Southern California. The film recently screened at San Francisco’s Frameline film festival, and before that at Los Angeles Festival of Movies. It will soon show in Europe. Although the concept of co-directing a film is unusual, the rapport between Cooper and Farley is natural… as evidenced by how they often finish each other’s thoughts in this QA with Jack Skelley. And this reflects in the quietly supernatural vibe of Room Temperature, which is

FOREVER by Spencer Lee

July 25, 2025

I’m sitting at the pool with the boys, listening to the gardener trim the hedges. The world right now is loud and whirring. When the gauze comes off, everything will be graceful and good. My surgeon’s a short man with steroid face–large, skeletal nostrils–but he has great taste in women’s faces. My face feels taut and ready for anything. Underneath the bandages, I swear that I’m smiling down at the boys. I lower my feet into the lukewarm water. The sun is injecting undulating crystals of white that look like ominous little spirits. Or Xanaxs. I wonder what my husband’s

SWIMMERS by Tobi Pledger

July 24, 2025

Doc Raeford lifted the tail and stepped back to avoid the torrent of steaming bull shit. After the last wink of the bull’s anus, he leaned forward and pushed the electroejaculator probe into the rectum, completing the docking maneuver. “Bull’s eye.” Mike would never have imagined that he’d enjoy helping a veterinarian anally penetrate a two-thousand-pound Angus bull, but he did. Raeford shrugged. “It’s a gift.” The bull resisted the intrusion, lunging forward, shoving his chest against the gate of the squeeze chute with a jolt. His nostrils flared, flecks of foamy mucus blowing out on the exhale. The Texas