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THE TEST by Arpita Roy

June 29, 2024

A man is pelting stones at a dog. In this story, because it is an old story, the dog is going to become a secret test for his humanity. The man is going to think to himself, if only I had known that this was a secret test, I would’ve chosen to keep the stones hidden inside my shoes. But the man doesn’t know and cannot choose, so he chooses stones and well, the dog was already there. As a child, the man had been a boy, small, and as a small boy, the man had seen his big father pelt stones at a dog and that dog had never turned out to be a test. It was a good ol’ non-test, regular dog with a regular bark, howling, when the pelted stones hit its body. A thwap and then the twin stones thwap thwap; the dog’s howl a mix of wince and surprise. But this dog on this day is a test dog, so when the man pelts his second stone – he would’ve anyway stopped after three – the test dog transforms into a god. God says son you failed and in reality the stones, too, were disguises of time, like I am, and thus for every stone cast, you’ve now lost a decade of your life. The man looks at god and wonders how he is going to break this news to his wife or his kids – or his landowner who will ask him to pay his debt. And what about his daughter’s surgery. And what about that mango tree he had planted. In ten years, he was going to hold their delicious flesh. And what about – At the end of this long thought, the man looks at god and says okay. He swallows the last stone.

KEY FRAME by Graham Techler

June 26, 2024

Five years I’ve been in animation. The doctor at the walk-in clinic says I have the wrists of an eighty-year-old. I’m not an eighty-year-old. He says by the time I’m actually an eighty-year-old, you wouldn’t be able to sell my wrists on the black market. According to the doctor, a black market buyer would say “you call that a wrist? This is not what I come to the black market for.” The doctor doesn’t have a very good bedside manner but that’s what you get at the walk-in clinic. Suffice it to say that when you meet me at the beginning of this story, I’m looking at my career the way a professional baseball player would: something one should try and enjoy while it lasts, while it’s a job the body can still do it, before it makes the body crumple in on itself to cries of “belly itcher,” “broken ladder,” etc. Only I don’t earn four million dollars a year. I earn seven hundred and sixty-nine dollars a week. I never work less than fifty hours a week. I do not have sick days. I do not take vacations. And for the last six months, it’s something I’ve failed even to enjoy whilst bringing to life the following section of Dustin Down the Drain.

INT. THE DRAIN - CONTINUOUS
Dustin, now fully shrunken down to the size of his action figure, wails as he slides down the drain, through a series of forks in the pipe, before being deposited in a pool of scummy water.

DUSTIN
UM, this is not what I signed up for, dude!

Dustin Down the Drain is due in theaters next Summer. Dustin Down the Drain is budgeted at one hundred and fifty million dollars. In order to break even, after marketing costs, Dustin Down the Drain will need to gross three hundred million dollars. After the breakout success of Dustin Gets Big a couple years ago, the studio thinks Dustin Down the Drain has the potential to earn more than nine hundred million dollars. If you’re not in the industry, just trust me: nine hundred million dollars is a lot. Oh, for context:

“Dustin is an ordinary kid who is tired of his ordinary life and wishes he could get big again like he did last Summer. But when his wish gets misinterpreted by the wish machine on the boardwalk and he shrinks down to the size of an action figure, Dustin gets more adventure than he bargained for. Next Summer, Dustin is going: Down the Drain.”

Every animator says they’ve wanted to be one since they were a little kid. I can back it up. When I was six, the projector showing me and my fellow children a cartoon broke five minutes in. The projectionist let me keep a section of the damaged reel. I could see exactly how the cartoon fist went from being cocked one moment to hitting another cartoon’s face the next. I could see the exact frame in which movement started, and the exact frame in which it reached its conclusion. Nice, right? I’ve used this story in every job interview I’ve ever had. It’s a little cute, but you have to tell them something like that. You can’t just tell them that you need a job or else you’ll die, and that (oftentimes) you don’t want to die—no, you have say when you were a kid your house burned down, and your dog ran into the flames to rescue your sketchbook, and you swore that his dog death wouldn’t be in vain, or something. If I told a story like that, I’d have gotten every job I’ve ever applied for. I don’t talk to many children. When I do, and they tell me that they want to do what I do? I try my best to scare them off of it. I ask them if they like having wrists. I let them know that the job I have is twenty-years-worse than the job I dreamed of getting when I was their age, and if they get it, their job will be twenty-years-worse than mine. Then I smack the ice cream cone out of their hand so they know what the world’s really like. I didn’t always feel that way, exactly. At the time, I was just a normal animator: overworked, underpaid, battling a head cold. My immediate superior was in my work space, showing me my own work, and leveling the very serious accusation that I was not making movie magic. “You’ve got Dustin bouncing off this pipe here and then tumbling twice before he hits that pipe there. The line of continuous action is shattered”—he said, using some animator argot so I’d know he knew what he was talking about—“and it’s just busy, busy, busy!”I told him I could clean that up, no problem. “This is not the kinda work a crunch is supposed to produce,” he said. “I can’t pass this up the chain of command, because this is just not the kinda work a crunch is supposed to produce.”They had set up bunk beds for us in our work spaces. They had ping pong tables too. You know, to make it fun. Like a fun little work sleepover where you don’t get any Vitamin D for days on end. I promised him that I was gonna get that line of continuous action looking way more continuous. He paused as he ducked under the bunk bed in my work space. “Oh,” he added. “I heard that you put in a request to take Christmas off to drive to Nevada for one day and spend it with your family? Now, I don’t know exactly what the fuck you meant by that, but that’s not the kind of attitude a crunch can really accommodate. You wanna give your family Christmas presents? You are going to give all four quadrants of the human population the best Christmas present they could ever hope to receive when Dustin Down the Drain arrives in three thousand theaters on July 7th. Alright? I know twenty kids at USC who would kill for the job you have right now. They would kill you if they even thought it might get them your job. They’d kill you just for having a job at all, when so many others don’t. Now, I wouldn’t let them, because we’re a family here. But I need you to start acting like the hills are full of hungry wolves. Because they are.” It was the most hardcore thing I’d ever heard someone say half-crouched under a bunk bed. I’d frequently take my midnight lunches at a diner down the block from the studio called Louie’s Lunch Car Luncherarium. The futuristic hobo train theme was confusing, but the milkshakes were good. I liked to just get a big milkshake for lunch because it’s something you don’t need wrists to consume. That day, I was too angry about my immediate supervisor’s criticisms of Dustin’s line of continuous action to care about my wrists, so I was doodling on my placemat, something I never did anymore unless I was in a terrible mood. I didn’t look up when the hobo boxcar front door slid open and another customer walked in. I didn’t look up until she was sitting in my booth across from me. She was wearing a long red leather coat and sunglasses so skinny I didn’t know what the point of them was. I felt confident she was the most striking customer in the history of Louie’s Lunch Car Luncherarium. The kind of woman who makes you really self-conscious about all the empty milkshakes in front of you. “That looks good,” she said. “Milkshake,” was all I could think to say, so that’s what I said. “No,” she said. “Your drawing. That’s really good.” I looked down at my doodle. It was a character I’d created in my youth, back when I had real convictions about the effect my work could have on the world if it was done with craft, truth, and rigor. His name was Spiggletwit Montpelier. He was a duck who ran a boarding school. I thanked her. “You’re a real talent,” said the stranger. “I’d say you should become an animator or something, but I hear that job is actually really terrible. In fact I hear it sucks shit.”I agreed that it sucked shit. She asked if I was indeed an animator. I told her. Sheasked what kind of work I did. Did I ever do movies? I told her I did do movies. “Well that’s better!” she winked. “More money for them, more money for you.” I disabused her of this. She shook her head in dismay. “This fuckin’ industry,” she said. “This motherfuckin’ goddamn industry.” “Tell me about it,” I said. I liked how often she swore. “You know,” said the stranger. “I’m also in the industry, in a way. “Oh yeah?” I said.“Yeah,” she said. “I represent the interests of a major competitor.” This very weird thing to say hung in the air. “Yeah,” she continued, as if she hated to bore me with all this, “I represent the interests of a major studio competitor who’d really love to hobble the upcoming release of a film called Dustin Down the Drain. They (the major studio competitor whose interests I represent) just won’t shut up about how much they’d love to give someone $50,000 to wipe the hard-drives at the studio producing Dustin Down the Drain, which, if it doesn’t erase the film from existence, will at least damage the workflow so bad that Dustin won’t be able to go down the drain for years and years, probably causing the studio to suffer permanent reputational damage that could be parlayed by someone like my client to the benefit of themselves, and the proprietary, economically competitive artistic content they’re currently developing.” She was being coy as hell, but I had a feeling I knew what she was talking about. It sounded like she was working for the studio behind Mikey and the Shrink Ray: Requiem—an upcoming film with a very similar premise to Dustin Down the Drain (“regular-sized boy becomes tiny”) but not the red hot buzz a sequel to Dustin Gets Big could hope to generate. They had also made a recent major marketing fumble thanks to that subtitle: Requiem. The rumor was that the studio was too embarrassed to admit they’d made a mistake after a press release announcing the year’s slate had mixed up Mikey’s subtitle with the subtitle of a vampire film that had instead been announced as Oathhunter Elegy III: Always Bet on Small! The stranger went on to explain that it was actually so funny but she actually had the $50,000 in a briefcase right that very moment, alongside a stylish two-piece suit lined with extraordinarily powerful magnets. Magnets that could easily annihilate a computer server if someone was to give that computer server a little hug and rub up and down on it a bit. “So,” she said, “my project right now is to tail Dustin’s animators around the city until I find one who wants to take it, hopefully a disgruntled one who wishes their life and wrists had turned out differently.” I felt a briefcase-sized object slide under the table and rest between my legs. I explored this object with my feet. It sure felt like a briefcase full of money and magnets. Still, I hesitated. I had never engaged in corporate espionage before. And nothing in my worldly experience suggested it wasn’t the kind of thing I would probably mess up. I stood. “You haven’t paid for your three milkshakes,” she said. I still didn’t know what to say. So I just said “milkshakes” again. “Actually, allow me.”She put the leather briefcase on the table, popped it open a crack, and placed a hundred dollar bill on the table. All the forks and knives slid over and affixed themselves to the leather. St. Bartholomew’s Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles has, for many years now, partnered with a nonprofit organization called ‘Miracles for Hope,’ which gives the most messed-up children on their saddest wards the opportunity to make their dreams come true before it’s too late. ‘Miracles for Hope’ has shown a kid what it’s like to perform a stadium rock and roll show. They’ve helped a kid experience zero gravity. They’re a really special organization, and we’re glad to help them out whenever we can. At least that’s what my immediate superior told me back at the studio the next morning when he introduced me to Dylan, a smiling, super cute little child decked out in Dustin apparel. “Sorry, who is Dylan?” I asked, distracted. My suit was extremely uncomfortable. There was a good reason most professionals wore suits without magnets in them.“He’s Dylan,” said my immediate superior, pointing at Dylan. “Dylan is here from St. Bartholomew’s Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles.” “You’re making my miracle come true,” said Dylan. “For my hope.”My immediate superior explained that Dylan was afflicted with Zweimann’s Syndrome, an extraordinarily rare disease that gave him a small bubble in his brain which, at any moment, could explode, killing Dylan on the spot. “But,” he added, “we’ll be damned if that’s going to happen before Dylan can get a special sneak preview of Dustin Down the Drain.” I turned to the boy: “Are you sure that’s what you want your wish to be, Dustin?”“I’m Dylan,” said Dylan. “This is Dylan,” said my superior. “Dustin is Dustin. Dylan loves Dustin, though.”“I think that Dustin and the drain mouse are going to get married!” said Dylan. “Well, you’ll know for sure in seventy-four minutes” said my immediate superior. “Right this way, Dylan.”I stepped in front of him, impeding his path. “You’re impeding my path,” he said. “You can’t show Dylan Dustin,” I said.“Every moment you impede my path could be the moment Dylan’s brain bubble explodes. You do know that, right?”“This is a security breach,” I pointed out, wiping sweat from my brow. “Next thing you know, that kid is going to be talking to every blogger in town, and then everyone will know what happens to Dustin. Everyone will know whether Dustin marries the drain mouse, or not.”My immediate superior shoved a finger into my chest. “‘Miracles for Hope’ has shown a kid what it’s like to perform in a stadium rock and roll show, buddy. They’ve helped a kid experience zero gravity. And Dylan is going to find out what happens to Dustin when Dustin goes down the drain.”Before Dylan followed my immediate superior down the hall, he turned and smiled some more at me with his big toothy kid mouth. “Hey mister,” he said. “If my brain bubble doesn’t explode too soon, I wanna be just like you when I grow up. I’m gonna draw all the pictures for the movies they make for kids just like me, and I’m gonna win every award in town, and I’m gonna dress like a million bucks, just like you.” “Sure you will, Dylan,” I said. “Sure you will.”This would have been a sweeter exchange if I hadn’t already done it. While the servers that once housed Dustin were quietly inspected, I waited for someone to put the pieces together and find me at my desk. But no one came. No one said anything to me at first. And then no one said anything to me at all. The $50,000 went towards a $70,000 loan I’d taken out to attend the University of Southern California. I’d already paid off $90,000 of it at the time. After the lump sum, I’m still paying off the remaining $120,000. Dylan didn’t get to watch Dustin Down the Drain that day, but thankfully, he’s still waiting to die—much like the rest of us, but different. He no longer harbors pie in the sky fantasies of overcoming Zweimann’s Syndrome and becoming the next great me. If he lives much longer, maybe he’ll thank me for it. The studio quietly moved Dustin Down the Drain’s release to the Fall. When they were sure that the damage was irrevocable, they moved it to the Spring. There was no kind of profit that could justify the cost of making Dustin Down the Drain twice, but nobody in this town will ever admit something’s over when it’s over. They move it to the next Summer. They slowly take people off the project one by one. They move it to the next Fall. Now it’s just a few of us going over the same salvaged frames again and again. Paid a small allowance to keep the work going in the basement forever, just to spare them the embarrassment. It’s going great. It’s almost done. It’s going to do boffo box office numbers. It’ll be out in time for Christmas. I make a sketch of Dustin bounce from pipe to pipe. His line of action is perfectly continuous. It’ll be out next, next Summer. It’ll be out for the twentieth anniversary of Dustin Gets Big. It’ll be out on my eightieth birthday. The muscles in my wrist will keep shrinking somehow, even when it seems like there isn’t any more wrist left. We’re going to celebrate one hundred years of Dustin by finally sending him down the drain. I read it in the trades, so it’s definitely happening. The motion picture event Dustin fans have been waiting two hundred years for. Three hundred years. I bounce him back and forth down the drain for a thousand years. Two thousand years. Ten thousand years I sit at my desk, drawing Dustin bouncing back and forth down the drain for the millionth, two millionth, three millionth time. I have to agree with him. Not what I signed up for, dude.

TRANSMISSIONS: PaperBird

June 25, 2024

Welcome to Transmissions, an interview feature in which X-R-A-Y profiles podcasts and book youtubers.PaperBird can be found on YouTube: www.youtube.com/c/PaperBirdCOURTING THE MUSE: PaperBird talks about obsession, recognition, and those damn teenage years.Meeting PaperBird was harder than I expected. It's not that he's reclusive or antisocial or anything like that; no. It's just that his house is damn near impossible to find. He warned me about this beforehand, on the phone, saying that it takes "a car with all-wheel drive, a mountain bike, and a pair of hiking boots," just to get there. I got directions to his house anyway -- pretty detailed, I must say -- and made about three miles into the forest before my car broke down. Then it started raining. I didn't have the requisite mountain bike or hiking shoes, just a few sticks of chewing gum for food. I didn't see another human for days, maybe even weeks: I'm still a little fuzzy on this. All I know for sure is that I woke up one morning in a hospital bed, with Mr. PaperBird right there beside me, looking concerned.Author of three novels (Bored and Aroused in Boston, Lonely and Anxious in London, and Puking Towards Paris), an autobiography (Baby Penis), and a self-help manual (Introvert's Guide to Being a Power Asshole), PaperBird has been getting a lot of attention. Not because of his books, which remain unpublished, but because of his YouTube channel. His blend of humor and absurd surrealism (or what he calls "absurrealism") has excited, frightened, and tickled mainstream audiences and academics alike. Looking at Mr. PaperBird in his loose-fitting clothes in a way reminded me of the under-nourished cats you find lying on the side of the road. The man can't be more than 120 pounds, if I had to guess. There's a mysterious scar on his nose. His eyes are so brown they're black. One eye is lazy.-Terri Bradshaw

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: First things first. I'd like to personally thank you for saving my life.

PaperBird: (laughs) No problem. I have to do that once in a while. It's gotten to where no one comes to visit.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: I was kind of anxious to see where you lived.

PaperBird: It's just a cottage, really. I built it a couple years ago with my brother. He's an architect, you know (not officially licensed). I think that was like his first real project.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: But why out in a forest? Why so far away from society?

PaperBird: At first I thought it would be interesting, to pull a Thoreau or something, stay unplugged, but then I checked my finances and realized I had no other choice. Did I mention I have a Patreon? Just kidding. (It's a "Ko-fi" - https://ko-fi.com/paperbird)

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: Speaking of platforms, you're mostly known for your YouTube videos. Those wacky book reviews. How would you describe the channel to someone who is unfamiliar with what you do?

PaperBird: I guess you could say I make videos that dive deep into books but miss the mark completely and end up getting shattered a few feet away where the book and the author (if still alive) glance over, shake their head, sip their margarita, and nudge the sunglasses back up onto their face.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: How long have you been at it -- "diving deep and getting shattered"?

PaperBird: The channel’s been around since 2014… woah, almost 10 years now! That's really sad. Masochistic, even.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: We do get some whiffs of that, yes, but we'll get to your fetishes in a bit. At first you posted these very lofi rambling videos filmed in your car during what appeared to be your lunch break at work. I bet it was hot AF in the summer but figured after filming you’d come back in all hot and happy, high on your own supply.

PaperBird: (laughs) Exactly!

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: Are there any channels that influenced or encouraged you to start the project?

PaperBird: Not really, I started posting videos as an excuse to not continue writing in a traditional sense but still stay connected to books. Being on YouTube though I got hooked into watching knife review videos, especially ones made by Nick Shabazz. On his videos, he never shows his face, it’s just his hands holding the knife as he’s reviewing it. That inspired me to move out of the steamy in-car POV and adopt the same top down / table top style, except with books instead of knives, kind of as a joke.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: Which of your videos would you recommend to someone who is new to what you do?

PaperBird: Here's a good sampler pack: Gary Lutz, Gerald Murnane, Jon Fosse, Pierre Michon, Claude Simon.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: How do you go about selecting what to feature on each video?

PaperBird: It used to be as easy as grabbing the next book on the pile. I would read it a couple times, take some notes, talk about it on camera, then rinse and repeat. But over time I got tired of that, in fact now really dislike talking about books straight-on. It’s the same with the books I like to read -- the less hand-holding, the less information the better -- although in a “review” you kind of have to do that a little, give out information.

Now it’s more about building a container to dump in whatever's going on in my life, and somewhere along the way, an author or a book gets sucked in and spread out as the foundation. After a few months, if the structure holds, that load-bearing book (pun intended) becomes what is featured.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: You used to publish short stories, poetry, and book reviews in more traditional places, maybe 15 years ago, under a different name, and if I had to guess, you still scribble in your notebook every day, though it's more a stream that feeds into whatever video is bubbling up, like background processing, am I right?

PaperBird: Yes, well… when things are flowing, creating the video feels similar to writing, actually it’s more rewarding because things can happen quickly, moving things around, sometimes you get this euphoric mix of imagery, music, and voice that couldn't possibly have been planned. I remember this review I did on Wilson Harris which I gave up on midway and instead turned it into a meditation on death. Maybe the method is more like abstract painting or DJ'ing.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: Or like that show Iron Chef? Where the grandmaster would announce the theme ingredient and the contestants would use it to make their own original dish? The ingredient in your case being the book under "review."

PaperBird: Something like that, literature as seasoning on the larger animal inside that you want to serve up and knock people out with. Hit them with your own spices and herbs. That’s the beauty of this medium, it’s like a blob of hot dough that stays gooey for longer and you have a bigger sweetspot in which you can shape it, even randomly sometimes, it’s that forgiving. And the synchronicities happen more often and more quickly. It's the best feeling in the world when everything clicks.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: You mention somewhere in Baby Penis, your autobiography, that your creative tendencies really took off when you were in high school?

PaperBird: That's right. I'd say around the time I was a sophomore. And I had the strangest motivation for writing. I wanted to impress a woman. I'm not going to say who… Let's just say she's a celebrity. (I reveal who she is in my Esther Kinsky video.) But yeah, I was very lonely and thought that if I wrote a novel -- I was fifteen at the time -- I thought that if I wrote a quality literary novel, at the age of fifteen, I would get recognized and become a celebrity, too, and that way She would know who I was. That's all I wanted in life then: to be recognized by this person whom I was obsessed with. We're talking Taxi Driver here.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: Good thing you didn't kill anyone.

PaperBird: Yeah, it was only a teenage daydream, but a really strong one. Writing this novel was all that I thought about. And Her, of course. She became a muse or mother goddess, the "female personage" that Gerald Murnane writes about. I began to see Her in others. The girl who sat next to me in math class (Lauren). The girl who also liked to write, whose house I rode past on my bike almost every day (Kathleen). The girl I once slow-danced with whose perfume I would recognize even now (Angela). They all had brown hair and blue eyes. But can you see what else they had in common? It's all in the letters in their names, the colors of those letters… I still sometimes… I still search…

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: Hello? Hello… Earth to PaperBird… (snaps fingers) OK, let's pivot from that for a bit. For the techheads and aspiring booktubers out there, which single item of kit do you consider essential for the production of your channel?

PaperBird: You mean other than a knife?

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: Ah yes! I was hoping you'd get into that! For those of our readers who may not know, you have this penchant for cutting up your books with a knife on camera. Before we get into exactly why, let me just say, I've noticed that your knife handling skills have really improved over time. I remember early on, maybe it was the video on John Yau or Samuel Beckett, where it looked like you almost cut off your thumb. But then you're starting to hold the knife better, dare I say with more confidence, as you slice through your books. Are you trying to turn them into chapbooks or something?

PaperBird: It's a way of getting the weight down. Some of my compatriots on booktube -- Leaf by Leaf, Travel Through Stories, W.A.S.T.E. Mailing List -- they gravitate toward the chunkers. I like chunky shapes too. But after years of typing, cooking, crocheting, saxophone playing, whatever, my wrists blew out. Can't hold up anything weighs more than a Kindle now.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: I ask because I think it was in the Sally Rooney video, where you go off on this 20 minute tangent just "deconstructing" one of her books, and I must say, the knife handling in that video was superb. You said you cooked? It was almost like you had worked in a butcher shop for years. And in the Gordon Lish video, where you chop off what appears to be your penis with a meat cleaver, just incredible, the way you handle both heavy and lightweight cutlery.

PaperBird: Thank you.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: There's this one digression in the Fernanda Melchor video that I haven't been able to get out of my head. It's the part where the twins are starving and Fernanda has to get them food somehow, and so she goes on this long hunt through the forest...

PaperBird: Yeah, she's chasing some kind of unidentified animal. A boar, actually.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: Right. And so she slaughters the thing and drags it all the way home, where she has to dice it up before dawn comes and the twins awake. And through the magic of editing, you show Fernanda Melchor skinning and chopping up and preparing this animal for over thirty minutes, and the overall accruing effect of the passage is just mind-numbing. It's like nothing I've seen before.

PaperBird: That's one of those digressions that demand a lot from the viewer but ultimately pay off in the end, I hope.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: It was particularly exciting for me, all the details you worked in there about, for example, the sound of the animal's hide ripping, and the texture of the animal's striated muscles, and the way the tendons and ligaments would stretch on the bone and then snap off. I think the sound they made was "tCHew!"

PaperBird: Um, actually it was "tCHaw!"

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: Watching that video repeatedly and its attention to detail made me wonder if you've ever had any actual hands-on experience slaughtering animals. I mean, the scene with the blood caking on Fernanda's hands and all that, the shimmer of the freshly-killed animal's intestines -- it doesn't seem like you could whip that up from scratch.

PaperBird: Well, there was some research involved. I read a book on general swine anatomy, and then visited a meat market where the butcher was kind enough to let me observe. But the rest I pretty much made up, although I did dissect a cat in the eighth grade.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: How big was it?

PaperBird: The cat? I'd say about a foot and a half.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: The reason I'm wondering is because I happen to work with animals. Mostly dogs and cats, but sometimes deer, possums, and armadillos. They're usually dead by the time I get them, or rapidly reaching that state, so I'd say I know more than your average joe about the death of animals. And let me be the first to attest to the accuracy of your scene concerning the boar's death and dissection in the Fernanda Melchor.

PaperBird: Thanks. (laughs) What is it you do exactly? Aside from working for X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine?

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: I guess you could say I'm a type of artist, or what some would call a "roadkill artist." Basically, I drive around interstates and highways and look for animals that've been run over or knocked dead by cars. I take the animals home and hack off as much meat as I can without damaging their skeletons, and then boil the rest off their bones.

PaperBird: Not for eating purposes, I hope.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: (laughs) No, no. I'd say it's fairly dangerous to eat roadkill. What I'm interested in are their bones -- the ones that haven't been shattered or splintered by the impact. Sometimes the cars do so much damage I can only extract about 20% of their bones intact. Usually they're the small ones, like the carpals or patellas, but every once in a while I'll be able to get a whole femur or pelvis. Complete skulls are hard to come by, and always require that I drain the brain out through the nostrils.

PaperBird: No kidding.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: The key to working with dead animals is to get to them before rigor mortis sets in. That way you'll cut your flaying time in half. And it's always important to know where the bone is in relation to the muscle, so you won't accidentally cut in too deep and make abrasions on the bone's surface. Usually I just feel for the bone and leave about a centimeter of meat on and throw the whole thing into a vat of boiling water. I have these vats at home for this purpose. They loosen up the muscles and tendons and kill off any bacteria. Then you just slide the meat off and you're left with clean bone. In my younger days, I used to just snap it off, like Fernanda did in the video, but I found that doing that'll strip away some of the outer layer, or what's called the periosteum. The ligaments did make a sort of tCHaw! sound when I ripped them off, though. Actually it was more of a tCHwee!

PaperBird: tCHwee?

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: Right. I guess the exact sound would depend on what ligament you're dealing with, but I think it was a tCHwee!

PaperBird: Hunh.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: Anyway, getting back to what I was saying. Once you get all the muscle and connective tissue off the bone, you'll want to paint a coating of enamel over the surface in order to preserve it, keep it from deteriorating. Maybe also add a layer of glossy white paint to give it that clean look. I've heard of some roadkill artists working in ceramics. It's up to the individual. Myself, I like having a clean and durable bone because I work with furniture. That is, I make furniture out of bones. I've made tables, chairs, dressers, beds, and footstools. Once, I built a staircase for a friend of mine. That one took a couple years and an insane amount of roadkill. I practically had to drive cross-country for that one. And you can see why it's important, when building furniture, to want a bone that isn't splintered or damaged in any way. Especially for something like a staircase.

PaperBird: I see.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: But there're probably limits to how much roadkill you can find in a given year. Sometimes driving around I'll get as many as two or three a day, freshly-killed. Then it might take weeks before I find another roadkill, and it might just be a bird or a squirrel. Which makes things hard for me because lately I've been getting lots of offers from clients. They want maybe a throne of bone by the end of the month, or some sort of man-sized bird-cage or what have you. They can get really specific, and that's totally appropriate because everything I make is custom-designed. Hand-crafted. I think the price is fair, and I always give a one-year service warranty. But lately I've just gotten too many offers. I only have so many resources stock-piled in my vault. Can you see my predicament? It doesn't help asking my friends and neighbors if I could have dibs on their pets after they die. Their pets, that is. But right now, I'm in the process of cutting a deal with a veterinarian who happens to like what I do, so there's some hope for me yet. And the other day I got contacted by a record-company who wants me to build an elaborate canopy-style bed that can be used to promote this death-metal band's next album. Have you heard of Sarcophagi? I think that's their name.

PaperBird: Not a fan.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine: But you know the name? I'm hoping this'll give artists like me the kind of exposure we need. Not that roadkill artists have an alliance or anything. I think we just need some credibility and recognition because things're really hard for us. I live out on a farm in Minnesota with a few of my carpenter friends. We built the place ourselves. They're all sort of marginal artists like me: Sherry makes Egyptian-style caskets out of papier-maché, Trent works with rubber, Steven's an engineer in roller-coaster design but so far no amusement park will contract his work because they think his stuff's "unethical." But what can you do? You just plug away at it and hope that something good'll eventually come out. That's my advice to young artists: never take the easy road and never give up. As long as you remain true to your work, keep your work genuine, you'll be all right. There will always be times when you really doubt yourself, like when you're not eating as well as you should be because you can't afford anything besides microwave dinners and corndogs, and you're working at the IRS or for some low-circulation magazine or newspaper writing soft journalism and counting down the days to your next paycheck, and you have no love- or sex-life because you don't have the time or energy for that kind of thing, although you really do want one, it's all you think about, having an understandable and caring person be there for you, to buffer the pain and constantly tell you that you're not alone in this world, and you wonder to yourself, Are these sacrifices I'm making truly worth it? Am I putting out anything into the world that will make it a better place -- or that will help me be remembered after I die? Will I ever achieve the sort of recognition I honestly think I deserve in this lifetime, or at all? Or am I just going to have to fantasize about it in very strange and elaborate ways? Is it worth it to even go on with my life? Sometimes you'll think that the world doesn't need another someone like you, another dreamer, another hopeful who for some reason couldn't make it and is relegated to a life of mediocrity, who doesn't make an iota of a dent along the passage of time, and passes easily through the anus of history as if they never existed. But you just have to keep at it. Even if your spiritual back is broken, even if you're down to your last can of Spam, even if you've wasted away to 120 pounds when you really should be 160, even if you truly are all alone in this world, you just have to pick yourself up and reach for the next bone.

PaperBird can be found on YouTube: www.youtube.com/c/PaperBird

YOUR WIFE’S GYM FRIEND IS DRUNK by Kyle Seibel

June 24, 2024

Your wife’s gym friend is drunk. Not outrageously drunk, but too drunk to drive. According to her, he went to a work happy hour thing that morphed into a dinner thing which became a cocktails thing and now he is stranded somewhere in the city. There are no Ubers apparently or the wait is too long, so he calls your wife and asks for a ride, that is, of course, if it’s alright with you.“I don’t understand,” you say. “He’s getting kicked out of the bar?”She’s standing near the door with car keys in her hand. “No, just drunk. I said that already.” “You’re really going downtown now?” She taps her phone. “It’s not that late.” You turn off the TV and say you’ll come too. Your wife drops her keys and they crash on the tiles. “Perfect,” she says, picking them up.

It’s just after Christmas last year that your wife declares war on her gunt. When you ask her what a gunt is, she lifts up her shirt and pulls down her pants and points to the crepey pouch of tissue on her lower stomach. Say goodbye, she says, grabbing and shaking it. To her credit, she follows through. Your wife wins the war against her gunt. She wins the war and just keeps going.And at first, there’s no issue. Not really. The gym is her space, her time. You’re happy for her, even. You have your places too. Your own gym, for example. Your office friends, you’re close with them. You know intimate things about each other. Brad from account services tried to kill himself in college, for example, and Sue Ann the media planner recently had plastic surgery on her vagina. But they know you as well, know when something’s off. It is Brad, in fact, who brings it up first. Comes over for a beer one night and asks where your wife is.“At the gym,” you say.“Didn’t she go this morning?” Brad says. “Didn’t you mention that?”“That was a class,” you say. “Boot camp or something. This is free weights. Or yoga, I forget.”“Does she do that a lot, go to the gym twice a day?”“Well,” you say. “She usually goes three times.” Brad takes a long drink of beer, wipes his mouth, looks away, and says jesus.

Your wife’s gym friend is wearing an untucked black shirt with the top three buttons undone. He is sitting in the passenger seat and giving you directions to his condo. Your wife follows behind, driving his car, which is some kind of SUV off-road type thing. It’s got a big stovepipe situation coming out of the hood, which he says comes in handy more often than you might think.He talks about work. He asks you what you do. When you tell him, he makes a face and says, “Damn dude!” Looking over, you notice your wife’s gym friend must shave his chest. You can tell because he has stubble. It distracts you for some reason. You roll a yellow light and pull over on the next block to wait for your wife to catch up.“Ah, just keep driving,” your wife’s gym friend says. “She knows where she’s going.”

You’d be more concerned if there was more to be concerned about. There’s a thing called trust, you tell Brad and Sue Ann. I trust her, you say. Ten years, you remind them. That’s a long time. But they don’t look convinced. They think it’s weird, all the time at the gym. And it’s not their fault, they just don’t know, don’t understand the extent of the situation. You’re not one of these shithead husbands. You do the dishes, your own cooking. You’re not ignorant or moody. You’re an adult, goddamnit. It’s how you’ve always been. Virtually nothing has changed since the day you were married. Hell, you wore your tux last Halloween and went as James Bond. You tell them you’re exactly the same person you were on your wedding day. The microwave in the breakroom bleats in bursts of three.“So, okay,” Sue Ann says. “Maybe that’s the problem.”

“How does she know where you live?” you ask your wife’s gym friend. You are still pulled over, waiting for the light to change and your wife to join you.“Hmm?” he says.You swallow and repeat the question. Behind you, your wife flashes her brights.“Oh, she’s taken me home from the gym before,” he says.“What?” you say.“Sometimes I jog there,” he says. “Double exercise, you know.”“Right,” you say, putting the car into gear. “Double exercise.”

It’ll take you three weeks to look at your wife’s phone and when you do, you’ll see her gym friend’s penis in the folder for recently deleted photos. You’ll be shocked by its color, its fluorescent redness. You’ll think, did he use a filter? Does he have high blood pressure? Is there something else medical going on here? You’ll look down at your own crotch. So normal looking, so boring. How can you compete with a day-glo dick? You can’t, you think. You can’t, of course.You’ll throw the phone against the wall. You’ll think, I should throw the phone against the wall. Then you’ll realize you already did that. You’ll pick it up and throw it against the wall again. A buzzer will go off in your ears. Your wife will come into the kitchen. She’ll be screaming at you, that was the buzzing. She’ll follow you out to your car, sawing like a cicada. You’ll leave the house and go to Brad’s and against Brad’s advice, you’ll return home a few hours later. For five days, your wife will refuse to go to the gym. She’ll lie in bed sobbing, begging for you to talk to her.On the sixth day, she’ll move in with her gym friend, into the condo where you dropped him off that night. Over the next couple months, she’ll intermittently try to get back together. She’ll text you baby names and call late at night. Your lawyer will advise you to not pick up. Your lawyer will also advise you to not prevent her access to the house, so when she asks to pick up some stuff, you’ll say that it’s fine, just don’t bring her gym friend. He’ll come along anyway.Your wife or whatever she is at this point, will run off upstairs to collect her things and leave you in the kitchen with him.He’ll say that none of this is her fault and that he understands how you’re feeling. He’ll say that neither of them meant for this to happen, but that it’s against nature to deny true love. He’ll say that in a couple years, we’ll laugh about this. You’ll tell him quietly that you’re going to punch him in the face. He’ll do this shitty laugh scoffing thing and shake his head and say he’s trying to have a mature conversation and so that’ll be when you punch him in the face. He’ll fall down, out of surprise mostly, and without thinking, you’ll kick him as hard as you can in the back, the spot where the kidneys are. You’ll do this a great number of times. He’ll writhe around on the ground. You’ll step on his head a little and grind his face against the kitchen floor. Something religious will fill your chest when you hear his nose crunch under your foot. Your wife will hear the yelling and come running and see the blood on the white tile and faint, but when she comes to, she will be looking at you in a whole new way, and it will disturb you, it will turn your stomach, because you’ll realize that somewhere in all this violence, the seeds of your eventual reconciliation have been planted.

You keep the car running as your wife walks her gym friend to his door. Driving him home was your good deed for the day, you reason. There’s really no point in overthinking things. Tomorrow’s Thursday. You can take Friday off. There’s nothing wrong that can’t be fixed by a long weekend. Your wife gets back in the car, turns the heat up full blast, says something you can’t hear. You ask her to repeat it. She says never mind.

###

BREAKING by Emily Rinkema

June 23, 2024

On the designated day for punishing mothers, those of us who got our applications in early enough show up, mothers in tow. Most look like they came willingly, walking ahead of their children, mostly daughters, but not mine. I had to sedate her to get her in the car.I paid for the deluxe package, which includes interrogation. The application allowed three questions. Two were easy: What really happened to the kitten I brought home in third grade? And, Why did you only let me shave my legs to my knees until I was sixteen? The third was harder to decide on, but I went with, How can Kant’s categorical imperative ever truly be a reliable guide to moral obligations if humans lack rational agency?I prop Mom up next to me to wait our turn for interrogation. She puts her head on my shoulder, but only because her neck won’t hold it up. I may have over sedated her. I take a granola bar out of my bag and Mom lifts her head enough to give me the look that says I can’t believe you’re eating again.The door opens after only a few minutes and a mother and daughter come out of the room. They have both been crying. The mother is missing a few teeth and a finger, has bruises on her neck, is soaking wet. For a moment, I wonder if I am overreacting, if maybe it’s not too late to cancel and take Mom home, but then I see her sit up straight, roll her shoulders. I can tell she is judging the other mother for being weak, for breaking. She gives me that smile that says she can’t believe I chose to wear these shoes in public and cracks her knuckles.

LESS DEAD by Samir Sirk Morató

June 22, 2024

When asked, Dad says, Don’t worry about Ximena—she’s just a girl good at running away, but you find a shoebox of condoms, calling cards, Selena CDs, baby name lists, and blush palettes squashed between a bed leg and a wall, the last of Ximena in her whirlwind-emptied room, which reminds you of Diva Fridays:Come on, she’d say, I’ll teach you about eyeshadow, before putting her heavy handed brushstrokes on your lids, which made you miss Marco—who lived in her room before he too fled—all cropped shirts, eyeliner, and laughter mixed with hair oil and truancy.He had a box of condoms too.The animals look like them, you tell Mom. She doesn’t understand that squirrels are gnawing with baby teeth, raccoons developing pink palms, vultures singing raspy cumbia, your beagle watching you through Marco’s eyes rimmed in black skin; she sees only laundry, lunch boxes, and outlines.One Saturday, after you follow these animals into high weeds, burrs on your socks, Dad-tied pigtails on your head, you find the rotted lumps they’re eating: skin and bear paw people-fingers and maggots plated on shattered bones. It smells like basement.Your dad says it’s just deer. Leave it alone.Later, a woman calls you, asking if you’ve seen Ximena. She barely speaks English. You finger landline phone curls, safe and bored, before saying No.No have money to call again, she says, so please—Get more money then.You hang up.Many bad, fun runaways later, when police turn your boneyard into a poppy field of flags and shoot your animals for evidence, Mom weeps, vowing I didn’t know, while you tell yourself that you lied to be good, to be a girl missed, knowing you lied for no reason at all.

THREE MICROS THAT TICK by Daniel Seifert

June 21, 2024

Yesterday came the decreeAnd today it comes into force. We must all fight like Plains Indians, from here on.That means cool your arrows. Your axe must sleep in the ground while you win prestige by counting coup: Curl yourself like a puff of wind. Inch your body to the enemy. Closer to his neck, where the soft hair curls against his pulse. Touch his body with your coup stick—you have won. Steal his horse if you want; beat the darkening air with your cries. But the battle is over now, if you want it.

***

Press playWe are the narrators in his head. The man who each night plugs us in his ear and listens to stories. Alchemised from the page by our mouths, paid by the hour.We’re in bright studios far away, but we know the man is in bed when he kisses our lips to his ears.Dark-time. Pillow. Moulded rubber in shells of skin. The marvellous intimacy of audio.And we have a burning question: why does he listen in the dark, when he falls asleep so fast? Like bathtub water pulled down narrow pipes? Oh, time made foam. And we have a theory: he likes the way we read from scripts, threading words to thick red scarves that press his horizontal skin. He likes the way murderers are always caught, in the end. He likes how he forgets what we said last night and how he can rewind to the good parts—just before the foam hits.

***

ColtYoung horse shimmering between the plain and sky. Blue falling to four-legged black, to land on dirty green.Old man who calls himself a cowboy. Walks to the horse thinking how can it still stand. Madyoung thing kicking in a red barn door and the door kicking back, snap. Just like that, a sentence passed.Old man touches young horse snout whispering blue-sky words. Speaking in fact to the mouth of a holster, the handle of his gun. And green just waiting.

FUZZ by Tim Bird

June 20, 2024

WHAT THE BODY WOULD NOT HOLD by Liana Meffert

June 19, 2024

(Spring)We have to count several times to get the numbers right. There are so many. Superior right buttock, inferior left buttock, and flank, right temple, right chest, left lower leg, and thigh. And when the counts agree, we sit down to call his mother, who doesn't answer, but calls back several minutes later. Whether she believes us or not is beside the point; she hangs up. I hate this. Wouldn't you? We call the medical examiner and the organ donation center, who will in turn call her, and then she will begin to believe, or won't. There isn't a checkbox for grief we don't have time to summon. We move on: ten calls to five numbers that don't pick up and voicemails to call us back, soon. He's dead, he's dead, he's dead. Say it with me now. The heart will flop like a waterless fish in my hands, appendages dangle like fins, going nowhere. The lungs, when full, will balloon from their cage, their smooth surface shining like the back of a whale breaking the ocean surface. You will never forget this. I stop living in my body and become another's. The man crumpled beneath a 300-ton tractor whose heart we cajole for hours, with blood, electricity, and the weight of our own hands backed by whatever it is we have left. And when we had failed, or rather, the odds against us too great, we wear a family's thick suit of grief that chafes in the halls and leaves us breathless climbing stairs. I pass them with my lunch for a hunger that is no one's. I want to say, if I stopped eating every time someone died, I would never eat at all. My death, that is not my death, watches his son lean against a wall in the waiting room and finger the blinds while he calls more family. My death drinks orange juice, tastes the salt of a potato chip, then licks it clean. There is so much I lose track. I stop writing it down and that is my first error, though not my last. It feels like one long sleep, a feverish night, the sweat caked to the back of my old high school T-shirt where a Viking (our mascot) lays plastered to my chest, cracked from laundering and soaked in solidarity. I lose touch again, and again. Where am I? It is afternoon, then evening, then early morning again, and I am asleep, or awake, or going to sleep, or rising to meet the failing sun. The body lives on like a broken rearview window, glittering pieces stuck whole. (Summer) A hot summer day in the deep end of a swimming pool. A canister of baby formula. The aqua blue settling in his lungs. Gaze of a dead man. The best way to deliver news is the same way we all want to die—quickly. The baby kicks its chubby legs from the car seat in the corner. The grandson in his swim trunks. I was thinking about how we put up walls to survive and now are squeezed between these four that echo heat like a black asphalt street. The stamp of a wet backside on the chair. Excuse yourself. Shut the door and let them scream a hot yowl of grief. It's not the mind that grief goes to first, but the body (like a single nerve grief traverses) that sinks to the floor. The baby screams. A weather barometer sensing tension in the room. No, it's not your fault, no. Say it again for the people in the back. No one moves to quiet the baby. In the corner in the car seat. I was thinking about the four walls that hold a body like water in a pool. The deep blue of a deep end. Another summer day. I never had a journal when I was kid. That's a lie, though; I had tons, having received multiple every birthday from the time I could write until I was fifteen and maybe a few scattered thereafter. I meant I never had a journal I wrote in. Maybe it had to do with the implication of the gift, that my thoughts could be written down and kept safe with a lock and plastic key I could dangle from a wrist or neck—whatever. I never wanted my thoughts to be safe in that way. Outside in the park a group of men are playing basketball, and when I can't discriminate between their yells to pass it here and hey man, you can't fucking block me like that, I cross the street to walk away. Somewhere between 14 holes in a body and a courtside argument under this quiet sun lies the truth, and on this particular Sunday afternoon, I realize I've lost the ability to discriminate between the two. A child tumbles down the slide, two friends (lovers?) sleep side by side on a picnic blanket with twin bags of produce at their feet. A dog barks at something, and the community garden flowers grow taller, droop over the fence like tired smiles, all of them. Eyes still find a summer day cross-legged on the linoleum floor where we drank beer not because there weren't tables, but because we needed something bigger. There were a lot of ideas back then, and they were fragile. We couldn’t let them fall or look too close. (Fall) A patient is brought in for self-immolation and what has been billed as second-degree burns to his chest with third-degree encircling his neck. (In reality, the burns around his neck cut off just below his ears. These details matter quite a bit; a third-degree burn turns skin into a tourniquet of leather, like a noose around the neck). The man looks resigned in his tattered white Hanes T-shirt. He looks like a man who wanted to die and thought better of it ten seconds too late. He smells of my teenage summer nights. Bonfires on the shore and bad beer you drank just to prove you could be someone else. I was always someone else. The first to plunge into the pitch-black ocean, the white moon winking, cold as ever. "I'm fine," he says, when someone asks. He wants to be someone else. He shivers, his clothes damp with the water he used to put out the fire.My dreams flash big billboard messages, and I wake up wondering what I have missed. Annoyed that I’ve been abandoned to my consciousness. Another catalyst with no plan. My bank accounts are sucked dry; I am 20 weeks pregnant, feeling the surreal swell of my abdomen like a bloated fruit. We are blowing up a circus tent. And anyway, in real life, a loaded pistol slips from the backside of a pocket for the second time this week, and if that isn’t a sign, I don’t know what is.Time stands still, or rather, it slips through the slats of my fingers. I play with the digital numbers looming over the trauma bay. Crouch down and the 8 loses its horizontal hat, becoming a 4. Close one eye and the 18 becomes a 4. You can take minutes off a life like this. I miss the bakeries back home that shut their doors at 4 pm and run out of the best pastries before noon. They are adamant about the passage of time. Their darkened cafes and belly-up chairs pin me to the ground like a wild animal.I keep telling myself I have to stop running red lights. I will be a better person. I will be nice and smile. I will remember birthdays. I will forgive. I will forget. I won't relive or perseverate on others’ wrongdoings—or my own. I will live a better life. The one I always wanted. The one where I make small talk with the checkout person and learn the name of our mail carrier. I will learn my neighbor's names and remember more than just their dogs. Recycle. To do: Become a person who does not want for so much. A clean kitchen counter. Fresh pair of underwear. A day someone does not die.I fall in love with a man who drives his motorized wheelchair up the center of my street. Two lanes that should be one. No matter, the cars will wait. He has speakers tucked in the undercarriage of his throne that play perennial upbeat 80s music as he hums along and hands out well-wishes like candy. One for you, and you, and you. Sometimes he pulls his friend who gets around on a two-handed engine. The friend hangs on the back with just a few fingers, looking real casual, real cool. They bump to the music, grinning like they stole fun, and let the cars line up behind them, spotlit by headlights. (Winter)Two buildings up from me, it starts with an asbestos inspection. Weeks later, a second sign appears for a new building permit. It's then I realize the windows have been dark for weeks and the children that played outside in the planter boxes haven't been out to play. Even while telling myself it's because of the rain. Counterevidence mounts. The weather spares the sun occasionally to glance mounds of discarded belongings in the alleyway that spill into the sidewalk. Playsets, a trowel, several pairs of jeans, an overturned ironing board projecting an X into the air, a yellow jumper, bloated white garbage bags: their contents poking through like a cartoon where a creature fights to get out. Overnight it snows, and the belongings are covered with a white sheet the way a body is when you can’t wish anymore. When a lung looks like snow packed in the chest it’s called a “complete whiteout.” A chest is quiet without air, a snowstorm silently brewing. The other lung is collapsed: air has become trapped between his lung and chest wall, and it is collecting, pushing his lung towards his heart, and preventing it from expanding when he breathes.I only see this image after he's been dead for some time. It's early morning and we have called Jennifer, the presumed daughter, whose voicemail is alarmingly cheery like she’s warding off people like me leaving messages like this. I'm glad I hang up when I do because another patient has started smoking in 26B, and security is moving slowly to escort her out as she screams and struggles. Nursing shift changes at 7 am, so the department is at maximum capacity with twice the nurses, half of them carrying warm mugs of coffee, and smelling of freshly washed hair or at least the essence of freshness that reminds me of the staleness on my tongue. They line up in parallel so she can be escorted through, and it's like a sort of sendoff, the woman struggling and yelling that she can walk herself out. Other things I forgot until now: how the patient in the bed in the hallway hiked her gown up to her knees with an air of calculated insouciance to urinate in the highly trafficked thoroughfare. Snow, heavy overnight. The wheelchair that goes by, leaving parallel tracks of urine as if to guide future travelers. Environmental Services—one of my favorite hospital euphemisms—called overhead and orange cones set around her bed like a minor traffic accident. The white spell of silence that hangs when the world holds its breath. How she sat back on the bed, her face indecipherable. ( ) There's having a bad day, and then there's getting hit by an oncoming truck on your way to see your daughter, who is getting taken off life support. I pick out pieces of glass lodged into your bloodied scalp. The water meant to dislodge the pieces too fine to see drips into your eyes, and you let it run in rivulets down your face. There's I'm so sorry and there is silence, which this is. It's 2 am, and I've been in the hospital for nearly 24 hours. This isn't about me, but I don't know if the sun ever rose yesterday, if the moon became the promise of a waxing gibbous. I'm tethered only by nursing shift changes (always at 7) and the cafeteria, which opens and closes. The smell of brewed coffee from the adjacent cafe with mockingly limited hours, and the omnipresent aroma of Subway—the only 24-hour food option—not quite food, but not quite something else, that wafts inexplicably strongest around 3 am. The hospital is not unlike an airport in this way: it contorts time as you fumble to replace sky-dwelling anchors, pace the halls when it goes quiet, and finger an artificial bonsai with longing. It seems you are the only thing living here, and the connection is tenuous. I stitch up the open wounds still bleeding. You're not on life support, but that fact is far from a consolation prize. Several hours later, when you have moved up to the floor, a code comes overhead, and I run up three flights of stairs to find you silent again. I call your sister who is on her way to your daughter. The line goes quiet until she asks—no, wonders—aloud: "Should I turn around?" And finally, your body breaks.

GENDER BENDERS AND GENRE BLENDERS: Victoria Brooks and Jack Skelley in Conversation

June 18, 2024

Two freaky fiction writers chat. Jack Skelley, author of The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker (Semiotext(e), 2023) joins Victoria Brooks, author of Silicone God (Moist, 2023). Fear of Kathy Acker is a cult hit embraced by young readers. Skelley’s new book of stories is Myth Lab (Far West Press, 2024). Silicone God is a strange strain of post-human, science fiction/body horror by “Queer Mistress Wife Human” (Brooks’ Instagram name). Topic A: How horny writing may reach beyond tired categories of sexual and textual orientation. Jack: I’ll kick it off! Victoria, I was first attracted to Silicone God for its boundary blurring. Your debut novel straddles genres, becoming larger than its many parts: It’s billed as “queer sci-fi” but also subsumes body horror, perhaps auto-fiction, and ventures into themes such as species evolution (which my new book Myth Lab does too!) At the same time, its (very horny!) narrative messes with the sexual orientation of its protagonist. In fact, the novel messes with the very concept of time and narrative. Can you encapsulate how and why you do this?Victoria: In terms of why, I don't think I can do otherwise. It's all a mess: me, bodies, sexual orientation and gender. Sex. Time. I tried to reflect this in Silicone God. But I always feel like I'm fighting between letting the mess in and keeping it out - deciding which false coherences I'll accept. Choosing genres and drawing straight lines is hard because mess is fucking fun. And when the mess is sex, it's horny! This, especially in the case of writing like ours that mixes genres, including auto-fiction, can leave the reader with questions about what's real and what isn't. My writing (my nonfiction work and my sci-fi) draws on aspects of my life, but I like to play with the reader. I want them to wonder. I think it's sexier to read a hot scene and think maybe it actually happened. Myth Lab also embraces the mess (or the blur) in such a beautifully wild and sexy way - I'd love to know more about why you're also drawn to this mode of writing. Jack: I get what you said about “deciding which false coherences I’ll accept,” because so many coherences are merely imposed norms. Including sexual norms, of course. Myth Lab goes crazy messing (as you say) with depictions of sexual orientations and genders. For example, it portrays booming transgender medical procedures as advancements in human evolution. Hormone replacement therapy (HRT), silicone implants (breasts, butts and beyond), and “neurodivergent” approaches to sexual orientation are all celebrated in Myth Lab’s mish-mash mess. Rather than in traditional story form, it does this via mock-academic “theories,” and other genre perversions. I think Silicone God does a parallel thing. But in (mostly) narrative mode. Here’s a freaky paragraph from your book:My little suckers cupped her skin – the slimy hot and cold sensations sending her wild. I put one on her clit, and carefully engorged it with blood so much that it became a mini cock. She begged me to kiss it till she came.The sexy mess is so messy that the quaint term “bisexual” doesn’t begin to cover the book’s realms of trans-species sex. And trans-temporal sex! So let me confront you with the (admittedly reductive) question your readers have: How much of Silicone God is based in your personal experience?Victoria: I love how we converge on the point about transness: in Silicone God, there is a divine trans character (created by mushroom gods 3000 years in the future). Myth Lab's theories give me life, and more specifically give life to my drive to see sex on the page. Your text takes the form of so many dimensions of a sex life. We have the hallucinogenic poetic parts with lines like: “Where voice and vagina conflate, you’ll find kisses promise more illicit pleasures. The Other’s voice cajoles, seduces, instructs, creating the one hundred-letter word for thunder....” Then later, a switch to a more linear prose—one of my favourite parts is a short meditation on the erotics of gel nails—then to the tender: “How I yearn to hold and heal. How, upon cumming, I laugh uncontrollably. How, later or at any time, I weep at the most maudlin nonsense. A detergent commercial.”It also gives me joy to see your creative destruction of academic or philosophical authority over sex. I feel we have a similar drive in our writing to understand something, or grasp at a truth about sex (that maybe exists beyond our own words) and do something wild with it. To your question: it's hard to distinguish where I stop, and Silicone God begins. Even the scenes taking place in a future dimension called Time ruled by mushroom gods. Now, if the question is rather: Are there scenes that are written directly from experience? Yes. My book gives dramatic color to my thinking around the mistress archetype, and I have been a mistress many times. So some of the tougher scenes (and some of the hot ones) are direct from experience. So I've paired the very real, with the outright unreal. I wonder why. Does Myth Lab have a theory? Does it do the same?Jack: Yes, Silicone God’s trans divinity from the future comports with (one of) the central hypotheses in Myth Lab: That technology, an extension of language, is exponentially speeding human evolution. And this includes a new universe of sexual mutations. I sort-of summarize that in this line from the Myth Lab “theory” titled “Rendezvous with God-MILF”: “If DNA is evolution’s hardware, language is its software, and dirty talk does most of the coding.” Many of these ideas derive from Terence McKenna, the psychedelic shaman who postulated that pre-human evolution was jump-started by a metaphysical intervention from psilocybin mushrooms. So there’s another connection between your novel and my stories! Magic fungi! Towards the end of Silicone God, the narrator has this bizarre epiphany:When I first saw the Sea of Time, I thought it looked like heaven. It was a heaving mirror, the same color as the violet sunset and the silica under my feet. Massive cock-shaped mushrooms poked up among the dunes….Setting aside the phallic symbolism of mushrooms, Let me ask you this: You’ve already acknowledged having been a multiple mistress. Do you also have experience with magic mushrooms? Or what is the source of your mushroom god imagery?Victoria: We've coincided with mushrooms: magic! I'm excited that you mention one of my favorite scenes in Silicone God. I have certainly had my fair share of psychedelic experiences, but the source of the imagery is rather the evolution and physicality of mushrooms themselves. I find it extraordinary that their mycelium underground networks have helped trees secretly communicate; even flirt with one another. And as a queer person who believes fiercely in activism, I adore this. Perhaps it's even brought together our books! I'm also interested in the analogy of the mycelium and the mistress, and how she becomes a mode/body of communication between wives (or indeed between wives and husbands, and with other mistresses). That's where I was going with the scene you mention: the mirror sea (made of mistresses) nourishes the mycelium which is the network connecting the mushroom fruit bodies. I feel like we could keep on talking about this (and our mycelium line of communication will certainly continue) but perhaps we can wrap things up here with my question to you about imagery in general. I feel like our approaches to imagery are similar, although in Myth Lab I was struck by how skillfully you managed to evoke so many hallucinogenic scenes. This, for many reasons, is one of my favorites: “It suggests that James Joyce’s mistress ululates her uvula. It flutters with ovulations in the ‘Linguaverse,’ as you might call it. The ultimate sex worker, this super uterus is formed by subtracting her slave names from her pet names, and hiero-symbols in doublewide quasar waterways.” I'm curious about the experiences and/or processes that have resulted in such poetic alchemy? Jack: These “theories” are intertextual: They are inspired by what I’m reading and hearing. I quote from other books, and each story ends with a list of sources. I blend them with personal compulsions to arrive at a third place: linguistically based with lots of dumb puns and pop-culture references. This is my go-to high/low synthesis. Myth Lab mixes everything from Kim Kardashian and TikTok to C.G. Jung and Noam Chomsky. Plus a bunch of mythology, romance and sex, including sex-worker material. It’s fun to write, and – one hopes! – to read.