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INTERVIEW WITH JAMES McADAMS by Jo Varnish

May 25, 2020

James McAdams’s Ambushing the Void is released this month by Frayed Edge Press. I caught up with him for a chat about his book, his writing process, and his inspirations.

JV: Ambushing the Void is a collection of stories drawn together by themes such as relationships, loss, and nostalgia, and told through truly memorable characters. Professor Pankova and Teo are two of many that will stay with me. Did you draw from real life counterparts for these and other characters?

JM: It’s pretty easy for me to look at a person, or read/hear about a person on a podcast or Tweet, and then imagine them into some weird scenario combined with my experience of the world. I guess that’s true for all writers. Teo, however, I have no idea where he came from. I think I had the idea to write about this immigrant character from the 1980s, but I do think some of his determining characteristics (being a young baseball player) was probably taken from a documentary of Yankees players from the Hispanic world, maybe? Professor Pankova is modeled after a Russian literature professor from the Czech Republic I had at the University of Pittsburgh. I was fascinated by how enthusiastic she was to share her heritage with the students (cooking for us, showing us pictures of her hometown, dressing in weird post-Soviet almost-gypsy garb) combined with the utter indifference of most of the class, who were busy sleeping or texting or laughing behind her back. It was sad I guess, everything’s sad, but it seemed like something more. I think adding to her character a sense or recognition that her students didn’t care makes the character work. I hope this is the case. Other characters: Joe the Plumber (“My Friend Joe”) is based on the “Joe the Plumber” character from some of the idiotic Sarah Palin rallies in 2008 and beyond. The most literal kidnapping of a public person for my purposes comes in “Somewhere in FL, an Angel Appeared,” which I’ll get to.

JV: The use of technology is a recurring theme in these stories. How do you feel about modern relationships’ reliance on technology, and is there a wistfulness for a time when social media and the Internet weren’t integral to our lives?

JM: I’m 40, I think around the same age as you. I feel like I straddle the world of my students, who are like, Why wouldn’t our entire lives be mediated?, and the world of, say, my older siblings in their later 40s/50s, who really don’t care about this. So I’m in between and have both thoughts in my head all the time: I hate this but I’m on it 3 hrs a day. Ultimately, I’ll just be old and say 1) there are dopamine functions that the software and hardware and application developers are manipulating and exploiting and there will probably a class-action lawsuit in a decade or so, just like what happened to Pharma and Big Banking;  2) the old Pascal quote, viz. something like “the most important skill for a human being is to be alone in a room”: I can’t do this anymore. Can you? I need to be Mr. Promotion Machine on social media for the next few months but I’m pretty sure I’ll be off everything by the end of 2020. I would like to go off the grid and hike to Alaska or something but I have literally zero abilities to take care of myself without things like microwaves and YouTube recipes and WikiHow instructions so….no off-the-grid for me unfortunately.

JV: Drug use and addiction are peppered throughout the collection; what inspires you to explore them through your writing?

JM: Quick answer, which is true: I’m writing a novel set in a rehab so a lot of the later stories in here (“Delray,” “Red Tide,” “Somewhere in FL…”) are from that. Longer answer, which I’m not sure is true: I think drug addiction is another side of love. So I think you can have love (for a person, or a higher ideal maybe) or love for a drug, or even a phone or app (as I said above), or whatever pings your dopamine. And as you’ve noticed there’s like zero romantic love in this collection, because love is boring to write about IMO, so to fill that vacuum I went with drug addiction, which is just another, less culturally-sanctioned, form of love. I’m not sure this is true as a sociological insight. Do you buy any of it?

JV: It makes sense, having read your book! Talking of, tell us a little about the inspiration behind the story, "Somewhere in Florida, An Angel Appeared." It’s a beautiful piece, quietly moving, and one that leaves an impression, possibly asking more questions than it answers…

JM: I’m happy to! The piece was initially dedicated to Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls, but we removed it because I have a big heart and was dedicating every piece to thousands of people until it annoyed my poor editor, despite her patience...Anyway, Amanda has one of the more famous TED Talks called “The Art of Asking,” which she later expanded into a book. It pretty much explains the rationale for the move around 2005-2010 to artists just giving away their work for free online as a reaction to piracy. Anyway, she tells a story about touring with the Dresden Dolls in her 20s and crashing on fans’ couches. In one story, she talks about her band (so we imagine a bunch of loud young brash punks) staying over at a small little hut in a Hispanic enclave in Florida. In the morning, she recounts being woken up by the Colombian grandmother and some other elders, who, while teaching her how to make authentic breakfast burritos (or whatever), thank her repeatedly for saving the life of their little girl who loves her music so much. It’s around the 3/4th part of the video, I highly recommend it.

JV: What attracts you to the form of short and flash fiction?

JM: The earlier works in this collection average 4,000 words, the more recent fewer than 1,000, which is the consensus cap for flash fiction. While this wasn’t a formal decision I made, it makes sense for a number of reasons, some practical, some neurotic: My attention span, because of THE OBVIOUS, doesn’t work anymore. I base my TV shows on those I can watch with 33% of my brain, so I can read with 33% of my brain and listen to music with 33% of my brain. Online, I don’t read anything longer than 2,000 words. I am not proud of this, but I can’t be alone. Even most podcasts nowadays are moving towards 15-minutes…

I think Rick Moody wrote this once, but the cool think about flash is that you can do any weird experiment and if it doesn’t work, then who cares. For example, I just published a piece about a M2F Trans worker who creates fake profiles on online dating profiles in the form of a Reddit AMA. I wouldn’t build a 300-page on this foundation, but for a 500-word micro it’s okay if it sucks. Small achievements, weekly. It’s sort of a psychological trick, but I’m writing a novel now cut into discrete, 500-1,000 word chapters. This way, at the end of each week, I have chapters done, chapters I can publish, that make it easier to concentrate on writing a novel for 3 years.

JV: Who influences your work as a writer?

JM: This will seem crazy after what I just wrote about flash, but I love the big old Russian-Soviet books: Gogol, Tolstoy, Goncharov, Dostoevsky, Bely, Nabokov, Pasternak...as well as the poets like Akhmatova, Mayavosky, Tsvetaeva. James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men has been my muse for the past two years; His A Death in the Family is pretty good too. Also, Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle trilogy is an amazing experiment about opening your brain 100% to readers.

It’s sort of like what Howard Stern does on the radio since 1980 in terms of pure confessional mindfulness that makes even the most banal quotidian events (10% of My Struggle is Karl feeding his little kids) seem numinous and holy. As for more contemporary authors, DFW (I realize I just lost 40% of sales because people will think I’m a DFW-fanboy…no footnotes in this collection, I promise), Lydia Millet, Colson Whitehead (he of the repeat Pulitzers), George Saunders, J.M. Coetzee, Denis Johnson, Samuel Delany, Kathy Acker, William Vollmann, now I’m just looking at bookcases…and thinking, “I need more non-white males,” so let’s stop here.

Except to say: I’m lucky to be Flash Fiction editor at Barren Magazine, so I get to read real-time Indie authors like Marisa Crane, Chelsea Laine Wells, and Cathy Ulrich, who you probably know about it. Wish more people did!

JV: Cathy Ulrich is a hero of mine! Tell us a little about your writing process. Do you allocate time to your writing every day? How much of your writing time is rewriting and editing?

JM: I’m horribly lazy and have no self-discipline about the writing grind. Most of this collection was written between 2-5 a.m. when I couldn’t sleep and wasn’t watching The Sopranos reruns for the 25th time. I tend to write super fast and don’t revise all that well. I will say, 99% of my editing goes into dialogue. I slash and slash and slash at dialogue until I find something that sounds true but unique. I have a rule where if I can tell what the next line is (“Hello, how are you, Sally?”/“I’m fine, Reginald, how about you?”), then it gets deleted automatically. I stole a lot of dialogue techniques from William Gaddis and Don DeLillo. As an editor, if I don’t buy the dialogue that’s something I really have trouble getting over.

JV: Finally, what are you working on now? Has the lockdown has afforded you time to write much more than usual?

JM: I’m writing a novel-in-flash about The Florida Shuffle Rehab facilities have sprouted everywhere, many of them nefarious, profiting from insurance scams and general duplicity, referred to as “The Florida Shuffle.” "Delray” and “Red Tide” from the collection are in this.

"Ambushing the Void explores the margins of 21st century America, with characters confronting new worlds, new technologies, and new social structures while attempting to retain their identities & worldviews. These quirky, off-beat stories (with a tinge of the weird and disturbing) are thought-provoking takes on the post-modern search for meaning."
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¿CÓMO ESTÁ TU MADRE? by Phebe Jewell

May 24, 2020

Every morning Mom digs in the garden plot behind our house, dressed in a faded red shirt and ripped jeans. She refuses to wear black. “I’m done mourning,” she says. “I’ve been grieving since the day he enlisted.”

Kneeling in the dirt, Mom turns the soil with a hand spade. It’s a small plot, maybe five by seven. She says she’s putting it to bed for the winter. No cover crop seeds yet, so there’s nothing to bury, just dark loamy soil she churns and churns.

She’s still there in the afternoon when I open my Spanish workbook at the kitchen table, trying to remember the difference between estar and ser. My book tells me one expresses temporary feelings, the other, permanent being. What does that mean? I look out the window. Mom wipes mud from her face before plunging the tip of the spade back into the dirt. I stare down at the page and answer the question ¿Cómo está tu madre hoy? (How is your mother today?) with Ella está triste (She is sad). I leave the question ¿Y tu hermano? (And your brother?) blank. 

Dad starts dinner, pulling out an onion from the pantry. When we were little, Mom used to entertain us by tugging on swim goggles before cutting onions, transformed into a bulging-eyed alien, a human-sized fly. Dad dices the onion at the counter, tears streaming down his unprotected face. 

When dinner is ready I go out back to get Mom. Even in afternoon rain, the plot looks like the same mound of dark earth as this morning and the day before and the day before that. 

Mom shivers at the table, a damp towel around her shoulders while Dad coaxes her into taking small bites. They face each other knee to knee. “Open up.” He guides the spoon toward her mouth like when I was little. Once in a while her mouth goes slack and food streams from her mouth. He wipes her face with a dishcloth before repeating “Open up,” his voice a hand cupped under the spoon. ¿Cómo está tu padre? (How is your father?). Él está cansado. (He is tired). “Good job,” Dad says as the spoon slips between her open lips. 

After dinner Mom gets ready for bed, and I fill the sink with warm soapy water. Dad says spring will come, and Mom will get better, but scrubbing the pan, I know she’s not coming back. Setting the last bowl in the drainer to dry, I sit back at the table and take out my homework. I erase Ella está triste and write Ella es triste, sure my homework will be handed back with a red circle isolating es and a note to review the difference between feeling and being.

 
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A TRANSVERSE PROGRESSION by Alyssa Jordan

May 23, 2020

iv. Late one night, Fred acted on a whim. She reached out to the one friend who still took her calls. 

Together they stood, poised on a street corner with coffee cups in hand. The Friend was tall and blonde and intrigued. Red lipstick lined her mouth, wet like a bloody smear. She held a cigarette in her other hand, taking demure drags that did nothing to distract Fred from the pink smoke that curled around her shoulders.

“How about them?” The Friend asked. 

When she squinted at the couple heading toward the bus stop, Fred was met with a charged, acrid tangle of color. The varying shades of yellow and green made her recoil. 

“Something about green…it doesn’t feel right.” 

Fred shifted her weight back and forth. She still wasn’t sure why The Friend had taken this turn of events so well.

“What does mine look like?” The Friend asked.

“It’s very pink.”

“Oh, good. I always liked pink,” The Friend said and took another drag.

 

ii. One day, Fred drowned. She coughed up an entire ocean after a woman cracked her ribs and convinced her heart to beat again. 

When Fred opened her eyes, she was met with a curious sight.

Dense fog hung around the woman’s face. It carried at least a dozen shades of blue, the kind Fred wanted to pet and touch. Strangest of all was the grey film that masked her hair. It encased each strand like a second skin. 

Back then, she hadn’t known what that meant. 

 

iii.  Fred stayed indoors for the first few months. She was still coming to terms with drowning. And, if Fred was being honest with herself, she had been holding out hope that the woman was a fluke. The lack of oxygen could have scrambled her brain.  

A walk to the corner store proved her wrong. She felt as if she saw the world through the bizarre lens of a kaleidoscope. 

After a while, Fred came to understand that everyone was different. Some people had dim auras, like reedy threads of smoke, or diffused splotches of fog. Others seemed to fill up the space around them, struck by saturated colors that burst behind her eyes, keeping Fred bedridden for days at a time. 

She decided to buy an old T-bird. The rusty hood and layers of decomposing trash were the least of her problems. It got her from one highway to the next, and that was all that mattered. 

Fred spent her days driving, constantly heading toward the water, and late at night she would return to her apartment, avoiding people at all costs. 

 

v. “Why not face this head on?” The Friend asked after another day riding highways. Her roommate waved Fred inside with a toss of his head and a faint bluish-glow that made her shiver. 

“Clearly running isn’t working. You still have the headaches, don’t you?” 

When she nodded, The Friend smiled knowingly. “So stop running and face it. Do your worst.”

 

vi. At the height of summer, Fred drove to a different beach every week. Miles of crowded seashore motivated her. In the water, a chill would cut to her bone; then, a telltale burn swelled in her lungs. 

She always swam closer to shore.

Once she was in view, Fred would jerk her arms and inhale the sea. From below, it looked as if sun-shaped flowers danced along the surface, which were so pretty she almost regretted disturbing them. 

Fred drowned three more times before The Friend followed her. Cigarette in hand, shrouded in pink, she took a drag as the latest good Samaritan pumped Fred’s chest. Her fluttery rib cage bruised in shades of sunrise.

“It’s still there.” 

Fred wanted to say that after she opened her eyes. Instead, water shot from her mouth in great, hacking coughs. The Samaritan—a man this time—lunged to flip her over. Powder-blue wisps clung to his arms, his hips. On the delicate arch of his foot, gold sizzled like hot oil. 

“Dry drowning is a thing, you know.” The Friend peeked over the man’s shoulder. Her silhouette blotted out the sun. She tapped a cigarette against her sparkly phone case. “Wikipedia says people confuse it with secondary drowning. That’s a thing, too.”

Trying to talk just made her cough harder. Fred gestured from herself to the man. 

The Friend sighed. “This isn’t what I meant.” 

When the man reared back, staring at her in disbelief, The Friend only smiled. She flicked her cigarette into a gust of salty wind. 

 

vii. Fred’s car broke down in July. More than once, she boarded the bus soaking wet, dribbling seawater onto the floor (her jeans were never the same). She must have looked extra pitiful in gritty denim—the bus driver usually let her stay.

In August, a nasty cough took root. The Friend tutted about Wikipedia entries every time she joined Fred. Sometimes, she smoked; sometimes, she sucked down margaritas with tobacco-stained fingers, spilling lime and tequila in the sand. 

Fred always noticed after a near-drowning. She spent a lot of time in the sand, too. 

 

viii. On the best days, a dull throb bloomed behind her eyelids. She tried to enact her near-drownings more and more often. It would work, eventually. Everything would go back to the way it was.

“Want one?”

A middle-aged man held out an orange. He unearthed another from his weathered saddlebag. Over his head, buttermilk clouds pulsed with murky green. Fred wanted to close her eyes. 

“No, thanks.”

“You sure?” Smiling, he shook the saddlebag. Green tendrils began to grow over his arms.

She laid her head against the window.

 

ix. In autumn, the man from the bus saved Fred’s life.

She had waited too long beneath the current. By the time she surfaced and flailed, few people remained on the beach. Even fewer left their towels or plastic chairs. As the sea filled her mouth, Fred vaguely wondered if someone would call the police. 

Water rose over her head. For a moment, she plunged beneath the waves, slipping into the cool calm as her body sunk. A sense of longing dragged her down, down, down. 

When Fred opened her eyes, she was lying on the beach. Water expelled from her aching lungs. The violent, rhythmic motions surged, storming her body. Green flickered in Fred’s peripheral vision. It strung the man’s neck like a noose. Inside his bag of oranges, the dancing flamingos on her wallet swayed with every step.

She limped to the nearest pay phone. Around her, people milled through narrow, winding roads, veiled under shrouds of pink and green and gold. Occasionally, purple or blue would split the churning haze. 

It felt as if a tiny heart thumped in her skull.

Palming some coins from the gutter, Fred leaned against the payphone and stared at her reflection. In the blurry metal, bloodless fingers touched her face. A nearby store window showed the same girl. 

“You did it again.” The Friend said after she answered her phone. It sounded more like a sigh. “Why do you keep doing this?”

Fred looked away from the window. “I’m trying to put things back. Like they were before.”

“Oh, babe.” 

She could easily picture her lighting a cigarette, heedless of the pink wisps trailing her every move, settling on the wing of her shoulder blade. They were like a wound no one else could see.

“You know,” The Friend said. “Some things are more beautiful after breaking.”

 

i. One day, Fred stood at the edge of the ocean. Waves skinned the top of her feet for hours. They sunk after each press of the water, tingling from lack of movement. Soon they were no longer visible to the naked eye. 

With every year, Fred thought she disappeared a little more. 

She remembered loving sun flowers and 80s movies and swimming at night. Back then, she had been so proud of the medals she won. The degree hanging in her mother’s kitchen. The missions she completed. 

These things now boiled down to a checklist in her head. 

Fred kept reaching further back in time. She tried to assume who she was at 30, 25, or even 20, only to realize those women were already gone. All that remained was the distinct impression of earlier years.  

Most of her summers had been spent in the ocean. Fred could still feel her mother’s hands on her back, large and steady as they kept her afloat. So many times they had returned so she could learn the mechanics of swimming. When to push and pull. How to tread water or drop deeper.

Every time she went under, Fred felt okay again. Like she was weightless, her arms outstretched, legs gently pumping, safe and whole in the dark. 

Fred bent to gather stones for her pockets. This time, she needed to be heavy. 

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SALT IN THE BODY by Kelsey Ipsen

May 22, 2020

Ghosts do not come to me because I grew up by the ocean and my body is still full of salt.

Girl; all limbs, all eyes and sudden fearlessness, dared the waves to become bigger and they did. And of course she was sucked under, tossed about, close enough to death. Of course she was rag-doll, rag-doll, rag-doll. Remember when your body was your body but now it is not. The feeling is like this. I know my body is other things, is waves, is salt. Is once a house/a host/a body with another body’s cells in it. The other body’s cells are still inside me, touching my own cells, and we will be like this forever. An adult body contains 250g of salt meaning I am a walking mix of salt and you. Meaning I was right all along while I was under the waves thinking this is it, thinking this is what I really am. Women understand that ownership of the body is an untruth. I think men only discover this when they are dying. 

If I have one piece of advice it is this: if you have not yet learned to be terrified of the ocean you should learn to be terrified of the ocean.

I have heard a needle inside me break through to water like an explosion. I have heard shells chaotic over each other as the ocean breathes out. We are all crashing against each other. We are all life trapped in flesh gods trying. We are only meant to be born screaming. I only wanted your loudest sound.

Noises in the night can be explained away by morning, but the depths of the ocean will just swallow you whole.

Whispers in my ear are not spiritual phenomena, they are voices from me telling me something I don’t want to hear but need to hear: Don’t forget to breathe. Don’t forget the shape of your abdomen, duneless. Don’t forget the length of arms, you can use them to reach in, to grab someone out of the waves, to make someone bird—forever sky, never drowning. 

The depths of the ocean, when explained, are still uninhabitable.

I cannot follow you if you do not scream, baby. Scream. Small kicks can’t sound louder than this. You only ever heard me. You only ever heard me from under water.

Ghosts, when explained, will let the water flow right through them.

I am the ocean and you are the ghost. I am still here without you here. I want to know how to breathe when I can’t breathe. I need to know that the salt in my body will surface me. I need to know that the next wave makes sound. I need to know that the next wave makes something other than this.

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THINGS TO SHIP TO AMERICA by Jessica Evans

May 21, 2020

Is heaven a proper noun?

Here, I learned to love myself. To love the thick full shimmy of thighs against one another; to appreciate the height of my traps compared to the valley of my clavicle. I fell in love with butter churned from cream produced by cows who live only a few kilometers away.

I learned to seek out the salted rotisserie chicken, its skin crispy and shimmering after hours on a spit. As much to bite into something with savage need as because there's ownership that comes from eating simply to eat. But chicken is only good when washed down with room temperature fest beer, brewed like their ancestors and consumed within modernity in overcrowded but not too autophobic beer tents where everyone knew everyone else, except for us because here we are, moored inside something that looks like expat living but is actually attempts to recreate America whenever possible.

 

Our circle within a circle confuses even us. We drive roundabouts and autobahns and pay tolls on roadways, deposit euro coins into bathroom vending stalls so we can enter and not be able to tell the attendant there's no soap, the water is too cold. We recede into the background if we're not on post.

Or.

We become obnoxiously loud and boisterous, the kinds of Americans who boast about a war that ended seventy-five years ago, who consistently remind the local populace that had it not been for us, the entire world would look different, feel different, be different. Well. That's so consumable and true and entirely false that the congruencies between understanding now and then becomes complex and altered so it's easier to reach for another warming beer.

We travel, we rove, we move, searching for something that feels like home but gives us enough space to learn to grow. I take moments for myself, carve out instances in which I can identify as myself and not (just a) spouse, my own person, my own truth, my own evocation:

Mornings when the moon is bright, and there's no one else in the forest so I can turn off the headlights and pretend I'm a real forest witch.

When half my drive has no cell signal, so I'm forced to sit in silence, contemplative, and settled.

Looking for the quiet markers of age—the creasing of an elbow joint, the slow upstart of lifting from a chair, I settle into this time-space, being the preemptive feelings of being nostalgic before it's time. 

And in nostalgia for here comes past-longing for forms of then, tangible or  esoteric, the kinds of memories that come unbidden:

Dima buying a bedroom set, Ken buying an air mattress, his aging skin that looked like leather from a distance and felt even more snakish next to mine. The first two airmen I slept with, their introductions into my life only a half-week away from one another. The expectation that eventually, I would find myself grown, polished, and with a family to support.

A mother, two toddlers, and an infant strapped to her chest, EPT test in hand as she sets down birthday candles, plastic party favors, sweets and treats onto the conveyor belt, her hand clutched around her wallet, head constantly evaluating her two small humans, looking for relief and answers and silence. And I watch her watch that which she's produced and clearly her womb isn't hollow, her tribe is continuing to grow, (though I sense that she gleefully accepts the silken luxury of sitting in a bath in solitude, or spending a morning reading and drinking coffee, luxuries that she's never going to be able to afford, not now, not with her progeny continuing to propagate and just once), I want the openness that might come from being able to reproduce; mitosis at its very core, a concept that has both alarmed and paralyzed me, left me bereft with longing and sighing with relief.  

 

Whisk(e)ys we like

Bushmills Original only in basement Irish bars watching soccer and listening to 90s "classic rock" while we're both recuperating from the walking and the sleeping outside of our schedule, the constant seeking of something that we're certain, if we just keep traveling, we're going to find. In these basement bars, we avoid serious discussions, like what's going to happen when we never have children, and how should we deal with deployment, or our next concrete steps after the army, after uniform, after boots. Instead, we talk about the better band and I toss out suggestions, none of which are ever, ever better than Nirvana. The light is low, which hides the shimmer strands of grey that color both of our heads, our lines from lack of sleep, hollow nights lost to wonder and worry. 

Glenfiddich, good for dessert cheese plates when we're feeling fancy and pretending like we were born fluent in sophistication, though communism and generational poverty rarely suggest a fluency in anything but loss and longing. 

Paddy and Red Breast for those nights when we've finally made forever friends and we can just be loose but that would require us to be in a place longer than a tour and we're both so hard to get to know that ultimately, we learn to lean into our own patterns, create tradition that can exist outside the need for friends

and finally

Querceto Chianti that's a little overpriced paired with Italian food that a chef didn't prepare but we're hungry and trying because it's been a long weekend full of unknowns because we're on the way to listen to a symphony, something purchased well-ahead of time, that Sunday morning when we planned the trip to Salzburg; when it felt wrong not to include a small dip into the sort of chords that make each of us whole.

So tonight—

I'm sitting in a 17th century palace where Mozart first performed, watching a small group of students play a selection of winter music. Two whiskeys and two wines in and the viola player looks exactly like a powerlifter I used to fuck but can't remember his name. Exactly like him, even down to the shape of his nose, the way it meets the beginnings of his lip because I used to think it was so endearing that his youth meant he couldn't grow a beard (and even in those endearing moments I used to find a slight smidge of pleasure at knowing even at my age, I could still pull one so young; but that was always accompanied by the idea that at my age, I shouldn't need to pull because I should be settled, which would revolve like glass doors of emotions that shouldn't be examined or even seen during the middle of a little better than average sex) so in the palace, for the next 90 minutes I focus in and out of trying to remember what his name might have been, studying this Austrian's face for similarities to the Ohioan kid, but now I'm thinking maybe he was from somewhere north in Ohio where they're committed and focused on OSU football because their small towns are devoid of industry and therefore absent culture or other events. I can remember his numbers; he was a beast on bench, pushing with ease and his youth made it so he could easily shed weight before a competition or put big gains on the bar without really struggling and I always wondered what someone so objectively physically gorgeous was doing with an old lady like me, until I realized from his perspective that I was the one who had my shit together; early thirties graduate student who could afford an off campus rental that came with a driveway and a basement, two gym memberships because I was just that serious about making myself into what I wanted to see. One day, he came over, residually stoned and hiccupping about not being prepared for his next day and all I could think was how delightfully not serious it must've been to just exist for one single day.

At the palace, I'm flanked on either side by two pregnant women and their presence makes my womb ache in ways that feel hollow, mountainous, bereft.

I watch my husband watch a promising Virtuosos whose hair reaches her hips and whose lace cuffs land delicately on violinists' wrists. He leans in, whispering between Vivaldi's notes, that our daughter should play, too.

And I want to tell him that we're both getting old, geriatric for conception, so maybe that very pressing desire needs to be butterfly-fleeting, the way spring sunlight can't be captured, the way trills and scales feel real and immediate in the moment but whose notes eventually, ultimately, finally, fade away.

*

The Heart of Joy premier vegan but we're starving and don't look at the menu because it's snow-raining and we're more attuned to fashion and photos.

Dead animals, eggs, Buddha, a repeat loop of some Kundalini style retreat, servers dressed all in white, heads covered, I can practically hear tables repeating Bhajan's words

We need meat

A runners' body, the server's face

Falls

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A GROCERY LIST FOR A SAND DUNE by K Chiucarello

May 20, 2020

The grains could never contain me.

I had always been a shape-shifting blurry little thing packed tall behind foundation slabs, their windows blown out with the shutters ringing loose, paint chipping off the front tooth. When the coastline birthed me, I was a miracle of wonder: pretty as a Cadillac slicked straight, my mother said. Daughters of the fishermen ran atop me, ribbons rippling in the breeze, pairs of feet driving down towards my candied belly, full of a momentum that had me wanting the snow. I explained by long way of lecture to the hills what it was like to direct spoonfuls of yourself into the hands of others. There was a neighboring boy I had liked and we traded weather forecasts as pendants of desire. Wind high today, flood lines low tomorrow. 

One evening, with all the stars dipped neatly above us, I called my boy over and he came to lay with me. My mother made us chocolate covered strawberries and we barricaded the fruit between our bodies. I slowly confessed to his ear, thigh over thigh, my long-game: I had wanted to be a mountain and I would stop at nothing to become so. I knew there were steps I needed to take to present as a mountain and so I hardened my insides blackening them to licorice. I draped my body on ice, hoping it would freeze over or melt down. It wasn’t until I swallowed a house whole did anyone pause to consider that maybe my consumption lay beyond my spit.

The house I came to first held me spellbound. I lowered myself over its roof, loosening my hands around giving door-frames of wood and rotting glossed varnish. I ravished a bathtub clean in one audacious gulp and next made my way over to the pillars on the front porch that echoed onto the beached landscape. There I would sit for a week or two or three months or nine, hoping my hunger would diminish. I swam laps in my appetite for destruction, reclining, sipping its cherry taste through a straw, my lips tender as foie gras in the summertime. Soft uniforms of breeze had whipped me into a devotion that only the birds now could see, a feeding frenzy gone absolutely rogue. 

The townspeople became fascinated with me. Newspaper headlines read I was a virgin daiquiri, all cream, no bite, stretching itself half-baked out in the cracks of walls. That was the last dare I took.

I spilled my way into the next thirty-seven homes rowed up pretty as pigs in a glass showcase, butcher hooks still drooling crooked off of my mouth. I choked down gardens filled with kale, celery, radishes, heirloom tomatoes. I swallowed one girl in my path simply because she had been there and I had little time to spare before someone would catch up with me. The village began to protest, construction workers bulldozing forks blunt into my ambered sides, the mayor frantically binding my chest. I tested this suffocation and stilled, taking time to do up my hair, pinning wisps out of my face. On the fourth day of silence I bubbled through twice as tight, yeast toppling pyramids onto each other.

Everyone evacuated. My mother and the boy ran parallel to me, adjusting themselves in a mirror of rupture. I had no more houses in sight. I stood there plush in the shadow of myself, a town buried under scoops of thawing sweetness. I had done it; I had become my mountain. Once in a blue moon I ruminated on what I needed to do there to get here, on things that needed to capsize for me to stand erect. I took a bottle of port to wash it all down. 

It wasn’t until the liquid reached my toes did I feel a shifting beneath me, 

a hot magma afterglow for thought. 

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SING TO ME THE ONE ABOUT THE RIGHTEOUS EMBRACE OF THE INEFFABLE by Pat Foran

May 19, 2020

Something

My name is Phineas and if I can get the pose right, a photograph of me will appear in the 1979-80 Ridgid Tools Two-Year wall calendar. 

In a two-piece and six-inch heels, I am holding a No. 930 1/2-inch D-Handle Reversing Drill like it’s a semi-automatic weapon. 

“I need a little more…something, Phineas,” the photographer said. “A little more serendipity, a little more world-weariness. Show me a righteous embrace of the ineffable. And a little more gam.”

***

Level

We were fixing up a place that needed fixing up. We were going to live there. Her parents were helping, although it was more like I was helping and they were fixing. 

“Can you hand me that level?” her dad said. 

“What’s a level?” I said.

***

Someday

It’s the voice on the radio, the voice from the moon. The one that sings about someday and orders the Tour of Italy at Olive Garden. The one you listen for when you’re cold. The one that holds your hand.

***

Beaming

I turned to watch her walking down the aisle.

I saw her mother, dressed in fuchsia, freaking a little and fumbling with plastic aisle markers that were melting in the 95-degree heat.

I saw her grandmother, who also was dressed in fuchsia or maybe off-fuchsia. 

I saw her father. He was dressed in black. Her father was a practical man, a provider man, a good man. In many ways, a man I was nothing like.

There was a tap on my shoulder and turned to face the tap. Red-faced in the sun, pregnant out to here and presumably miserable, the judge was smiling. Beaming. “Hot enough for you?” she asked.

***

Everything

I’d written the lyrics for “I Just Want To Be Your Everything,” a big hit for Andy Gibb back in the day, and I’d been invited to serve on a panel at a songwriters convention in Kennebunkport, Maine. 

During the Q&A, a young girl asked: “What does ‘Everything’ mean—or, more to the point, what did you intend for it to mean when you wrote this song?”

I waxed on the nature of that which is and the vastness of the all, citing instances in popular music within which this is-ness manifested in one individual seeing the is and the all in another individual—witness “You Are Everything (and Everything Is You),” the fabulous Stylistics record. There’s “Everything Is Archie,” perhaps the finest example of a paean to pantheism the world’s heard. But for all-encompassing is-ness and the unbeatable all of it all, nothing tops Donny Hathaway’s “Everything Is Everything.”

The girl, who identified herself as a freelance correspondent for the Neil Armstrong Elementary School Post-Gazette, exhaled with what might have been a combination of impatience and contempt.

“I guess you don’t understand my question,” she said.

***

Taking Names and TRL

A little before dark and a little after the end of the beginning, we saw a toucan taking names on Lexington Avenue.

“Just routine,” the toucan said.

We held the children tight, but they wriggled out of the hold. A pink parchment sky opened, possibly to show itself to the various and sundry sporadic believers, which included Nathan Hale impersonators, anthem buskers and non-committal arena rockers.

“When are we going to visit the set of Total Request Live?” the children said.

***

That One Sade Song

If you were cold and I were cold and the lights were cold and the rabbit ears were cold as daffodils, I would sing that one Sade song to you. Or maybe the cold-calling moon would sing it to us instead.

***

My Name Is

My name is not Mud, but it is.

Just like shame isn’t dread and shame isn’t fear and shame isn’t the smoke-ring halo I think I’ll see if I look in the mirror while I’m shaving. But it is. It's all those things.

Shame also is Cliff Robertson, a guest villain on Batman c. 1967.

When I was 20, I wrote a song titled “My Name Is Mud.” It's about a guy saying, “I know my name is Mud, and I know I’m something of a disgrace, and I’m probably dead to you, but I hope you'll stay with me, metaphorically speaking, in the event the Mud thing isn’t actually a thing.”

It's a thing. It's like when you lose your voice and you can’t sing anymore, or lose your voice so you can’t talk anymore. You can’t sing to people, you can't talk to them, you can't tell them anymore. You can't tell. Also, you can’t tie your shoes.

***

Neither One of Us

We were listening and not listening to the northeast wind, which wondered if we'd considered talking things out. 

We were listening and not listening to the Voice of America, which asked who do you think you're fooling? 

We were listening and not listening to Gladys Knight sing about two people who didn't want to be the first to say it.

"It's not the first of us who says it, but the first to say it again, again, and then again," I said, listening to the sound of you, not listening. "The first to say it so the words take us over the hanging bridge, clickety-clack, to the next ridge, where we pick clover, reconsider the sun, and decide who gets the Fiddle-Leaf Fig Tree, and who gets the Peace Lily."

***

 A Full Fuller Fullest Blue

I was to be the last stand-up comedian ever to perform at the Fuller Brush Company annual meeting and golf outing.

“I was proud of you, once, you know,” my ex said, slurping Red Velvet Cupcake Blue Bunny ice cream out of a straw.

“I know you were, and if you knew how much I thought I loved you for it, you would…know it,” I said, leaping out of bed and into the living room, where the Fuller Brush men were waiting. 

The Fuller Brush men asked me if I planned to work blue during my routine. I said I wasn’t sure what constituted blue these days.

“We don't need any of that wistful, underlying sadness stuff. Nothing poignant, no pathos—no song sung blue every garden grows one," they said. "Embrace the moment, yes, strike a pose, sure, but remember your audience. And no life insurance jokes. Hear what we’re saying?”

“I hear what you’re saying,” I said. 

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BERMUDA by Danny Cherry Jr.

May 17, 2020

It was somewhere between the fifth and eighth rendition of the “birthday song” when I began to see the appeal of a tight noose and a wobbly stool. That’s what this job did to me. I prayed to the chain restaurant gods to put me out of my misery, but all I heard instead was the firework-like pops of sizzling meat and the chefs’ philosophical debate over which one of the new girls had the fattest ass.

I sat on the milk crates in the kitchen and scrolled through the social media feed of my ex acting school classmates and hate-liked as many of their photos as possible. This one got a gig in a commercial. That one got a stage play role. Another somehow got a role in a big-budget film. In the group message, they asked how my luck was going. I responded with the truth. “I think I may have found my most challenging role yet.” They sent back happy faces and hearts. I responded with “thank you” and enough exclamation points to emphasize my happiness.

Then a sinister sound low below the chefs’ passionate debate grew louder, closer, like the music in slasher-films right before the victim’s throat got slit and the carotid artery splattered against the curtains.

“Alright, Diggity Dog customers!” The manager and crew continued to shout and clap their hands. “We have a special birthday guest today!” 

I closed my eyes. “Fuck me.”

I filed in and clapped along. “Happy happy birthday! From our crew to you!” And with each mangled verse of the song, what little pride still lingered evacuated my body.

It was at this moment when I realized I wasn’t lying to my friends; this was my most challenging role yet: a 20-something post graduate with a useless degree and a job in the hometown he practically sold his kidney to escape. And I was nailing it.

 “Welcome to Diggity Dog where our franks are as pleasant as our customers. What will you be having today?”

I smiled at the four-top table and passed out the menus with vigor. I nodded as they ordered but watched our mascot through the window on the sidewalk spin an arrow up and over his head like a helicopter, letting people know we had a special going on: two franks for the price of one. That damned arrow worked better than the Pied Piper, but instead of attracting kids, it summoned all of the plant workers and foremen and their overly made-up wives, along with their gaggles of children who somehow always turned their food into a mosaic on the floor. 

The parking lot was full with F-150s and jacked up trucks with confederate flags hanging from the back. I would guess there were more rifles and AR-15s in the parking lot than the weapons cache at our Sheriff’s department.

At dinner once, one of my classmates asked, “Is your hometown like ‘Friday Night Lights’?” We were at our favorite restaurant, which sat atop a skyscraper that sliced through the clouds in the sky. The glass buildings across the way looked like pitch-black monoliths, like giant Carbonado diamonds, with the exception of squares of light that came from individual rooms and offices. 

I sipped my twenty dollar drink. “Yea, I guess it’s like ‘Friday Night Lights,’ except fewer black people.” She and my other friends laughed, and one made a white hipster comment about how quaint it must be and how they’d love to visit one day, just to see one of our antique stores. Or to see the stars in the sky. But there were no stars in those skies; a constant orange tinge from the gasoline plant’s flames loomed over the town night and day.

I told them no, they didn’t want to visit. My town was nicknamed “Bermuda” because no one ever left. One of my friends put an arm on my shoulder and said, “That’s not true,” and shot me a corny, soap-opera gaze. We laughed and toasted a night that was foggier than the early mornings over the New York waterfront. 

That was a year ago. Now, I was back home, where the Confederacy and football were kings, where bonfires often replaced house parties, and when there were house parties, they were thrown by those whose parents could afford two-month vacations in Europe. The type of parties where I’d be the black fly-on-the-wall and every group would swat me away and whisper “who invited him?” The type of parties where the few black people who were there huddled up off to the side in their letterman jackets. I wasn’t permitted into that group either. I was the “faggot” in the drama club. 

Bermuda is a place I spent many years trying to escape. I applied for a “Minority In The Arts” grant and took out student loans so I could  find myself in a city of millions. And I did it. It required thousands of miles, six figures, and four years. I chiseled out the person who I always was and made friends, had girlfriends, and went on misadventures in the city. I stayed in an apartment with rickety floors and cockroaches big enough that we considered asking them to go half on rent with us. 

It was hard to accept I wasn't there anymore. As I take this table’s order, I wish I could take back the joke I made about people never leaving Bermuda. If that were true, I would never leave this fucking hellhole ever again, and I’d be doomed to spend the rest of my life clapping and singing happy birthday songs to the very people I tried to escape.

A woman with snow-white hair sat at one of my tables. She wielded sarcasm like only Baby Boomers could, using a smile to dampen the stab of her patronizing remarks. I wanted to remind her she shouldn’t expect five-star service from a place with ten three-star reviews and several food safety violations, then I remembered the lengthening zeros in my student debt balance and shut the fuck up. “I’ll take it back, ma’am.”

My next table wasn’t much better. Two baggy-eyed parents clung to their cups of coffee as if  they contained the water from the Fountain of Youth and allowed their kids to scribble with red crayon on the walls. My tongue-biting and forced courtesy only netted me the loose change from the bottom of their jeans and a dollar older than the coffee we served. I accepted the “tip” with a smile.

I ambled to the kitchen with another dissatisfied patron’s dirty dishes in my hand. Then I heard it.

“Squirt?”

I froze. The old nickname excavated old memories I had buried under expensive therapy and four years of distance. I turned to see a table full of people from my high school days.

“Darius ‘Squirt’ Miller,” he said again. I stood like a sentry as he flashed his smile at me. My body reacted like he was an apex predator baring his teeth. While I  stayed in character, I placed the dishes in a bin near the kitchen entrance and dragged my body towards the table.

He asked, “How you been?”

“Been good.”

“You’re a big-time actor yet?”

The memory of my stint as “Dead Guy #3” on Law & Order came to mind. “I do all right.”

The wrinkles under his eyes and his stray strands of remaining hair read like the life-lines of someone who had their vitality and motivation sucked dry after years in a town that eats people’s souls and shits out withered clones. He raised his arm to shake my hand. “Well, that’s good to hear, man.” Muscle memory told me to flinch, but I tightened up and gripped his hand in return before I walked away.

Some last words were said to my back. “It’s good to have you back in town, Squirt.”

I walked away and sped up once I was out of eye-sight, throwing my one-second finger up at my tables, flashing my smile, and letting them know I’d be right back. I went into the restroom where somebody stood in front of the faucet. I hid out in a stall and waited for the hissing of the faucet to stop. 

When the door opened and closed, I took one deep breath, balled up my apron, and screamed. I screamed into it like it was a vacuum in space that could swallow my frustrations, like it was an endless void where I could deposit my angst. The apron muffled my shouts, but my throat strained. I belted and belted until I felt Bermuda’s sharp talons unleash itself from me. I got up when I heard the door open again. I walked out and straightened my apron. 

When I got back to the floor, the table of ex-high school classmates was clear. I was directed to a new table by the hostess; they looked like truckers. I clutched the menus and, for a moment, pretended as if I was back in art school. I closed my eyes, whispered my lines, and asked myself what the character’s motivation was: not to be broken down again by the antagonist, this town. 

I took out a pen and notepad and smiled at the truckers. “Welcome to Diggity Dog where our franks are as pleasant as our customers. What will you be having today?”

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IT ALL STARTED WHEN THE CHALLENGER EXPLODED by Shannon Frost Greenstein

May 17, 2020

I sit, tense, breathless, eyes glued to the screen.

I am thirteen years old.

It is cold outside, the kind of cold that stings the tip of your nose and bites deep in your lungs when you inhale.

It is almost time. We’ve been waiting all morning. I’ve been looking forward to this for weeks, obsessively following the news for mention of launch preparations, reading Christa McAuliffe’s simple biography in The Inquirer: an ordinary history teacher, just imagine! 

I’ve been lying awake at night, thinking about the infinite nature of space until infinity blew my mind and I couldn’t grasp the concept any more.

“Jordan, will you sit back from the television? You’re going to ruin your eyes.”

My mother, in a gesture of love and true understanding of my inner workings, has let me stay home from school. My father is at work, my sister at school—God forbid she misses a day of basking in her popularity—despite my mother’s offer to let her skip as well. It is just my mother and I, pajamas and mugs of cocoa even at eleven a.m., basking in America’s superiority over Russia and the limitless potential of travelling the universe.

The vestiges of Kennedy’s Space Race, the moon in our corner, the epitome of the country’s collective grit and sheer will.

I want to be an astronaut. More than anything in the world, I want to be an astronaut. I’ve got it all worked out, even as I attempt to navigate puberty and peer pressure and bad choices. I’m going to graduate high school with a scholarship to an Ivy League college, where I will be pre-med and graduate with honors, and then join the military so they’ll pay for my med school. I’m going to learn to fly and be an on-flight doctor, and then I’m going to apply to NASA’s Astronaut Candidate Program.

This has been the plan for as long as I can remember. I am a good student, a hard worker, disciplined, focused. I know what I want, and I’m sure I know what it will take to get there.

“What time is it?” I ask my mother impatiently.

“It’s 11:30. It’ll be any minute.”

The last time I would look forward to anything so guilelessly, so naively.  The end of innocence, a swan song, the curtain call of childhood.  

I sip cocoa, I fidget, I stare at the images reflected on the television: The launch pad at Cape Canaveral morphs into a stock photo of the NASA command center that’s replaced by a reporter, hugging herself against the unseasonable cold, describing conditions and sensations the astronauts will face over the next several minutes.

“Are you excited?” my mother says.

“Are you kidding?” 

I don’t have to shift my face from the screen to know she is smiling, that she doesn’t mind my tone. I know they say a mother is always closest to her firstborn, that the second child is neglected in both attention and love. That’s not the case in our family, just like a lot of things are not the case in our family. My mother and I share a bond that is creepily extrasensory, that borders on clairvoyance or telepathy.

We did. Then I fucked up. It started that day, watching the Challenger.

“Do you know how proud I would be if I’m ever there,” my mother says, “in the crowd at Kennedy Space Center, waiting for you to take off?”

She supports my dream, perhaps subconsciously driven to counteract my sister’s grand, lifetime aspiration to amount to a supermodel and fitness spokeswoman. Every straight-A report card I bring home is prominently displayed on the fridge; I get a whole paragraph to myself detailing all my accomplishments in the yearly family Christmas newsletter. I’m excused from boring family get-togethers and church services if I “have to study.” I’m several grade levels ahead in STEM subjects, and even have a special “gifted” IEP at school that allows me to study trigonometry while everyone else works on binomials.  

“You will be,” I assure her absentmindedly, practically manic with anxiety, with anticipation.  

There is no doubt this will be me someday. I mean, I’ve been saving for space camp with all my birthday and Christmas money for two years. How could I possibly ever be anything but an astronaut?

“I think something’s happening, I think something’s happening,” I shout, up on my knees on the floor, directly in front of the television, unable to control the volume of my voice, my fingers clenched, my jaw clenched, ecstatic to be watching the Challenger launch with my mother behind me on the couch. It’s only us, gazing in wonder at the culmination of human brainpower to this point, the trophy of generations upon generations of evolution, the ability to explore space.

Three minutes appear on a giant screen, counting down, the seconds ticking away like little eternities, each number illuminated for a lifetime before finally surrendering to the next digit. 

I squeal, my hands balled into fists, my eyes burning because I am forgetting to blink. At this moment, I am sure the universe is affirming my plans, my destiny. Just as I always have, I feel a pull, a calling almost religious in nature, toward the billions of stars and planets and moons out in the great beyond.  

Christa McAuliffe wanted that, too. She wanted it, just like you wanted it. Imagine what her last moments were like. Do you think she had time to regret ever signing on to be a Payload Specialist before she died? Do you think she was alive when she hit the water?

The clock counts down.

Two minutes. One and a half minutes.  

“Come on,” I shout at the television, believing I can speed up the process in Florida from my living room in Philadelphia.  

A minute.

The longest minute of my life. Except for many minutes which would come after takeoff.

“I love you, Jordan,” my mother says suddenly. I tear my gaze away from the screen to look over my shoulder at her briefly. She’s grinning, her eyes bright, unable to sit still as her hands flutter around her hair, her collar, her mug. This is just as exciting for her. I feel kindred, a flash of pride about having brought this joy into her life. At this moment, I am already an astronaut, just by the sheer weight of both of our beliefs—certainties—that it is what will come to pass.  

Remember that time you thought you were going to be an astronaut?

“I love you, too,” I say happily, bubbling from within with exhilaration.  

A minute. Forty-five seconds.

The clock is stubborn, exploiting time’s relativity, insisting on stretching the spaces between each second to impossible lengths. It ticks down, and the camera zooms in for a close-up of the shuttle, where things are starting to happen.

Challenger begins to tremble slightly and then shake in earnest, a vibration I can almost feel through the television, across the states and into my teeth. Smoke billows, and I see the flickering of flame.

Ten seconds. Five. Zero.

Against nature, against God’s design, in an awe-inspiring show of ability and triumph over the elements, Challenger takes off, rising up like a revolutionary, fighting gravity to lift its bulk upwards and upwards into the sky and through the atmosphere.

“Yes,” I shout, rising up myself, on my feet as if I’m taking off as well. I feel something foreign and natural at the same time, something I can’t begin to describe, but which I would later come to recognize as something sexual, the endorphin-rush of orgasm, an orgasm of possibility and expansion and the human experience.

It continues to ascend, smoke and fire trailing the shuttle like its own comet’s tail. I am already wishing I could see it enter the stratosphere, exit it, enter and exit the exosphere, enter open space. Everything in the world is as it should be. I am truly happy.

Challenger explodes.

There is more fire and smoke, but also shrapnel, chunks of engines and rockets and ceramics and body parts and dreams. Challenger, disembodied, plummets to the Earth in pieces, like heaven is weeping the kibble of human invention.

There is no God.

“What?” I cannot grasp what is happening.  

The debris hits the ocean at an unfathomable speed. Plumes of smoke still hang in the air like huge lazy clouds, the only evidence that seven people once lived their dream for 73 seconds.

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