CW deep griefSmionagar (Irish word meaning shattered fragments or pieces). It is an orchard bathing in fog but you would have described it as a swatch of your life receiving its daily powdered kiss. It is a ramshackle house, your former home, but you would have said it’s where you learned that some parasols don’t always give shade to their own suns. It is the anger that you are gone and that the sunrise doesn’t have the decorum to abandon its rays. It is having no jurisdiction over when and where your unpunctual and formidable smile will thaw the freezing demesne of my grieving mind. It is silly, insignificant things like knowing we pronounce vase and scone the same way. It is the crying shame that not all saw the elegance of your ballerina’s legs as they danced. It is lazy, useless afternoons and the even longer nights that were talked into morning. I never told you that smionagar is my favourite Irish word but only when I’m in a tenebrous mood. It is those conversations we shared that were carbonated by the soda stream of realising we were for all intents and purposes the same. It is those laughs forged by the abstract silhouettes of others’ otherness and our similarities in reverse. It is the free-wheeling anarchy of a concert featuring a violinist on the triangle. It is recognising in hindsight that every moment shared was an occasion. It is all the obsolete joys when the world is devoid of the waterfall of your gentle voice. It is life’s cruelty that refuses to let it scrape its dishes. It is the privilege of calling myself your daughter. It is the defenestration of futures and their gradual replacement with forevers. It is knowing that nothing but love beautified the landscape of your mind as it died.
People often ask me what my spirit animal is. I'm not sure why I am asked so frequently. Maybe they are unsure if I am still human. Or maybe it is the clear spirits mixed with bile I have used to decorate their terrazzo floors that confuses them, and they are not sure whether to use lion strength metho or if bumblebee spray-and-wipe will be enough. In any case, I tell them I don't have a spirit animal, but if I could choose a spirit mineral, it would be Moissanite. Moissanite is somewhat of an unknown in the spirit world, but it’s one hell of a mineral. Moissanite is the second hardest mineral on earth, behind only diamonds. So hard it is almost impossible to chip anything off an old block of Moissanite. More the pity for me, who has been carved straight from my guilt-ridden Catholic of a mother. Guilt strips me slowly, or sometimes in great chunks. Nothing eats away at Moissanite. Not even alcohol. Eight gin and squashes on a Tuesday night doesn’t even leave a blemish.Moissanite—unlike my former self—does not contain any soul, or at least none yet discovered by the technology we have available to us as amateur mineral enthusiasts. This is a good thing. Souls are weak. They break at the drop of a baby. Moissanite—unlike diamonds—is conflict free. Like a dim-witted alien without a spaceship licence, it hitched a ride on a meteor and crashed to the earth’s surface. It can also be grown in a lab, where synthetics can be manipulated for greater strength and resilience.Perhaps Moissanite is conflict-free because it is incapable of blame. Even if it was able to remember which set of hands strapped —could you really call it strapped?—that baby bicycle seat, or who it was that panicked when a magpie beak perforated their eardrum and haywired their vestibular system—completely understandable—it would not be able to allocate blame in a fair and balanced manner. It wouldn’t even try. Credit to Moissanite where credit is due, I do believe it would be able to sit through grief counselling sessions without chain-smoking three joints in the alley outside prior. Conversely, it would not have the thumb dexterity to secretly record the most salient points made by Sally the grief therapist to later use as ammunition in a war in which both combatants are already buried in trenches.And perhaps most importantly—unlike any animal I have met or seen in David Attenborough documentaries, and unlike any of the spirits hiding in my pantry, or in the shaving cabinet, or underneath my bed—Moissanite is not transformational. It is what it is.It does not have the ability to harden at the sight of a familiar face—now seen only once a year—as it trudges towards a crooked slab of marble lodged in grass. It cannot soften, as it watches this face leak upon withered yellow daisies. And it cannot re-harden, as it sees the face turn, swallow the apology on the tip of its tongue, stand, and walk away once more. Moissanite originates from the stars, a twinkle in the sky. On cloudless nights, I stand outside and gaze up at all my unmet wishes. If I wait here long enough, perhaps one day she will fall again. This time I will catch her.
BUTTHOLE PROBLEMSWhat’s it, what’s it, I can hear you saying, what’s even a butthole problem, or what’s a butthole other than being a problem in itself, of itself, that sounds to me like a butthole problem, butthole, a butthole that rashes like hell after a hot date, that itches like a motherfucker after a night well spent at Taco Bell’s, unlike some other buttholes that smell like proper buttholes, buttholes that smell like years of regret and day-old butter, buttholes that gossip about other buttholes in family functions, about Steve Bannon, about Santa Claus, buttholes that dream of traveling far away and broadening their buttholes, buttholes that wish they could trade their buttholes for other things—a roof, some money, fair sex—buttholes that burn with regret in the mornings, buttholes that should deal with external threats, like inflation, like novel viruses, like lubricants and penetration, buttholes that go on around other buttholes like can we make this happen, how can we make this happen, buttholes that bear smaller buttholes inside them like a Russian doll of buttholes, buttholes that could turn cancerous—if not malodorous—if left unattended, buttholes that could move from one butthole of a place to another, like from Texas to another part of Texas, or straight from Texas to hell, a hell that’s not particularly literal or metaphorical, not even allegorical, a hell where demons could famously roast your butthole on a spit, a hell that could make you feel at home and wish you didn’t even have a butthole in the first place, that you didn’t have a life after all, that you didn’t come into this world, into this body, most certainly not this body attached to this particular butthole you were born with, have to carry with, live with, laugh with, die with, halfwit.A DROWNINGEach of us was supposed to either push the turtles over the pier or jump into the water ourselves.Jimmy said, “How many turtles?” and we had to explain to him that one would do. Though I could tell he wasn’t fully convinced, he took the news in good faith. He checked us out one by one, then gently grabbed a turtle from its shell in his last act of mercy. His arms quivered in hesitation before he tossed the turtle into the lake like a skipping stone.“How’s this exactly a punishment?” he turned to ask upon the unclimactic silence. It was a fair question. Though the gist of the game wasn’t about punishment, there was something about meeting up this late, far from our homes, that lent the whole ordeal an unmistakable element of sin. If my sister were still here, she would tell us all about her own wrongdoings, about how testy the waters could be when provoked at just the wrong time.But she could no longer talk, no longer breathe.“It’s where they come out from.” It was Cornball who finally broke the silence, who then picked up the remaining turtle and catapulted it into the water with a kind of intensity that made me assume he had some unfinished business with the turtle kind, or that he was resolving some unfinished business he had with someone else with turtles.We all stood in a delicate silence before someone said we should go back. The crickets filled the air with chirrups, another mark of the South. When we arrived at the car we found the main road deserted, which made me feel as if everyone was dead and we were stuck in some kind of limbo. I could almost hear my sister calling me a dickhead from beyond.COVENANTFor Pim’s seventh birthday we pin her to the ground and shout “Eat shit, you human” by her side, Cane’s homemade Xenomorph costume torn from the thighs, revealing the sponges he filled his crotch with to make it bulge, all while clawing at Pim’s ketchup-stained chest with his needle-like tinfoil fingers, watching Pim’s head jerk to left and right as if slapped by a pair of phantom hands, shouting “Stop,” strictly in character from the start, Pim is our Ripley for the day though she looks nowhere near Sigourney Weaver, she’s half-German and standing at 4-foot-5 but she’s the birthday girl anyway so we keep our mouths shut and try to have fun, except for her brother Percy who stands all brickfaced on the porch like Michael-frikkin-Meyers when he was supposed to play Ripley’s crewmate, but it’s no surprise, he’s known to be a softie like his dad who’s now babysitting Pim’s newborn sister in the rocking chair, smiling and winking at us every few minutes like that one weird uncle in every family——and Pim suddenly elbow-strikes Cane’s jaw and somersaults to say, “Hope you like soup, motherfucker,” grinning at us all Ripley-Ripley, showering us with what remained of her piss in her nerf gun, we Xenomorphs glancing at each other as if we’re truly done, Cane starting to wail through his broken teeth, his head peeping out of his tinfoil Xenomorph costume like a chick in a hatching egg, and that’s when Percy shows a sign of life and starts to run toward us like a good crewmate, screaming out obscenities and cries of revenge, his habit of eating beef jerky for the past three months nonstop finally showing through his self-confidence, and Cane turns to me like a rabbit caught in the headlights and says, through his swollen gums, “Wow.”
Ten years, Dad broke his back for the railroad for ten years and they laid him off, leaving him unemployed with a new mortgage and us two boys to raise on his own. My little brother Jeremy and I became the poorest kids of our middle-class neighborhood. The unnurtured ones, the unsupervised ones, the ones who strayed the streets in the middle of the night. Feral beasts snapping at the moon. The ones sent into the store with a book of food stamps while our father waited in the car. And when we objected, because we had pride too, our father would say, “It doesn’t matter to me. You guys are the ones who want to eat. If you don’t want to eat, then fine, don’t use them.” We did want to eat. We were always hungry. This was around the same time I realized something was wrong with my balls. Not every morning, but most, I’d wake up with a dull pain in my gut. Not enough to be debilitating, just enough to be uncomfortable. And sometimes when I walked, I could hear a suction noise coming from down there. That was the worst part. A faint pulling a shoe from the mud-type-sound that I hoped nobody else could hear. At the time I was navigating through the beginning stages of puberty when everything is a bit strange anyway and I hoped this problem was just another symptom of becoming a man, like getting hair in places I never had hair before. But one afternoon I found the courage to bring it up. While getting dressed in the city pool locker room with my friend Ryan, I asked to see his balls. “To compare,” I said. And like a good friend, he obliged. His were both the same size and symmetrical and they were small, barely even there. Totally different from mine. I only had one, one gigantic ball, the size and shape of a mango. Even if I wanted to get it checked, Dad couldn’t afford the doctor, not without the insurance he lost with his job. Medical care was no different than a new pair of Jordans to my brother and me, just another luxury we couldn’t afford. Dad was constantly stressing about all the things we couldn’t afford. It was his version of preventative care. Staving us off with guilt prevented us from asking for things. Besides, what child wants to go to the doctor? My parents, like most, charged hard into the Win-One-for-the-Gipper-Day-Glo-Nuclear-American-Grudge-Fuck of the 1980s. They bought our first home the summer before I began grade school. No more trailers or cramped apartments for us. We were moving on up! As I’m thinking and writing about those early days on Everglade, it’s the smells that return more than anything. Milkweed, sunflowers and sage, the rain, creosote from the railroad tracks, smoke from mom’s Marlboro Lights. Pioneers smelled many of the same things, I imagined. The Oregon Trail crossed less than 100 miles from there. Perhaps the pioneers thought of it as the smell of some bright future, the way we did. We lived on the last street of the sub-division. Beyond our backyard was all prairie. Standing on the back deck, you could see the Great Plains unfold clear into Nebraska. That first summer in our home I saw a tornado back there. The sky turned from blue to black. The rain came down in sheets, then the hail. Just as quickly the rain and hail stopped and it became deathly quiet. A funnel poked out from the clouds. Just a little tail at first, but it kept stretching and reaching until it touched the horizon and it would suck the earth up into it and get bigger and louder until it sounded like a freight train was going to come barreling out of all that dust. Mom’s eyes widened with panic. So wide and blue. I noticed a vulnerability in her I had never seen before, like maybe she didn’t know what to do. This frightened me as much as the tornado. Parents always knew what to do. Dad was out of town cleaning up a derailment somewhere out west. Mom was our only protector. She hurried Jeremy and me under the stairs. She asked what two things we wanted to save in case everything blew away. I wanted my plastic cowboys and Indians. She ran upstairs and got them, along with her Marlboro Lights, a radio and stuffed animals for my brother. We stayed under there until the DJ on the radio said it was safe to come out. Some homes were left with their tops peeled back and some weren’t left at all. People stood in the wet street sobbing. One screamed, “Dear God please!” I wanted to tell him it was God's fault in the first place. How did he not know this? I was just a dumb kid and I knew. It was only a couple of months later when I caught Dad bawling on the back deck. The first time I’d ever seen him cry. He wouldn’t tell me what was wrong but deep in the tissue of my heart I felt a sadness, a loss—like things would never be the same. Seeing my dad cry knocked my world off axis. I witnessed a secret world, the adult world, a world I wasn’t meant to see. One where your parents aren’t bulletproof. By that winter, they had split-up, living in different places. Dad took custody of my brother and me. We stayed in the house while Mom moved across town to a small basement apartment.Seventh grade would be starting soon. I’d be in a new school, with new kids and a chance to mold my own reputation. To do that, I needed a pair of parachute pants. My mind was set on them. I had many fantasies of the nylon swish swishing as I walked down the halls of Johnson Junior High. The other students whispering to each other, Is that kid from the big city? I bet he’s a professional break dancer. I begged Dad for weeks for these pants. “For back-to-school clothes,” I said. And I think he saw how important they were to me, because he took me to look for them. We found one pair in all of Cheyenne that were cheap enough for him and small enough to fit my puny waist. Of course, they weren’t the real Bugle Boys, just knock-offs. I didn’t care. Anything not hand-me-down, was designer to me. When I got them home, I found a small rip in the crotch. I was disappointed but I kept my mouth shut. If I told Dad, he’d force me to take them back. Like I said, they were the only pair, anywhere. One day I was just messing around and I pulled my big ball through the rip—a furless rodent squeezing through a quarter-sized hole. A big furless rodent with protruding veins all over it. That’s what it looked like. We’d be walking down the street, or down the aisles of the grocery store and I’d have that one ball hanging out of my parachute pants just waiting for my friends to notice. When they did, I’d pretend I didn’t know it was hanging out, they’d laugh, then I’d laugh even harder and we’d feel better than before, because laughing releases feel-good chemicals in the brain. And I was really hoping one of them would say, “Hey mine looks like yours.” Then I wouldn’t feel so alone. And I guess it worked because one night, my brother confided in me that his balls looked like mine. He showed me, and it was true. They were like mine, only smaller. Which made sense, since he was two years younger. He made me promise I wouldn’t tell anybody and I promised. I felt some relief knowing I wasn’t all alone. It wasn’t one of those “one in a million” deformities. To register for seventh grade, students were required to get a physical. Dad had no choice but to fork out the cash. I’d heard the horror stories from older kids. Tales passed down from generation to generation. A creepy doctor forcing them to pull down their pants and cupping their balls in his long arthritic fingers. “Cough,” the doctor would say. And he’d say it with a cigarette hanging from his lips and the cigarette’s long ash would be about to fall on the floor. And what if when he told me to cough, I got hard? Could penises tell the difference between the hands of a doctor and the hands of a lover? In those days, before the internet, a black and white photo of a woman wearing a bra in a JC Penney catalog would get me hard. But if I got hard when a man touched me, that would mean I was gay. In Wyoming, in the 1980s, gay was not normal, but doctors who smoked were. I don’t believe much has changed. The Urgent Care next door to Kum and Go was running a back-to-school deal on physicals, only $19.99. I cut the coupon out of the paper and Dad drove me over one rainy afternoon in August. He handed me a twenty-dollar bill. “What about tax?” I asked.“Doctors don’t charge tax,” he said. “And tell them to hurry. I don’t want to be sitting out here all night,” he said. “I’m not going to tell the doctor to hurry,” I said as I got out. Dad sat in the truck and listened to 850 KOA Sports Talk Radio, Home of Your Denver Broncos. My heart was pounding, thinking of every terrible outcome. What if it’s a cancerous tumor?Or a stillborn twin that somehow got trapped in my scrotum? A nurse checked my vitals. She said, “Don’t be nervous honey.” A doctor appeared, almost as ancient as the one I imagined. My balls gurgled. I wondered if he could hear it. He tapped my knees with a small rubber hammer. Held my tongue down with a stick. Put a cold stethoscope on my back. Dumb doctor shit. Then came the words I feared, “Drop your drawers young man.” My face got hot and my hands went numb. It took me a minute while I fumbled with the zipper of my parachute pants. I didn’t have any clean underwear, so I didn’t wear any. As soon as I pulled them down and the doctor saw, he said “Something isn’t right.” I played ignorant. Real sheepish and dumb. I said, “What do you mean?” He palmed my testicle and instructed me to cough. I coughed like this: Ach, ach. He shook his head, pushed the ball up into my stomach and held it there. “Does this hurt?” he asked.The pain knocked the breath right out my lungs. “Yes,” I squeaked. He told me to lay back on the bed. Paper crinkled under my bare ass. He squeezed my ball between his thumb and finger and asked if that hurt. Frantically, I nodded. I wanted to hit the son of a bitch. “Young man, speak up.” “Yes, it fucking hurts. You’re pinching my balls,” I said. He told me to watch my language and called for the nurse and the nurse came and he told her, “Put your hand right here.” She held my ball in place while the doctor poked at my stomach. Don’t get a boner, don’t get a boner, I kept telling myself.She wasn’t as pretty as the girls in the JC Penney catalog, but her hands were soft, she smelled good and she was the first woman to ever touch my bathing suit area. Then I told myself not to fall in love. It just wouldn’t work. We were at different points in our lives. When she bent over, a small silver pendant, a cat, dangled in her cleavage. It seemed so warm and comfortable in there. I wanted to burrow down in there, curl up and take a nap. I had to stop looking before I did get turned on. So I thought of my step-grandaddy instead—his yellow teeth, the hair jutting from his nose and ears and the way his boobs sagged when he’d walk around the house with his shirt unbuttoned. The doctor shook his head, sighing as the examination went on. He seemed annoyed that I had a real medical problem, that I was making him work for his $19.99. He asked where my mother was. I said I didn’t know. I hadn’t seen her in a month or so.He asked how I got there.I told him about Dad in the parking lot listening to 850 KOA Sports Talk Radio. He had the receptionist fetch him. When Dad came in I was still on the table with my pants down, the nurse resting her hand on my thigh.“This young man has an inguinal hernia. Most likely it’s congenital. When his testicles dropped, the hole in the tissue never closed back up, allowing his intestines to fall through the muscle into his scrotum. It looks like he only has one testicle, but there are two in there. Bottom line, he’s going to need surgery,” the doctor explained.“How much does that cost?” Dad asked. “I have no idea,” the doctor said. “I’m not a surgeon.”“Are you sure he needs surgery though? Could he just grow out of it?”“Into it,” I said. “My ball is big. I’d have to grow into it.” The doctor paused, his eyes straining over the rim of his glasses. “Mr. Hardung, if his intestines tangle and rupture, it would poison his whole body with waste. He could die. He’s lucky it hasn’t happened already. I can’t give him the go ahead to participate in any physical activities until this thing is fixed.”The pain on Dad’s face, I was feeling that way on the inside, and not just from the hernia. He was stressing over money. On the way home I was going to hear about how we didn’t have any. I was angry at my body for putting this burden on us, for making me uglier than I already was. Puberty was hard enough without the Elephant Man dangling between my legs. I was also really scared. I didn’t want to go at this alone.“Jeremy has one too,” I blurted.“That’s not funny,” Dad said.“I saw it,” I said. The doctor told the nurse she wasn’t needed anymore, and she walked out of my life. I kept looking towards the door waiting for her to turn around and say, “Wait, we can make it work,” but she never did. Dad took his glasses off and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Can I pull my pants up now?” I asked. The doctor said, “Why are they still down?” Then he warned me not to participate in any “rough housing,” until six weeks after the surgery and I said I wouldn’t.As soon as we got home Dad confronted Jeremy. “Pull down your pants.”“Why? I didn’t do anything. Are you going to spank me?” Jeremy asked.“I just need to see something.” “See what?” “Are your balls fucked-up like his?”Jeremy glared at me. “You promised. You baby.”“I’m saving your life. That’s what I’m doing,” I said.“If you don’t show me, I will spank you. This is important. Pull down your pants.”Jeremy argued, but he pulled them down. Dad looked. “They seem fine to me,” he said.“Get closer. Look, they’re just like mine,” I said. He bent down for another look. Once he saw that I was right he threw up his hands. “Well, I’m fucked. Why didn’t you guys ever say anything when I still had insurance?”“Four years ago? I was eight and he was five. How were we supposed to know?” I asked. “Well, how am I going to pay for two surgeries?”Jeremy said, “I’m not having surgery. You don’t need to pay for me.”And I said, “Then your guts are going to get tangled and leak shit into your whole body. Your shit is poisonous. You realize this, don’t you? You’ll die. Is that what you want?” “I guess I’ll die then.” Him and Dad went on arguing while I snuck off to go play tackle football with the super religious kid next door who had one shoe with a tall sole and one shoe with a normal sole, on account one leg was shorter than the other. Then the time came to check into the hospital. I’d be missing the first week of junior high. In some ways it was great, because I was scared to start a new, way bigger school and wanted to put it off as long as possible. On the other hand, by the time I started, the cliques would be formed, everybody would know where their classes were, where they sat at lunch, who their teachers were. I’d be so far behind. After all the nerds had already been tormented for a week, here I’d come, a brand-new nerd. I’d be the nerd the other nerds picked-on to make themselves feel less insecure. Jeremy and I shared the same hospital room. They wheeled me off to the operating room first. The anesthesiologist counted down from ten. Six was the last number I remembered. When I came to, I was naked and thirsty in a brilliant, white room. My skin was stained yellow from my belly button to my knees. Iodine, as I later learned. The two pubic hairs I had been growing out were shaved off and a row of ugly stitches ran across my groin. A person in blue scrubs and a mask hovered upside down, above my face. She said, “You’re done,” and stuck a sponge on a stick in my mouth. Three hours had gone by and I couldn’t recall one second of it. As I became more coherent, the more my body hurt. They wheeled Jeremy into surgery as they were wheeling me out. When we were both done and back in our room, an old lady brought us pillows with tiny storks on them. Her old lady group made them for sick babies to make sick babies feel better. But I think it made the old ladies feel better, like they still had something to contribute to the world. Selfish old ladies always thinking of their needs first. Jeremy was already up, waltzing around the room, fucking around and laughing. Me though, I couldn’t get out of the bed, felt like I took a shotgun blast to the groin. Both Mom and Dad were there, on opposite sides of the room, the first time they were in the same place since they divorced six years earlier. The surgeon popped in to explain his procedure. He wasn’t sure who to address, looking back and forth between the two. The resentment they held for one another was pent-up in their faces. And it hit me, the four of us probably would never be in the same room again unless me or Jeremy got married or died and I thought back to the tornado bearing down on us and Mom running upstairs to get our favorite things and how I never questioned if she’d make it back. I knew it would take more than a natural disaster to keep her away then, but I wasn’t so sure anymore. Seeing them still hating each other like that and all the times I heard them talk bad about each other made it apparent that love wasn’t guaranteed to last forever. Love is a pair of parachute pants. Holes form, we grow out of it. And I couldn’t help but wonder, would they stop loving me one day? A nurse came in, lifted my gown and checked on my balls, in front of my parents, my aunt, uncle, cousins. I think my grandma may have been there. They all got to see. Then the nurse asked about the pain, on a scale of one to ten.“Ten,” I said without hesitation. The nurse stepped out for a bit, she came back with a bag of liquid and hooked it to my IV. Morphine Sulfate, I heard her mention to my parents. It went, drip, drip, drip. My blood went from cold to warm. How spilled ink consumes not just the surface of the paper but the fibers inside it. I could feel it enter each cell from one side and push the pain out the other. The fear and worry I usually carried was gone. For the first time since I could remember, I didn’t give a shit. About my clothes, my balls, about who loved me and who didn’t. I was numb. I was a cloud. I wanted to feel this way forever.
A female patient of 29 years came to my care for what she described as “a strange break, an awful break” in her leg. After examining by palpitation I was able to verify that the lower portion of her left leg had indeed been severed, just below the knee joint. However, the contour of the juncture of this tear was quite unusual, namely, it was unusually smooth. Even breaks due to puncture by a sharp corner or line tend to leave some level of raggedness and unevenness. Upon noticing this, I asked her permission to make a proper documentation of her case for our most eminent medical journal, which she kindly acquiesced. The second thing that I noticed about her case was that, while her mobility was expectedly limited, and she did complain of pain, her vital signs were all within normal range, and physically she did not seem any the worse for having sustained this injury. As I continued to interview her, things became stranger still. When I asked her how she had sustained this injury, whether she had struck her leg on the sharp corner of a building or fixture, etc., she denied anything like this having happened, saying that she had been merely walking home when she started to feel a “strange throbbing” in her leg, as well as “icy chills” and “spasming.” She began shaking her leg back and forth to rid herself of this bothersome cramping sensation, when, according to her “it just broke” – and, most curious of all, it did not break into two pieces – the remainder of her leg “just disappeared.” While such an account is hardly credible, I duly noted her description, so that at least I would have documented what she herself had made of the situation, to aid me in determining what had actually taken place. I asked her if this had been the first time that she had experienced any of the described symptoms or cramping, and after a pause, she acknowledged that she had, on several prior occasions, experienced much the same thing, and had sought care from this the same medical office in the past, to no avail. “However,” she continued, “I did not think the symptom, as it was, was serious enough to require further assistance.” While broken legs have been known to occur, not infrequently, from accidental, unsteady movement or flailing, these breaks never involve severance of the limb, but rather contortion to the left or right, clearly absent in the patient before me. When I asked her to describe the nature of her injury and pain, she insisted that she experienced “a dreadful phantom” of the leg. Phantom limb syndrome was known to her and myself, and the persistence of pain in a limb that has been so severed is itself not unusual. However, she did contradict herself, at times insisting that it “[was] no phantom, doctor, it’s still there, and it pains me so!” Being ever obliging of my suffering charges, I indulged her by asking what sort of pain she experienced. “It’s like nothing I can describe, doctor!” she exclaimed, a kind of unearthly thinness in her voice that gave even me some pause. “Do try,” I insisted. “It’s hot at the same time as it is cold, it shivers and sways back and forth as though caught in some terrible wind, even when there is no such wind. It bends back and forth even as I know it stays in place.” I calmly assured her that her leg was neither bending back and forth nor in place, it had been, by some means or other, removed, and she had naught to worry about anymore. But, ever the curious academic, I did press her on what she meant by “hot and cold at the same time.” She then paused for so long I was not sure she had heard me or would answer. “It’s as though half of it is hot and half of it is cold.” she finally said, haltingly. In relation to everything else she had described thus far, this did not seem so strange an answer as to warrant such hesitation and drama, so I wondered if I were not still missing some crucial component of her experience, due to her inability to describe it or mine to understand it. Ever cautiously, I asked her, “Which half do you mean? Is the top half cold and the bottom half hot? Or is the right side cold and the left side hot? Or vice versa.”“It isn’t like that, doctor,” she said, and I could read easily the consternation in her voice. Even more cautiously than I had asked, she answered slowly, “The top side is hot, and the bottom side is cold.” “Yes,” I said, growing impatient. So, just below the knee-” “No, doctor,” she cut me off abruptly and then sighed in frustration. “It is the top, where the knee ends, yes, but just one side.” “Yes,” I replied evenly. “So, is it the right? The left?” but, rather than answer, she chose to avoid the question, and continued by adding that it was as though the missing, phantom leg, were “swaying back and forth in some breeze – only it isn’t back and forth. It’s more like – up and down.” This description made no more sense than anything else, but I duly added it to my written notes. Before sending her on her way, I offered her a prescription for pain killers, as was my duty as a physician. She accepted them, and then, pausing one final time, urged me to palpate the wound again, paying particular attention to “the sides of it, the corner, the…bend.” I reminded her that there was no such bend, as her leg had not been broken sideways in a way that could be realigned, but had been severed, and furthermore that the missing piece had been lost and could thus never hope to be reattached. “But, it’s right there doctor!” she exclaimed. “It is bent…just up.” No longer paying her words much mind, I moved towards her to palpate the damaged limb a final time, feeling my fingers round the perfect line of the break, where instead of a ravaged, jagged tear, there was only that same smoothness that had first so caught my interest.
David Kuhnlein's books include Bloodletter (Amphetamine Sulphate, 2024), Die Closer to Me (Merigold Independent, 2023), Decay Never Came (Maximus Books, 2023), and his movie reviews are collected in the zine Six Six Six. He co-edited the horror anthology Lizard Brain (tragickal, 2024) and his book of stories Ezra's Head (tragickal) is forthcoming. David is online @princessbl00d and his website is davidkuhnlein.comMikita Brottman, Thirteen Girls(Nine-Banded Books, 2012)Instead of focusing on the criminal act itself, Thirteen Girls steeps us in its aftermath, in the endless expanse that opens up only after the shock wears off. In an expository essay accompanying the book, Brottman acknowledges that her thirst for true crime is not due to the promise of violence but “the lure of peripheral details.” Small black and white polaroids act as portals into each chapter, shuttling us into the absence left behind by the dead girls: A messy bedroom, a white-sheeted figure atop a gurney, a winding country road surrounded by deciduous trees. These blurry figures behave like Proust’s transportive cookies, a couple details are enough to unfurl entire worlds. These vignettes are not told from the perspectives of infamous killers, but from their adjacent, often ignored, survivors: A grieving mother, a nosy neighbor, a child whose father was dating one of the victims. These stories are told in the comedown, after the blood’s been scrubbed. Voices gathered from the shadowed periphery. If a crack in a teacup opens a lane to the land of the dead, as W.H. Auden’s epigraph suggests, imagine where a fatal wound in a young girl might lead. I enjoy a book that pieces itself together slowly, makes me do a bit of work. Books are best when playful, flirtatious. No one wants everything straight away. One publisher who rejected the manuscript said, “these stories are just too stark and unforthcoming to be satisfying…You are left with a sense of ugly contingency and meaninglessness.” In response, Brottman writes the best lines in the book: “In real life there is no payoff, no closure. The truth about dead girls is this: In the end, they are all forgotten.”Joseph McElroy, Hind’s Kidnap (Republished by Dzanc Books, 2021)The first section of Hind’s Kidnap follows Jack Hind, a six foot seven inch man who forgoes his most intimate relationships in order to rekindle the long cooled kidnap of a boy named Hershey Laurel who went missing six or seven years prior. Hind moves nimbly through New York City in a deceptively straightforward narrative. Deceptive because the deeper into the novel we travel, the more beautiful and strange McElroy’s sentences become. Dig deep enough and phrases become fossils — their beauty evoking impressions left behind from previous sentences, phrases, words.You, like Jack, will find clues glimmering everywhere. In the names of characters, for example: Beecher, Ash, Ivy, Laurel, and Wood, it’s easy to read into the organic growth that these names denote. “There was this constant danger of letting things lure you off course just by being themselves.” Statements spoken to Hind double as leads for the reader. Long-legged phrases spider out with multiplicities of meaning. The figure of the “stand-in” is a common thread weaved throughout, the main insistence of this is that Hind was adopted and was raised by his guardian (a replacement of sorts) as opposed to his birth parents. As readers we grapple for a way in, or a way back, as Hind does: “Hind had again found an opening through the now slag-thick, sea-dense, reverend mugginess of the August heat, toward the case’s last, inner darkness where he could prove…he wasn’t nuts and Hershey Laurel existed trapped.”This book is both the pointing finger and the moon, even if sometimes we’re stuck looking at the finger. Try to swivel your head before all that beauty bleeds into the background. If instead this book were made of water, I might submerge my head in it and open my eyes to see every tributary at once, its every bank and tide, rather than stay stranded on the island of a particular passage. Alas. At 600 pages, it might seem as if everything has been said, and yet. Hind’s height, the guardian’s obsessive grammar, sometimes it’s a bit over my head, not unlike a pullup bar that, over time, page by page, I work myself up to. And soon I’ll not only be able to see it, but I’ll be stronger for it. Even if there was never anything there to see, or if this complex way of seeing is impossible. The means, an end in itself. The clue, a reason to keep going.Jimmy Doom, That Fountain Ain’t Gonna Grant Your Wish(Independently Published, 2023)Detroit legend Jimmy Doom graced my very humble reading series at Cafe 1923 a few months back. I met him at the Hamtramck Labor Day festival. He asked about my Misery Tourism T-shirt and we talked about writing. He told me about his Substack, which has been going for nearly three years straight, the only daily fiction Substack in existence. At last count he has over 1300 original stories. Over an NA beer Jimmy tells me that kids these days worry too much about editing, that stories should be written like Ramones songs, fast and hard, you might miss a few notes but so be it. And sure, out of the thousands of stories he’s written some don’t hit as hard. But honestly, most of them hit. And besides, this book is a collection of his best. One page I’m crying, the next laughing. And that was what it was like listening to him read at the cafe. People tearing up at the end of one story, laughing at the beginning of the next. These are powerful character-driven stories about everyday people. Even better, they all take place in Detroit.Jesse Hilson, The Tattletales (Prism Thread Books, 2023)Jesse Hilson’s newest book The Tattletales takes the shape of a western noir. We follow Darryl Winter, a private detective estranged from his kin who unconvincingly says he wants to quit the booze and return to them. He seems content using his job as an excuse to do what he wants, which includes getting a tug job involving a block of wood and some burlap, and spying on his boss’s hot Swedish wife. At the end of both of Hilson’s novels (The Tattletales and Blood Trip), ambiguity abounds. His last pages break bodies past their word count. As cold and satisfying as being on the right end of a gun. Headlights glimmer across the smoking piece. Open roads beckon the shooter. Thankfully, Hilson has hidden a few pieces of the puzzle. Hilson not only publishes genre fiction, but beautiful poetry and delectable criticism. It takes a strong work ethic to read great literature but write genre fiction. The world is just as grateful for Sara Gran and Josh Malerman as it is for their more demanding and difficult counterparts. Sometimes I crave a mental movie. The Tattletales flows clean and easy as a two stroke motor boat on a freshwater river. Hilson’s narrative guides us gently. He’s packed your lunch, but left a couple of bones in the fish. Chew slowly.Babak Lakghomi, South (Dundurn Press, 2023)I finished reading South on an airplane traveling to California last weekend for a friend’s wedding. Reading a book while suspended in the clouds, in that dreamy and tenuous space, can amplify novelistic elements in surprising ways. The main character of South is known as B, who willingly takes a journalistic assignment in the south of an unnamed country. He arrives on a hostile oil rig where no one is forthcoming with information except for one character known as the Assistant Cook, although that title doesn’t correspond to his job. No matter, he quickly goes missing. Several people are possibly executed by the State. If any are lucky enough to resurface, they appear fundamentally changed. In one of B’s dreams, the only witnesses to atrocities have nothing where their mouths should be, and their bowl-shaped heads accumulate soup that they can’t eat until it rots. Lakghomi strikes a match between humor and horror. His stark, surreal language illuminates the mysterious peripheries of our earthly lives. “The leaves of the trees were made of ash and the sun rays were grey.” I enjoyed the parallel of B willingly driving to a place where “everyone is always thirsty” and me vacationing in a state that was actually on fire. When my friend and I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge and pointed out the beauty of the fog as it rolled off the hills, that was when we smelled that the fog was not fog but smoke, and we laughed. Riddled with bureaucratic strangleholds and miscommunications, South is indebted to Kafka in the best of ways.Michael Salu, Red Earth(Calamari Archive, 2023)“Let us go home/ where no pain can live.” These are the opening lines of what reveals itself to be an experimental talk show. The creative portion of the text can be read in one sitting. The last section is a process essay in which Salu discusses his Red Earth project, a multimodal experiment. A QR code on the back leads us to its digital components: photography, video, et cetera. His essay traces the feedback loops that tangle themselves between culture, language, and art. Salu also links early AI tech back to Asia and Africa and questions the Western insistence on progress and truth (whatever those things might be). For example, Hollywood, AI, or porn might digitally represent humans without scars, striation, or feelings, which not only has the potential to become a horrifying ideal for ourselves, but also “what we covet (or think we covet).” Red Earth is a page-turner, but not in the typical way of a plot-driven narrative. I honestly felt like I was listening to a talk show, not reading a book, so it came naturally to let the rhythm of Salu’s voice wash over me like sound, the way I do when listening to my non-rewindable radio. I’m a fan of Calamari Archive and its corresponding 5cense blog and Sleepingfish magazine (this is me recommending the press as a whole, other recent favs include Math Class, Marsupial, Divorcer…in addition to this, they’re putting Kenji Siratori’s Blood Electric back into print). But with other Calamari titles, I’ve spent more time savoring sentences or pages. Garielle Lutz has labeled the ends of this spectrum as “page-turning” and “page-hugging.” Of course, these are ends of an imaginary spectrum, but Salu has taken a step away from this spectrum entirely. Red Earth is propelled by strong voices (Salu himself says he’s influenced by Dante and epic poetry), rather than by narrative or with a focus on language. We’re haunted by talkative ghosts, who call in to the show to discuss death, history, and violence. “Someone said we live in words,/ but yet with words we chase the indescribable.” Self-annihilating sentences like this mimic the truth-seeking theme of Red Earth, allowing us to momentarily “witness unlit corners of our world ever-present within us.”G. Matthew Mapes, Denaturing Sonnets for Souls Loved by Electricity (Independently Published, 2024)G. Matthew Mapes book of poems Denaturing Sonnets for Souls Loved by Electricity doubles as a grimoire in which enchantment is an end in itself. Like any decent occult knowledge, these poems should be experienced firsthand — do yourself a favor and read them aloud, or even better, find Mapes reading them himself on YouTube. The book’s title is a playful reversal of George Russell’s album Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature. Russell was a music theorist and composer who, according to Mapes, “had a huge influence on 20th century music and music theory.” Alliteration and repetition in Mapes’s work functions similar to the inner voice of Russell’s piano, dashing itself into the hour-long live album. In Mapes’s poem “abandoning the body” he writes, “kneel on a pillow as you portray your accelerant,” the word pour sonically hidden in the word portray. Not once is fire mentioned in the poem, and yet flames are evoked with words such as “extinguished,” “raspberries,” and the phrase “brighter than 1000 vanities.” I feel commanded by this poem, as its adhering recipient, to both pour and portray my accelerant — I’ve always loved the smell of gasoline. Visualizing myself pre self-immolation, Mapes’s spell is cast. Every word haunts hermetically: “I cloud reaction, cryptically.” His poems strike like matches, one after another, in the dark, in devotional renouncement: “I will not community. I limbo.” Yes, we use words to communicate, but Mapes’s art reminds us of language’s darker, more mysterious nature — that of incantation.You can find G. Matthew Mapes on social media to obtain a copy of his book. He is not accepting payment.
Did I ever tell you I saw Elvis Presley, years after they said he was dead? Saw him right after I first moved to town, walking through the parking lot of that run down, barely hanging on truck stop over off of Highway 45, a place called The Hungry Hauler. They said he lived in the nearby woods and would come in on occasion to eat and wash up. They were used to him and wouldn’t make a big deal about it, and didn’t like people who did. He was an old man by then, and moved slow any time he emerged from the wilderness to limp into the dining room. A beard the color of dirty snow hung loose off his face, like it was trying to escape the sour smell of his rotted teeth. The hair on his head was well past his shoulders and he’d wear it in braids like a Comanche. His clothes were rags on rags, a patchwork quilt that he’d wash in their bathroom sink. If you went in at the right time you could see him naked as a newborn, jiggling around and humming his own songs to himself as he worked on cleaning the layers of dirt off his skin. I snuck in there once when he was washing, crept in out of pure curiosity, like a real perv. He was all dangles and stink — there were no sequins. He’d always eat the same thing after his sink bath, waffles and sausage, but would never finish the food on his plate. More than once I was tempted to walk by and sneak a bite just to say I’d shared a meal with the King of Rock n’ Roll, but I never did. And he always paid with cash that was dated before 1977. They even let me see it once, crisp and fresh as the day it was printed. When he left he’d do it without saying goodbye. You could watch him walk back into the woods, not to be seen again for weeks or even months. Sometimes folks new to town would mistake him for Bigfoot when they saw him near a tree clearing or out wandering a deer path.Over the years I hiked every inch of those woods in every direction, looking for him. But I never could find where he was living, never came across evidence of a cook fire, never saw a lean-to built against a small cliff face, or a tarp folded over a branch as a makeshift tent. I followed for miles every creek I could find that he might have used as a water source. I would cup my hands over my ears to try to catch the faintest gasp of him humming to himself out there, maybe even singing.At night I’d sit in the garage with my guitar, playing the same three chords with my two working fingers, strumming them in every order and pattern I could think of, trying to lure him out the way fishermen down at the lake cast their fly baits over the different lilly pads to get the bass to jump out of the water. My wife would come out and sit with me when she’d hear me playing. We’d share one can of beer and talk about our son, laugh with each other about the good old days. Sometimes we’d stay out there so long we’d fall asleep in our lawn chairs, holding hands like a couple of teenagers at the drive-in movies, and we’d wake up in the wee hours and itch the welts swelling over us from the mosquito bites — what a fine feast we made for them — and we’d pat each other’s forearms as if to say it’s time to go up to bed darlin’, and she’d go in first and I’d fold up our chairs, and half the time I’d forget to close the garage, and she’d tell me the next morning that we needed to watch for snakes or rats or bats out there for a few days. I’d say at least the bats will eat all the mosquitos.I thought I saw him once, on one of those nights, as the garage was going down, not Elvis, but our son, our boy, grown into middle age, limping up the drive in rags of his own, probably with a bad back like mine, his own beard hardly sprinkled with gray the way mine was at his age, finally outgrowing the boyish looks he still had when he left, when we told him he wasn’t welcome anymore, because the preacher said we had to cut him out of our lives, to stop enabling him — it’s always the preachers who give you the worst advice — and I ran out, ducked under the closing overhead door, the thing chomping down like a mouth behind me, and I hustled out to meet our son, to tell him I was sorry, that I didn’t know what I was doing back then, that no one ever knows what to do in this life, no matter how much you try to learn, we are all too stupid for how smart we are, and I was ready to jump into his arms, let him cradle me, his old man father who had just moved faster than he’d moved in years, let us fall to the ground in one another’s arms, dizzy and concussed from the blow of this return. But when I got there all I saw were footprints. Or maybe they weren’t even footprints. Just the gravel blown into little divots by the shifting wind of an incoming storm. I had to knock on our door and ring the bell to get Fran to let me in. She came down and asked what had happened, was I getting so old that only one beer and a little nap could get me so out of sorts. I laughed and said maybe I have finally gone senile.This morning Frannie was working in the flower bed in front of our home, planting tulip bulbs, doing her favorite thing, making our dot on the world beautiful. She has said recently she hopes she’s doing exactly this the moment she dies. We are old enough that we have both realized we could die any second of any day, without warning at all. She says she loves the thought of going out like that. I tell her I hate the thought of her being dead. I tell her she can never die, that she must break all the rules and conditions of our existence here and become immortal. Then I tell her I’m going for a hike. She says bring your compass and don’t go too far.I still look for signs of him. Even though I am well aware that no elderly man could survive in these woods for very long, that Elvis has probably been dead for years by now and his bones are likely out here weathering into flaky ashes, his soul gone into flight through the universe, I still look for signs he was here. Maybe I’ll come across a carving he made into a tree. Maybe I’ll stumble over an old stone monument he made, inspired to do so by the stars the same way our ancient cave dwelling ancestors were. Or perhaps I’ll be lucky enough to uncover some notebooks hidden in a tin box under a shelf of rocks, words he never spoke to anyone but himself with pen and page. I wouldn’t read them. It’s not my place. But it would be nice to know they’re there, to find the signs of an old moment when he was here, nearby, living and breathing our shared air. Maybe in that notebook would be an old memory of his, maybe an observation, maybe how he’d walked past a strange old couple’s house one day, that they sat in a cluttered garage together and played notes and sang songs, howling out to someone they’d never find.
Wes Blake’s elegiac novella Pineville Trace (The University of Indianapolis’ Etchings Press, 2024) visits the wild places, those untouched stretches of land that somehow survive intact while progress lays out its encroachment in steel and concrete. In short, lyrical chapters the book travels inner and outer byways, gracefully tracking a spiritual road trip. In the pines the sun may not shine, but specters in memory shiver in broken light. I spoke to Wes about the book.Rebecca Gransden: How did the initial idea for Pineville Trace materialize? Wes Blake: The initial idea for Pineville Trace materialized in the summer of 2014 when I was just beginning my MFA at the Bluegrass Writers Studio and was in Lisbon, Portugal for the Disquiet International Literary Program. One of the speakers said to “write about what obsesses you”. And that struck me. I walked along the cobblestone streets of the Barrio Alto neighborhood thinking about what did obsess me. I remembered stories I’d heard about my friend’s great-uncle—a southern revival preacher who started out traveling with an old circus tent from town to town. And hearing firsthand stories from people that knew him about how genuine he could be, how much he impacted the people that knew him, how charismatic he could be, and how fondly they remembered him, stuck with me. There were also allegations of fraud. My idea for the character of Frank Russet was inspired by this type of character. I wanted to write about a character like that, whose real self was a mystery, to find out who they really are. So, over the next three years, I wrote a novel named Antenna about Frank Russet and how he built his life and made a name for himself. I wrote the book to find out who he really was. And I thought his story was done. But in February 2022, I was in Pineville, KY and realized that Frank’s story was not finished. I drove by the city of Pineville and was struck by it: a small town whose quaint houses wound and coiled up along the side of the mountain in an unreal way that looked right out of a dream. I’d never seen another place like it. Then, after seeing a sign for Bell County Forestry Camp—the minimum-security prison I’d researched and written about where Frank Russet had been sentenced for fraud—I found myself following the signs towards it. The signs led me up Pine Mountain. It’s a striking place with so many pine trees that it looks more like the Pacific Northwest than Kentucky. As I approached the minimum-security prison, a car passed by on the other side of the road. It was an old late fifties/early sixties model Buick LeSabre—the same car that Frank Russet drove. It was eerie seeing such a rare car in such an isolated place. In the first novel, Frank had briefly befriended a stray cat that visited the prison. It was only a passing scene. But that would be the beginning of Pineville Trace. RG: Who is Frank Russet, the main focus of the book, to you?WB: I’ve been writing about Frank Russet, off and on, for the last ten years. He started off as a mystery, and in some ways, he remains one. How much of his intention was pure and how much was ambition? Did he start off with good intentions and lose his way? Did he have some measure of real healing power or was it all an act? Frank Russet is torn between the world of the body and the world of the spirit. Like all of us, there are parts of him that are authentic and parts of him that he puts on like a mask in order to make his way in the world. Only, because of his line of work as a revival preacher, this conflict is more dramatic. He’s capable of soaring highs and crushing lows. A person going up on the mountain to find the truth is an old story. For Frank Russet, who he becomes on the mountain reveals who he really is. And who he becomes when he comes down from the mountain, back down into the world, also reveals who he is. I’ve been writing and thinking about Frank Russet for so long that he feels like a real person to me. He feels like a friend.RG: When driving east, before reaching Bell County Forestry Camp, you pass Pineville. The name of the town was what led me to the place. Both in fiction and in real life. I had imagined the house from the first sentence. And I wanted to find a house like it in the real world. I felt it must exist.Place is an essential component of the novella. How do you use invention when it comes to location? What is Frank’s relationship to the environments he travels through?WB: I read this article on Leonardo da Vinci a few years ago that was illuminating. Essentially, da Vinci believed that observation plus imagination equals creativity. You can see how he put this into action with both his “Studies of Water” (astute observation) and his sketches of angels and demons (pure imagination). Both da Vinci’s observation and imagination are so precise, committed, and detailed. So realistic. This combination of observation and imagination is true for how I use invention when it comes to location. I strive to closely observe places and get a sense of their tone. How does a place make you feel? And what aspects of the place make you feel that way and why? We can’t separate ourselves from our environments, and they affect our outer and inner worlds. Our inner landscapes color how we perceive our outer world. I strive to capture this reality in Pineville Trace. Frank is particularly sensitive to environment. He’s more in tune than most people are with how time affects place and how environment is both a mirror and a prophecy for self. RG: Nature and the wild is an important aspect of the book, but central above all imagery is that of the pine trees themselves. A constant presence, whether it be close by or on the periphery, these trees frame the landscape of the novella. How do you view the pines of Pineville Trace?WB: I followed the credo of Donald Barthelme’s essay “Not Knowing” when writing Pineville Trace. I let my subconscious lead the way. I allowed my intuition and what I had previously written lay the groundwork for what came next. And when I read the book over and again when polishing/editing I realized that many of my obsessions wound up in the book. Leonardo da Vinci was obsessed with water. I’ve always been obsessed with pines. I’m not sure why. I was close with my grandmother—my mom’s mom who we called Nanny—and, growing up, I would often stay at her house in Mt. Sterling, Kentucky. We even lived with her for six months between our move from Rowan County in eastern Kentucky to Lexington. There was a row of pine trees at the back of Nanny’s yard, and as a kid I was always drawn to these pines. Their dark green color, their coolness in summer, their smell, the way they hid you from the world. They made me feel relaxed and safe. I spent a lot of time around those pines when I was young, and I still spend a lot of time around pines. My wife and I have planted thirty-two pines on our rural property in Woodford County, Kentucky. I’m researching mystics, psychics, and energy healers for my new book, and I just read about how someone who can see auras described how all living things have an aura, but trees, in particular, have a large aura—sometimes two feet wide or more—that she can see from far distances. I wonder how she would describe the aura of pines?Frank is haunted by pines and drawn to them. They represent a stubborn resistance to change, refusing to lose their needles while other trees shed their leaves when the seasons change. When the wind blows, a pine’s stillness and quiet contrasts with the sound of other trees whose rustling leaves make louder sounds. Frank seems drawn to the pines in Pineville Trace for reasons he doesn’t fully understand. Their dark green and stoic stance may remind him of the peaceful reality he seeks that has always eluded him.RG: “We’re all gravediggers.”Frank describes, and acts out, a deep emptiness. As his travels progress, this only becomes more pronounced, as echoes of the past catch up to him, however adept he is at staying in motion. The book carries a tension, where it is unclear in which way Frank is pulled; away from the hauntings of his past or towards a daydream of a future. How do you see Frank’s path? WB: Frank has spent a lot of his life as a southern revival preacher charged with providing salvation and healing for many people. His job was to assuage people of their emptiness, to show them the magic of life and its larger meaning and purpose. To revive them. To bring them back to life. And this seems to have taken a toll on him over time. He sought distractions and ways to escape his own feeling of emptiness that remained, and his human flaws only made him feel more empty and false. In his past, Frank spent most of his life moving. Constantly traveling from one town to the next. In Pineville Trace, for the first time, Frank must finally stop moving and face the emptiness in himself that he’s been running from. He must face the guilt over his flawed nature. He gets rid of the shackles of who he needed to be in the past, and all the weight of falling short of that. Anything short of moral perfection and performing miracles would be a failure in his former life. And he happens to be quite a flawed human being. Escaping from a minimum-security prison—in the way that Frank Russet does and in the circumstances that he does—is an existential act. He walks away because he doesn’t want to be the person he had been before. This escape allows him to have a chance at a future with real peace, but it is not an easy escape. His past, his emptiness, his guilt over all the harm he’s caused, plague him. They are deeply carved into his nature. I see Frank Russet’s path as a perilous one because while he is striving to free himself from his past and who he’s been, the ghosts that have always haunted him do not want to release him. RG: A key presence in the book is that of a cat named Buffalo. Animal companions often come to us when most needed, or are associated with a particular time of life. Have there been significant animal bonds in your own history, and, if so, did that feed into Pineville Trace? How do you view the connection between Frank and Buffalo?WB: I’ve always been obsessed with cats. When I was a little kid, I wanted a cat more than anything else. As a small child, I had both a teddy bear and a small Pound Puppy kitten that I slept with. My brother and I always tried to earn the affection of Nanny’s and my aunt Charlotte’s cats. But they were slow to trust us because we were kids chasing them around without much understanding or gentleness. I remember when I was about six, another cat of Nanny’s—a white Persian kitten named Tinker—warmed to me and would jump up in the bed to see me and attack my watch band. It was one of my greatest achievements in life up to that point. My brother wound up being allergic to cats, so we couldn’t get one of our own, but many years later, as an adult, my wife and I have had several cats. We have a calico cat named Pig, and she’s been my nearly constant companion for the last seventeen years. She sleeps in the crook of my left arm most every night, after trying to bite my nose several times. Her Christian name is Lilly, but her personality earned her the name Pig. When I was a little kid, we had a Cairn Terrier named Daisy that I was close with. I had read too many Jack London books, so I tried to have her pull me around on my skateboard while holding her leash like she was a sled-dog and imagining we were in the Klondike. This obviously wasn’t a smart idea, especially on hills. Animals are completely loyal when they choose you. They really do offer unconditional love and friendship in ways that humans often fall short of. All they want is your time and attention, which is such a pure intention. There is something mysterious about cats, and they must be won over. But once you earn their trust, they are reliable. Buffalo is a guide for Frank, and she is a true friend. She is there for him, accepts him for who he is, and Frank doesn’t have to be anything special for her. He only has to be himself. For a lot of his life, he’s been expected to perform miracles, heal people, and live a perfectly moral life. No human being could meet these standards. So, Buffalo, is such a welcome presence for Frank. She has no expectations for him, and she reminds him of the simpleness of life and what really matters. And, in return, Frank is a loyal and dedicated friend to Buffalo.RG: You display the natural elements and the seasons as signifying incremental change, a signpost to an unknown future or destination. I took this to be in strong parallel to Frank’s inner movement, not only his compulsion to keep running, but also his wider struggles. There is a blurring of lines between the exterior and interior that gives the book a dreamlike quality. In terms of character development, what was your approach to Frank and his relationship to the passing of time?WB: The seasons are a reminder for Frank of nature and time’s passing. The seasons remind him of reality and connect him to the nature of time, change, and impermanence. He’s been disconnected from nature, following his own ambition—and the expectations that accompany that—for most of his life, and connecting with the concrete reality of impermanence and change that the seasons reveal can sometimes be terrifying. Like Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, Frank Russet has awoken from a dream of his own ambition, his own movement, and his own escape.RG: Signs, exits, fields, forests passed. The sun stayed behind clouds. Kentucky became Ohio. The light became gentler. Then headlights. Ohio became Michigan. Frank kept his speed right at the limit.Frank’s actions at first seem illogical and as if he’s possessed by a waking dream. As the story unfolds it slowly surfaces that his chosen path is one that makes emotional sense. His travels take him to liminal environments, where he exists as someone passing through. How does the wider concept of agency and Frank’s relationship with personal autonomy come into play in the book?WB: When Frank walks away from the minimum-security prison on Pine Mountain in eastern Kentucky, he claims his own personal autonomy for the first time. As many people do, Frank has become trapped in the role he’s created for himself. His role just happened to be that of a revival preacher. This role was necessary for him to make a living and place for himself in the world. We all take on these roles and as we age, we may find that the roles don’t align with our true nature, and the nature of Frank’s role as God’s messenger carries more weight than most. So, his experience dramatizes something that many people go through. As an old man in his last days, Leo Tolstoy had a similar epiphany as Frank when he left his home and family. Tolstoy’s letter to his wife explained his decision in words that would ring true for Frank: “I feel that I must retire from the trouble of life. . . I want to recover from the trouble of the world. It is necessary for my soul and my body.” In Pineville Trace Frank, too, is taking control of his life and throwing off the chains of what people expect of him because it is necessary for his soul. Like Tolstoy, he takes control of his life to “recover from the trouble of the world.” Ironically, the trouble of the world from which Frank must recover was also largely created by himself.RG: Frank’s past involvement with organized religion adds extra dimension to the spiritual aspect of his travels. Do you regard Frank’s story as a pilgrimage? What do you view as the role of religion and spirituality in the book?WB: I do feel that Frank’s story is a pilgrimage. He seeks a sacred place, a vision—a dream cabin surrounded by pines—that at first, he only imagines in his mind. Frank wants to experience the reality of the life of the spirit. He wants to break down the false separation between things. As a healer, Frank was always drawn to the raw and true spiritual elements that are often, sadly, on the fringes of organized religion. And in Pineville Trace, he abandons religion entirely to understand and directly experience the spiritual world. Scott Laughlin, writer and co-founder of Disquiet International, talks about how his friend, the poet, Alberto de Lacerda would often say, “This is what I live for: friendship and the things of the spirit.” These are the things that Frank Russet has always wanted to live for, but his obligations from society and organized religion got in the way. Frank’s biblical ancestor would be David. King David, sometimes referred to as God’s favorite, also lived for friendship and the things of the spirit. His close friendship with Jonathan shaped his identity. He was a poet and a musician. As a child, he was a shepherd and felt a close kinship with animals and nature. He was a deeply flawed human being that valued connection, lust, and love, as his relationship with Bathsheba shows. Religious stories are often parables that illustrate spiritual truth. In Pineville Trace, Frank wants to throw off the organized religious framework entirely and experience spiritual truth directly. His journey is as much an inner spiritual journey as it is a physical one. As Frank proceeds on his journey, the illusion of separation between the physical and spiritual world disappears. RG:. He had to look tough. Serious. He considered his khakis, boots, flannel. He wished he had his old suit: pressed black slacks, black suit coat, fine black silk socks, polished black shoes, a bright, starched white button-up shirt, and his silk black tie. In that suit he could convince anyone of anything. Even himself. At least he used to be able to.Clothing is a recurring theme throughout the book. From Frank’s orange prison jumpsuit to later changes of attire, the clothes are more than something to wear but take on the quality of costume, sending out a specific signal or impression. What do these costume changes mean to Frank, and what, if any, significance do they have on a narrative level?WB: In Frank’s previous life as a southern revival preacher, appearances were important. His smart black suit and appearance helped sway his audience into belief. For him, clothes represent both identity and a mask. When he trades out his suit for an orange jumpsuit, he’s made even more aware of the shallowness and unreality of identity and how we present ourselves to the world. But he still struggles to separate himself from his ego. He still longs for the past and that suit represents his peak in life. Even as he struggles to move beyond his ambition and ego, they still hold sway over him. Macbeth’s identity is also represented outwardly by his change from a soldier’s costume to that of a king’s robes. After Macbeth has murdered the former king to secure his place as king, Angus says that Macbeth must feel his “title hang loosely about him, like a giant’s robe upon a dwarfish thief.” Clothing does represent our identity to the outer world, and Frank, like Macbeth, must feel ill at ease in some of the costumes he’s presented to the world. At one point in the book, Frank finds a secondhand suit, a tattered approximation of his former costume. It is a fair representation of his inner state in that moment. RG:Pineville Trace is rich with symbolism. Buffalo shares her name with animals associated with great meaning, the buffalo a ghostly presence in a landscape in which they were once abundant. Later in the book the myth of Spirit Rock is recounted, and water seems to represent psychic as well as physical boundaries to be crossed. Do you regard Frank’s story as in the tradition of the mystic quest? Why does he feel the pull to the outskirts and the fringes?WB: I do see Frank’s story as a mystic quest. Frank is seeking spiritual realities and truths and wants to shatter the illusory barrier between the physical and spiritual world. He’s always been connected to healing and that is what led him to his role in organized religion more than anything else. I’m fascinated by Native American literature and have been influenced by several books over recent years. A book called Black Elk Speaks tells the story of the Oglala Lakota visionary and healer Nicholas Black Elk and how he struggles to manifest his vision in the physical world to help warn, guide, and protect his people from harm. Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko is another fascinating book that haunted me and tells a story of real healing. Larry Brown wrote a concise biography that I loved about a more famous Sioux warrior and visionary Native American mystic, the son of a medicine man, called Crazy Horse: A Life. Crazy Horse was an enigma, and his own family didn’t even understand him. The book describes how Crazy Horse went off in the wilderness alone on his vision quest—a rite of passage for the Lakota called a Hanbleceya (translated as “to pray for a spiritual experience”). It seems that people who seek deeper truths, or have a capacity to sense them, often are pulled to the outskirts and fringes. Even though Frank has lived much of his life in the spotlight, he’s always felt like an outsider and feels most comfortable on the fringes. He stood in the spotlight for years because he felt he must do it to survive. And I feel that he did have a real desire to help people. But that life became hollow, and he felt the need to explore deeper spiritual truths and escape from the expectations of society. On the fringes, he feels free. He feels a kinship with ghostly presences, birds, cats, trees, and wild, forgotten things. For thousands of years the buffalo crossed the Cumberland Gap and humans just followed in their steps, and Frank feels it is a great injustice that they have been largely forgotten. On the fringes, the buffalo are remembered always, and Frank feels most comfortable there.RG: Communication is a theme you return to. Frank’s previous life involved radio, and many of Frank’s concerns involve the signals he sends and receives. Memories appear as if broadcast from a past he is disconnected from but unable to avoid. Figures manifest as ghostly reruns in memory. What was your approach to memory for Pineville Trace?WB: Like Kurt Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, Frank Russet seems unstuck in time. When we think of the reality of time, it seems like it is always linear: past, present, and future. But when you think of how our minds experience time, it is not separate at all. We have thoughts of the past and reactions to them like judgment, desire, sadness, guilt, or joy; observations of the present and the way we feel and think about those observations; and plans, hopes, and fears of the future—along with all the emotions and judgments that come with them. And all of this is happening in the present moment in our minds. All the time. Fiction can illuminate the inner experience more fully than any other medium, and I wanted to explore that reality of the experience of time and how memories function in Frank Russet. I wanted the past and memory to be just as real as the present because that is how our minds often perceive memories. We don’t choose our memories. Our memories choose us. Marcel Proust’s narrator of In Remembrance of Things Past dips a cookie into some tea, takes a bite, and he is transported into the past as his memories overcome him. And that is how we experience memory. I wanted to capture that reality.RG: Do you think about how a reader of Pineville Trace might react to it? WB: Some of the books, stories, and poems that have most impacted me, like Flannery O’ Connor’s Wiseblood, Leonard Gardner’s Fat City, Denis Johnson’s Angels, Christopher Chambers’ Delta 88, Ezra Pound’s translation of Li Po’s “Exile’s Letter,” Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, Barry Hannah’s Ray, Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo”, James Still’s River of Earth, Phillip Roth’s The Dying Animal, Richard Brautigan’s An Unfortunate Woman, Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf, Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, James Baker Hall’s Mother on the Other Side of the World, and Franz Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist” haunted me long after I read them, for mysterious reasons. They made me recognize and remember important experiences from my own inner and emotional life. The recognition was palpable. They made me feel something. They stayed with me. My goal is for readers to have that kind of experience and reaction with Pineville Trace.RG:. After I drive past the woman smoking in the Range Rover, at the edge of the forestry camp on Pine Mountain, I think about Frank. Think about his life. And his story. About what it adds up to. What it’s about. I say into the recorder: “I always tell the same story. Over and over. It’s the story about getting what you want. And the story about not getting what you want. It’s the only story I know.”In reflection, did Pineville Trace give you what you want? WB: From the conception of the idea for Pineville Trace, through its first draft, multiple drafts of polishing, and final edits, I’ve had a sense of excitement. The experience of creation was charged. The challenge of marrying this weird story to this odd novella-in-flash form was riveting. I loved being able to spend the time with Buffalo and Frank Russet. I got to learn more about who Frank Russet really is. And, even now, it’s exciting for me to introduce Buffalo and Frank to readers. If even one reader experiences a deep recognition of their own inner experience or is haunted by Frank and Buffalo’s journey, then Pineville Trace has given me what I want.
Cammie has a Hermés Birkin pulled up on a resale website. She pushes the blinding screen towards my face across the white tablecloth between us. She’s talked about wanting a Birkin before, but I didn’t really think about it that much. “It’s ostrich leather,” Cammie says, and she pouts. Her raspy voice is hushed over the trepid steakhouse pianist on the baby grand. What does it take in life to become a steakhouse pianist? “It’s an investment piece. Ostrich leather is going to have better resale value than cow leather. But it's much less than crocodile.” The orange pinpricked leather looks like a nest of mosquitos stuck themselves into the smooth hide and had a feast. “How much?” I ask, hesitant as I take a bite of the rare filet alone on the massive plate in front of me.I really don’t like fat. I’ve carved the excess off to the side because I asked the waiter to tell the kitchen to remove any fat after the steak had been grilled, but no one listened. Grease pools across the glassy steakhouse plate.Cammie’s turn to hesitate. She shrugs and glances away. “Nineteen thousand dollars.”God.I choke. When I glance up at Cammie, I can’t breathe.She is beautiful and unimpressed. Her taut cheekbones and the small point of her nose are lit only by the flickering tea candle. Tense wrinkles cast shadows under her eyes.I panic, less at choking, and more at my beautiful, unimpressed, embarrassed girlfriend. I grasp for my napkin. I remember when she would have hidden a laugh in her own napkin instead of watching me cover my mouth, as the chewed, swollen wad of meat rolls up into the back of my throat. I take the wad down again with a desperate gulp of water. Cammie looks away and sighs as I clear my throat. “I’m sorry,” I dab at my mouth with the napkin and glance around. No one at the other tables saw me. . Only Cammie, but she’s the last person who wanted to. “Just chew your food,” she says. She brings the rim of the glass of Sangiovese to her plumped lips that I so want to kiss when I don’t have ice water dripping from my mouth like a blubbering, drooly baby. I watch as she tips the wine back along her tongue, and her eyes look beyond the rim of the glass. She’s not looking at me, but she’s looking at something far behind my shoulder. I get to kiss her, lips sweet with wine, later that night, and she almost smiles at me. “Thank you for dinner,” she whispers, the small point of her nose brushing up to mine. I watch her naked back rising and falling under the plush duvet next to me in bed. She has a small tattoo on her ribcage that she got when she was eighteen of her grandmother’s name in thin cursive. It sinks in the concave skin between two ribs. She wants it removed. I can’t stop looking at handbags. Bong would say That’s so gay. On my walk to the office through Battery Park I spot bags made of saffiano leather, pebbled leather, and calfskin. A few are coated in scales but I doubt that they are real snakeskin, or crocodile. None are ostrich leather with its swollen, plucked pinpoints. This is a universal male experience: to buy your girlfriend or wife the very expensive handbag or jewelry or shoes that she asks for, or to tell her not right now and that you’d consider it closer to Christmas or for her birthday? I think my mother would tell me to marry her first, but two-and-a-half years together was too soon. I think my father would tell me to just keep her happy, look at all I do for your mother but I was bad at that. I made Cammie happy when I broke up with her friend Samantha to date her instead. Sam was bright, but at the bar she could barely order for herself. In our last year at Columbia, Cammie was getting her J.D. I was splitting my time between class, rotations at BNY Mellon, and spending my analyst paycheck on blow in the bathroom of Soho House. She clocked me for what I was: doing what I was supposed to do. Desperate. Stumbling. Too caught up in my own pride. She was calculated. She was going to be such a good lawyer. Had I made her happy since then? I got my MBA. I deleted my blow dealer’s number from my phone. I work seventy-hour weeks to pay for rare steaks and two Soho House memberships, and handbags, and maybe even an engagement ring. I take this elevator to the thirty-sixth floor of my office to put up with my bosses. She is rarely impressed. Neither are my bosses at work, which is what keeps me meeting expectations. Bong says she’s always busting your balls. He says she’s bleeding you dry, man. Bong knocks on my office door at end of day, right before the sun dips below the horizon on the Hudson. He walks in before I can answer. I call him Bong to Cammie and when I told her to never repeat that, I put my finger to her lips, shushing her. She kissed my hand. Her eyessmiled at me. “He’s gotta be the most relaxed motherfucker in IB. I know he doesn’t smoke, but he’s just… disheveled. He went to UCLA anyway.” Cammie told me a few months later after last year’s company holiday party that Bong was a little drunk. He told her he had a Xanax prescription because otherwise, he’d throw himself off the bridge. “Hey,” he says.“I’m finishing up.”“Jason and I are going to get drinks at P.J. Clarke’s. Come with.” I look up from my computer. “Jason?”“Junior director.” “I’ve never met him. P.J. Clarke’s?”I lean back in my seat. Bong is on the fritz: his hair is more disheveled, his shirt is more crumpled, but his eyes are wide open like saucers. “You’re freaking me out.” “We need to talk,” Bong says. “With Jason?” I stand up from the desk and start to pack my stuff. “Yes,” says Bong. “Get your shit together.”We take the elevator down from the thirty-sixth floor to solid ground and walk to P.J. Clarke’s in complete silence. I think that Cammie wouldn’t touch a place like P.J. Clarke’s. She’d be embarrassed to know that I’d even stepped inside. She would scoff at the checkered tablecloths and paper menus with crosswords for children printed on the back. “Why are we here?”Bong walks me over to the bar where Jason is sitting. I’d seen him around the office and we’d spoken once or twice in passing. He is younger and baby-faced. His Brooks Brothers sport coat is tossed over the seat next to him, presumably for me to sit at. He’s got a leather messenger bag by his seat, his phone face down on the bar next to a bottle of Bud Light.He stands up from the pleather barstool, stone faced, and claps me on the back. “Is this an intervention?” I ask. I feel like I could chew the tension between the three of us. Bong and Jason sit down and I follow. “We need you not to yell,” says Bong. They were very diplomatic about it all. The situation was laid out as dull as a boardroom meeting. There was no needful reason to yell because they were right. Why P.J. Clarke’s? Because no one at P.J. Clarke’s knew us if I did yell. This was a good strategy on their behalf, but P.J. Clarke’s was not where I wanted my relationship with Cammie to end. Jason pulled up screenshots on his phone of Cammie’s Hinge. The first photo was a selfie that she had posted on her Instagram. Her lips were just healed, and they were pursed slightly around her teeth, the angle of the phone camera low enough that her eyes looked down on you in disdain. Camilla, 28. From Bethesda, Maryland, but lives in our apartment in Murray Hill. Associate, of Counsel. Columbia graduate. Capricorn. Figuring out her dating goals. Her other photos were of her and her girlfriends at Le Bain, at her sister’s wedding in a lavender bridesmaid’s gown that she had desperately hated, and a photo I had taken of her pinching the stem of an espresso martini glass at a Soho House party. She was in an oversized blazer cut down to her chest, staring down the camera like she could kill it. A fact about her that surprises people? She wanted to become a nun until high school. Give her travel tips for… Portofino, where we had talked about traveling for our three-year anniversary. A green flag for her? Spontaneity. And I knew all of this about her. But this wasn’t for me to care about anymore. Cammie had answered one of Jason’s prompts: I’m looking for… the best Sazerac in Manhattan, Jason had answered. Cammie said she loved the one at Apothéke in Chinatown, why didn’t the two of them meet up after work this week? Jason said “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” after every sentence.He couldn’t have been more sorry. He was sniffling and couldn’t make eye contact. He had no idea she was Cammie, as in, my girlfriend Cammie. She had no idea he worked in my office. He was right. He found her Instagram, checked her tagged photos, and recognized the photos I’d tagged her in. He asked Bong if Cammie and I were dating.“I looked at him like what the fuck are you talking about?” Bong said, hushed. “Like, of course, you’re dating. You’ve been dating for-fucking-ever. Good luck prying her out of your arms. How’d you even get this idea of going out with her? And then he showed me his conversation with her on Hinge, and I was, like, oh shit.”“I’m sorry if you didn’t want to know,” said Jason. “I’m sorry. I unmatched with her. Immediately. Never got drinks. She doesn’t know I’ve told you, or anyone. I’m sorry.” I’ve been staring at Jason’s open phone, cast aside on the dull wood bar. The screenshots of Cammie’s Hinge profile glow, then dim as the phone just sits while Jason and Bong stare at me in desperation. They fill the air with apologies. They wanted to do the right thing. They wanted me to say something. They are terrified. Finally, the phone screen turns to black, and Cammie’s taut cheekbones and pointed nose and eyes are gone. And it was all very diplomatic, and very fast. I hear myself tell Jason “Thank you. I have nothing against you. You did the right thing, and I respect that.” I hear myself ask Bong if we can leave. I am watching myself being diplomatic and calm from behind my eyes, where complete numbness sits heavy in my chest. A cinderblock. A hydraulic press. Cammie lying on top of me in bed. I swing my coat over my shoulders and clap Jason on the back. Bong rushes out of P.J. Clarke’s behind me. “You gonna be okay, man?” I keep walking. “Hey,” Bong yells behind me. “Hey! You’re not gonna kill her, are you?” I stop. I watch myself turn towards him and hear myself say “I’m not that kind of guy. I just need to go home.”“You’re not gonna kill yourself?”“I thought you were gonna do that.”“What?”It’s been a year and a half and I haven’t spoken to Cammie. I haven’t seen Bong. Or Jason, or the thirty-sixth floor. That doesn’t matter to me, and I don’t care about them. On my walk to the coop, the summer squall of cicadas hisses in the maple trees, from the gutters on the roof, wherever the hard-shelled bugs are screaming and fucking and dying. My boots are covered in shit and dirt. Everything smells like hot shit and dirt: earthy, putrid, sour. I went to the Governor’s Ball one time and it smells worse than the portable toilets used by thousands of sweaty office job workers rolling on molly. The trepid tittering of the ostriches reaches a fever pitch as I unlock the collapsing coop door and seven bowing, writhing, growling birds teeter outside into the sunlight. They rasp and cluck. Their taut faces and thin, pale necks ebb and bounce as they stick their faces into the brown grass and feast. Their bird eyes roll in the sockets with wrinkles collecting underneath them. They are dumb, savage creatures. I check on the incubator with ten bulbous ostrich eggs baking inside. It barely needs to be turned on in the summer heat of Arkansas. I got here with four monogrammed suitcases that still sit on the floor where my mattress is, in the apartment above the garage. I had walked into JFK and thought I’d go visit my parents in Chapel Hill. By the time I got to Charlotte I thought I’d kill myself. The flight to Little Rock was three gates from where I landed. No one asked questions, and I’m happy they didn’t.But that doesn’t matter to me, now. I’ve got four acres, paid for in cash. I bought eight African black-necked ostrich chicks from a wildlife farm I tracked down in Eureka for $250 a bird. The man who sold them to me didn’t tell me his name. He had a silver knob pierced in his eyebrow and the top of his head was bald; strings of long, white hair tangled around his sunburnt shoulders. The 2017 Toyota Tacoma I got off a used car lot was $19,250. A Birkin, I thought to myself, and a bird. I took P.J. home as a puppy in it. My neighbor’s golden lab had puppies and I picked one up. That was the only time I’ve seen them in a year and a half because they asked if I was from animal control. They were suspicious of me. I told them no.I push through another door that separates the coop from storage. The hides, strung up to dry, flutter in the drafty breeze. They are ghastly, pale, amorphous spreads, like maps, every follicle a pinpoint. This was the first ostrich I’d skinned of the eight chicks. She was a sweet bird. She never growled at me, or tried to kick me like some of the other birds did. She didn’t put up a fight. I sliced her open. I strung her up. I plucked her feathers to sell wholesale, each bone begging to stay in her skin. I watched myself butcher her, all diplomatic and fast and about it. Of course it was gross and at one point I threw up in the dry grass outside, where the other birds trot over to inspect the vomit. I let them be. P.J. herded them away. I let the birds distract me. The process of mopping up the blood, carving off the fat, plucking and cleaning and fleshing and cleaning and tanning and scrubbing and salting and tanning and wringing the leather out is excessive for a handbag. I have the bag designed in my head. I haven’t thought about how I’d get it to Cammie yet, or where she is or who she’s with. I don’t want to think about this. She hasn’t found me, or at least hasn’t tried to. I care for the birds, really. When I sell the bird’s eggs at a farmer’s market, I get comments that I’m different, that I can’t be from around here, where was I from? How’d I get to ostrich farming in Arkansas? Did I have a family nearby, a wife? And I smile. I watch myself tell these well-meaning locals It was a long time coming. Something God had planned for me. But that doesn’t matter. None of it does. It’s just me and the birds, now.
The sun rises late in the morning, creeping above the treeline like the encroaching fingers of some lethargic yet sinister god of anti-democratic thought. It’s hard not to feel like the entire world is turning against me. I lean against the kitchen’s marble countertop and remind myself the sunlight isn’t the enemy. The natural world knows right and wrong. If only the same could be said for man.Above my head, I hear my wife Barbra rise, the soft creak of wood, the exhale of bed springs. Even the good guys have to get their hands dirty. My battlefield is one of disinformation, a smoke screen behind which the truth can safely nestle like a slightly moist bird. My job, my marriage, even my name, all of it is a lie. This is what service requires. The work is thankless. And my legacy? Only the satisfaction of a job well done. That, and a media empire of best-selling novels, Hollywood blockbusters, video games, and a permanent place in America’s heart. But at what cost? Here comes my wife, padding down the stairs, wrapped in her bathrobe, our dog Alvin behind her. “Is the coffee ready?” Barbra asks.Strong men do what is necessary. “Sorry, I forgot.”The lie bites at my throat like a KGB Black Russian Terrier, specialty guard dog of the Soviet state, famous for their ferocity and loyalty. I never forget the coffee – but Sam Meadows does. Sam is an insurance agent. He owns a boat and fly fishes and supports the Rams. I know everything about Sam: how he eats, how he sleeps, how he shits, how he calls for more toilet paper from the can while he’s shitting. But I’m not Sam Meadows.My secret is that I am Tom Clancy, award winning author and, more importantly, Patriot.I knew things were headed downhill when Obama won a second term, and was soon proven right when that turncoat Snowden was allowed to pilfer the womb of America’s intelligence and deliver the child straight into Russia’s supple embrace. That was the final straw. The country was falling apart. No hero would save us, and so my hand was forced – I faked my death and went undercover. I am the beachhead for America’s heart and mind. The mission is simple: live a clean and godly life. Like a red, white, or blue blood cell, I treat the infection from inside. Tom Clancy was too well-known, too highly regarded, asked to go onto too many talk shows, hailed as being too prophetic and successful and smart and popular and moral and just too powerful of a person for this kind of assignment. And so I gave it all up and became Sam Meadows. All for this country that I love.I pull into the office at 7:48. It takes me exactly four minutes to park and walk into the office. Another seven to get coffee from the cramped box of a kitchen. When I’d first started at Meadows Insurance, I’d thought for certain that the building had been built intentionally small, some Chinese architect awash in socialist propaganda, convinced that folk just love to trip over one another, cheek to cheek. Turns out it was built by some fella from Maryland, and the smallness of the kitchen is a cost-saving measure, less piping, less expense. A reasonable decision, but Tom Clancy’s used to big kitchens, kitchens the size of states with their own economy and carbon footprint. The boss shows up at 8:12. Were Eddie Marrow not such a stupid man, I’d assume him to be an agent of a foreign government. He trundles through the door, tie askance, glasses smudged. However cramped the kitchen feels, it’s nothing to the suffocating aura of incompetence that he brings with him, part of that wider breed of man that’s weakened this country. Working under him is its own special form of hell. But what better place to stage my war than in the enemy’s camp?“Oh, Mark,” Eddie says as he passes my desk. “Did you have a chance to look over the Burgeons’ account?”“Not yet,” I say and bite my tongue. I want to tell him that I’ve got better things to do than look at his little insurance problems. But my cover demands I keep silent.“It’s been more than a week since it came in. Did you have questions?”“No questions.”“So you’ll do it today?”Eddie Marrow looks like a worm stuffed into human clothes and taught some crude approximation of our god-given tongue. Slimy, tiny eyes behind frames too big for his face. “I’ll take a look at it,” I say, suppressing my distaste. Eddie stands there blinking. “Do you need help with some other cases?”No amount of training can keep my face from flushing. The impudence to suggest that I need his help. Perhaps it’s time to reassess whether he’s an agent after all. Who else would goad me into breaking cover so brazenly?“I’ll look at the Burgeons’ account today,” I say and look down at my screen, hands shaking with the desire to choke the life out of him. I could, too. Older, I may be, but none of the fighting spirit’s left me – I’m as strong as I was at twenty-five. Eddie stands there, looking at me. Perhaps he’s calculating whether it’s safe to push me further. Finally, he turns without another word and goes into his office. One day we’ll have it out, me and him. But not today.
***
I watch as my husband leaves for work. He pulls out of the driveway, hits the mailbox with the side view mirror, and drives away oblivious. Perhaps the hardest part of my mission is smiling through all my husband’s faults. Even our dog, Alvin, seems to feel it. He lets out a whine of embarrassment and I scratch his head to reassure him. Self-important Sam; so confident when he knows so little, even about his own wife. But he’s a good man. And if there’s one thing I’m qualified to determine, it’s the quality of a man – after all, I was one of the best. I may answer to Barbra Meadows, but the truth is that I am Tom Clancy, writer of military fiction so real it may as well be history. And often it is history, future history that has yet to be written, except it was written by me.Make no mistake - there are forces that seek to warp our world, and it is only my constant vigil that keeps them at bay. When some vagabond begs for a dollar outside the supermarket, when the weedy clerk at the check-out counter only offers a paper bag instead of plastic, when a supposed American company allows the enemy to hang their rainbow flag in store windows like conquering huns - these are assaults upon the national soul. It is my duty to drag these sinners into the Colosseum of verbal combat and metaphorically wring the life from their godless necks. They can call me all the names they like (psycho, Karen, that loud and bitchy bitch) but none of it will dissuade me from my mission. When Sam gets home, we eat dinner, watch the news and then head to bed. But Sam has other ideas – he wants his favorite thing. At the foot of our bed, he pulls his shirt off slowly, trying to titillate me with his flabby body and pasty skin. When he mounts me, I can smell our dinner on his breath. Were I not committed to my mission, I’d show Sam exactly how a man’s supposed to use his penis, but I lay there and pretend to enjoy it. When he finally rolls off, breathing heavily, I tell him it was good and he nods without replying. I don’t mind his incompetence. Bad sex has its own righteousness, especially between a husband and wife. And, really, his delusion keeps my identity all the safer. He’d never suspect it’s Tom Clancy he’s making clumsy love to.
***
The old man and woman wake up a few hours apart and go about their day. I watch from the floor, scratching my ear, waiting for one of them to serve me my kibble. Some would be surprised that Tom Clancy eats dog food three meals a day, but in truth I’ve developed a taste for it. It was a delicate operation, breaking into the Louisville Pet Orphanage, stuffing myself into an admittedly uncomfortable kennel, and waiting for the man and woman to arrive. I’d orchestrated the whole thing, of course, their actions as predictable as amateur insurgents. When I stood on my hind legs and barked, I already knew who the good boy was, just as I’d known I’d be heading home an adopted pup. And now, with the perfect cover, I can save this country, one fire hydrant at a time.
