admin7EyZHDb8HNC8btr3, Author at X-R-A-Y

MY NAME IS JIM PARCHEESI OWNER OF JIM PARCHEESI’S AND I’VE WORN THE SAME PAIR OF SOCKS FOR 45 YEARS SO SUE ME by Dan Weaver

June 2, 2025 · Fiction

You’re gonna come in here into my place and tell me to change my socks you’re gonna tell me that? Get out of here with that horseshit. This is my place and these are my socks and I’m not changing them just because you don’t like that I’ve worn them these same ones for 45 years. I’m not here to do what anybody says to do I’ve earned it you see the fucking pictures on the walls of this place? There’s pictures of me with like several different celebrities ok? They came to my place here and they gave me…

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WHALE WATCHING by Kelly Dasta

May 30, 2025 · Fiction

My dead friend isn’t supposed to be on the whale watching tour. It’s a pale summer morning, the harbor glazed with fog. I’m standing on the boat’s upper deck directing tourists aboard, gesturing to empty seats, passing out pamphlets. And there she is, lined up behind a family of five. She’s wearing a navy windbreaker, jean shorts, and muddy white sneakers. Why are you here? I ask. You’re scared of the ocean. Only the Pacific, she says. The Atlantic is fine. I say, Okay, but don’t freak out the children. We jet off, gliding over the glass panes of the…

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WHISPERING GALLERY: AN INTERVIEW WITH WILL CORDEIRO by Rebecca Gransden

May 28, 2025 · Interviews & Reviews

Will Cordeiro’s fiction unfurls a kindly finger and beckons you to follow an uncommon path. As you tramp along seldom visited trails, your mind wanders as much as your feet. You arrive at the peculiar, the disquieting and the mysterious, without a clue how you got there or even if you want to leave. With Whispering Gallery (DUMBO Press, 2024), Cordeiro invites entry to an off-kilter world, where those who disappear into the mist entrust their steps to the uncertain ground beneath them. I spoke to the author about this curious collection. Rebecca Gransden: Some people claim that time isn’t…

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MIKE TOPP by Mike Topp

May 27, 2025 · Micros

TODAY Today a bully from my high school is coming by to beat me up one last time (he has cancer). AMERIKKKA Of course Amerikkka leads the league in serial killers. There are a great many serial killers in town right now—because of NYC’s favorable tax laws and enterprise zones and the big serial killer parade we have every year, and because in a lot of our restaurants serial killers eat free. A JOINER Here’s something you might not have known about me: I was a joiner in high school. Carbona Club, Whip-Its Society, Nutmeg Club, Friends of…

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POWERPOINT JESUS by Izzi Sneider

May 22, 2025 · Fiction

I found the file by accident. It was tucked between Q3BudgetProjections.pptx and TeamSalesSeminar_2021(final_FINAL2).pptx on the shared drive. Jesus.pptx Just like that. I clicked it out of curiosity. Or maybe boredom. It’s hard to tell the difference between the two when you spend the day in an office staring at spreadsheets that mean nothing to you. The file was empty. One blank white slide. No title. No bullet points. No formatting. Just a white void. A warmth emanated from the screen. I stared at it for a while. I bathed in its glow. My body slackened. My thoughts dulled to a…

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FALLOUT by Marta Regn

May 21, 2025 · Creative Nonfiction

Every weekend we begged our mothers to drive us to the mall, to leave us at the arched entrance by the Red Robin, and not to look back. We pooled our money. Birthdays, summer chores, quarters from fluorescent plastic Easter eggs. We bought T-shirts emblazoned with the names of bands and bracelets shaped like penises, breasts, middle fingers. We wore our contraband to school under our jackets and swapped shirts while waiting for the buses. No other kids recognized the faces spread across our chests, and we liked it that way. When we stared at our navels, we tugged our…

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SEA MAIDENS by Ravi Mangla

May 20, 2025 · Fiction

Ever since her husband was hit by a municipal bus, Mrs. Atwal would spend her afternoons watching the hippos at the aquarium. Their fleetness of hoof belying their primordial size. At two o’clock, on the nose, the hippos were isolated in a separate part of the tank and the mermaid show would begin. Children crowded the double-paned glass. A drowsy piano tune was piped through the speakers. The mermaids emerged from some unknowable recess in the tank. Each time one of the mermaids waved at Mrs. Atwal, or otherwise made eye contact with her, she imagined a hippo breaking loose…

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SEASON OF THE RAT: AN INTERVIEW WITH ELIZABETH HALL by Aiden Brown

May 19, 2025 · Fiction

Against the verdant landscape of boarded-up gay bars, bluffs that swell over cresting waves, and hot sand between toes, a haunting, frenetic, and razor-sharp narrative scurries to life in Season of The Rat (Cash 4 Gold Books, 2025). Like the rat, author Elizabeth Hall invites her readers to “taste it all- flowers and cigarettes.” The result is a work which resists definition—part novella, part confession, part dissertation, and part infestation. The reader plays the simultaneous role of voyeur and confidant, observer and observed, the rat in the ceiling and the girl who listens to its scurrying steps below. Season of…

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CITY DESK by Michael McSweeney

May 14, 2025 · Fiction

Last spring the county newspaper paid me $200 to write about local dreams. I interviewed a man whose job it was to cycle out the books from the little lending library in the center of town. We met at a diner nobody liked and was always empty but stayed in business as such diners often do. He told me he mostly dreamed about colors. Yellow in spring, green in winter, purple in autumn. Summer heat made the man’s legs swell and he didn’t want to talk about what he saw those nights. He seemed uneasy about the approaching season. As…

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SIGNAL ISSUES AND FUZZY SNIPPETS: AN INTERVIEW WITH CHASE GRIFFIN by Rebecca Gransden

May 13, 2025 · Interviews & Reviews

Chase Griffin’s alchemical style continues with Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace (Corona/Samizdat, 2026). At once a fanciful record of an unfathomable mind and experiment in merriment, the book is unabashed with its lingual adventurousness. When life gives you strange frequencies it’s time to whistle your own tune. Griffin is a psychedelic jester, and, as is common to that type, also the smartest guy in the room. I spoke to him about the book. Rebecca Gransden: Where there are gaps in this text, there are gaps in my life. I was only able to write this introductory material after an…

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