We happened upon the enormous hole by chance. It was a tremendous hole. The largest I have ever found. Perhaps twenty feet in diameter and located in some woods along the Southern State Parkway. The walls of the hole were perfectly flat and thus of unnatural design, although I cannot say who would have dug such a thing. I could not see to the bottom. I threw a rock in and listened to it bounce against the walls, and listened to the sound grow fainter and fainter and eventually vanish altogether. Of course I urinated in the hole. My need to urinate is why I happened upon the hole in the first place. I found the lack of report unsatisfying.Bladder cleared, I trudged back through the tall grass. Stewart waited in my car’s passenger seat. I give Stewart too much credit: it was not We who found the hole. The hole finding was done by Me and Me alone. If Stewart says otherwise, know that he is a liar and that his generation is brain damaged from lead poisoning. I told Stewart through the window to hold on a bit longer, I needed to make a call. He did not look up from his phone, but gave an okay sign with his thumb and index finger. P. answered. She said, Yes? I said, The hole you are looking for is eastbound off of exit 42. Beyond the grass. Watch for the swaying pine. Then I hung up. Being cryptic was a running joke between P. and I.I returned to the car and told Stewart of the enormous hole. Obviously he wanted to see for himself. I assumed this would be a quick thing, so I trudged again with Stewart in tow. The swaying pine which would possibly not be swaying by the time P. arrived swayed over us. Presently, this pine swayed quite a bit. More so than the other pines, at least. Its plumage was robust. Stewart and I stood at the edge of the enormous hole and gandered.“It makes me wonder,” Stewart said. “This life is full of beauty and mystery and there are so many things that we’ll never find.”Waxing poetic again. There was little in the way of mystery in regards to this hole and even less in the way of beauty. I said, “Howsabout we go back to the car and get out of here. I would like to eat. I am withering away.”“But who would dig this thing?” he asked. “I do not know, Stewart.”“I can’t see the bottom at all.” He went down to his stomach and peered over the edge of the hole with his phone flashlight. “Me either, Stewart.”“I’d like to climb down there and have a look.”“I’d like to leave, Stewart.”“Somebody dug this hole for a reason and I, for one, am itching to discover that reason.”I would never have told Stewart this, but I wished to be long gone before P’s arrival. P. and I have a speckled past and I still to this day find it best to avoid her in person at all cost. Stewart in the mix compounds things. Based on where P. lived and her style of driving, I estimated her arrival to land within the next twenty minutes.“I have three hundred and fifty two meters of climbing rope in my backpack,” Stewart continued. “This pine tree is more than thick enough to support me. Although I don’t like how it’s rocking.”Before I could respond, Stewart began tying the rope to the pine. The pine swayed in a way that could possibly have been interpreted as annoyance, if pines got annoyed. “What is your plan for getting back up?” I asked. The sides of the hole were near perfect in terms of smoothness: this hole-digging was the work of a professional. “I reach the bottom, you untie the tree, you retie me to the car hitch, you pull me out. I thought you were the college boy.”I often grow tired of Stewart, but an unfortunate fact is that we will be together until the bitter end. And I will admit a fantasy of this bitter end glided across my mind as Stewart donned his climbing harness, as he slid the rope through the appropriate hooks and carabiners, as he pulled the rope taught and leaned back against the edge of the hole, and as he hopped back and descended into the cave. Yes, the wicked fantasy glided in a most elegant way as I listened to his feet slap the wall. But despite the occasional fantasy of Stewart’s death, I still love the guy. Those things are not mutually exclusive. I would never, say, loosen the rope from the swaying pine and listen to Stewart plummet to his doom. No, I stood on the edge of the cave and watched him hop his way down. I yelled, “How’s it looking down there, buddy?” My voice echoed and his voice echoed back, “Like a cold, dark hole.”“It is enormous, is it not?”He said, “This hole is of a depth unencountered in my years of hole-diving.” Which is something I knew to be true. “I want a photo next to it when we’re finished,” he said. There was silence, and then he asked, his voice growing feint, “Do you ever wonder if there are irreconcilable differences between the generations?”I lied. I said, “I am unsure, Stewart. I would prefer not. I would prefer that you and I are basically the same. But who knows, the world changes and with it so do we.”I could not make out Stewart’s reply. It grew dark. A red Corvette pulled up behind my car. This red Corvette belonged to P. She got out of the car but kept it running. She stepped into the headlights and I felt small eruptions in my gut. P’s hair is the color of Autumn. She always smells like a fresh batch of snickerdoodles. I still to this day find the scar on her face pleasing in an unconventional way. She paused in the headlights and sashayed. She knew what she was doing. Then she pushed her way through the tall grass and said, “We’re going to have to check ourselves for ticks.” She noticed the climbing rope. “Why in the name of the lord Jesus is Stewart doing that now?” Just then, the rope went slack. For a moment, we thought there had been an accident, but several tugs on the rope indicated that Stewart had in fact reached the bottom. “I admire Stewart’s bravery,” P. continued. “He’s a man who doesn’t shy from risk. A man who knows just what excites a woman. A man with arms muscular from a life of hard work. I’d like to wrap myself around a man his age and climb him like a primate.”I walked to the edge of the hole. I spread my arms out wide. I closed my eyes and fantasized about leaning forward, the rush of wind parachuting my clothes and watering my eyes.“Don’t be ridiculous again,” P. said. “I’m only talking ish.” “I’m just hungry,” I lied. “We can hit that diner you like so much. The one with the pork flambe.”Stewart’s rope continued slacking and tightening. The pine continued to sway.“Don’t you have work to do?” I asked.“A hole this enormous is going nowhere,” P. said.“What do you think is down there?”“Probably a hole lot of nothing. Get it?”Stewart’s rope slacked and tightened in an impatient manner. I find the older generation pushy. They want what they want and they want it now. I untied Stewart’s rope from the swaying pine and retied it to my car hitch and P. showed me how to tie a figure eight. I wanted to yank Stewart out of this hole and be done with the night. I was hungry for pork flambe. I wanted to feast. P. remained at the hole to supervise.Stewart left my car radio on a vintage jazz station. Velvety trombone filled the cab. I switched to four wheel drive and crawled along the shoulder of the parkway. Every couple of feet I braked. If the rope went slack after braking I would know Stewart was out of the hole. I figured that part out by myself because Stewart was right about me being a smart college boy. I turned the jazz off and rolled the windows down so that I would be able to hear of any developments from P. The commuters had already gone home. Cicadas buzzed, a bat skittered overhead, a light breeze carried from the south. It was overall a peaceful scene. In the rearview, I watched Stewart’s rope lit up by my tail lights. The rope pulled against the non-swaying trees and created a sort of pulley system. Stewart only bought quality rope and so there was no worry of fraying, but if I floored the accelerator, something tragic would have happened, or even if perhaps I simply untied the rope. I hit the brake. The rope was still tight. I shifted the car to park. Yes, both options were tempting. But Stewart and I will be together until the bitter end. I shifted to drive and continued on at a steady ten miles per hour. I braked once more and the rope went slack. I got out of the car and heard P. and Stewart calling my name.
My buddy Pilot comes to visit. Says it’ll do him good to get out of town for a couple days—new scenery, change of pace, leave the normal life problems and complications and stresses behind. But also we’ve been wanting and meaning to hang out for a while. The new scenery and change of pace and leaving behind of life’s problems and complications and stresses are all bonus. Icing on the cake, cherry on top. All that. It’s sunny out, blue skies, warm. It is beautiful, in that way that can feel unique and special to the Pacific Northwest. We make pizzas. I got Lili a pizza oven a couple Christmases ago, which means I got us a pizza oven a couple Christmases ago; we’ve made pizza once, sometimes twice a week, every week since. Mostly for ourselves, but also when entertaining. When friends come to town and we replace life’s problems and complications and stresses with food and ease and friendship.Pilot raves about the pizza, and we say we know, because we’ve gotten good at making pizza and we know it. Still. When he raves about it, it makes us proud. We eat and drink and share stories and volley compliments back and forth and round and round.Making food for your friends. Sharing time with loved ones. Beautiful, warm, sunny, Pacific Northwest blue sky days. Getting good at something. Sharing that thing with others. Friends giving you honest, proud compliments. Friends, in general. Gifts, all. Life can be gifts, all the way down, when you let it be.Lili asks Pilot how his summer has been so far, and he says he’s been writing a lot. Lili knows that, because Pilot’s been sending me new stories as he’s been writing them, and I keep telling her about them, but she nods and tells him that’s great.I can’t publish any of them cause they’re all about my divorce, Pilot says. But it's all that's coming out right now, he says.I remember that, I say. Meaning, getting divorced. Meaning, it being all I could think or talk about. They’re really great, I say. Each is more fun and stupid and inventive than the last, I say. As a compliment to Pilot and also to Lili, though she knows. I’ve said that to her before, too. We have a few more beers, and tell some more stories, about writing and divorce, about friendship and food, about life and art.
***
The next day, we have a lazy morning. In the afternoon, we walk down to the waterfront for happy hour. Oysters and tuna tartar and beef skewers and pineapple shrimp and cocktails. It’s happy hour, so everything is discounted, but we’re on the waterfront and so everything is expensive. We complain about the prices, while ordering more than we can eat and second and third rounds of drinks. We each agree when someone else says how beautiful the day is; we each, when it is our turn, say how wonderful life can be. Full and a little tipsy, we walk along the waterfront and Pilot says he really wants to see an orca. Do you think we’ll see an orca? he says. How magical would it be if we see an orca? he says. I guess it isn’t really orca season, is it? he says. I kinda feel like it would solve all my problems and complications and stresses and be magical if we get to see an orca, he says. I can’t remember if I’ve ever seen an orca here along this waterfront. It feels both like I have and haven’t. It feels both impossible and likely. I tell Pilot we’ve seen a few seals swimming around in the water and that always feels special. He asks if there’s sea lions here too, and I say I think there are but I can’t remember for sure. We don’t see an orca.We don’t see any seals or sea lions either. It’s ok. We go out for tiki drinks, and we share more stories and we re-share the same stories we’ve already shared and we recap everything from earlier in the day, and the night before. Lili is giggling her drunk giggle and Pilot is glowing like he doesn’t have a care in the world and my face is warm like I probably got a little too much sun.At our table inside the tiki bar, we’re on an island, or in a boat, or under water. Maybe all three. We’re pirates and sailors and explorers and mermaids and mermen and sea captains. We order another round. We cheers orcas.The walk and the day and our lives and the the view of the water and the sun on our faces and the tiki bar and sharing stories and sharing meals and getting drinks together and escaping our lives for a couple of days and friendship—ours, specifically, but also just friendship, in general— and getting to tourguide a friend around somewhere you love? Gifts. Magic! There can be magic anywhere—everywhere—if you know where to look. That isn’t really what this story is about though.
***
Revisiting this story months after first writing it, I’m unsure what it really is about. I’m unsure if I knew at the time, when I first wrote it, and have since forgotten; or maybe I was always unsure and I wrote that sentence as something of a reminder to figure it out at some point during revisions; or maybe I was unsure, but I was ok with that, and I wrote the sentence just because I liked the sound and feel and idea of it.I’m leaving it now.I like the sound and feel and idea of it.And what it’s really about isn’t really up to me, anyway. That’s for you. To decide, or to decide that it isn’t up to you either and that it doesn’t really matter.That’s ok, too.
***
The next day Pilot returns home, and Lili and I take the ferry to one of the nearby islands. She’s never been on a ferry before, and I’m reminded how special it can be to experience something with someone for their first time. The ferry ride is fun and cool, and the views are beautiful, and it all feels a little like make-believe. And then watching all of that through Lili’s eyes, reflected on her face and in her smile and radiating out from her whole body, makes everything even many-fold times true. On the island, we drive along the coast and comment on the tide being so low. We walk through a farmers market; we eat lunch and have a drink; we walk through the downtown like tourists to whom everything is new and discoverable and anything is possible. We drive across the island to a park and we go on a hike through the woods and then we walk along the beach. We see a sign about local sea animals. The sign tells us about the seals and sea lions and porpoises and orcas in these waters. The sign places them on a scale of how frequent they can be seen, from common to occasional to seldom. We drive back across the island and get another drink and another meal. We drive along the coast going the other way and comment on the tide now being so high. Magic! we say. Magic! we both believe, in this moment, even if not in others.
***
In that previous draft of this story, Pilot was Kevin. Because the stuff in this story that actually happened, happened with my buddy Kevin, when he came to visit.I’m unsure why the change.When I first wrote this story, I was in the middle of a burst of writing. Every few days, and sometimes every day, I’d write a new short story, inspired by something Kevin, or our other friend D.T., texted to our groupchat. I’d copy and paste it into a Google doc and use it as a springboard into another 600-1800 word piece of autofiction about us, and writing, and friendship, and telling stories and life and seeing art and magic and beauty everywhere you look. D.T. texted that he needed a break from life, and so I wrote a story about a guy quitting his job and driving around the country, visiting friends and meeting strangers, buying a boat and learning how to sail, becoming a follower of different religions and denouncing others, all looking for meaning and for purpose. Kevin texted that divorce was like God sawing off parts of your body, and so I wrote a story about God telling a woman to saw off her partner’s limbs, adding in narrative references to the story of God telling Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. God didn’t tell the woman in my story to sacrifice her partner, only to saw off his limbs, and also He didn’t stop her at the last minute like He did with Abraham. When I told my girlfriend about that one, I expected her to make fun of me for writing story after story after story after story where Kevin and D.T. keep popping up, but instead she glommed onto the surreal body horror part. Which surprised me, because normally she looked at me like what the fuck are you talking about? when I described one of my more surreal or speculative stories, but also because I’d forgotten that was even what the story was about. I’d gotten so distracted by how Kevin and D.T. keep popping up in them. She told me she used to have this idea for a story about someone cutting off their skin so it would grow back healthier and blemish free.I could write that story! I said, and went and got my laptop and opened up a blank Google doc and started typing. In the story, the narrator cuts off his skin so it will grow back healthier and blemish free. He works from home and orders delivery and never leaves the house, waiting to reenter the world as a whole new version of himself. But his skin never grows back. He doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t know what to make of this miscalculation. Doesn't have any idea how to make sense of this world at all, now that he thinks about it. He has an idea. He sits down and writes a story and when he gets stuck, these two characters, his friends, Kevin and D.T., appear out of nowhere in the story and tell him what to do next, or they do something funny, or they say some non sequitur that doesn’t literally tell him what to do next and isn’t technically funny, but it makes him laugh and gives him an idea for how to proceed. He finishes the story and sends it to the Kevin and D.T. in his story.I sent the story to the Kevin and D.T. in my actual life.Is this your whole thing now? D.T. texted.I like it, Kevin texted. I didn’t say I didn’t like it, D.T. texted.I like it, too, I texted. They’re fun. I keep trying to write something fun and stupid and inventive, I texted. But every story just keeps ending up being earnest and nostalgic and open-hearted.But that’s fun and stupid and inventive, too, Kevin texted. That’s just your version. I wrote the bonkers version and yours is just a little happier and like you had a good day, he texted.Are they just dumb and repetitive though? I texted.They feel like iterations, but not really repetitive, Kevin texted.And so what if they are repetitive, D.T. texted.The so what and also the word iterations gave me another idea and I wrote a story about a guy writing a story about a guy writing a story about a guy writing a story. I lost track of how many levels or layers of story-within-a-story it was. I told my girlfriend about the story, describing the story itself and also my writing it, and how I sent it to Kevin and D.T. and they said it was earnest and nostalgic and open-hearted, and how that surprised me. I told her about how writing is weird, how you’ll have one idea and start writing it, but then it will become something else without you meaning it to, sometimes without you even realizing it, and she looked at me like I was stupid.She knew all that.I’d told her some version of that a million times.I kept writing stories like this. I didn’t know what to do with them; they felt too meta for anyone else to care, but they were so fun and Kevin and D.T. said they were fun and when I told my girlfriend I finished another and described it to her she’d roll her eyes and look at me like you’re so dumb or like what the fuck are you talking about? but also she’d say it sounded fun, and she’d laugh, and it would light up her face and the room and our lives and the world and God would smile down on us and say, Aaron, that one was even more fun and stupid and inventive than your last, and also even more earnest and open-hearted.And then, time passed, and I revisited these stories. This story. I again feared it was dumb and repetitive, but I also liked the idea of it being in conversation with some others I’d written. So I changed Kevin to Pilot.Pilot is the name I sometimes use for a best friend character in my stories. The Pilot character is usually a fictionalized version of one of my friends, though not any one of them specifically. It rotates. Sometimes it's an amalgamation. It’s never my friend who is a pilot, though. That would feel too on the nose. In the last story I wrote about a character inspired by my friend who is a pilot, his name was Matt. That isn’t his name, though it is the name of another of my friends. My friend Matt has appeared in a couple essays I’ve written, but I don’t think ever a fiction, so I’ve never changed his name to anything. He made an appearance in a piece of fiction by my ex that was kind of about me, and she changed his name to Luke. He jokes about that sometimes. But then, I couldn’t help myself, so now there’s all these sections that are still and again about Kevin and D.T.It is kind of dumb, and repetitive. Or iterative. And I don’t know what it’s “about.” But it feels fun. And just might be the bonkers story I’d been chasing. Though maybe even just thinking that means it’s actually the most earnest and nostalgic and open-hearted. It’s the most everything. Which is maybe what the story is about. Fun and stupid and inventive, or earnest and nostalgic and open-hearted, every story seemed to be about how, every now and then, if you’re paying attention, if you’re open to it, the whole world can be about anything and everything.
***
On the ferry ride home from the island, Lili and I go to the top deck and watch the island recede behind us. The sun is starting to set and it’s bouncing off the water and everything is lit up in gold. There’s a whale off the right of the ferry, a voice alerts us over a loudspeaker. Everyone on the ferry runs to the right side of the boat, hoping to see the orca. My girlfriend gets there first. I saw it! she says. I saw the whale!We’re all staring at the water, staring into the sun bouncing off the water, looking around, looking for a quick glimpse of something to prove that magic is real.I see something in the water. It submerges, surfaces a little further away, then submerges again. A seal or sea lion, probably; a fin of a porpoise, possibly; an orca, maybe even. I keep watching and watching and watching and watching and watching but don’t see anything else. I wonder if Lili saw the same thing I did, or something else. I wonder if she saw the orca and I missed it, or if she saw a seal or sea lion but wanted it to be a whale and so believed it was, or if I saw a whale but am too doubtful and so believed it wasn’t. The same voice over the loudspeaker now tells us that we are almost to shore and to return to our vehicles. Our trip and our journey and our day is almost over.But first I close my eyes. I feel the sun on my face and the crisp air on my skin. I’m silent and still and unthinking.I open my eyes and see an orca, and then another, and another, and another, and another. They’re everywhere. Cresting, submerging, spraying water up through their blowholes, swimming all around us. I watch and I smile and I laugh.I close my eyes again, and when I open them, the whales are gone. Just like that. We return below deck and get in our car and wait to be told when it is our turn to exit the ferry, back to the mainland, back to our normal lives.
Kevin M. Kearney’s latest novel FREELANCE(Rejection Letters, 2025) is a dystopian thriller. It is a psychological profile of loneliness in the age of OnlyFans. It is a condemnation of AI and the gig economy. It is the story of a young man’s search for purpose, part character study and part surreal, page-turning romp. Above all, it is a lot of fun. The novel follows Simon, a driftless 19-year-old driver for the rideshare app HYPR, whose world is upended when the app offers him a seemingly life-changing opportunity. This combination of breadth, emotional acuity and fast-moving plot is nothing new for Kearney. His debut novel HOW TO KEEP TIME (Thirty West, 2022) is a portrait of marriage and family that reads like a mystery, with a dose of New Jersey folklore thrown in for good measure. In short, his books do a lot. Ahead of the publication of FREELANCE on May 31, I connected with Kearney over video call to discuss his writing process, building a universe across books and why Philadelphia is the perfect setting for a sci-fi noir. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity. Leo Vartorella: So FREELANCE is a book that touches on a lot of big themes. You’ve got AI, the gig economy, and coming of age as a young man on the internet to name a few. Did you set out to tackle all these themes from the beginning or did they kind of come up organically as you were writing the book?Kevin M. Kearney: I think the short answer is no. I had the idea to write about an Uber type driver. I thought that would make for a good narrative conceit, because you've got this character who, by the necessity of his job, has to interact with all these different people throughout the course of the day. So as a writer, it's entertaining, because you can just say, well, who would I like to show up next? Pretty much anyone with a smartphone in Philly could show up in his back seat. So what does that look like? It kind of started as a game, just to play and see what happens. And then I started realizing that it could be something larger, and it could probably be a novel. So that’s when some of those themes started showing themselves. Some of them were obvious in retrospect, but at the time they kind of came out of the storytelling.I left teaching and moved across the country in 2022, and I also started writing this book in August 2022 as soon as I moved to California. At first, I thought I was just writing this story about this rideshare driver. Very quickly I realized, oh, I'm actually writing about teaching, and I'm processing what it means that I'm no longer in the classroom. And then I also realized, oh, I'm writing about Philly because I'm no longer in Philly, and I'm processing what that city is or what my experience with it was. And then I very quickly realized, oh, all the things I'm writing about teaching are actually about work. LV: And what about Simon in particular? What drew you to him as a character and how did he start to take shape for you?KK: I taught high school for 10 years in Philly. I taught at this all-boys Catholic school that I also attended as a student, which is a whole other story. I had a lot of students throughout that decade who were a lot like Simon, kids who are a little over their heads, kids who maybe don't know what they don't know, but who are just trying to forge a path and figure out who they are and who they want to be. So I think that was the main inspiration. I felt like I'd interacted with this kid many, many times and the more I wrote about it, I realized at various points in my life, I had also been that kid.LV: From a construction standpoint, I really admire how you write chapters. They are always building momentum and leaving me as a reader wanting more, and I feel like you really know how to end them in a satisfying way without it feeling too on the nose. What do you look to accomplish in a chapter and how do you think about them as narrative units?KK: That's a great question, and I appreciate you saying that, because it's something that I have really worked on. You use the word unit, and I think that's the perfect way to describe it. I haven't thought about it in that way, but that's absolutely accurate. It is its own thing, right? It’s a living, breathing element in and of itself. It's not the same thing as a short story because it’s pushing along this much larger narrative. So I think of it more like a joke, like in the context of a sketch or a stand-up set. Sometimes a joke can stand on its own, but a lot of times they are much more satisfying and a lot funnier in the context of the larger thing, but they are also units that can exist on their own, because there's a premise, there's a setup, and then there's a punchline. And so I think when I'm writing a chapter, I'm always hoping that there's a buildup, there's a setup, and then there is some sort of punchline, even though a lot of times it's not funny. But there's something about how the end of a chapter lands that not only feels satisfying – you could close the book, if you want, and feel like an idea has been realized – but that hopefully it’s going to make you want to turn the page, because you're going to see that replicated in the next chapter and the next.LV: To speak about plot and momentum more generally, this book really zips along. We could use the phrase page turner. How do you think about plot as you're writing? Are you an outliner or are you figuring it out as you go?KK: I appreciate that, because that's something I think about a lot. I love page turners. I think for some people, that's seen as less than, like it’s a trait of genre fiction that maybe certain literary types kind of turn their nose up at. But I think it's really admirable and quite difficult to keep it moving and to make it feel entertaining and engaging enough to keep someone constantly turning that page. In terms of plot overall, I think for a long time I am writing scenes and just figuring out who the character is. And my process, when I first start something, is I'm just writing completely fragmented scenes, and I don't exactly know who the characters are, I don't exactly know where it's going. Sometimes just a paragraph, and then sometimes that's several paragraphs, and then maybe a sentence, but I'm just trying to get as many things down on the page as possible. And then over time, those connections start to make themselves more obvious to me, and I can start to see the threads between those seemingly disconnected fragments, and then I can start piecing things together. Then I can put together a pretty broad outline of where the story starts, where it's going to go next, and where, ultimately, I hope that it winds up. As the process goes on and things become more refined, I get a pretty detailed outline, and especially when I'm revising drafts, I'm outlining pretty intensely and doing reverse outlines to see if the story architecture actually holds up and makes sense.LV: In both of your books, a key element of that architecture is the way you deploy shifts in point of view. You don't really seem restricted about how you do it or when you do it, and I think it works very effectively. Sometimes you come back to a character, or sometimes like with Simon's parents or Tamika, we might just spend one chapter with them. How do you think about when and how you're shifting point of view?KK: Well, I think part of it is just like a very dumb reader view of it, which is that as soon as it starts to feel boring, hearing from the same person, that's usually a sign for me that I need to start moving in another direction. In the reverse outline that I mentioned, it’s one of the main things that I'm looking at. So when I'm reading the first full draft of a project, I ignore whatever previous outline I had, and as I'm reading it and marking it up, I'm outlining it as it exists on the page. So here's what happens in one chapter and here's whose perspective it's from, or here are the characters who are involved in the scene. And that allows me to then have a Google Doc that's pretty much just one page, and I can see I've got this character's perspective for eight chapters in a row. I’m always asking myself, is this interesting or has this become stale or mundane? Is this balanced structurally? Just trying to look at it all as objectively as possible.LV: I think some of the strongest characters across both your books are the parents. One element of the parent-child relationship that you explore nicely is intergenerational communication. Beyond their family connection, parents and children are products of different eras trying to figure each other out. Especially in a book like FREELANCE, why was it so important to give voice to Simon's parents?KK: That’s a great question, because someone who read an early draft said they thought I should cut the parents, there’s no need to hear from them. So I went back and tried to see if that would be possible, and I just thought that it would be totally unrealistic to think that there's this 19-year-old kid who had all these struggles, whose parents don't have any window into his life. I mean, obviously that type of person exists, but I think that that's a pretty rare experience now, considering who Simon is and where it's coming from. So I thought that it was essential. Also, I mentioned earlier that I had taught so many kids who were like Simon, and I inevitably met all their parents because they were failing out of school, or they were socially struggling in some way. So I would be emailing with these parents or talking with them on the phone or sitting with them in guidance counselor meetings or parent teacher conferences, and I really felt for these people, even though sometimes I could see how their parenting was maybe facilitating or passively encouraging their kids’ struggles. But, you know, they're just people who are trying to figure out what's wrong with their kid, or where maybe they went wrong with their kid. They're really grasping at straws and trying to fix this problem that is way more complicated than a simple fix.LV: Yeah, I mean, it's believable that there's a 19-year-old Simon who's going through life and not thinking about his parents, but that there are parents who are thinking about him is the important perspective that really adds a roundness to the book.KK: Thank you. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure that my therapist would have something to say about this, but I always find that I'm writing about parents, always writing about work. LV: Throw Catholicism in there and you’ve got the trifecta.KK: [Laughs] Right, and I'm always writing about a Catholic school. That always works its way in.LV: I feel like Cassie is a character who grows increasingly important as FREELANCE progresses. How crucial do you think her perspective is in a book that's otherwise about this driftless young man?KK: Yeah, I think it's crucial. She’s the wise character, not that she's perfect by any means. I don't think anyone in the book, or in life, is perfect, but she sees through all the things that hamstring Simon and a lot of the other characters, and she realizes that defining your identity by your profession is a losing game. It's a trap. But also defining your identity based on social capital, like maybe Dylan does, is also a trap. So that scene with her and Maya at the end, I think that is the crux of not only her arc, but the book as a whole. She’s not even a mother: she's Cassie. And even that name is a construction. Even that is artificial. She is this energy, this spirit, for lack of a better word. All the other things are artificial, and I think she sees through that, whereas Simon is really hung up on how he's perceived by others and whether or not he's successful enough.LV: Speaking of how he’s perceived by others, Simon lives with a group of privileged post-college kids who feel like they are figuring out their lives, but they're all on a path to security and success that is very foreign to Simon, whose trajectory is much more precarious. Tell me about putting Simon in a house with these people. Why was that important?KK: I think the first reason is that Philly is filled with people like that. It would be fair to say that I have been that person at times too, who's sort of poor but not poor, right? Sort of cosplaying poverty because you just graduated college. So for one, it felt realistic. If you're writing about people in their 20s in Philly, that's a not insignificant portion of the population. It was also supposed to echo Simon's experience in high school. A very elite school that’s in the city but not necessarily of the city. And I think it’s a dynamic he could look at and wonder if his whole life is going to feel outside of these people, removed from them and completely isolated when he tries to relate to them about seemingly normal things.LV: Staying with Philly for a sec, something I noticed in HOW TO KEEP TIME and FREELANCE is a similar arc for the characters where they go through a lot of shit in Philly, and the city kind of spits them out into Jersey. What is it about each of these places and the relationship between them that makes them so compelling to write about?KK: Yeah, that's a great question. I think that a lot of people in Philly, and maybe even a lot of people in New Jersey, view Jersey as this other planet. Even across the country, when I mention to people that I grew up in New Jersey, they think of a different New Jersey than the one that I grew up in. I grew up in South Jersey, which is like a Philadelphia suburb that very quickly becomes farmland and woods.Philly is very strange in its own ways, very haunted in its own ways. I think New Jersey feels like a counterpart to that. It’s also very strange, but in different ways, and very haunted in different ways. And it feels like a place that you could be exiled to. With Mercer in HOW TO KEEP TIME, that's the place where he's trying to get his head on straight and figure things out. And for Simon in FREELANCE, that's where he's cordoned off, a purgatory of sorts.LV: You mentioned you started writing FREELANCE after you had moved to California. Compared to the process of writing your first book, how was it different writing about Philly and Jersey from across the country?KK: With HOW TO KEEP TIME, the only way that I could think to do that was that fragmentary process I was talking about, taking all these seemingly disconnected scenes and making them work in a narrative. A lot of it was my day-to-day experience in the city or in the Pine Barrens, things I noticed, things that stood out to me – pretty much notes – then fictionalizing them and putting them in this very dramatic narrative. So I was able to, in real time, see something and then immediately put it into the story.Being 3000 miles across the country and trying to write about the place, that was about mining my memory. And I think the result of that is a more heightened or surreal version of the city. And when I started to realize that, I thought, oh, it would be cool to try and make this feel like a noir or a suspenseful thriller. So I started reading Raymond Chandler books to try and see how you make it feel like there are shadows everywhere, something always lurking around the corner.LV: I love Chandler.KK: Yeah, I hadn't read him before, and when I moved to California, I thought I should read a bunch of California books. Chandler was one of the things that seemed the most obvious, so I read The Big Sleep and The High Window. And I was thinking I should write a sci-fi noir, so I was reading those Chandler books and then, in quick succession, also read Neuromancer and the novelization of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I'd never read before. It’s really fun. So I was using my memory of not just what I moved away from, but also Philadelphia in 2010 when I first moved there as an adult, and then trying to infuse it with these hyper-real or surreal elements that sci-fi and noir allow.I also read this book called Hustle and Gig by Alexandria Ravenel. It's a sociological study of gig work including Uber, Airbnb, Task Rabbit, and a company called Kitchensurfing. It was super helpful, because it gave me actual data and experiences of people who have gone through this that were vetted by an academic. Because I was also reading tons of forum posts, subreddits from Lyft and Uber drivers, to get a sense of what the job is actually like on the ground. But it was nice to have the academic text to complement that and verify things. Because I think there's a lot of bluster on these forums, which are incredible texts in and of themselves. They are fascinating to read, because, for one, they're not written with any sort of artistic pretense. They're really just written a lot of times to blow off some steam or to talk some shit. And I think that's refreshing to read – something that is so intentionally anti-intellectual. There is no hoping that someone thinks they're smart because they wrote this. They’re doing it to express a feeling. I'm fascinated by digital texts like that in general, stumbling upon something on the internet that is made public for literally the entire world to see, and yet you still feel like this is a private document that you're not supposed to have seen. I love that. So then playing around with writing my own, it was fun. In terms of reader experience, I thought it was a nice way to break up the narrative and hit refresh every once in a while. Also, it allowed for a lot of indirect exposition.LV: You’ve mentioned how Catholicism and Catholic school are themes in both of your books. What impact does religion have on the lives of your characters?KK: I wish I had some thematic reason for why I write about Catholic characters, and, more specifically Irish-Catholic characters, but I think at the end of the day I’m writing from my own immediate experience. I also think there’s a lot of strange ethnic traditions that have nothing to do with religion but everything to do with Catholic or Irish-Catholic identity. In HOW TO KEEP TIME, it's the inability to say the thing – the absolute deferral to silence whenever something gets potentially uncomfortable. And I think that animates a lot of the tension between Simon and his parents. His dad in particular can't bring himself to say that his son is depressed, because what if that sets him on this certain path that's going to lead to all these other problems that could have been avoided if we had just not said that, right? His mom is more open, but probably too much. She’s probably overbearing with the amount that she's willing to say the thing. I don't know, it's something I constantly plug into, and I have found that there's no shortage of inspiration with writing about that world.LV: Speaking of HOW TO KEEP TIME, I was very happy to see Mercer make a cameo in FREELANCE. It’s not a particularly important episode for Simon, but it felt like a pretty revealing coda to see where Mercer is now, and kind of worked like an aftershock that brought me back to the world of that book. Why did you want both of these books to take place in the same universe?KK: Well, I think you describing it as an aftershock is incredible. That’s the effect that I was looking for. I love writers who build universes and then slowly expand them over the course of their bibliography. When I was in high school reading Vonnegut and burning through his books, seeing Kilgore Trout appear in multiple places, Eliot Rosewater too, I just thought, wow, this is so cool that a writer gets to do that. That they get to build this entire world.LV: Reading Vonnegut in high school and hitting your second Kilgore Trout mention – nothing can match that high.KK: Totally. I also love Jennifer Egan and I think she does that really well. She has built a universe of all these characters that start out in A Visit from the Goon Squad, and then they show up in a number of her short stories published after that, and then she wrote sort of like a sequel, but it's all about these very seemingly minor, peripheral characters from the first book. I think that's just so exciting as a reader and as a writer. It's incredible that you get to build your own universe, not just for a single book, but one that lives throughout an entire body of work. It's really fun and hopefully it maybe adds to a deeper sense of realism for a reader who's following book to book. This story does not begin on page one and end when you close the book, it actually continues. I have another idea that I'm working on right now, and it's about St. Luke's, the Catholic school that is in HOW TO KEEP TIME and FREELANCE, so that might be another way to kind of continue the universe.
Israel Defense Force (IDF) Soldier: “What the fuck are you doing?”Banksy: “You’ll have to wait until it’s finished.”IDF Soldier (to subordinates): “Safeties off!” —Banksy’s account of painting the West Bank wall, 2005Blue and white guard rails shepherded us from a bus stop toward the low, sprawling Checkpoint 300 gate complex outside of Bethlehem where my friend and I planned to cross from Israel on foot into the West Bank. The imposing concrete West Bank wall stretched endlessly in both directions, reminding me of photos I’d seen of the Berlin Wall, although at 26 feet high, this border barrier stands three times taller, constructed from thin concrete slabs, each ten feet wide. Every so often a military turret tower split the wall panels. Near the top, wire netting hammocked outward to catch anything thrown by protesters on the West Bank side. It was spring of 2011—six years after Banksy first tagged the wall. Back in August of 2005, when Banksy traveled to Palestine after February’s Sharm el-Sheikh Summit signaled an end to the Second Intifada, he had already gained international recognition for his satirical anti-establishment installations in Bristol and for major exhibitions in Sydney, Los Angeles, and London. Back then, in 2005, the West Bank wall stood largely blank, and though he wasn’t the first to tag the wall, he was the first artist with any modicum of renown to attack the structure, so Banksy’s nine stenciled images on the wall transformed him into a worldwide icon. That day in 2011, my friend and I—both American college students studying abroad for a semester in Jerusalem—set out to hike the border wall to find Banksy’s work, the precise locations of which had eluded us during the minimal Google searching we’d done the previous day at our university in Jerusalem. We knew Banksy had left his mark on the wall several years previous, that he was a renowned contemporary artist, that his artwork on the wall had simultaneously increased international scrutiny of the West Bank wall and contributed to kickstarting a tradition of graffiti on that structure—all of which we hoped to witness now that we lived a mere bus-ride away. On the other side of the checkpoint, I looked back at the plain concrete wall above the border complex and to my surprise, immediately saw the first Banksy installation, recognizable from my googling. A faded, black, dashed block line crept vertically up the wall, then turned at a right angle and traveled about forty-five feet before an angled turn downward: a pair of “cut along the dotted line” scissors appeared just to the right of the first corner angle. Originally, the line made a huge box, the bottom of which was painted onto the ground itself outside the checkpoint, meaning we’d walked across it without noticing. Sometime before 2011 when I visited, though, Israel had installed more fencing for crowd control, obstructing full view of the image. By 2017, Israel painted the wall sections at this checkpoint white, fully erasing this Banksy installation. Though it saddens me that street artwork can be destroyed like this, the first Banksy artwork that I ever witnessed in person demonstrates a couple key facets of this artistic medium: 1) graffiti exists always in temporal form. Existent street art can at any moment be defaced, replaced, or erased due to the public nature of the installation. And because the initial act of painting is in itself a defacement, what’s to stop further defacement by another graffiti artist, or for the owner of the defaced property to attempt to return the “canvas” to its original form? 2) all graffiti enacts a political message, no matter how innocuous the message might seem—at minimum, graffiti evidences a rejection of authority, of hierarchy, of societal norms. In the case of this dotted line installation, however, Banksy’s message tagged onto the wall an invitation to viewers to remove the very purpose of the wall, to open up the landscape once more, to return the wall to not-wall. So of course the state of Israel would paint this checkpoint section of the wall white. I’m just shocked they allowed the dotted line to exist for the six years from which Banksy painted it to the moment I viewed it. The only West Bank Palestinians that Israel allows to cross the border are women, Christians, or Muslim men over the age of 23, married, with at least one child, who possess an officially documented job in Israel—a measure that is supposed to reduce terror attacks in Israel. Until October of 2023, each morning, before four a.m., 70,000-160,000 Palestinians with jobs in Israel lined up at one of twelve border crossings. It could take between two and five hours to cross. The fencing at Checkpoint 300 controlled the thousands of workers who have grown riotous in the past when the Israel Defense Force (IDF) stalls checkpoint crossing. Outside writers and scholars, as well as many Palestinians theorize that border delays are a tactic for getting Palestinians fired from jobs in Israel, while others guess the process is made arduous to keep Palestinians discouraged, stressed about catching rides. Since most of these workers pay monthly brokerage fees to secure jobs and work permits, if they miss a day of work, they end up owing money. I myself once experienced a crossing delay when IDF soldiers refused to let an elderly Palestinian couple cross the border because they each carried a plastic grocery bag full of pita bread, which the soldiers deemed beyond one day’s food supply—a limitation to control trade. As the couple argued to get their pitas across, the IDF soldiers halted all crossings for 20 minutes, laughing through the bulletproof glass as the couple argued to no effect and eventually gave up, walking back into the West Bank. This food import/export limitation is one example of policies that create an economic desert within the West Bank, which has limited capability for international trade given its lack of political autonomy from Israel. With minimal prospects for export, 71 percent of workers in the West Bank work in the service industry and there’s a 17 percent unemployment rate. Per capita, the average yearly income is only $4,300 a person, so money spent by tourists or foreign visitors is highly sought after, something I was clueless of as a student back in 2011. Since the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023 and the ongoing genocide that Israel is conducting in Gaza, the situation in the West Bank has become even more grim, as the state of Israel revoked 160,000 work permits for West Bank Palestinians—an economic reduction of $370,000,000 per month for Palestinians in the West Bank—a measure that’s hard to frame as anything but an economic punishment on the larger Palestinian population for the actions of Hamas. Since implementing this “security measure” on the West Bank’s population, some work permits have been reissued, though the majority have not. Construction of the West Bank wall began during the Second Intifada (2000-2005) in what the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Israel (MFA) described, in an official PowerPoint made public in 2000, as a “temporary defensive measure to block terrorist infiltration” [emphasis theirs]—a response to suicide bombings that wracked Jerusalem after Ariel Sharon, a controversial Israeli politician, visited the Temple Mount surrounded by hundreds of security guards. Statistically, violent attacks from the West Bank have decreased in Israel since its construction. According to the MFA, between 2000 and 2003 there were 73 terror attacks in Israel, killing 900 Israelis, whereas after the wall’s construction, between 2004 and 2008, there were only 15 officially designated acts of terror in Israel—killing 48. However, it seems impossible to pin decreased terror attacks directly on wall construction while ignoring hundreds of other pertinent factors—such as the end of the Second Intifada also mirroring this decrease in violent attacks. But even if the barrier itself were the primary cause of the decreased number of attacks, could that justify the wall’s oppressive effect on local Palestinian populations? This question becomes even more necessary to ask because, contrary to the MFA’s initial statement, the West Bank wall is anything but temporary. In that same PowerPoint circa-2000, the MFA stated that the barrier would not: “establish a border of any kind,” “annex Palestinian lands to Israel,” “change the legal status of any Palestinians,” “prevent Palestinians from going about their lives,” or “create permanent facts on the ground.” Another slide reads: “The Palestinians will not be cut off from their commercial and urban centers,” and “Every effort will be made to avoid causing hardship and interference with their daily lives.” These statements juxtapose later MFA slides that read [again, emphasis theirs]: “Death caused by terrorism is permanent; Inconvenience caused by the fence is temporary,” and “The right of Palestinians to freedom of movement cannot take precedence over the right of Israelis to live. Saving lives must come first.” This vastly oversimplifies, balancing several handfuls of deaths with systemic inconvenience doled out along ethnic lines—hardly an equitable comparison. And still today, the West Bank wall remains. And it’s not just the West Bank wall that inhibits Palestinian freedom of movement: in May 2025, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs published a report documenting 849 movement obstacles and 288 road gates (checkpoints) imposed on Palestinians in the West Bank by the state of Israel, restricting the movement of the population at a micro level, compared to the wall. Obviously life has value, but at what point should large-scale oppression brought about by a wall no longer be categorized as an “inconvenience,” but shift into the realm of ongoing societal death? In 2004, the International Court of Justice deemed the West Bank wall a “breach” of “international humanitarian law.” That same year, the Red Cross echoed this ruling, characterizing the barrier as breaking the Geneva Convention, saying that the wall “runs counter to Israel’s obligation under [international humanitarian law] to ensure the humane treatment and well-being of the civilian population living under its occupation.” Despite the MFA’s insistence that the barrier would not cause the above-mentioned ill-effects, the wall has profoundly affected Palestinians in nearly all the ways that their PowerPoint promised it would not, splitting families, dividing land, and obstructing access to jobs and resources, creating horrific living conditions for Palestinians in the West Bank. As I stumbled the length of the wall in 2011, I’d yet discovered little of the wall’s injustice; I was an American college student, nearly oblivious to any nuanced comprehension of the concrete canvas to my right—but the imposition of the drab structure, how it blocked out the land, how the looming gray cement contrasted the deep blue sky above, felt heavy, oppressive. Plastic grocery bags whipped about, snaking across the pavement, blowing up into the air, and catching on chunks of jagged cinder blocks dotting the landscape, evoking the slightest sliver of a sense that I did not understand what I was seeing, that I had no conception of the horrific effects of this structure, of the pain and invalidation that it imposed upon those living their days in its shadow. A third of a mile from Checkpoint 300 the graffiti grew thick—phrases scrawled everywhere: “Welcome to Soweto;” “I hate Israel;” “No Christ, No Peace—Know Christ, Know Peace;” “Fuck Israel;” “I Want My Ball Back…;” “‘I Will Cut You’—Bon Qui Qui;” “Je Suis Le Palestinian;” and “Leave Your Rights at the Checkpoint.” A light-blue streak of paint stretched as far as I could see in both directions, as if someone had walked along the wall with a paint roller stretched out at shoulder-height. In one place, a graffiti rhinoceros “burst” through the wall; this artist had come after the painter of the light blue stripe because they’d framed their work by modifying the line into a ribbon swirling down both sides of the rhino. As my friend and I trudged the wall, an image caught my eye, only one concrete panel wide, almost hidden in an unintelligible mish-mash of color. Another Banksy: a simple monochrome stencil of two children playing with a beach pail and a small shovel beneath a painted “hole” in the wall. The light blue paint line streaked across the top of the taller child’s head and various unintelligible messages had been scrawled across their bodies. I’d nearly missed it because the image looked so different from the original I’d seen online: the hole originally showed a sandy beach scene with lush palm trees and blue water. But Banksy’s imaginary aperture had since been filled in white. Of Banksy’s artworks, this is my favorite as its 2011 state evidences the transience and mutability of street art; the ongoing-ness of story, of life, and of place; the critique of the lasting-ness of the structure upon which the art exists. But it’s my favorite for more than what it says about street art as a form: in 2005, Banksy depicted the children smiling while innocently playing with their buckets and shovels—implicitly, the ones who dug the hole through the wall, exposing the oasis on the other side; this artwork captures the promise and latent power, the potential of children, and in its position on the West Bank side of the wall, it evinces the freedom from the confines of the barrier that the West Bank will eventually gain. Yet, by the time I witnessed it in 2011, Banksy’s oasis had been blotted out with painted graffiti bricks, Banksy’s hole patched, the wall reconstructed with another artist’s spray paint. The children remain smiling, though, unbound by the graffitied chaos encroaching on all sides, nearly blotting them out. During a 2019 conversation with Taqi Spateen—a Palestinian graffiti artist from Ramallah—I showed him the photos I’d taken of this Banksy back in 2011, of Banksy’s oasis covered over by painted white bricks. Spateen explained that one night in 2007 or 2008 a Zionist group from an Israeli settlement visited the West Bank wall in both Bethlehem and Ramallah to paint over any graffiti that depicted “a hole in the wall” or anything that made the wall “see-through.” Spateen continued: “It is 100 percent the Zionists [who] did it. They used the white color and the blue color because the flag of Israel is blue and white. And the material is too expensive; Palestinian people [are] unprepared to pay a hefty sum to destroy a painting on the wall.” In contrast, when he saw the photos, Hamza Abu Ayyash—a Palestinian artist—said, “Since it’s on the eastern side of the wall, then most probably a local [Palestinian] guy did it. Zionists are weaker than doing stuff in highly populated areas with Palestinians. It’s street art after all. Sometimes you should see it in a simpler way.” And he is right; anyone can paint on top of anyone else’s work on the wall. And it is possible that a Palestinian wanted to enact a flag-colored reminder of the state that’s enacting the oppression. But targeting “holes” painted onto the wall seems to me to be a deliberate and pointed gesture, especially considering the color choice. Either way, though, someone painted-in the “holes” in the wall, and this overwriting of Banksy’s work before 2011—which goes unreported by any western media outlet—evidences the extent to which the wall embodies the Palestinian/Israeli conflict: people care enough about maintaining the separation enacted by the wall that they went to the effort of erasing even a semblance of metaphoric freedom for anyone looking outward from the West Bank. And yet, looking at my photo again, I notice that just to the right of the children, another more recent artist painted a mural of a tree springing up, bursting a new hole in the wall, roots embedded deep within the image’s ground—an artist just as committed to breaking through the wall as whoever had erased the holes. In 2005, Banksy published photos—which he called “Holiday Snaps”—of his West Bank artwork, writing on his website:
The Israeli government is building a wall surrounding the occupied Palestinian territories. It… will eventually run for over 700km—the distance from London to Zurich. The wall is illegal under international law and essentially turns Palestine into the world’s largest open prison.
When installing his work, Banksy received mixed responses. Reportedly, as he was packing up his paint, Banksy thanked an elderly Palestinian man who’d told him that his graffiti looked beautiful, to which the man snapped, “We don’t want it to be beautiful, we hate this wall. Go home.” Street art forces the viewer to decide how to read the installation, to navigate the liminality of artistic expression and criminal act. Art on a border wall complicates this further: by tagging such a barrier—an embodied political structure—the artist imbues contrasting political significance, forcing the viewer to move beyond the structure’s base border functionality, to engage in conversation with the wall. Banksy’s interaction with the Palestinian gentleman evidences the crux of this dichotomy: is it better to leave the wall bare so onlookers see the plain concrete structure for its utilitarian purpose, or to elevate the barrier into a canvas, creating a massive symbol of protest? Further down the wall, a sturdy military turret set into the concrete structure was splashed with an assortment of pastel paints like a Jackson Pollock canvas, splatters streaking down to the ground over top of the blue line of paint, still stretching itself across the span of the wall. Through the turret’s window slits far above, an IDF soldier in a battle helmet watched us pick our way along a large drainage culvert filled with volleyball sized stones, rusted metal, and refuse. It smelled like sewage, likely because the .4 square mile Aida refugee camp—which houses more than 5,500 Palestinian refugees—still lacks proper water access and sewage and waste disposal some 60 or more years after it was established for Palestinians displaced from 43 villages in Israel and the West Bank. And so, refuse is discarded in cesspools along the community’s edges abutting the wall. Behind the culvert, the silhouette of a prone figure spanned twenty-eight wall sections—an immense installation that made me feel tiny. Upon closer inspection, mock wall blocks constructed the silhouette—a personified stone blockade. I couldn’t decide whether the mural evidenced the personal nature of the wall, or if the wall lying down or sleeping had some significance lost to me, but the blue paint line stretched across the figure’s entirety, effectively binding the mural to the wall. Standing at the silhouette’s head, we could see the end of the wall a fourth of a mile or so ahead, and decided to walk there to finish it out even though there didn’t look to be much graffiti on the remaining wall. A gigantic mural of the phrase “Open Sesame” spanned twenty-two of the final wall panels, which seemed a fitting end to the structure. Only when I reached the final concrete wall segment did I realize that at some point between the sleeping silhouette and “Open Sesame,” the light blue stripe of paint had also ended, though I’d missed seeing where or how. Though the West Bank barrier is commonly thought of as a concrete wall, in actuality, concrete makes up a mere five percent of the barrier, fortifying the most fraught areas of the border, specifically the border nearest Jerusalem. In the official description by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Israel (MFA), the other 95 percent consists of a barrier fence that’s “high-tech and [that has] other intruder prevention systems,” which go unspecified. At the end of the barrier wall, intense coils of razor-wire replaced the cement, looping haphazardly, half buried in dead weeds on either side of a dirt IDF-controlled border patrol road extending as far as we could see.By painting on the West Bank wall, Banksy both publicized Israel’s oppression of Palestine and legitimized the wall as canvas, creating space for the thousands of artists who have come after him. Banksy’s visit also turned the wall into a tourist destination, drawing visitors from around the world who then spread word of the wall’s effects. In 2007, Banksy returned to Palestine, opening an art exhibition titled “Santa’s Ghetto Bethlehem,” featuring collaborative work by artists interested in revitalizing West Bank tourism. Banksy added three graffiti installations, one of which was an IDF soldier checking the papers of a donkey (think the Virgin Mary riding a donkey to Bethlehem)—an artwork soon destroyed by Bethlehem locals who found the work too sardonic as the IDF actually requires animals to have papers to cross the border. However, in 2017, artist Taqi Spateen recreated the Banksy donkey on a notable section of the West Bank wall in Bethlehem, and since then, he’s maintained the image anytime it’s been defaced—both, I would venture, as an homage to the impact that Banksy’s graffiti has had on the local tourism industry and to the importance of the image’s critique of Israel’s ongoing border oppression. Around noon, tired and hungry from our two mile trek, which had taken us the better part of the morning, we arrived back to Hebron Road—the main street running through Bethlehem that heads out Checkpoint 300 toward Jerusalem—and found another stenciled Banksy mural: this one of a young, pig-tailed girl, maybe eight years old, in a pink dress, patting down the leg of an IDF soldier who stands, feet spread, hands above his head against the wall so the viewer only sees his back. The soldier’s M16 leans up against the wall. A white bow wraps the girl’s waist. The drab concrete façade under the graffiti looks dirty compared to the olive green military uniform and the light pink dress, which has since faded to a crème color under the sun. Sometime after 2011, the owner of the building constructed a gift shop around the wall, both to monetize access to the artwork, and because other street artists kept tagging the wall, causing concern that this Banksy might be damaged beyond recognition, as has happened to some of his other works. Cutting from Hebron Road to Manger Street, we happened upon another Banksy, painted on the side of the Saca Souvenir Store, which sells “Fine Jewelry—Genuine Antiquities—Olive Wood Carvings—Souvenirs.” Tagged onto the olive green-gray facade flies a white dove with wings spread, an olive branch in its mouth. In the classic Banksy twist of expectations, the dove wears a flak jacket. Over the bird’s breast, a red sniper sight crisscrosses a central laser dot. Next to the dove, a sign greets visitors: “Welcome to Palestine. Welcome to Bethlehem.” After grabbing falafel from a corner shop, my friend and I hailed a taxi for the two miles back to Checkpoint 300 because we’d seen the Banksy’s we’d come to see. Pulling out onto the street, the young Arab cab driver introduced himself: “My name is Hassan. You?”After introducing ourselves, we asked him about driving. “It is very bad here in Bethlehem,” he said. “No jobs. No agriculture because Israel sends water to Jewish settlements instead of here. Driving taxis is an okay job though because there are many tourists. There were many drivers waiting for you at Checkpoint 300, yes?”We nodded. There had been dozens waiting when we arrived that morning.“Many drivers wait there, but I don’t. Drivers rent their taxi every day from a company and get one tank of gas free, so every day I hope for many trips to make back the rent. It is hard, but it is a job and I am very thankful.”After inquiring where we lived in the U.S., Hassan asked why we were studying in Israel and why we were in the West Bank. “Ah,” he said. “Banksy. Very famous.” After a long pause, Hassan said, “Jerusalem… Is it a big city?” “Wait…” I stammered, “what?”—momentarily confused by the question because the outskirts of Jerusalem are easily visible on the hills beyond the West Bank wall. “It is a big city? I cannot go there, but my grandpa lived in Jerusalem before the separation and tells many stories. What do you like about the city? Is it beautiful?”My friend and I described how much we loved living just outside Jerusalem’s Old City, how walking the crowded alleys felt like being transported hundreds of years into the past, the beauty of the Dome of the Rock. Hassan pressed us for more—Jerusalem’s New City, the urban sprawl, the wide boulevards, the expansive markets. “I sometimes go to the top of a hill and look out at Jerusalem,” Hassan said. “It seems very beautiful. It is my dream to go there someday. Maybe I will get a job in Jerusalem when I am older. No more taxi driving.”I didn’t know what to say other than agreeing that hopefully one day he could. Here I was an American taking a day trip into the West Bank to see art, and he couldn’t visit his grandfather’s city on the other side of the wall. In March of 2017, Banksy returned once more to Bethlehem to open “The Walled Off Hotel,” a functioning nine-room hotel owned by a Palestinian named Wisam Salsaa. The second floor of the hotel contains an art gallery displaying work by renowned or up-and-coming Palestinian artists. The hotel rooms, decorated by Banksy and other artists, run from $60 to $965 a night, and provide views of the West Bank barrier. Salsaa calls it the “hotel with the worst view in the world.” On the walls of the “Banksy Room,” which runs at $265 a night (the cheapest room painted by Banksy himself), a soldier and Palestinian boy engage in a pillow fight and delicately painted feathers explode throughout the background. In another room hangs a framed graffiti image of a Palestinian woman holding a brick as depicted in CNN coverage, yet a layer of glass covers the work, a bullet hole shattering the still. The “Budget Barracks” (the $60 option) are furnished with surplus items from IDF military barracks—concrete walls and floors, thin metal bunk beds, mosquito netting, and barred windows. The hotel lobby itself is open to the public and contains a functional café themed like a colonial British outpost circa 1917, the year Britain announced official support for establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. The café walls display homemade slingshots beneath rows of security cameras, as well as various Banksys: Palestinian children scaling heaven’s gate, an industrial bulldozer dozing peaceful homeowners, a portrait of Jesus (with a laser site trained on his forehead) looking upon drones overhead, and a tower turret turned into a carnival-esque merry-go-round for children. In a corner stands a Romanesque bust: nose and mouth covered with a handkerchief, a can of teargas frozen in perpetual spray wending its way around the statue. Every hotel key attaches to a scaled-down concrete panel of the West Bank wall—each six inches tall, heavy and unwieldy. In the FAQ page on the hotel website, in response to “Can I paint the wall?” Banksy writes, “Guests enjoy privileged out of hours access to Wall*Mart next door—the graffiti supplies store which stocks everything you need to make your mark and offers expert local advice and guidance.” After “Is It legal?” Banksy writes, “It’s not not legal. The wall itself remains illegal under international law.” Under “Is It Ethical?” Banksy: “Some people don’t agree with painting the wall and argue anything that trivialises or normalises its existence is a mistake. Then again, others welcome any attention brought to it and the ongoing situation. So in essence—you can paint it, but avoid anything normal or trivial.”In December of 2017, Banksy painted two cherubs near the Walled Off Hotel. Together, the angels work to pull the wall apart with a crowbar, and a slight gap in the wall makes it appear that their concerted effort is working. Hassan pulled the taxi up to Checkpoint 300 where we’d cross back into Israel. “You have seen both the Banksy’s here at the checkpoint? Cut-along-the-line and the chairs?” “We saw the line, but not the chairs,” I said. “Where’s that one?” “The chairs have been damaged, but part is still there,” Hassan said, motioning to a wall section nearly hidden to the left of the border complex, on which were stenciled two black and white wingback armchairs. Between these, a small decorative table supported a single flower pot, behind which stretched an expansive curtained window. We thanked Hassan, paid, and he drove off, leaving us staring at this final Banksy.I later learned that originally, within the window, Banksy had pasted a large poster photograph of a snowy mountain foregrounded by a wooded pond—a realistic contrast to his crisp, stenciled cartoon chairs. Yet that day, in the condition in which I saw it, phrases had been scribbled across the gigantic furniture and the alpine landscape photo was long gone, peeled away to expose an empty window frame, filled in with light blue paint.Today though, looking back at the photo I took of that Banksy in 2011, for the first time I notice that whoever painted the window light blue—the Zionists or Palestinians, whoever did it—also streaked their paint roller to or from the west, breaking Banksy’s window frame with a single streak of paint—the origin point, or perhaps the ending point—of the light blue line that I’d lost track of while walking the length of the wall. Across the entirety of the window pane, washed-in with the color of the sky, someone had scrawled brick and mortar lines in dark blue and green—one final window walled into the West Bank barrier. And yet, in the few years since someone painted it, weather has badly faded the paint, wearing away this attempt to block the metaphoric view—a reminder that with time, even the elements themselves tear down our best efforts to wall people in. Sources Consulted:Abo-Salamah, Yazan. Personal Interview. 8/29/19. Al-Ali, Naji. A Child in Palestine: The Cartoons of Naji Al-Ali. Verso Books. 2009. “Al-Aqsa Intifada Timeline.”BBC News. 2004. “Aida Camp Profile.”The Applied Research Institute—Jerusalem, The Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID), and the Azahar Program. 2010. Asi, Yara M. “The Occupied West Bank Since October 7: Movement Restrictions and Collective Punishment.” Arab Center Washington D.C. 2024.“Banksy at the West Bank Barrier.”The Guardian. 2005.“BANKSY Graffiti Bethlehem Tour.”Murad Tours. www.muradtours.com.Baruch, Uzi and Tova Dvorin. “15,000 More Jews in Judea-Samaria in 2014: Jewish Population Over Armistice Lines Close to 400,000 According to the Interior Ministry.”Arutz Sheva 7. Israelnationalnews.com. 2015. Boom, Wilco. “Rutte Walking on Eggs in Israel.” NOS.nl. 2013. Booth, William and Sufian Taha. “A Palestinian’s Daily Commute through an Israeli Checkpoint.”The Washington Post. 2017.Checkpoint 300, 2017: Google Street View. Cohen, Dan. “Repression and Resistance in Bethlehem’s Aida Refugee Camp.” Mondoweiss.net. 2014. “Dutch Water Company Terminates Relationship with Mekerot Following Government Advice.” Palestinian BDS National Committee. Bdsmovement.net. 2013. “Ethnic Cleansing.”Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign (SeaMAC). Goldenberg, Suzanne. “Rioting as Sharon Visits Islam Holy Site.”The Guardian. 2000.Gritten, David. “UN Experts Accuse Israel of Sexual Violence and ‘Genocidal Acts’ in Gaza.”BBC. 03/13/2025.Hareuveni, Eyal. Dispossession and Exploitation: Israel’s Policy in the Jordan Valley and Northern Dead Sea.www.btselem.org. 2011. Hass, Amira and Barak Ravid. “Dutch Water Giant Severs Ties With Israeli Water Company Due to Settlements.”Haaretz. 2013. “Israel.” The World Factbook. The Central Intelligence Agency. www.cia.gov. “Israel is strangling the West Bank’s economy.”The Economist. 2023.“‘It Is Important to Call a Genocide a Genocide,’ Consider Suspending Israel’s Credential as UN Member State, Experts Tell Palestinian Rights Committee.”United Nations. 419th Meeting. 10/31/2024. Jones, Sam. “Spray Can Prankster Tackles Israel’s Security Barrier.”The Guardian. 2005. Khalil Safi, Shatha. Personal Interview. 8/29/19. Lazaroff, Tovah. “Why Netanyahu Can’t Finish West Bank Security Barrier.”The Jerusalem Post. 2016. Liddell, Graham. “Gracing the Walls: Saleh from Bethlehem.”Marshallah News. 2014. Liddell, Graham. “In Photos: Bethlehem Remembers Teen Slain by Israeli Forces.” Ma’an New Agency. 2014. Liddell, Graham. “Remembering Saleh: A Life Cut Short.” Ma’an New Agency. 2014. McArdle, Elaine. “Banksy in Bethlehem! Banksy Street Art, Bethlehem, Palestine.” www.thewholeworldisaplayground.com. 2014. “Movement and access update in the West Bank | May 2025.” United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. 05/27/2025. “Official: Israel Lowers Water Supply to Nablus Villages.” Ma’an News Agency. August 8, 2010. “Palestinians Say Over 1,500 Children Killed by Israel Since 2000.”Haaretz. 2014. Parry, William. Against the Wall: The Art of Resistance in Palestine. Chicago Review Press. 2011. Quigley, John. “The Lancet and Genocide By ‘Slow Death’ in Gaza.” Arab Center Washington D.C. 07/12/2024. “Red Cross Criticizes Israeli Security Barrier.”BBC. 2004. Reed, Katya. “Bethlehem Checkpoint: Waiting in Line vs. Waiting in Line Under Occupation.” Mondoweiss.net. 2010. Renmar, Taylor. “Banksy Graffiti in Palestine.”The World of Banksy Art. 2012. “Restrictions on Movement.”B’Tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. 2017. Rothchild, Alice. “‘Beautiful Resistance’ in Bethlehem’s Aida Refugee Camp.” Mondoweiss.net. 2010. “Rights expert finds ‘reasonable grounds’ genocide is being committed in Gaza.”United Nations: UN News. 03/26/2024. “Saving Lives: Israel’s Security Fence.” Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs PowerPoint. Securityfence.mfa.gov.il. 2000. Sharon, Jeremy. “Despite ostensible ban, tens of thousands of Palestinians working in Israel – report.”The Times of Israel. 2024. Spateen, Taqi. Personal Interview. 8/28/19. “Teenager Dies Following Shooting in Bethlehem.”International Solidarity Movement. 2013. Touq, Toleen. “Key of Return.”Berlin Biennale. 2008. “U.N. Court Rules West Bank Barrier Illegal.”CNN. 2004. “UN Special Committee finds Israel’s warfare methods in Gaza consistent with genocide, including use of starvation as weapon of war.”United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. 11/14/2024. “Victims of Palestinian Violence and Terrorism since September 2000.” Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Mfa.gov.il. 2025. “West Bank.”The World Factbook. The Central Intelligence Agency. www.cia.gov. “‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’ Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza.” Amnesty International. 12/4/2024.
With the short fiction collection My Child is a Stranger (AOS, 2025) Brandon Teigland offers a close reading of possible futures. Teigland’s exploratory voracity lays the groundwork for an examination of impulse, whether towards the limits of art or the human. The realm of theory has to live in our very real, fleshy heads, at least for now, but what happens when assumptions break down? I spoke to Brandon about this questing and interrogative collection.Rebecca Gransden: How long has the compilation of My Child is a Stranger taken you? What was the process of choosing the stories for inclusion like?Brandon Teigland: Over the past decade, while writing and publishing three other books, I was also assembling this collection—eighteen stories written between 2015 and 2025. In that time, the culture of contemporary fiction has changed. All the stories I've included in My Child is a Stranger are in some way about the time of their writing, whether they explicitly address the issues of the day or not. Everyone knows what these are: globalization, economic collapse, inequality, technological upheaval, environmental degradation, mass displacement, terror, war, and, with these, shifting ideas of what it means to be human.Is there a common thread among these? Probably not. As Jean-François Lyotard would say, there is no overarching metanarrative to explain and justify everything. There are only outcomes—ideas lived out in all their messy complexity. The 'child' in the title comes from Emmanuel Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, where he cites Isaiah 49: My child is a stranger, but a stranger who is not only mine, for he is me. He is me, a stranger to myself… However we relate to children in our own lives, the figure of the child—whether as an evasion or an embodiment of hope and despair—tells us something of the fears we as a species have for the future and what hope we invest in it.RG: What does the posthuman mean to you, and how does it manifest in your writing?BT: Posthumanism is a strange institution—one that allows us to be everything, anything. David Roden’s Disconnection Thesis suggests that posthumans would be radically different from humans because they would be 'disconnected' from existing human forms of life, practices, and conceptual frameworks. This disconnection isn’t just physical but involves a deeper ontological rupture—meaning posthuman beings may not be understandable in human terms, as they would operate outside the assemblage of human social systems.I see two kinds of posthumanism: ‘open’ posthumanism, which is unrestricted and capable of embodying anything, and ‘closed’ posthumanism, which imposes its own self-chosen limitations, restricting what posthumanism can be. I find both compelling and a little suspect, which is why I consider my writing a type of speculative posthumanism.Roden’s speculative posthumanism contrasts with critical posthumanism, which focuses on deconstructing the human concept within cultural and philosophical contexts. Instead, he considers the possible emergence of new kinds of beings beyond our ability to conceptualize—an unpredictable evolution where technology, biology, and autonomy break free from human structures. This aligns with my interest in posthumanism as a post-existential, almost unknowable state, where identity, transformation, and alienation lead to forms of existence outside human comprehension.To ask, ‘What is posthumanist literature?’ is to examine how writers might explore these feral forms of fabulist fiction. Literature is bound up with what it’s like to be us, to be human. How we make ourselves intelligible to ourselves. Posthuman literature matters not because it helps us understand who we are today, but because it asks who we might become, or not become, tomorrow.RG: “The Last Shape” explores themes of aging and decay, of the ravages of time. You highlight how the pursuit of ‘beating’ time, the thirst for life extension, can lead to a state that pollutes the living environment. How do you view the concept of deep time? What is the contemporary relationship to the idea of primitive memory and evolution?BT: In “The Last Shape”, Professor Ali Abbasi, a biogerontologist, ventures into California’s Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest in search of Methuselah, haunted by dreams of being trapped among its twisted pines. He realizes these trees endure not through vitality but by existing in a half-dead state, mirroring his fear that extreme life extension leads to stagnation and detachment.As he ascends, he encounters a breath-like entity dormant within the roots, suggesting that longevity is not just biological but an unnatural disruption of time. When he descends, his own breathing has changed—his body altered, his humanity uncertain. The story critiques the philosophy of senescence as a postmortal impasse, where longer lifespans sever us from evolution, erasing primitive memory and disrupting the natural balance. Deep time, embodied in these trees, reveals that life and death are inseparable, and immortality is not a triumph but a corruption of identity. The pursuit of preservation doesn’t just pollute the environment—it pollutes the self, rendering us unrecognizable. True continuity lies not in defying death but in accepting the decay and renewal that sustain all life—offering no solace beyond nature’s endless cycle.RG: We each have to face our own apocalypse. The collection confronts apocalypticism on both a personal and societal scale. How do you view the modern era’s version of apocalypse? Is there an apocalyptic zeitgeist in the literary scene?BT: The apocalyptic realism of contemporary literature is an as-yet-unstated movement, forming new waves around writers who are realizing that there is no limit to what literature can do: it can do anything it wants. It can be raw, risky, and random—deliberately unfiltered, uncensored, and unprofessional. Most significantly, it can embrace a wilder edge, a kind of optimistic nihilism—something like a Crowleyian call to 'Do what thou wilt.'RG:I chose the wrong means of escape. I took an awkward shortcut that led me right back to where I was, left to compound the horror of living there, in that place of no escape, with the exhaustion of the journey. Empty-handed and up to my ears in student debt. If I wasn’t a destroyed human being then, I am now. Stagnant and useless. Full of false sensation. False scorn and feeble hatred. Not knowing which it really is, scorn or hatred, I laugh.“The Naysayer” pays particular attention to the concept of ‘giving up.’ What does ‘giving up’ mean in this story? To what degree did you consider structure in your approach to “The Naysayer”?BT: “The Naysayer” is a novelette written with the experimentalism and exploration of postmodernism and pessimistic fiction, chronicling a protagonist who internalizes failure as a metaphysical and existential certainty. The narrator, a disillusioned student burdened by debt and an eroding sense of self, isolates himself in a rented room where he discovers a lost manuscript, A Theory of Giving Up, written by the enigmatic Detlef Stefan. This "taxonomy of failure" becomes the narrator’s gospel, shaping his understanding of human effort as futile and resigning him to a state of inertia.Giving up, in this story, is not simply surrender; it is a conscious philosophical act, an assertion of negative will, a final form of resistance against a world that demands constant forward motion. Structurally, “The Naysayer” parallels this philosophy by rejecting conventional narrative resolution, unfolding in recursive loops of failed attempts, lost texts, and abandoned thoughts. Each passage feels like a false start, a directionless intellectual meandering that reflects the narrator’s inability to progress in life. The disquiet of “The Naysayer” is not in catastrophe, but in its quiet insistence that all roads lead nowhere.RG: How do you feel about the idea of anonymity?BT: I prefer to be a known unknown—recognizable yet obscured, present but absent. Absolute anonymity doesn’t interest me, but neither does full visibility. Slavoj Žižek describes the “Bartlebian act” as a quiet refusal, an opting out rather than direct resistance, like Melville’s scrivener who “would prefer not to.” Writers like László Krasznahorkai cultivate a similar aura of mystery, remaining at the periphery of mainstream literary consciousness while exerting undeniable influence. Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms take this even further, fragmenting the self into multiple voices, each existing independently while the author remains elusive. In an era of constant self-performance, there’s value in resisting that pull, letting the work speak for itself, and leaving just enough space for the writing to haunt the reader.RG:I’m afraid to begin this story, a story with no definite end. There’s no single structure I can name here, no crystallized normality around which I can base the experience of my life, nothing that I can’t doubt any more than I can doubt the very room where I’m writing this now, a room in a city in a postanthropic culture on a planet in space. On an old bed, I lie down passively, supine, in a kind of resignation, and wait for the end.Are there stories that you are still afraid to begin?BT: “Cathedral of Spiders” collapses the boundary between fiction and nonfiction by making myself a character, testing how far self-mythologization can go before dissolving into alienation. The work teeters between self-aggrandizement—casting myself as the last human, the final perceiver—and the ironic deflation of that role through solipsism and cosmic insignificance. Writing becomes both an act of creation and self-destruction, a manuscript that longs to be burned yet refuses to end. I feared this erasure—not just of identity, but of the distinction between fiction and reality, between writing and self-annihilation, between the author and authored. The text spirals endlessly, a voice narrating its own extinction, unable to stop.RG: What does the future mean to you? Where would you like to take your writing?BT: The future is a place where writing literature is impossible—extro-literature. Extro-science fiction, as described by Quentin Meillassoux, explores worlds where science cannot be used to explain existence. It rejects science’s ability to establish objects or theories, confronting the idea that the laws of nature are not logically necessary. In a similar way, extro-literature suggests that writing itself becomes impossible in a future where meaning dissolves, where narratives are no longer anchored to human logic or perception.All my writing questions the limits of human-centered storytelling. I’m trying to understand how a posthuman novel both embodies and reshapes its own form—how a posthuman novel functions. If writing itself becomes impossible, what remains? Perhaps only fragments—stories that can no longer be told, slipping away. If posthumanism severs us from our origins, then posthuman literature must do the same—breaking away, leaving no meaning behind.
You reach your forties and your life’s nothing but bus rides to work, and long hours in the lab, and a sandwich for lunch because with a mortgage and a spouse and two nearly-grown sons your pay doesn’t go far, and every day it’s rinse-and-repeat, your life fading away in this windowless room with its unsparing fluorescent lights, its stink of solvents and reagents, and then one day you mix compound A with solution B and what you’ve made is a substance so viscous and black you can scarcely believe it, you tip it out and it’s like you’ve poured emptiness into a puddle on your workbench, a hole where there can be no hole, an utter absence of light that you lower your head to peer at, and touch its tacky surface with a fingertip, then press your fingers into, and that’s when its chill soars through you, rapid and numbing and dragging darkness with it, and before you know it that darkness is everywhere, that darkness is everything, and you should panic but you don’t, your heart should race but there is no heart, there is no you because you are this void and it is you, and it is stillness, and it is peace, it is where time has never existed, so it’s a shock when it breaks apart and you’re yanked back by a burning in your chest and your eyes open to a glare of ugly lights and your colleagues kneeling over you, weeping with relief that they’ve revived you, and you’re weeping too because you are you again, back in this sordid little world.
Everyone was lined up to watch. We’d waited months. Cassie sat beside me on the curb as her dad revved the engine of his bike. Ready. All eight cars from the night’s derby were bumper-to-tail in front of him like a canyon. He had cleared seven in Wichita once, but never eight. Cassie’s step-mother Luann had refused to show. Cassie and I both wore shirts with a graphic of him soaring through the air. He signed them earlier that day, laughed and apologized that he was out of the smaller sizes. “Christ sake, those look like dresses on you two...” Walking away we’d sniffed the signatures as they dried. We sat beneath a streetlight waiting for the jump. Our white shirts glowed. Her knees were tucked into hers like huge tits, she looked down at them and smiled at me. “Hope mine never get this big.” She made jokes when she was nervous. Her dad turned the throttle again, ZRRAANG....ZRRAANG. Carnival lights turned woozy in storefront windows as they shook. He took a last look at the ramp and then retreated to the end of the block for his approach. He was the coolest guy I had ever seen. My dad was on stage with the rest of the band and they all started banging away on their instruments. He was on drums. It was their first original tune all night, a rabid, crescendoed free-for-all. The engine screamed through its gears down the street toward us. The band stopped on my dad’s cue as the front tire reached the foot of the ramp. Our hearts beat into our ears. Eight cars. Cassie knew before anyone else. She realized Luann was right. That eight was too many. She pulled her knees from her shirt and sprinted toward where he would crash land, feet from where his helmet split against the street.
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After that he was different of course. The bones eventually healed but his head never did. No more state fairs, no more jumps. And Cassie was different too. She threw away all those shirts because no one wanted them anymore, especially her. They sold his motorcycles to pay the hospital bills. He would shuffle through neighborhoods, never lifting his feet. Sometimes barely dressed. People whispered in their yards about him until it wasn’t interesting anymore. Finally he took a shotgun into the basement and finished what the crash had begun. The police took most of the mess away, but the blood was still there. Shards of bone were left behind too, some stuck in the ceiling tiles even. I heard my dad screaming into the phone the next day, furious. “Because I would’ve done it myself, Frank, for fuck’s sake!!!” He came out of the kitchen, eyes wet, shaking his head. “That poor girl...’’ They’d let Cassie clean it all up herself because she and Luann couldn’t afford someone else.
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I followed Cassie down to the creek behind the funeral home. She lifted her dress over the tall grass along the bank. The first time I’d seen her in a dress, or a necklace. She took off her shoes and put them on a large rock, then stepped in. She bent down and caught a few tadpoles in her cupped hands. That time of year there were thousands of them. We’d collected them together as little kids. “Lonesome in numbers...” I didn’t know if she was talking to me or the things squiggling around in her hands. She looked up. “It’s something my dad used to say. That there are so many people it can make you lonely sometimes. Like these things...just too many of them to mean anything. C’mere...” She let the tadpoles go and took off her necklace. It was a delicate gold chain with a dull, white pendant shaped like an arrowhead. “Gimme your hand.” She pressed the sharp edge of it against her palm and drew blood. I asked her what it was. “A shark’s tooth. My dad gave it to me.” It didn’t look like any shark’s tooth I’d seen. I gave her my hand. She squeezed hers hard against it and I felt our blood mix. We watched it drip from our hands and disappear into the water. She asked me if it hurt and I shook my head no. I looked at her and saw she was crying. That’s when I knew it wasn’t a shark tooth between our palms; it was bone.
Over the last year or so, Amy DeBellis has been one of my favorite newer short story writers. Now she has a new novel, ‘All Our Tomorrows,’ published by CLASH Books, which is one of my favorite books of the year.Her writing is so skillful: the language, the plots, the pacing, the characters. But I also love her writing because I find many of her stories to be dark and bleak. To me, her stories feel steeped in depression, menace, and a kind of claustrophobic doom. I want to present the reader some examples of stories we’ve published by DeBellis:‘Purgatory’ –- a short story about a teen who becomes infatuated with a boy at her highschool who is killing animals. Soon he teaches her how to hunt and they start shooting animals together in the woods: deer, foxes, frogs. At one point the boy says: “Only ever point the rifle at things you are willing to destroy.” Then the story says: “She thinks of aiming it at every tree on her property, at her house, at her mother’s car. Into the open cavern of her own skull.” The story ends with them shooting the neighbor’s cat.‘His Body’ — a short story about a woman whose husband has caught an STD that causes incurable lesions to break out all over his body. The holes in the flesh never go away, until eventually his entire body is covered in them.We also published three micros by her:‘Yakutsk’ — about a woman who is getting ready to wander alone into the frozen taiga‘Wake’ — about a woman at her mother’s funeral. First sentence: “Morning: the sun smears blood across the sky.” And a micro titled: ‘Even My Fantasies Are Chronically Ill.’I spoke with DeBellis about her writing.
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Chris Dankland: Hi Amy! Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me. Do you feel like your writing as a whole tends toward the melancholic, or does it only show up in certain pieces? Is that feeling something you consciously cultivate and lean into, or does it emerge naturally? Amy DeBellis: I do think it leans towards the melancholic as a whole. (In fact, it’s like the Tower of Pisa with how much it leans…) I’m trying to think of a piece I’ve written in the last couple of years that doesn’t have that darkness, and I’m coming up short. Even humorous pieces (“Upgrade” in HAD, for example, or “Persistence” in Roi Fainéant) have elements of darkness in them—it’s just that that darkness isn’t played straight the way it is in the majority of my writing. Yeah, it’s in everything. It emerges naturally. I love beautiful things—for me, in many ways, the written word is the ultimate form of beauty—but I also believe you can’t have beauty without something to contrast it. That discordant note. That, to quote Donna Tartt, “little speck of rot”. Except for me it’s a little bit more than a speck. CD: To me, your stories often feel physically heavy. Sometimes I get a weird image when I read your work of a stone sinking in water. You are very good at embodying emotion and describing it in a tactile way. Your stories feel like they live in the body: grief shows up as fatigue, sorrow has weight, dread feels like muscle tension. Is this a conscious part of your craft, this physical translation of emotional states? AD: I love the image of the stone! And that’s a huge compliment, that my writing could give you this mental image. I’ve always believed that the body is the seat of memory. There’s this wonderful Stephen King quote: “Art consists of the persistence of memory.” So the body and art are inextricably linked, being as they are both holders and representations of memory. And since the present runs continuously into the past, almost everything not held by the future is already a memory. I personally feel emotions very strongly, so no, it’s not really conscious that this comes across in my work. I mean, of course I try to choose the best descriptors for a feeling of dread, but the translation of emotional states to the physical—I believe it’s the most powerful way to get across emotion to a reader who might not have experienced the same thing that’s happening in the story. Let’s say there is a story about a grieving widow. Not everyone knows what it’s like to have lost a husband, or even to have lost a close family member, but everyone knows the feeling of grief. Describing it as a physical sensation is a way to bring the reader into their body (not their mind, where they’re thinking Oh but I was never a grieving widow) and force them to feel the emotions of the piece. CD: I feel like the three main characters in ‘All Our Tomorrows’ are all stuck in a depressive rut at the beginning of the book. The characters are isolated in the sense that they are always wearing some sort of mask around most people. They don’t feel a real human connection with others, and this only starts to change near the end of the book when the characters meet.For most of the book, each character seems trapped in their own depressive logic, their own sealed inner monologue. Was it challenging to bring them out of that headspace and allow for genuine human contact?AD: It was a bit difficult, but it was also really fun. I massively enjoyed describing each character from the viewpoint of the others—it allowed me to view them from the outside looking in, for once. I am not one of those writers (no shade to them though) who says that their characters are speaking to them in their head. But for the scene where they all meet—particularly the second one where they’re all together—I kind of just let the words flow. My characters took the reins more than ever before. I truly had no idea what Janet was going to say when [redacted]*, for example. Or when Gemma figured out that [redacted]*. It was truly magical seeing their personalities come alive on the page. *I am keeping everyone safe from spoilers.CD: I feel that climate change is mostly unstoppable. I have little to no hope that humans will solve this problem, and I believe that things are only going to continue to get worse from here on. Humans are survivors, but I think that the Earth in which humans will have to live, 200 or 300 years from now, will be so degraded that it won’t be all that different from hell. I don’t feel hope for the future, in the long run. The existential threat of climate change is a worry hanging over the heads of all three main characters in ‘All Our Tomorrows.’ How do you personally feel about climate change?AD: Sadly, I agree with you. I think we’ve all seen over the past few years that even if humans could solve this problem, we wouldn’t want to. And by “we” I mean the people who run the world, the CEOs of megacorporations, the billionaires who wreak the most environmental damage. It’s my opinion that they are almost uniformly psychopathic in their behavior and their lack of empathy. No normal person would want to do the things they’ve had to do in order to gain their position—and I believe that if a normal person did find themselves with that much power, they wouldn’t remain normal for very long. On the one hand, I truly enjoy my laptop, and my phone that allows me to contact my friends overseas. And parasite-free, running water. And medicine! But I also believe that our modern way of life is an aberration, a blip, almost a wrinkle in the way things are designed to be on earth. We are not entitled to live this way, it is not sustainable, and we are paying the price. People forget that for the overwhelming majority of human history, we lived in hunter-gatherer tribes. The Neolithic Revolution (when humans first began to farm) happened only ten thousand tears ago, which is around 3% of the time Homo sapiens have existed. And the Industrial Revolution, which gave us our industrial capitalism and modern infrastructure and nearly everything we feel entitled to as a part of “regular life,” happened so recently that only about 0.08% of human history has occurred after that. It’s mindblowing that we’ve caused so much damage to our planet in such a tiny fraction of time.And that 0.08% is what we think of as normal. Our own lives are so short in comparison that, looking back along the eight or so generations that have lived since the Industrial Revolution, it really does seem like it’s been forever. There’s a part in All Our Tomorrows where one of the main characters is thinking about the spiral drawing that’s mean to represent all the eras on earth — something like this, but colorful. Most of it is blue and green. Only the very newest end of the spiral is a different color. To quote my book, that’s “the Anthropocene, a slice so tiny you could easily miss it, a fingernail sliver of rust-covered gray. If you zoomed in enough you could see minuscule buildings, cars, an airplane, all hovering precariously just at the edge. To Anna it looked as though anyone standing on that edge was about to fall off into nothing, into the timeless black that surrounded the spiral.”I fear I’ve gone into a bit of a raving tangent, but I’ll wipe the froth off my mouth, do some deep breathing, and attempt to answer your question more succinctly: I don’t feel hope for the future in the long run, either. Climate change is multi-pronged, as it gives rise not only to fires and floods but also ancient pathogens thawing out of permafrost, mosquito and tick-borne diseases moving further and further across the globe, and so many other things we simply aren’t prepared for. CD: In a past interview, you mentioned that you were “gearing for a not-so happy ending” with ‘All Our Tomorrows’ but ultimately felt like the novel needed a more hopeful ending because you didn’t want the book to “leave readers feeling like the novel was a bunch of pointless doom—we get enough of that from social media and the news.”Are you concerned that readers will misread the darkness in your work as nihilism? How do you feel about nihilism? What do you hope that readers are left with after reading ‘All Our Tomorrows?’AD: I’m not really concerned that they’ll misread the darkness in my work as nihilism. If they do, I don’t mind. I would probably mind if I branded myself as some kind of “Hope Coach,” but thankfully that is not a direction I have gone in. One of the phrases you used earlier to describe the feelings my work gave you—“claustrophobic doom”—made me smile. I love claustrophobic doom! (Writing about it, not feeling it.) But I don’t think that all of life is claustrophobic doom. Existence is multifaceted, and I choose to bring attention to the darker parts of it. They’re a lot more fun to write about, for one thing. But I also see a lot of toxic positivity everywhere. You get demonetized on social media if your content is too depressing, which admittedly makes sense from a branding point of view. But at the same time, I don’t agree with phrases like: Everything will be okay in the end, and if it’s not okay, then it’s not the end. It has its uses during a panic attack, I suppose, but on the whole that phrase never made sense to me. Like, what if someone is dying of a horrible disease? What—are you saying that things will be okay in the end because of the sweet relief of death? Well, okay, I guess that’s one way to think about it, but I don’t think that’s what that particular phrase is going for…The most popular type of nihilism seems to be that life is meaningless and has no value, nothing you do matters, and there is no point to anything (and, I can’t help reading this into it—that you may as well just shuffle yourself off this mortal coil sooner rather than later). Honestly, I think those nihilists are overthinking it. I don’t like to burden my small monkey brain with the overall meaning of life. Like, yeah, duh. Nobody knows the meaning of life. Maybe there is none. Where I don’t agree with nihilism is that life has no value. I happen to like being alive, for the most part. There is so much beauty to be found in life. There’s beauty in pursuing creative activities, in spending time with loved ones, in listening to your favorite music, in eating good food. I don’t care if it’s meaningless—I still enjoy it. And hey, maybe it’s all meaningless in the end, since we don’t live forever, and you and everyone you know will eventually die…but honestly, I think immortality would be so much worse. It’s the ephemerality of life that makes it so precious. (And, going back to the psychopathic billionaires, this is something that the most powerful people on the planet seem to have forgotten. I truly believe they can’t enjoy small pleasures anymore. They want to rule the world and live forever because they can no longer appreciate things that would make the dopamine and serotonin receptors in a normal, healthy brain light up.) Towards the end of All Our Tomorrows, it was a bit of a challenge to keep the story realistic but also have it not be totally depressing. The ending of Janet’s last chapter, as well as the ending of Gemma’s last chapter (which is literally the last sentence of the book) is probably my most clear and straightforward answer to the question that snakes through the manuscript, which is essentially “What are we supposed to do about all this anxiety, all this uncertainty, all this pain?”So, to answer your question, I want readers to come away from All Our Tomorrows with a sense of hope, with the knowledge that they can do something—even if it’s just something for themselves, and not something that saves the world, because that’s impossible—but something. Whether that’s spending time with family, or doing something creative you enjoy, or being with the person you love. Something that has meaning, and purpose, and value. And that is what makes my book incompatible with nihilism.Order 'All Our Tomorrows' here.
We’re brushing our teeth side by side at the sink, like we do every night, when I see it. A spot of bright red on my husband’s face, peeking through the bangs that have been out of fashion for years, but which he refuses to grow out because I adore them. It’s no bigger than the tip of my pinky. But it’s definitely not a pimple. It’s flat and even and there are ripples in the skin around it, like the imprint left by a tiny elephant’s foot.I get less than a second’s glimpse before my husband bends over the sink, spits out toothpaste, rinses with water. Then he turns and heads for bed. I’m still brushing, brushing, brushing. Still thinking about the spot. Hazily I wonder if, given enough time, the repeated motion of the toothbrush would eventually grind my teeth clean away. The news has been calling it SL-29. The SL stands for Spot Lesions: they resemble flesh peeled off in a perfect circle to reveal the raw redness of the meat underneath. Except they never heal. They never go away. Instead, they spread all over the body. The spots are often itchy, and weep a strange fluid—sometimes clear, sometimes yellow, sometimes black—that doctors have still not been able to identify. Sometimes they crust, like herpes sores, and then the pain is said to be immense.A better name for the disease would probably be something to do with pox, but that word would alarm the population, and the most important thing with any disease outbreak now is to avoid any alarm. After all, we saw what happened with the “Covid Crazies” and their masks, their stockpiling, the way they wanted to stay inside all day and sacrifice the economy for their delusions. The Vice President referred to them as “Gollums” the other day, and his fanbase (which regrettably overlaps significantly with the Lord of the Rings fanbase) praised him on social media with an avalanche of memes. The administration loves SL-29. It’s sexually transmitted, so what better punishment for the whores and sluts and single mothers than to have our loose morals branded on our faces forever? There are even rumors that the official SL title doesn’t stand for Spot Lesion at all, but for Scarlet Letter. Most people call them the Scarlet Spots. I finally rinse my mouth and head to bed. My tongue feels cold from toothpaste, a heavy slug resting against the slick backs of my teeth. My husband, facing away from me, seems to already be asleep, but that’s impossible. He never drifts off this quickly. Does he know I’ve seen his spot? Has he even seen it? Of course he has. For all the grief he gives me about admiring myself in the mirror so much, he could never miss something so striking. It really is scarlet. As I get into bed, he continues to breathe slowly and deeply. The steady rhythm remains uninterrupted even as I fluff my pillow and lay down, as though he truly is asleep. But he could be faking it. He could be praying I fall asleep without asking anything. But they don’t fucking disappear, my love, I think, clenching my jaw as I glare at his shape in the darkness. Are you going to shellac your bangs to your forehead? Use foundation so I never, ever see?And what about when the spots start spreading? What then? Yes, the only trouble with the spots is that men get them too. That’s why SL-29 is at the top of every STD screening test. Before chlamydia, HIV, gonorrhea, and everything else that can, in some way, be managed or treated or cured.
***
In the middle of the night, when I’m sure he really is asleep, I creep to the bathroom. I close the door quietly, flick on the lights, and examine every inch of my body. I have to use a hand mirror for the more hidden spots, but after a while, I conclude that my skin is SL-29 free. For now, at least. My mouth tastes rank, like I’ve been licking the floor and my own armpits. I go back to bed and try to sleep but my dreams are hallucinogenic, liquid, slipping through my brain like slick poisoned water.
***
Monday morning. Subway car rattling uptown, my sleep-blurred eyes, that odd gnawing hunger that always comes with not getting enough sleep. I brushed my teeth before leaving—alone, this time; my husband goes to work an hour later than I do—but my breath is stale inside my mask. I’m one of the few who still wear them, and my husband would be ashamed of me if he saw, ashamed and angry enough to shout, but he’s not here right now. Just a few other early-morning commuters, still mostly mired in the fog of recollected dreams, who couldn’t clearly give two fucks about my mask. Across from my seat, there’s an ad: “One night with Venus, a lifetime of SL-29.” Next to the bubbly words is a cartoon of an embarrassed man, face covered in red spots. I wonder how many people will catch the centuries-old reference to syphilis. When the subway gets to my stop, I stand up and walk past the sign, glancing at it one last time. Now that I’m closer, I can see the vandalism I would’ve caught earlier if the vandal had the presence of mind to use a Sharpie instead of a pencil. The word Venus has been crossed out in thin, barely-visible graphite. And above it, scratched deep into the shiny plastic, as if he could already tell that the pencil wasn’t going to be sufficiently discernible: A WHORE.
***
As soon as I sit down at my desk, the fogginess leaves me. It’s a sudden, destabilizing rush, like coming down out of the clouds on an airplane at night. Suddenly you’re seeing civilization spread out below you in all of its greedy, multiplied glory: city lights glittering like insect shells, spangling clear across the globe like earthbound stars. At least my resting bitch face comes in handy today. I’m left in peace as I boot up my monitor, open my email, scroll through my new tasks for the day. I don’t actually read any of it. Instead, I’m thinking of my husband. His way of saying “Only with you” when I ask him to do something he doesn’t really want to do—clean the bathroom, sign petitions, scrub the crusted stovetop. It’s true that there’s some romance in the teamwork, in both of us bettering our living space side by side. Once, we made eye contact over our flooded bathroom floor, flashed each other twin grossed-out grins: We’re in this together.The way he promised, using almost the same language, that he’d always be mine. It was just after he proposed, and he was holding my hands carefully. Like they were birds, hollow-boned and nervous, that might at any moment fly away. Most men make a big deal out of a woman being theirs and only theirs, but my husband seemed to find the idea of him being mine equally scintillating. At the time, I found it touching. Now I wonder if it was something he read online. One of those tricks guaranteed to lower the female guard. I think of my husband’s wide, toothy, childish smile. His complexion is so pale that even his teeth, which are actually fairly white, look yellow. Soon the spots will cover his entire face, astonishingly bright on his skin—not melting into one another like confluent smallpox, but just barely managing not to touch. So that each spot preserves its own perfect roundness. Almost as though it’s intentional. I once saw an interview where a doctor squinted at a patient’s face and pronounced them “the most perfect circles I have ever seen in nature.” He even took photographs, and other people measured the circles, confirmed that they were indeed mathematically perfect. “The good news is it’s not fatal,” the doctor said as he concluded the interview. “The bad news is it’s not fatal,” I muttered to myself, watching, because the suicides were rising by then and have continued to increase ever since. What the fuck do I do now?I check my wrists and forearms again. I fight the urge to march to the bathroom and strip down in a stall, twist until my body is covered in sweat and I’ve pulled a muscle in my back from trying to see every inch of my skin. I can’t panic. Panic won’t make any of this any better. According to the guidelines, the disease is 80% transmissible before any spots appear—that’s why we need expensive SL-29 STD tests, rather than a simple strip search. But once a spot has appeared, that person’s transmission rate climbs to 100%. Anyone they have intercourse with will get the disease too. And once a spot has appeared on someone you’ve been having sex with, you have forty-eight hours to see whether they’ve infected you during their asymptomatic phase. Forty-eight hours from last night. I just need to make it till Tuesday night, and I’ll know. For better or worse. And then I can…then I can…At this point my brain stops. Like a webpage that won’t load. I simply can’t think of what I’m going to do after the forty-eight hours is up. Almost with relief, I recognize another problem: I can’t know how long that spot has been there. Was it there the day before yesterday? I can’t be sure—I barely glanced at my husband all day on Saturday, preferring instead to read and separate myself from him and his video games, the way he cursed at the screen whenever he made a mistake. A flat red spot hiding behind his bangs would have been easy to miss. And of course there’s the question of how he got it. Where he got it. Who gave it to him. Only with you. I feel like I’m breathing through a rolled-up piece of paper. A hollow plastic cylinder. A straw. The ad from the subway flashes back into my mind. The slogan, the humiliated cartoon man, the crossed-out Venus. And then that other word, etched into the plastic, with such determination and fury, like a scar. Earlier, I thought of the vandal as a man. Now I no longer do.
***
My husband gets home an hour after me. His bangs are perfectly in place, and he’s smiling: his teeth the color of weak chamomile tea, his lips stretched and rubbery. “I got your favorite,” he says, holding aloft some bags from the nearby Korean restaurant. “Excited?”I blink at him. Does he think that he can use bibimbap and glass noodles to, what, bribe me to stay with him? That, supposing I’m clean, I’ll willingly let him infect me so that we can be scarlet-lettered together? Ha. Only with you, babe, right? Red circles clustering on our faces and then trailing down across our bodies, so bright we can’t cover them even with the thickest foundation. Maybe he’s even dreaming that I’ll come with him to live in one of the communities where the SL-29 social outcasts live as shut-ins: spending their worst days soaking in cool water, spending all the other days hiding behind thick curtains. Only venturing outside in the darkness, like suicidal, hideous vampires. I almost laugh at the idea. He takes my sardonic grin as a sign of pleasure. “I knew you’d be! It’s always better when it’s a surprise, right?”“Oh yeah, definitely,” I say, trying not to let the sarcasm seep too deeply into my voice. “Surprises are always better.” Only twenty-four more hours to go, I think. And it’s now that I decide. If I don’t have any spots on my body by tomorrow night, I’ll get out. I’ll tell everyone the truth and leave him to pick up the pieces by himself. It doesn’t matter that I can’t divorce him—I’ll run. And if I do have a spot on my body by tomorrow night….But the thought of that turns my guts into snakes. It makes my head so heavy that that I have to bow over, gripping it in my hands, and the next thing I hear from my husband, coming close and speaking in a voice that I could swear is more fearful than it ought to be: “Is everything okay?”In bed, he reaches for me. “Sorry, babe, not tonight,” I say, trying to sound as regretful as possible. “My stomach’s cramping…I think it’s from eating too much spicy food.”“But you love spicy food.” His hand is on my waist, stroking gently but insistently. I fight the urge to jerk away from him. “Yeah, but I’m not used to it anymore. We haven’t gotten from that place in a while. Or any of my favorite restaurants, for that matter,” I add, unable to keep the resentment out of my voice. “We’ve mostly just been eating the bland American food you seem to constantly crave.” In the silence that follows this, I hold my breath, letting it live high and shallow in my nostrils and the tops of my lungs. But, finally: “Huh, okay.” I can hear the shrug in his voice. I never rebuff his sexual advances unless I’m on my period or have a migraine, but he just moves to the other side of the bed. My body relaxes in relief. At the same time my mind spirals, trying to determine whether he’s given up so easily because he knows he already infected me last week, or because he thinks he’ll have another chance tomorrow.I want to ask Who was she? Was she hot? Did she refuse a test, or did you just not care enough to even ask for one?I want to ask Was it worth a lifetime of spots marring your whole body? Flesh pepperoni peeking out all over your cheese-curd-colored skin, skin the color of milk gone sour, skin like that of a corpse just before it stiffens and turns blue?But I don’t want to make him angry. Ever since the Domestic Violence shelters have all been closed down. Ever since the Domestic Assault hotline has been disconnected. Ever since calling the cops on your husband is the quickest way to get yourself dragged down to the station for “inciting the violence” yourself. Ever since new, privately funded studies came out showing that women are indeed the more emotional sex and that their manipulation can easily be used to paint good men as “abusive.” Ever since no-fault divorce was eliminated. Ever since. Ever since. Ever since. Ever since the dawn of fucking time because men have always been physically stronger than women and always will be.
***
In the end, I don’t even have to wait forty-eight hours. The spot is there on the back of my knee when I go to the bathroom the next morning, peeking out at me like a knowing eye. I stare at it like I’m waiting for it to wink. Heat unfurls across my body—a panicked rush of blood, a silent roar. My vision goes black at the corners, as though smoke is closing in, and I curl forward over my knees, muffling my wail in my hands. A crazy idea flashes through my mind: cut my leg off. But that wouldn’t work, not even if I took it off at the hip. The disease has already spread throughout my body. It’s like mold: glimpsing a little bit on the surface only means that the roots have long since claimed what’s underneath. There’s no stopping it now. The panic gives me tunnel vision, and I’m standing up now, staring into the bathroom mirror, staring at my face which is now unblemished but which will soon—who can say how soon—show a spot. Maybe with me, the disease will creep upwards. My husband’s will progress downwards, and mine will follow the reverse course. We’ll fit together perfectly.I turn the shower on full blast and scream into a towel. Swallowed up by the terrycloth, it’s more vibration than sound, and it shudders through me, shakes my arms and legs until I’m a trembling strand in the corner of the bathroom, looking towards the door with wild eyes, praying he didn’t hear anything. Because…because…Why? Why the fuck not?To get my answer, as I always have, I need the clarity that comes with pain. So I step into the shower. I gasp; the cold is a physical force, ripping the air from my lungs. Needles of icy water rain down on me, shocking, splintering me into a million particles like television static. A numb buzzing in my brain. Pain, pain, pain—And then, clarity. I slam the shower closed, panting and trembling. The facts are simple, clear as ice as they march out before me: He fucked someone recently. He got SL-29 from her. He returned home. By now he’s sure, by now he must be sure, that he is infected. He hasn’t told me. I’m infected too. Probably from when we fucked on Thursday or Friday. I’m in the same boat as him. We’re in this together. But it’s not a boat I’ve joined willingly. It’s a boat he’s dragged me into, without my knowledge or consent, a boat that could bind us together for a lifetime. If he were more possessive, I’d even suspect he’s done this deliberately, binding me to him so I can never escape. But he’s not like that. He’s never been possessive. And he loves himself far too much to ever destroy his appearance just to have me by his side for the rest of our lives. I clench my fists on the shower wall and get myself back to the row of facts. Okay: yes, I am infected too. I skip to the next one before my legs can start shaking again, quickly, onto the next fact: he needs to be punished. My husband can do so much to me. He can cheat on me. He can put his hands on me as many times as he wants—smack me across the face for speaking in the wrong tone of voice, pinch my lip between his sharp nails as a punishment for accidentally stepping on his foot—as long as there are fewer than two witnesses. He can stop me from voting. He can even impregnate me and force me to keep the baby (although what other option would I even have? a coat hanger? a handful of toxic weeds?). Although, in his defense, he has never done that last. He doesn’t want children either. It was one of the things we agreed on at the very beginning, one of the things that bound us together in a world where other couples were constantly fighting and breaking up over the issue. We simply looked at each other and said, “Nope.” Smirking, like we were in on some grand inside joke. A secret held like a jewel between the two of us. Funny how it’s always the wives who are paraded like a spectacle for bringing the Scarlet Spots into their homes. Sluts infecting their unsuspecting husbands. Funny how it’s never, ever the other way around. I think again of the ad on the subway. The original saying was One night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury: a phrase intended to sway young men away from prostitutes, because syphilis was treated with mercury in those days. But what about the phrases to sway young women away from the Johns who would later pass that disfiguring disease onto them? Those phrases did not exist. They never do.I step out of the shower stall, run the shower hot for a few minutes, and then emerge from the bathroom. Using my weakest voice, I tell my husband I’m coming down with a cold. “I just took a steaming hot shower,” I say mournfully. “I think I’ll take it easy in bed today.”He gives me a sympathetic nod and tells me to feel better. Before he leaves, I notice another spot, just below his chin. He turns away from me quickly, not wanting me to see. I want to tell him that I already know. But that would ruin the surprise. And surprises are always best, aren’t they, love?
***
As soon as I hear the elevator doors close in the hallway, I fly into action. I have to get everything set up perfectly by the time he comes home. As I walk to first one hardware shop and then the next, and then a chemist’s shop, and then a kitchen-wares shop, I try to let my thoughts wander. But they don’t want to wander. They keep coming around to tonight’s plan, like a fierce, certain arrow. And I smile. I keep smiling even as I’m aware of that spot on the back of my knee, that barely perceptible itch. What’ll happen tonight, what I’ll turn my husband into…it’s almost enough to make the infection worth it. Almost. I spend the rest of the day setting things up. He’s only got two red spots, but I can add a few more: early ones, surprise ones. Maybe I’ll take some things away, too. I think again of why I didn’t want to make him angry when we lay in bed that night. Yes, on the whole, men have always been physically stronger than women and always will be. But that’s assuming no other factors have been introduced to alter the equation. And a sedated man bound to a bed, tied in five-point restraints like they use at the hospitals for hysterical women—well, all his strength will be useless. As useless as the nipples on his chest. Maybe I’ll start with those. No one’s coming to help him. After all, the Domestic Assault hotline has been disconnected. Tonight it’s his body on the bed. And—finally—my choice.
The woman who wrote Beowulf considered it juvenilia. She composed it during the years she roamed close to the old hall, hearing the revelry, watching the fighting and fucking from the slippery dark outside. Over the long seasons she recognised, in her observations of the hall, a will that sprung from its inhabitants; a mode of life that ran in tight, obsolete cycles. Drink spilled, offence taken, necks opened, blood added to mud, children made, killed. These dances played out, accumulated nothing. Over time, she moved away from the hall and disavowed the tales she wrote about it. In their place, she composed stories that were not about human things. Wine and swords melted into the grey candlelight of the old world. She took what the land told her and made its rough clay into her letters. The humans and their fires were things she had stepped upon to light the way; this new language was in the stones, in the correspondence between root and soil, between a bird’s foot and the branch on which it balanced. The years turned. She roamed further into the land’s interior. Caves contained dialogues of water and stone. Animals in mating bred glyphs and signs. Trees bent horselike to meet her, brushing flowers into her neck as she went. There was no longer a distinction between herself and where she placed her body. Blood from a wound was shared with whatever thorn had cut it. As water ran over her hand it carried some unseen fraction downstream. These were inscriptions the world would not preserve; a language inscrutable by the evening of the day on which it was composed. She would scratch on bark or carve into rock, then find it gone. The idea of lines on a scroll became laughable to her, pulp, dirt. The description of a blade, a creature, a warrior, a mother––this was child’s work. She found within this new expression a tapering line, a promise that vanished like ice. Foot became tree became fur became blood became water. Eventually, she was no longer visible. The hall raged on out of sight, a red pinprick, prevailing.
***
It's a mistake for one to assume that writing is the end of anything. Anyone can knock stones together, that’s writing. Anyone can stick a sword through an eye, that’s writing. As words get older, they become solid. Eventually they’re just something to trip over, look back on, and curse at. The world does not have need of anything so final. A place is found in its accumulation and then its dispersal. What else is there to say, other than I am something that briefly came true. Aeons pass. A body sits at a table. It is hard to make out what it’s doing through the haze––perhaps the old perpetual scratching of lines. Some monster shambles to the door, knocks, enters.
