Crow Jonah Norlander, Author at X-R-A-Y

HOT SAUCE GLOW by Jody Rae

January 3, 2022 · Creative Nonfiction

Is it true we’ll spend the next nine months across worn-down Neapolitan-chocolate-brown carpet that we tell ourselves we’ll cover with a rug, but never do? The cinder block walls are painted dried vanilla ice cream on warm pavement. Like a wound that won’t heal, the thick drapes won’t close all the way and they bleed a strawberry sunset over Wide Open Spaces, an autumn-tinged campus and the regal-yet-defunct Boise train depot.

For a split second, I think you are giving me the cold shoulder when I come home from class and you are asleep with your eyes open and, yes, it is creepy. We never get enough sleep. Like a toxic love affair, we fight sleep and we crave it and we wrestle it and we yearn for it and we abandon it, and when we succumb to its gentle arms we never want to leave it again.

How many nights will we spend under this popcorn asbestos ceiling that we drove thumb tacks into to secure our twinkle lights, talking late and vowing to hold each other fiercely accountable for the lives we want? Powerless to the sparkle lurking between shadows, we will go astray, wander into intersections and stumble into gutters, eventually finding our way back to what we wanted all along.

Will we remember the wall-mounted phone with the spiral cord you deformed while twisting it around your fingers, drunk-dialing your crushes and defending your Scottish name in a rapidly fading Canadian accent. Grayg? Trayv?

There is a long line of boys outside our door for you, but before you go out on weekends, you leave sticky notes for yourself on the phone: Don’t Call [Current Crush]. And when you come home from the parties, you rip off the sticky note and crumple it in your hand while dialing.

Will you ever remember taking the trash out? There is a garbage shoot down the hall, and I think, seven floors high, what a ride. We are very bad at taking out the trash, but we’ll get much, much better.

You eat tacos from the top-down as opposed to coming in from the side. While earnestly and sincerely discussing angels and ghost theology, there is Jack in the Box hot sauce staining the corners of your mouth in an upward arc. While you speak, leaning close to my face, I think of the Joker. Years from now, I’ll learn about the Black Dahlia murder, and I’ll know exactly what a Glasgow smile looks like. Well, you are Scottish, after all. I’ll recognize the description of the image without needing to look it up online (don’t Google it). It’s Jack in the Box hot sauce without a napkin.

While I neatly arrange items on my desk like a still life painting, your desk displays unfolded laundered underwear, a case of diet coke, stray spiral notebooks and highlighters, Kraft Easy Mac dinners, and text books that never move all semester (they don’t need to). You wake before dawn to run stadiums with your soccer team, then come home to write a Women's Studies paper the night before it’s due. You’ll get an A.

We’ll tell each other a lot of things, but one thing I never tell you is that time I saw your crush at a party, cornered him on the beer-slick stairway, and threatened: “Heyyyyy, so good to see you, [Redacted]. Hey, listen if you ever Steal Her Sunshine I swear to god I’ll [redacted] and your mother will cry when she sees what I’ve done to you,” and his face went slack and, yes, it was creepy of me, but y’all hooked up anyway, and as far as I know he had zero power to steal your sunshine so, as far as I know, he remains intact to this day.

One night, religious visitors three doors down come in to stage what looks like an intervention for our friend in the next room. They speak quietly, kneeling on the Neapolitan chocolate carpet, while we strain to listen over our homework. You twist your hair between your fingers, sigh, and open a package of Oreos. “Should I do it?” you ask. I nod, not knowing what “it” might be, but knowing you should absolutely do whatever “it” is. You scrape Oreo cream onto your fingers and step into the other room where our friend is being held hostage by prayer warriors. With a straight face and steady voice, you hold out your hand and say to our friend, “Um. Josh stopped by to say hi, and wanted to give you this.”

I nearly pee myself. The prayer warriors think we’re on crack, that’s how hard we’re laughing. You fasten a bra over your eyes, blinding yourself, and hop like a cricket through the hallway, knocking the wall-mounted phone off the wall. “WE’RE NOT ON CRACK!” you yell. The prayer warriors leave soon after, tiptoeing past as we wheeze and writhe over the chocolate ice cream floor. Our friend comes over to our side and says, “You’re dead for that,” and snags an Oreo.

These will be the happiest nights of my first eighteen years of life — this pocket of acceptance I can come home to, in between classes and meals and study labs. You say you love my red Hurley hoodie, so I’ll ship it to you someday. I’ll sip hot cocoa in a navy waffle knit maxi-skirt, rolled low at my belly, and in that moment you’ll startle and say that I remind you of a beloved Aunt. I will wish for time travel again and again over the next decade, if only to go back to that dingy, cozy laugh haven.

At a toga party, we wear matching sheets covered in blue and gray stars over jeans and tshirts, and a stocky football player mistakes us for junior highers. “Fuck you! Fuck you!” you yell at the offensive lineman who will be accused of rape soon. I laugh hysterically because I can’t fathom becoming an adult, plus my mouth is filled with braces and my hair is braided. Let’s go, girls.

Spring break that year, you come home with me to Santa Cruz. My mom drives us all over, and we wind up in Carmel-by-the-Sea, where we shriek at $1500 tshirts and then pretend we already own one. At a drugstore, we wait in line to buy Advil or something when you sigh and ask me, “When does Daddy want the Jag back?”. I say five. It is 4:50. A smartly-dressed, gray-haired woman ushers us to the front of the line so we won’t get in trouble with our fake father. We quickly pay and race to the parking lot, ducking in our seats while yelling for my mom to “just drive” her Toyota Tercel like a getaway car. That night, we watch “Brokedown Palace”, and I, for shit and all glory, would one hundred percent sell myself out to release you from a Thai prison, no matter the charge or sentence. Later, my mom says, “She’s just so witty”. How does one become so witty?

This was your idea: We’re with Holly in the drive-thru line at a flagship JBX, remember that bullshit?. Boise is such a hot drive-thru market, we warrant a hipster analog Jack in the Box, I’m so sure. Yet here we are, waiting so long, creeping toward the speaker box like a car full of would-be “SAW” victims. “How many tacos? Hello? Hello!” You’re out cold, sound asleep, a serene smile plastered across your glowing face.

Is it true that I won’t laugh this hard for another eight years? Yes.

You always wanted to have two little girls. You have their names picked out. I always wanted to read a newspaper in my writer’s bungalow among mature trees, with eclectic throw pillows and a large hanging star lantern.

We are very good at manifesting.

Crow Jonah Norlander

STORYTIME by Robyn Blocker

December 31, 2021 · Fiction

What’s up, beautiful people?

So y’all know how when you type the first couple letters of an email address and a list of contacts pops up—all the ones that start with that letter?

Like, imagine it’s “D” for Dave, the guy you’re hooking up with. Not Hot Dave with the boat or Quik Lube Dave with the ink, but the Dave whose brother OD’d back in ’99 at the rock pit behind the Big House. Right, Sad Dave. The Dave you send naked pictures to as an inside-joke cue that you want to buy from him. (Rumor alert! It was Pollie Carsen that gave Sad Dave’s brother that heroin!)

Tonight you’re on the edge. You’ve deprived yourself of spontaneous self-destruction for eighty-nine days and can’t take another minute of good choices that only feel good because they’re hard. You ache to raise hell you’re too old for: to bust windows and noses, floor pedals, run reds, blaze bowls, break hearts, tag bridges and burn them and screw in the ashes.

You’re gonna send Sad Dave some spank bank selfies, so you type “D,” but here’s what happens: since you’re always trying to do ten tasks at once to keep your mind off wonderful things that’ll kill you, you somehow get the cursor positioned one contact name below Dave’s, on the email of your daughter, the YouTube influencer who’s gotten big telling stories about her life, her day, her peeps, her fam, her world, and the social injustices in it. People love her for her self-awareness, her willingness to own her flaws, her unending desire to do the painful dirty work of fixing them.

Like Dave, her name starts with D. You were seventeen, still a silly romantic, when you had D’Laynie, and you wanted all your future kids to be D’s just like their daddy. He was not named Dave, but you’ve forbidden yourself from speaking his name ‘cause it’ll make you think of him, and that’ll make you cry. (Rumor alert! Pollie Carsen gave D-Boy herpes and smoked his first two child support checks before he died in a 4-car pileup on I-35!)

You think, Hoooo girl, do NOT send those pics to D’Laynie. Think she hates you now? Just wait. You start to fix your error, to click UP back to Dave’s name. But of all the bad choices you could make right now, he’s the familiar one. What you want is to shut your eyes, squeeze your nose, and cannonball down into a moment whose depth you cannot gauge from this height.

You close your eyes and click a name. Open eyes, but don’t look at who’s getting the pictures. Just SEND.

You’ve maybe just bashed your life out on a new kind of rock bottom, and you feel more alive than you have in months. You sit back, take a selfie, delete it. Habit. (Your grandma Belle-Ruth always asks, “Who you trying to erase, girl?”) Finish your Diet Coke, gargle, go to bed. And before sleep comes, think, There’s 90 days clean again, Pollie Carsen. Aren’t you getting tired of starting over?

Late morning. Wake up. Shit’s hit the fan. Four missed calls from Belle-Ruth. One voicemail. She says, “Pollie, honey, did you… say… something to D’Laynie? She’s gone and made a…You know what? Just come over.”

Heart pounding, you check your inbox. Nothing. For one moment, you think the pics went to Sad Dave after all. You check your Sent mail. Wrong. She got them.

You go to D’Laynie’s YouTube page. She has 100K subscribers and a new profile pic, a dramatic ¾ silhouette of herself on the balcony of the Austin apartment she shares with two friends. Looking good: sunlight glowing on honey-golden skin. Tall and twiggy. Red lips, teeth perfect. Cold-shoulder white blouse and huge, yellow-mirrored shades. Great hair. His hair, his general look. No shit. As if your radioactive redheadedness could have elbowed its way past D-Boy’s black curls. Recessive genes, you think. Recessive. Recede. Back away. Back away from your baby in every way and stay far, far away.

What happened was this: you fucked up bigly. Hid meth in her diapers, left her alone while you partied. Shit like that.

When your mom adopted her and kicked you out, you went on a grand couch-surfing tour of all the drug dens in the county. At some point, you realized, Shit, this is bad! Got clean. Moved in with your grandma Belle-Ruth out in the sticks. Realized, Shit, I’m a mother! Presented sober self to mom and begged to see D’Laynie. Got permission. Freaked out. Showed up high to special arranged lunch. Permission revoked. Got clean again. Finally got lunch with D’Laynie, but by this time she was old enough to give you THE most devastating burns to grace the air this side of the former Mason Dixon Line. (Girl already had a way with words!) Got unclean, the dirtiest of uncleans. Belle-Ruth said, Get clean, darling. You said, Not this time, B.R. Went to your mom’s house, pointed a gun at her in the kitchen and strongly suggested she give you money, not realizing D’Laynie was hiding in the bathroom with the house phone, adding a real doozy to the list of bad moments involving her mess of a mama.

There’s more, but it’s a rinse-and-repeat-for-fifteen-years kind of thing, if you get me?

So look. Here’s where we stand now: When anyone asks, you say you’ve seen, like, three of D’Laynie’s videos. Hey, you’re not some estranged-daughter-stalker weirdo! And hey, who’s got that kind of free time, right? Hah hah!

Straight talk, though? You are that stalker weirdo, you do have that kind of free time, and you’ve watched every woke public service announcement, storytime, and social commentary D’Laynie ever made until you could imagine how it’d be to chill with her on a couch in an alternate reality where you never screwed up: girl-talk, green smoothies, yoga, and a general veneer of intimacy so foreign to you that you can only insert it in your fantasies through symbols: y’all get the same color nail polish by accident; you know when she’s due for a period, an oil change, a new boyfriend, a new girlfriend, another round of under-eye filler (“Storytime: Yes I’m Vain, Yes I’m Working On It, Until Then I No Longer Look Exhausted.”)

Two weeks ago, upon discovering just how much time you spend watching D’Laynie’s videos, Belle-Ruth suggested you take a two-week break from online stalking (“Not healthy, honey.”) Now it occurs to you that the beginning of your D’Laynie withdrawal coincided with the beginning of a steep increase in reckless behavior: skipping brushing. Not checking if you got your house keys before you go out to your car. Unprotected sex with Sad Dave. Sending nudes to your daughter.

D’Laynie’s posted four new videos since the last time you lurked: “I’m a Feminist but I’m Trying to Get Thicc;” “Storytime: My Indian Trip Showed Me I Was a Materialistic Brat”; “Storytime: I Adopted a Rescue Dog!;” and “Storytime: My Mother.”

Your heart: one half plummets with shame, the other soars with unexpected hope. You’ve thrown an explosive at your daughter, and if nothing else, it’s blasted a hole in your irrelevance to her.

Pace. Breathe. Push play on “Storytime: My Mother,” and there’s your girl frowning at her lap in devastating silence, face scrubbed, eyelids naked and pallid, hair wrapped in a green silk scarf. Night face. Vulnerability face. God, you’ve missed her face. Voice husky with feeling, she goes: “Yeah, I…don’t even know how to start this one…” and cuts and tries again.

It’s 22.36 minutes long. You watch it all. Belle-Ruth calls you twice. Decline. Decline. All your attention is balanced on this moment. You’re absorbed in the words D’Laynie is choosing for your story: “Small town, infamous juvenile delinquent, teen mother, high school dropout, substance abuse, constantly in jail or rehab, self-destructive, scary, broken promises, a parasite, a liar, a leech on my great-grandmother, pathetic…”

Her anger sings from the screen. She holds nothing back: all your antics and trespasses. But for whatever reason, she’s chosen not to mention the most recent terrible thing you’ve done: your body: her inbox. And she finishes the story with this: I want to forgive her, and I will one day, but not yet. And when I do, it will be for me, not for her.

You try to remind yourself that this is not good. This is a screwup. This is endgame kind of shit, and yet you still have the perverse sense that it’s a beginning. D’Laynie’s either thinking about you right now or trying hard to push you out of her mind. This is more than you’ve had with her since the long-ago days when you could have had everything. Fuck, man, this is something.

Three minutes later, you’re rounding off onto the gravel drive of the Big House, a red brick testament to old money that finds its way to you only in the conditional drops and driblets that Belle-Ruth’s good sense allows. With more money, you’d be dead. With less, panhandling up in town at the V.A. hospital, the Baptist Church, the Quik Lube, Buck’s BBQ.

A portion of these Carsen driblets finances your pick-up, another portion the single-wide trailer you live in a quarter mile behind the Big House. Your trailer’s next to a cluster of sun-bleached rocks and the lake where, twenty years ago, thirty teenagers drank and smoked and swam for your eighteenth birthday while Sad Dave’s brother laid down in the bed of his F-150 and never woke up.

Belle-Ruth’s sitting up on the balcony that runs the length of the second floor, hand shading eyes, batwing sleeve hanging down to her hips. She’s as skinny as you yet favors voluminous, gauzy tunics that billow, float, and alight on her bones with the deliberation of a butterfly landing on a barbed wire fence. “It’s the Pisces in me,” she always says of her fluttering clothes. To this, you always reply, “You old ho! How’d you fit a Pisces in there?” Gets her every time.

At the kitchen table, you and Belle-Ruth break the silence at the same moment.

You: “So, I watched it.”

Belle-Ruth: “Did you see it?”

“Jinx!” you say.

Belle-Ruth waits for more. When nothing comes, she smacks her little pink lips and sets down her coffee cup. “Pollie, why’d D’Laynie just up and make that out of the blue? What put you on her mind?”

You meet Belle-Ruth’s eyes and shrug. “Beats me. Maybe she saw an Amtrak go off rail and hit a bus and was like, ‘Hey! Speaking of trainwrecks…’”

“Hey, now, none of that,” Belle Ruth says. She fixes her sleeve, which has flopped up inside-out over her elbow like the ear of a hound, and frowns. “You didn’t say anything to her?”

“In response?”

“Beforehand.”

“Nuh-uh.” You take a big sip of coffee to wash down this bullshit. “Maybe she just needed to vent. Maybe the pain was building up in her and went kaboom last night.”

Belle-Ruth’s pink lips pucker into an angry little bubblegum-like wad. “Hell, honey, that pain was at the bottom of her lake. She dredged it up herself for the Internet for some thumbs up.” She shakes her head. “I gotta say, I’m disappointed. First that stupid tattoo, now this.”

You fix breakfast while Belle-Ruth takes her shower. When the food’s on the table, you take out your phone and check the comments on “Storytime: My Mother.” The most recent are:

“Incredible how one of the kindest humans on earth came from a selfish bitch.”

“Your mother is a narcissist.”

“Hugs to you, D’L! You are SO strong! Anytime you forget just remember you ARE NOT LIKE HER.”

“Forget her. Some people are just toxic, and if healthy people try to love them, they get poisoned.”

D’Laynie’s pinned her own comment to the top of the scroll: gratitude for everyone’s kind words and a call on her fans to donate to a substance abuse research institute.

You close the app. Something’s trying to get your attention. It’s in your head, positioned right behind your conscious thoughts at pervy proximity. You know what it is, and that’s why you won’t turn your full attention to it. You take a selfie and delete it. Maybe Belle-Ruth’s right. Maybe your selfies are a thing, like you’re trying to delete more than pictures. Or maybe you’re just trying to see what the universe, your sole and constant audience, sees whenever you pretend to ignore the thing in your head that wants you to look directly at it. The wanting.

In her video “Storytime: How I Learned to Stop Feeling Superior for Being Agnostic,” D’Laynie concluded, “What I believe, and this is just my belief, okay? Is that the universe, God, or whatever you’re called upon to name it, is deaf. It doesn’t hear prayers, thoughts, hopes, or wishes. It only sees the effects of what we do and say to other people on Earth. Get it? Doing and saying are how we petition the universe. So please, leave a comment and tell me: what are you doing on Earth, and why are you doing this?”

What are you doing? You’re digging up the number for D’Laynie you’ve had buried deep in your phone for years—the number you filched once from Belle-Ruth’s handwritten contact book and never dialed.

You’re hitting Call on the number, and you’re waiting and shaking. The third ring gives way to an electronic screech and an out of service notice.

Now what are you doing? You’re starting an email to Sad Dave. (No texts on days he’s got his kid.) Lifting your shirt, unclasping your bra, taking a pic of your boobs.

Why are you doing this? Because the gravity is strong around the old rabbit hole.

You never send the email because a clatter of rolling thumps and a scream comes from the direction of the stairs. You run for the sound, and there’s poor little Belle-Ruth sprawled on the landing, groaning terribly, face twisted in pain, ankle fractured.

Standing outside the open door of Belle-Ruth’s hospital room, you overhear your mom advise her to recover in a nursing home, where she’ll be taken care of by “good, trained people who know what they’re doing.”

Belle-Ruth will have none of that. “Pollie will do just fine, thank you.”

“Pollie?” your mom’s voice brays in a tone suggesting they aren’t talking about the same person. “Pollie will cook? Clean?” She lowers her voice. “Not steal your painkillers?”

A blue-scrubbed nurse walks by in the corridor where you’re lurking. You recognize her from high school, and judging from her uh-oh look, she obviously recognizes you—the “most likely” for all unprintable yearbookisms.

“Hey, how you doing?” you say.

She shakes her head and keeps walking.

When Belle-Ruth gets discharged, you move into the Big House with her. Note to self, you think on your first night. Don’t steal painkillers.

You first shacked up here at seventeen, after your dad threw a suitcase at you while your mom swung a bawling D’Laynie up on her hip and screamed, “Go break your grandmother’s heart now that you’re done with ours!”

Back then, you chose the bedroom at the very end of the hall so that Belle-Ruth wouldn’t smell your cigarettes. And if she ever got the inclination to eavesdrop on your phone calls, it’d be a lonnnnng walk from her room to yours—plenty of time for her to rethink her lack of trust in you. But now, this room reminds you too much of things that’ll ruin your life since you spent so much time here thinking of them, and this reminding immediately leads to a reflexive wanting. So this time, you choose the room that was your mom’s when she was a kid. The one you never entered, since it made you think of her.

You’re lying in your bed in this clean, safe space one afternoon, taking and erasing selfies and debating whether or not to start re-stalking D’Laynie, when you hear the crunch of tires on gravel. You step out on the balcony and glimpse a blue hybrid wending through the tree-lined drive.

Outside, you start down the sidewalk, passing rose trellis, birdbath, pissing-boy fountain, and the rusted remains of your childhood swimming pool—a repurposed cattle trough.

One rear door of the visitor’s car is open. A shadow moves in the backseat. At your approach, the shadow backs out and becomes a leggy girl in mom jeans and a vintage college-logo sweatshirt. She bends to flick a grasshopper off her leg, and you see that one side of her head is shaved to display a tiny tattoo of the words “Nothing but the Truth” on the scalp above her ear.

“D’Laynie,” you say.

She turns to you, and your own reflection, fishbowl-distorted, peers out from the lenses of her yellow-mirrored sunglasses.

Right when normal people would hug, you and your daughter square off and face each other across seven feet of deaf, watchful universe, kicking the silence back and forth with stony game faces. The spring air is neither hot nor cold, the sun’s effect a treat for Texans: blinding bright but not hot. “Yankee Sunshine,” Belle-Ruth calls it. You never notice weather unless it’s extreme, but today, in this charged silence, the neutrality is screaming.

D’Laynie finally tilts her head back. “’Sup, Pollie?” she says with an ironic I-don’t-really-say-words like ‘sup’ intonation.

“Hey,” you croak. “Why aren’t you in school?”

D’Laynie winces and looks up at the sky, like Sky, can you believe this idiot? “Spring break?” she says. “Hello?”

“Ah, right. Well, what you doing way out here, girl?”

“I want to say hi to GG. Plus, Destiny needs to stretch her legs.”

Destiny needs to…Are you supposed to know what that means? Is it an allusion to your past, some poetic way to call a truce? You stare. D’Laynie gestures to the backseat. You look inside. Huddled on the floor as far from the open door as possible is a small white mop of a dog with an orange ribbon stuck to the front of its collar.

“Hi, fwuffbucket!” you coo. The dog raises sad, guilty eyes, trembles, whimpers, tries to turn and bops her head against the door. You step away, look at D’Laynie, twist your body into an apology.

D’Laynie takes off her sunglasses, rolls her eyes, and says, “Nah, it’s fine. Everything scares her. That’s her thing.”

It takes D’Laynie a while to coax Destiny from the car. The trick is accomplished with a strategic combination of treats and ignoring.

Entering the Big House is a blur in your memory. While D’Laynie and Belle-Ruth hug and greet, you step back and recede from the scene like a Victorian servant.

By the time D’Laynie is next to Belle-Ruth on the pull-out in the downstairs living room, telling her about the rescuing of dogs, you’re cross-legged on the floor getting sniffed up by Destiny.

“And like, obviously, my followers are super supportive and motivating,” D’Laynie says. She frowns and scratches her head. “Wow. Okay. So I’m suddenly hearing how creepy that sounds. ‘My followers.’”

“It sure does,” Belle-Ruth says, “but it’s not your fault that’s what they’re called, honey.”

D’Laynie takes out her phone and starts typing. “Sorry, gimme a sec. Want to make a note about that.”

“What’s the orange ribbon for on the collar?” asks Belle-Ruth.

D’Laynie glances from her screen over to Destiny. “Oh,” she says, still typing, “that’s for awareness of at-risk-animals. She’s had so much trauma. Her first owners were these assholes who would hit her and kick her and stuff.” She finishes typing and puts the phone down. “Sorry, rude,” she says. “Yeah, then she had puppies, and they separated her from them too soon, and she got super anxious and would pee everywhere. Then she went to this guy who’s, like, all about rehabbing traumatized dogs. She got comfortable with him, but his boyfriend moved in, and Destiny was like ‘yeah nah, you suck’ and bit him when he was giving her food.”

Destiny is sitting now, gazing up at you. You think to her, Is this true? Do you bite the hands of the people who feed you?

“Then she went to this lady who takes in lots of rescues,” D’Laynie goes on, “but they never accepted her in their pack for some reason, and she got really depressed and anxious and started nipping and destroying stuff, so back to the shelter. She got good again, but, you know, a lot of people aren’t comfortable adopting a dog with that kind of history. When I got her, she was on the Kill List.”

You cock your head at Destiny, think to her, Kill List sucks, don’t it, baby girl? She puts a paw on your knee, like Girl, don’t I know it?

“Is that how she got her name?” Belle-Ruth asks. “‘Destiny?’”

“Ugh. I know,” D’Laynie says. “It sounds like a stripper name. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But that’s the name she knows, so I kept it. Hah. Not that it’s getting me any points. She’s never even jumped in my lap, dude. Not once. And she’s a lap dog. Sometimes she won’t even eat when I’m in the same room as her.”

“Aw, give it more time,” Belle-Ruth says. “What’s it been? A month?”

D’Laynie nods and frowns. “Yeah. Whatever, you know? My friend’s dog didn’t warm up to him for like, a year.”

You pipe up from your corner: “I was this close to naming you ‘Destiny.’”

Everyone turns to you, even Destiny herself, who’d been engaged in a butt-scratch. You’re holding one hand up, index finger and thumb nearly touching. “Heads D’Laynie,” you say, “tails Destiny.”

Belle-Ruth squawks a laugh.

D’Laynie yells, “Dude, no! I would never forgive you!”

“It actually came up tails,” you add, “but I like to give fate a run for its money.”

D’Laynie pulls a pillow over her head, falls forward, face-plants into it charmingly, and gives a muffled scream. Destiny does not like that shit at all. She yelps and runs from the room like there’s a fire under her furry little ass.

Lemme just say: the Big House is not the kind of place where you want to lose a tiny, freaked-out dog. Lotsa ins. Lotsa unders.

Destiny’s not in the downstairs bathroom; not under the kitchen, dining room, or pool tables, in the music room under the piano, in your late grandpa’s old office, or the laundry room.

“Upstairs, then,” you say, and D’Laynie’s expression darkens.

“I forgot how huge this place is,” she says, following you up, adding in a softer voice, “You know, considering there are people in Hong Kong literally living in cages, it’s almost obscene.”

You have no clue what to say to this. “Destiny!” you call out.

Destiny’s not under Belle-Ruth’s bed, the table with her sewing machine, or in the piles of wispy Piscean fabrics in the corner. Not in the attached bath, any of the bedrooms or closets on the back-facing side of the house, or the room that was yours twenty years ago, its carpet still littered with cigarette burns. You’re bending, stooping, crawling on all fours, craning neck. You’re invested. Not since hide-and-seek with your cousins have you searched so hard for something wholesome. An adventure—just you and D’Laynie! Today, you’re going to be by her side at the happy moment she finds her lost dog. From now on, every memory of the relief she’s about to feel will be associated with you. You’re shaking with giddiness, one dog away from bursting into laughter.

What’s weird is how D’Laynie talks nonstop as you search, remarking on even the unremarkable with the blasé fluency of a real estate agent high on cough syrup. “This room’s pretty except, ugh, drapes and ruffles everywhere, come on, GG, let’s exit the ‘80s, and ah, a bathroom that smells like Chanel No. 5 and ancient rolls of toilet paper. Leaving ruffles, we find ourselves in oh, look, it’s a Mad Men set.”

At one point, she stops and interrupts this syrupy tour with an exclamation: “Where is she? This is seriously annoying!” It becomes plain as day to you that you’re the sole explorer on this mommy/daughter quest—your companion was never feeling it.

As you and D’Laynie enter your bedroom, the final unturned stone, you see what has happened and what will happen: your distracted ass left the balcony door ajar earlier. D’Laynie will find Destiny out there, gather her up, and leave. And nothing will be changed. Something epic was supposed to happen on this dog search but didn’t. Maybe it needed more time. Maybe one of you missed a cue, dropped a line. Or maybe one of you, sensing a portal to connection, bricked it up with words.

Following D’Laynie out the balcony door, you think, Please, God, give me more time with her. The universe doesn’t hear prayers, though; it only sees what we do. What you do as you walk onto the balcony is turn the inside lock when pulling the door shut. You haven’t touched that lock in years. You don’t ask yourself which direction locks and which unlocks, don’t pause to test it. Maybe you’ll be lucky. Don’t pause to wonder whether locked or unlocked is lucky.

Destiny’s sitting on the far edge of the balcony, gazing at the pastures beyond like she’s considering buying the place. When D’Laynie approaches, she raises her hackles and growls.

“Whoa. Okay, baby girl,” D’Laynie says. But her eyes don’t say okay baby girl to you. They say, Well fuck you, too, dog. “Gonna get her treats,” she says, and heads for the door.

You put your hands on the rail, shut your eyes, flinch when you hear the clunk of the unyielding handle behind you. The sound reminds you of being handcuffed—not in the fun way. You wonder what is wrong with you, what possessed you, what did you expect?

“Uh. Pollie?” D’Laynie says.

You try the handle yourself as if there’s some trick to it, then try the doors of the other two front-facing bedrooms. All locked.

So we’re waiting, right? And D’Laynie’s pacing at wedding procession speed. Step . . . swing arms . . . step. This gives her plenty of time at non-talking-distance from you. Eventually, at the opposite end of the balcony, she starts her favorite yoga flow from that video she uploaded last winter with her fitness friend. You watch from the other end, mirror neurons firing hard. You’ve followed along to that workout a million times.

When her phone rings, D’Laynie leaps out of warrior pose and answers it.

“Billy Reese!” Belle-Ruth, breathless, triumphant, announces over speaker. “Just got to the feed store over in town but’ll swing by here on his way home. Hot damn, I’m good. Second person I called!”

“How long?” D’Laynie asks.

“Oh. An hour, maybe?”

D’Laynie raises her head to the balcony roof and groans. “Dude, there’s nobody close?”

A pause.

“You . . . are . . . welcome,” Belle-Ruth says, and oh shit, you hear it—tension, compaction, the mama-bear-in-the-box winding up.

D’Laynie laughs. “Sorry. Thank you! It’s just what are we supposed to do out here for an hour?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Belle-Ruth answers in a sarcastic little tune. “Maybe chat? It’s not like you and your mother don’t have anything to talk about.”

“That’s interesting,” D’Laynie says, examining her fingernails. “And just what are we supposed to talk about?”

“She saw the video, honey. Storytime. And believe me, I get it. She has not been an angel.”

“Oh my God,” D’Laynie mouths, rolling her eyes.

“But your mother’s trying to turn her life around, and putting the worst parts of her out there for the world like that so total strangers can kick her? Nuh-uh. Completely uncalled for.”

“GG, you ‘re cutting out,” says D’Laynie, her voice tight. “Can’t hear you. Call you back later.” She ends the call, tilts her head back, crosses her arms, and gives you a vinegary grin. “Uncalled for, huh?”

“I know,” you say. “I know.”

“For the record, I have nothing to say to you, there’s nothing I want to hear from you, and I’m not sorry for the video.”

“I know. You shouldn’t be. I deserved it.”

She makes an exasperated sound and flips her palm up. “It wasn’t for you. It wasn’t some punishment. It had nothing to do with you. It just happened to be about you.”

You nod. “I know.”

“Would you stop saying that?”

Destiny is zig-zagging across the balcony, button nose glued to the concrete. You sit in a deck chair and watch her stubby tail bloop back and forth in enjoyment of invisible ecstacies. “I just want you to know—” you begin.

D’Laynie claps loudly, and Destiny flinches. “Nope. Not happening,” she says. Her eyes are wide and locked to yours, mouth alternating between a grin and a grimace. The clap, you realize, was for you. You feel an anger you don’t have the right to feel, so you drop it and stomp it into ashes.

“What’s not happening?” you ask.

“You and I are not talking.”

“So why did you come today?” you ask. “You knew I was here, right?”

D’Laynie looks like she’s trying to keep the lid on a wild laugh. “Yesssss, Pollie, yesssss. And that is the point. You really think people can trust you? Like people can just believe you’re not, like, I don’t know, getting high and trashing the house and begging GG not to say anything about it?”

You’re offended, but you can’t be, so you’re not. You’re disappointed in your daughter’s meanness to you, but you can’t be, so you’re not. You’re sad that her on-screen persona is for everybody but you, sad you don’t count as an audience. Sad that the decisions you’ve made, even the ones you had no say in, have rendered you voiceless. You can be sad. Nobody minds you feeling sad. What you can’t do (because you did it too many times before, exploited it, manipulated and gaslit with it) is allow yourself the luxury of crying.

So you just nod and say, “Okay, well, that’s understandable. That’s fair.”

Then this happens: Destiny zips past D’Laynie, jumps into your lap, and starts spinning out a comfy spot on your thighs.

“Oh, come on!” D’Laynie says. “Seriously?” She puts her hands under Destiny’s belly and starts to lift (which you can tell right away is a big, big mistake, but you say nothing because your brain’s too busy learning what it feels like to be trusted this much). Destiny snarls and growls, flailing, enraged, squirming like she’s caught on a hook. D’Laynie, stunned by the reaction, holds her at arm’s length until Destiny manages one good twist that brings her jaws within snapping distance of D’Laynie’s skin.

D’Laynie screams, drops Destiny back into your lap, and slaps the dog’s rump hard. Destiny’s response is a cry so angry, offended, and disappointed that you can almost feel it resonating in your own throat, a proxy for your disallowed feelings.

Destiny scrambles up your body, climbing like you’re a cliff wall, claws scratching your chest. You don’t mind. You welcome it. This is the pain chain: You hurt D’Laynie, so D’Laynie hurt Destiny, so Destiny hurts you.

When Destiny’s muzzle is next to your ear, you stroke her fur and tell her it’s okay. Her orange ribbon is coming loose. Don’t fix it. Let D’Laynie notice it and see it as symbolic and feel punished by it.

D’Laynie has backed away. She breathes fast in choppy bursts. “I am so sorry,” she whispers. “I don’t know why I did that. I swear I have never, ever done that.”

You raise your eyebrows, and D’Laynie shakes her head as if the brows had spoken. She raises her arms up over her head, guilty hands open wide, eyes pouring. “How could I do that? What is wrong with me? Why did I do that?”

There I am in her, you think. You want to wound her, just a little.

“Because you’ve done everything right,” you say, “everything you were supposed to, but she still doesn’t like you, and that pisses you off.”

“No,” D’Laynie says. There’s more fight in this word than is warranted, and you know that you were right. She has been punished.

Speak her language, you think now. You can do it, you’ve seen every upload. You know exactly who she wants to be. “You’re not used to not being liked,” you say, “because you’re an honest-to-God amazing person who gets treated like one most of the time. But this dog’s giving you insane shade that probably feels pretty personal, so it’s screwing with your self-esteem and your mental health.”

For a second, she looks like she’s about to tell you you’re an idiot, but instead drops to the ground and buries her face in her hands. “Oh my God,” she says. She cries a little, then laughs a little about the crying. She raises her head, wipes her face, says, “You’re actually right, dude. How are you actually right? Like, how did you know that?”

You know how, but you don’t tell her—not then, at least. You know because Destiny’s a creature in stories, and so are you, and there’s nothing more enraging than a difficult character who doesn’t understand they burned out the audience long ago—that it’s time to end happy now so that everyone who rooted and fought for them through all that drama gets the warm fuzzies they deserve.

Instead of answering, you say, “You should give her to somebody else.”

“I can’t,” she answers into the back of her hand. “She’s been dicked around too much already.”

“Hey, if this is how it is between you two, keeping her may be dicking her around, too.”

“But I can’t just tell everybody, ‘Oh, I’m gonna adopt this dog. This is the right thing to do, and I’m gonna do it,’ and then say, ‘Oh, never mind! It sucked. It was too hard.’ Do you have any idea how that would look? Like, what kind of message would that send to everybody?” She rubs a hand through her hair slowly, thinking, and adds, “Plus, like, that poor dog.”

You’re about to ask, Who is ‘everybody?’ Who’s looking? but then remember there are thousands of everybodies for D’Laynie, countless souls who get off on watching her be an amazing human being.

Out on the road ahead, the red pick-up truck of Billy Reese, your rescuer, is moving toward the Big House turn-in.

“I’ll tell you what you do,” you say.

The sun just set. D’Laynie still has an hour-long drive ahead, but she had to charge her cell. Now she’s walking around Belle-Ruth’s kitchen positioning items, reconsidering, shifting them an inch to the left or right: Destiny’s leash and harness heaped nonchalantly on the kitchen table (but not so nonchalantly that you couldn’t recognize them for what they are in a single glance); bag of dog food in a corner of Belle-Ruth’s pantry, label conveniently smoothed out and readable; Destiny in her plush bed in the middle of the kitchen floor—obviously not the bed’s forever-space, but suitable for the opening montage of what needs to be D’Laynie’s most powerful, transcendent, realest storytime ever—the live-streamed tale of how two scared, struggling, at-risk souls found comfort and courage in each other, and how, without even trying to, they showed the world they belonged together.

You wheel Belle-Ruth over to a spot that will be off-camera. “Sure you wanna do this?” she asks. She’s looking at you, but it’s D’Laynie who answers:

“Oh, absolutely. It’s best when the feels are still steaming.” She unplugs her phone from the charger, licks her lips. “Ready, P?” she asks—voice encouraging, eyes a little worried. Maybe she knew Belle-Ruth was talking to you and didn’t want you to have time to consider take-backs.

You nod. “Ready.”

She counts down from three and hits Record. You and Belle-Ruth stay hidden as D’Laynie walks softly around the kitchen, silent, camera taking in everything dog-related. Good stuff. You can feel the mystery already.

When she’s got it all, D’Laynie sets the phone on top of a coffee can, sits at the kitchen table, smiles, waves with both hands, and says,

“What is up, my beautiful people? What you just saw is not my kitchen, but yes, that is my dog, Destiny. You guys will not believe what has happened! I . . . have got a story . . . for you. Where do I even start? Um, okay. First, you guys know it’s spring break . . .”

While D’Laynie goes on, you start thinking about stories, how people always fuss about finding the true one. As if every situation’s got one real version out there the universe accepts as gospel. As if there aren’t different interpretations, different storytellers, villains becoming heroes and funny parts becoming sad parts with a single switch of perspective.

As if the universe listens to stories at all and doesn’t just stare at our hands and hearts, like, Hey, creature, what are you doing, and why?

“ . . . and then I got locked on a balcony in the middle of nowhere for an hour and a half with Destiny and Pollie. Y’all already know Destiny. Well, this . . . is Pollie.”

On cue, you walk into the shot, sit down next to D’Laynie, and wave. But your heart sinks: you barely recognize yourself. You look no different than usual, yet you look so wrong on your daughter’s screen. Why are you next to her? What did you do? What the hell is this? Whatever it is, you can’t hold onto it. Too much. Too soon. Something in you will fuck this up or die trying. You need the familiar, a return to status quo, despite the horrors that live there.

In the last moments before your story begins, you know exactly what you’ll do when you finish telling it: text Dave some skin.

It’s okay. Maybe you won’t open the bag. Maybe you’ll just hold it.

You’d never just hold it.

Oh, no. Are you doing this again? You’re gonna do this again.

Please, please, please, universe, leave me a comment and tell me not to do this again.

“Pollie!” D’Laynie says, turning to you, sparkling with forgiveness. “What do you want to say to all the beautiful people out there?”

Crow Jonah Norlander

SCHOOL OF HARD KNOX: A Conversation with DuVay Knox by Charlene Elsby

December 30, 2021 · Interviews & Reviews

DuVay Knox is the author of Soul Collector (Creative Onion, 2021) and The Pussy Detective (Clash Books, forthcoming 2022). In his author bio, he writes, “I cum outta The South, by way of Louisiana and Tennessee… RUMOR has it I was born from The last Nut in My Daddys Sack. And came into this world when HE came. Needless to say/My Birth was Traumatic. Thus, I arrived here with an Attitude. The Doctor Slapped Me and I slapped Him Back. And So my Journey began. To Find Myself.”

I received an advance copy of The Pussy Detective from Clash Books. Within the pages upon pages of unabashed pussy appreciation, I found a portrait of a man devoted to mitigating the damage done to people by other people (and the desperation of those who would turn to such a stranger, when it seems all hope is lost.)

This interview was conducted as an email exchange in December 2021.

Charlene Elsby: Mr. Knox, your publications to date include Soul Collector and The Pussy Detective. Now it might be reductive to say your topics are sex and death, but the themes are definitely there. What I'm wondering about is the spiritual aspect, as it seems that within your work, sex and death are both conduits to a kind of beyond. Is there another realm behind our material world, and how and when can we access that?

DuVay Knox: Deep Q. Butt yeah DEATH is sho nuff another REALM. And when it cums to SEX the FRENCH say, in particular, dat The ORGASM is LE PETIT MORT aka The LITTLE DEATH. Having been a SEX ESCORT in Europe, among otha countries, Sex continues to play a part in mah Books. Especially the TRAUMA dat often accompanies COPULATION as part of a RELATIONSHIP dat SOURS—Or as a result of ABUSE. Meanwhile, much of mah life was like growing up in a WAR ZONE where I lost many of mah FRIENDS & RELATIVES To DEATH. And they were always wondering WHY? Why were these peeple TAKEN frum them? So much of mah WRITING is a NOVELISTIC attempt to address this issue.

CE: Deep answer. That was actually something I was planning to ask you about—that when I read The Pussy Detective, I was surprised to find the voice was so empathetic. I don't think it would spoil the book to talk about the reason the narrator gives for why women seek out the skills of the narrator. (Their pussy lost its magic on account of some bad man). It seems to me like you've had some really influential women in your life. Now that I'm thinking about it, I don't recall a single other male character with whom your character carries on a conversation, or who factors into the story significantly—not counting that fuck Greasy, of course. It's almost like you've got a source on women's psychology on the inside. Care to comment?

DK: Hmmmm. Had a good relationship wit mah Mama. Plus, I was married for 25-plus years (not all good....butt STILL we hung in there and did what we had to do). Then too: I slung dick as an escort for a number of years round Europe as a young man in the AIR FORCE. So I have spent many nites jes LISTENING to women. So much of the PUSSY DETECTIVE was based on THOSE S/experiences: what they talked about in regards to men folk. Imma good listener (so I have been tole).

CE: I have some quotations underlined, just because they remind me of various things I've read in philosophy. There's this mention of the pineal gland, which Descartes said was the source of thoughts, and which you identify as connected to the clitoris (which is the gateway to a woman's subconsciousness). Then there's a "SACRED HYSTERIA no womayne shood ever Sexperience--UNLESS she is giving dat thang up to the RITE muthafucka." And the idea that "KARMA Is Also a SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASE." You talk about majick, demons and gods. It looks to me like you've got a consistent and coherent spirituality that informs the whole theory of the book--and the ritual that Reverend Daddy Hoodoo conducts on Abysinnia. Are these beliefs to live by, or just part of a fiction?

DK: Years ago, back in the late 70s, when I started studying the CLITORIS (cuz I wanted 2 B thoro when it came to fucking) I came across the info bout the CLIT being konnected to the PINEAL GLAND it cumpletely changed how I viewed SEX and WOMMIN. And especially DESCARTES along wit NIETZCHE/OSHO & PASCAL BEVERY RANDOLPH informed mah SEXUAL PHILOSOPHY. For example, Nietzsche stressed the importance of FRIENDSHIP over LOVE. Dat made an impression. The NAZIS really took his shit outta context. And OSHO was the guru of FREE LOVE "butt" always noted dat it had responsibilities. That led one day to mee writing the quote: KARMA KAN BE A SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASE dat I explain in da book.

Add all this 2 da fack dat I grew up in da Life of HOODOO (New Orleans/Mississippi) and SEX MAJICK/DEMONS & GODS of the REALMS where destined 2 B a part of mah life. So yes I LIVE BY THIS (and THESE) thangs. They R not jes lip service. I view SEX as a GATEWAY to HIGHER REALMS via RITUAL (wich is how I was taught to view it). So yes: I draw frum these aspecks 2 pull them into mah FICTION.

CE: I did a quick search through the digital copy of The Pussy Detective and found that you use the word "pussy" 113 times, but you also use "puss eye" 17 times. I think I understand these two concepts, but for those who haven't read the book yet, could you explain what the difference is?

DK: PUSS EYE was jes mah DADDY'S funny name to take da Sting outta dat werd. Southern slang if u will. So dat was kinda an honorarium to him.

CE: So you've been around a while—on the planet, I mean. But you've just started publishing. I want to know how that happened. There's a hint in your Pussy Detective dedication that there are two women who "never let me forget that I could write something folks would wanna read if I really put my mind to it." In your previous life, were you not writing (or not writing something folks would want to read)?

DK: Yeah-i been round da block a lil skeet taste. I wasn't publishing tho cuz I was bizzy writing as a freelance journalist for many of the Top Hiphop-Rap publications in the country/copywriting for ad agencies and doing standup comedy (werking wit a lotta Names in dat world including DAVE CHAPPELLE, CHRIS ROCK, BILL HICKS, NORM MACDONALD, DANA CARVEY and many others .... even almost had a job writing jokes for the CONAN O'BRIEN show). Butt I left standup comedy cuz dat particular hollywood industry is such a beast & slimy.

I Slowly came to da thought of a writing a book after countless peeps telling me I should do it. A lotta dat encouragement came frum SLAM POETRY contests I useta compete in. AND da 2 women dat I hint at. Im kinda a Polygamist and have 2 Ladies in mah life hoo have been krucial and kritikal to mah success. Their motivation is what ultimately pushed me to git da books outta me and onto da page. In fack: MADAME X is based on one of them.

CE: How did you become acquainted with Marjorie Steele over at Creative Onion (who published Soul Collector) and then with Clash Books?

DK: Meanwile-I met MARJORIE STEELE when I was writing on MEDIUM round 2016-17. I was using da platform to write JOKES and SATIRE as well as SHORT STORIES and she took a liking to mah flow. She was one of mah most devoted followers. Later she tole me she was working on heading up her own PUBLISHING COMPANY and wanted to git mah shit out to the world. Tole her I was IN. She kept her werd. And on top of dat she is just damn good peeple. And GOOD PEEPLE in this Industry (let alone the werld) are hard 2 find. I will always be thankful 2 her for giving me a chance. Because where others were scared of mah RAWNESS she allowed me 2 B Unfiltered (which is the basis of mah Standup: rude/raw/offensive). She has never been afraid of mah FOUL MOUTH ways (profanity is mah 2nd Language).

CE: In the Soul Collector, the narrator collects souls, while in The Pussy Detective, the narrator finds lost pussies. I can picture both your books being episodic, i.e., they're both open to being serialized. Are you working on a sequel? (If so, can you give us any hints?)

DK: True dat. I wrote dem EPISODICALLY. Especially da SOUL COLLECTOR. I like mah TV/Movies da same way. I tend 2 think VISUALLY in da vein of COMICBOOKS when I write. I like dat old skool CLIFFHANGERS stile of writing/serialized shit (ala DICKENS). So yeah--im werking on SEQUELS for both books. Maybe simply The SOUL COLLECTOR #2 and/or the PUSSY DETECTIVE RIDES AGAIN (since he was always in his car going 2 rescue PUSS EYE).

CE: Finally, maybe you could tell me a little bit about Black Pulp Fiction Publishing House. What's your intention with that venture? What can we expect in the near future?

DK: BLACK PULP FICTION PUBLISHING HOUSE is jes mah attempt to resurrect a form/stile of writing dat deserves mo respeck than it has gotten. I think mah writing falls sumwhere between (altho inspired by) ICEBERG SLIM and GEORGE JACKSON wit nods to ZORA NEALE HURSTON & GAYL JONES (4 peeple hoo influenced mah own flow).

Im also concentrating on re-introducing the koncept of short novels (novelettes) as I think peeps are tired of LONG ass novels. I know i hate books that mo than 200 pages (maybe dats mah ADHD). To dat end books Im writing/publishing will fall into the old skool POCKETBOOK size of 4x6 or 4x7 and not over 150 pages. Having been in advertising I think psychologically peeps are subjeck to buying a book they kan simply putt in their pocket/purse. It gives dem the feeling dat writing wont be a chore. The age of the DOORSTOPPER book is over. Meanwile: JAMES PATTERON is alretty on this trend wit his BOOKSHOTS series. A lotta of those books are 100 pages or Less. And Im heah 4 it.

Crow Jonah Norlander

THE DOGS WENT BACK ON ALL FOURS by Evelyn Winters

December 29, 2021 · Fiction

The man went out to get the mail. He opened the mailbox and looked inside. There were envelopes and a magazine. The magazine was Gourmet. It was a monthly for his wife, but his wife was dead. The periodical people probably didn’t know she died. If they do find out will they cancel her subscription? he wondered.

The night’s air was brisk and clear. Walking weather. The street was quiet.

He was one of those sad men you see walking around with their eyes on the pavement. Trudged in the rain. Trudged under the sun. Dragging his feet. But now that his wife was dead he held his head high constantly alert, on the lookout for her whereabouts. There were times he swore he saw her sitting in a tree or hang-gliding above in the open sky, but it always turned out to be various breeds of birds: ravens, owls, songbirds, woodpeckers, vultures.

The man had an urge to bring the magazine to his wife, even if she turned out to be a bird. He crossed the street, straight ahead to the sidewalk. The street lamps gave intermittent light. Enough for him to read a few sentences. It was a cooking magazine. His wife used to cook the most amazing meals: Boeuf Bourguignon, Bouillabaisse, Crêpes Suzette, and always with gobbles of red wine.

The man imagined the writer of the articles to be his wife. Every published word was hers. He read as he walked, sometimes sticking his hand out to pull a leaf off a tree or pluck a rose from a rose bush.

Around midnight the neighborhood dogs began to follow him. They were nice, but had that look, as if they could turn into something completely different than Dog, perhaps another species altogether. The dogs spread out from sidewalk to sidewalk.

While walking (now in the middle of the street) he thought about his wife’s flat feet. She liked to put her big feet in the air when making love. He’d hitch her ankles over his shoulders and go to work.

“This is your job,” she’d say. “Fulltime.”

“Could use some benefits,” he’d say. “A 401k.”

“You can have it all!” she’d say, “Direct deposit.”

For mysterious reasons this sort of banter made them climax at the same time, every time.

As a kid the man was known for breaking things: lamps, windows, mirrors. But also other stuff like woodstove pipes, globes, doorknobs, and once he broke a piano key. He kept that key in his underwear drawer. He never got around to telling his wife why he kept it.

The man broke off a branch of a maple tree and busted a mailbox.

“I haven’t broken anything in so long,” said the man. “Feels good.”

Every time a mailbox fell the dogs would yelp.

The man decided to take the On Ramp to the highway. There wasn’t much traffic, but every so often a car would slowly swerve back and forth behind the dogs until ambling off the exit in defeat. The man didn’t care about drivers, he was on a mission to find his dead wife.

“She’s probably swimming in a clear blue ocean,” he said. “She loved to swim.” Then he closed his eyes and pictured her big flippers kicking the water behind her.

The man began walking on all fours.

“When you’re as broken as me you can walk on all fours,” he said. “Mind as well.”

He looked behind him and noticed the dogs up on their hind legs. When the man stood the dogs went back on all fours as if to rebalance the universe.

***

Around two in the morning a woman his height, his build, his exact gait, came beside and matched him stride for stride. Her hair was short like his. She was thin, but wore a yellow sun dress. Her breasts were on the smaller side.

“There you are,” he said. She looked like his cousin, Rosina. “I haven’t seen you since Christmas at Noni’s!”

“You used to look under my dress,” she said.

“It was the point of the game.”

“Those days are long gone,” she said, flicking his earlobe.

“God,” he said. “It’s like looking into the mirror.”

“Should we switch places?” she asked. “Just to see what would happen.”

“I’m in favor. Anyway, it seems like the right time to take a turn.”

The highway veered left. He looked behind him. The dogs’ tongues were out, panting.

At mile marker fifteen they traded clothes. He stepped into her dress and had her tie the string in the back.

“I’ve always wanted help getting in and out of my clothes.”

“It gets old,” said Rosina. “Believe me.”

He admitted (to himself) that the dress felt alright, kinda good at first, but then a little too free? Actually, he wasn’t sure how he felt about it.

After Rosina cinched up the leather belt and snapped the brass buckle she took EXIT 115 toward Lewisville.

“So long cuz,” she said. “Till next time.”

***

The man kept on, and at some point during the long journey became Female.

Also, and oddly, when she (the man) looked behind her the dogs had transformed into cats. Or perhaps the dogs gave up and some cats replaced the dogs? It’s impossible to know for sure, he thought.

The woman in the yellow sundress kept on, dead set on finding her wife.

She reached in her back pocket for the magazine but since she didn’t have a pocket she found only the soft curve of her ass. The magazine ended up being rolled up in her cleavage. She didn’t remember having breasts and certainly wouldn’t have thought to place a magazine there, but she pulled it out anyway wondering what else could be in this issue.

Music began to play upon opening the magazine. Big band music, Glen Miller style. When she closed the pages the music cut off.

When the music played the street lamps brightened and hummed as if they were getting turned on, sexually. When she closed it the street lamps grew dim and depressed as if they got their feelings hurt or their balls chopped off.

“Balls?” she said. “Penis and balls and all that man stuff. No thank you.”

She folded the magazine four ways and stuffed it in her panties.

She didn’t hate cats, but was surprised that cats were following her, since she always thought herself a dog person.

“My wife liked cats,” she said to the cats.

“Cats cats cats,” said the cats. But turns out they were little children in cat costumes.

***

Once they reached the end of the world the children giggled no more. She grabbed the chain link fence that served as the last obstacle and gazed out into the black abyss.

The children climbed the fence and leaped in shouting “Cats! Cats! Cats!”

Instead of falling they hovered over the darkness and began to shrink: children to toddlers, toddlers to babies, babies to fetuses, until there was nothing at all. She knew, she just knew, those kids were her unborn children. She began to weep with the realization of the unfair life. Some of her tears dropped and ran down the front of her dress.

After calming herself, she reached into her panties and pulled out the magazine. She read the first recipe: two parts radio, a pinch of Canada, a dash of moon, and a drizzle of lug nuts.

“Oh, I remember that one,” said a pretty voice coming from the abyss. “Delicious.”

“I found you,” said the woman in a yellow dress.

“Remember how I used to put my feet on your shoulders.”

“I miss your big feet.”

“I can see that.”

She looked down and saw her manhood restored and pitching a tent inside the yellow dress. And then from the abyss, a hand reached through the fence and up his dress, grabbing hold. She began to work it back and forth like she did when they were young.

“There it is!” he said. He stretched over the fence and took hold of her left breast.

“You always liked the left one best!” she said.

“I love it all,” but when he went to reach further toward her sweet center (where she liked him to rub just so), he felt her hand grab his wrist.

“If you go there,” she warned, “you’ll never be able to go back.”

He thought about all the things he broke when he was young: eight ball, lawn mower, sky light, hat rack, white chalk, sun flower, and the piano key still stuck in his underwear drawer.

“Where will I go?” he said.

“You’ll see,” she said, and giggled.

Crow Jonah Norlander

SEAN KILPATRICK on film with Rebecca Gransden

December 28, 2021 · Interviews & Reviews

What film, or films, made a deep impression on you as a youth? Which films felt transgressive back then? Were you secretive about watching them? Would you say any of these films defined your formative years? Can you talk about the influence film has had on your writing?By some superannuated lapse in parental bargaining, a ten-year-old-me was allowed to view Reservoir Dogs and Menace II Society. Using an online source, I’d already printed both scripts on half-pages with a nineties printer. One particularly sadistic week of basketball camp and I felt nowhere ingratiated with the world outside my VHS player. To compound the problem, I’d recently learned how to jizz. Expanding one’s taste from that list of homages, the influences of these influences (beholding From Dusk Till Dawn in a theater) cemented the era. Gnostic steroid demon gunmen flipping through stylized ballets (John Woo) and iconic machine slashers endlessly stalking girls were refined into the grunge of Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer and Confessions of a Serial Killer back to back. Strange Days was social commentary (though this film, of course, is something hard to process nowadays: far beyond message, style over message) and SFW philosophy. Midnight Express and Little Odessa ripped people’s tongues out, showing how process should commence. Love and a 45, Judgement Night, and Coldblooded proved the influence of influenced influencers could also influence (particularly Leary’s performance). In one glorious, preadolescent swill, I downed local hero Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy, Bava’s Demons, Van Bebber’s Deadbeat at Dawn, and Giovinazzo’s Combat Shock, retro sleaze masterpieces, and continued slurping Welles’s beautifully manic take on The Trial, and the cold brutality of Haneke’s Funny Games, funk atop craft.Very often film is one of the ways we first come into contact with a world outside that of our direct experience. Which films introduced you to areas of life away from the familiar circumstances you grew up in?The industrial ghettoes that sparked David Lynch’s genius were a relatable surrounding, but how far he took that inspiration into a separate creative world felt integral. Richard Linklater is the complete opposite of my purview, but is undeniably iconic and inspiring, especially back when. The international canon filled in the rest of the planet with all I cared to view of it. Finding Angel Dust at Blockbuster, the work of Tarkovsky, the exciting, riveting Kurosawa, (a hell of a snow day home from school watching) The Dollars Trilogy and the exhilarating The Young Poisoner’s Handbook, the claustrophobic Polanski classics, and for tropical tourism: Cannibal Holocaust and Make Them Die Slowly. The Forbidden Zone in place of fables.Do you use film as a prompt or direct motivation for your writing? What directors, film movements, or particular actors have been an influence? Have you ever made a film?I saw the two best meta cinema on cinema masterworks of the nineties quite young: Living in Oblivion and In the Soup (seconded by Contempt and Day for Night). I decided to pursue script writing and attended this cheap workshop downtown Detroit ran by a minor production assistant from one Spike Lee film. He wrote the word “weak” on my teenage script, which I appreciate, but he followed that up with zero useful advice. Though his spit on the page was perhaps relevant preparation for writing (had had that before, and daily now — my own), he’d have done better taking a shotgun to my lap in that regard. All of Kinski (chiefly what Herzog unlocked), Terrence Stamp in Fellini’s Toby Dammit, alongside the end of Imamura’s The Pornographers — actors going sublime and achieving a moment beyond presence. Lately, what Mickey Reece and Joel Potrykus manage to wrought against these artless times almost lets me experience optimism. I tried, and meagerly try, to make films, the hardest undertaking of an art form possible.Are there films you associate with a particular time in your life, or a specific writing project?Detroit is shit for art. But once there was an abandoned grade school in the Cass Corridor, pre-gentrification, called The Burton Theater: matinees amid the ruin, shock art projects decorating (everyone hates those now), plastic bags spider-webbed throughout the building, attached to a urinal handle so that the whole building shivered like an entity when you flushed). I saw Trash Humpers, a cut of Häxan (I’d only dug the Burroughs version) with accompaniment by the band Wolf Eyes in an auditorium sans air conditioning — seeing the screen through a heat haze mirage. Crispin Glover came and presented his wild films, standing stock still in a tiny destroyed closet between showings, addressing each fan in one on one sessions (I stammered with unexpected fear through mine, not realizing he’d deign an individual conference with everyone). Right about then, just as I saved up to join (what was, to me, a very pricey inner-sanctum membership), the yuppie boomer landlord (who gleefully rode atop toy trains) evicted the programmers and took over, switching the schedule to tripe such as Love, Actually during Christmastime. A local source of inspiration appropriately cut short at its height.Thinking about the places you’ve lived, are there any environments that are cinematic? Have you lived anywhere that has been regularly depicted onscreen? If so, has this had an influence on your perception of the place, or how you’ve depicted it in any of your writings?Jarmusch’s longshot landscapes met with People Under the Stairs and Fresh, Tetsuo: Iron Man and all the blasted hellscapes of Mad Max wannabes make me homesick. My old car is briefly featured in 8 Mile, sorry to say. Leaving Las Vegas evokes hopeless alcoholic dads punching the wall next to our child heads. But writers are supposed to be overly erect about the working class because utilitarianism is this country’s shiniest lie. (Many of today’s unintentional autogynephiles (re: all millennial men) could use some physical abuse, I admit.)Are there films you regularly return to, and do you know why?There is a type of film enjoyed on first viewing, but you brushed by it without dwelling, only to realize later the level of supreme art that went momentarily underappreciated. I often return to Kill List in awe, Kontroll (saw when released, holds up amazingly), Miracle Mile (describe this film to someone beat for beat, almost as mesmerizing as watching it), Branded to Kill (flawless, beautiful), and especially The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which I saw young enough to relish, to be broken further into film by, in fact, yet it took seeing it on a big screen, and many, many wonderful times over (it truly gets better with each viewing, grows in you) to comprehend the insane confluence of intensity captured on camera (dinner scene, etc.). Do you have any lines of film dialogue you regularly use in your daily life? Are there individual scenes that stay with you?The Coen brothers demand reenactment. I feel ran over deep into the beach like in Mike Hodge’s Pulp. I perform How to Get Ahead in Advertising aloud each night. I am nearly always issuing coffin mumbles from the end of The Vanishing. The depraved eighties overkill set pieces in An American Werewolf in London, Invasion USA, and Action Jackson are my manifesto.What films have roused a visceral reaction in you?The rowdy turns in The Caller had at me. Attack the Gas Station rallies the viewer. Pretty Persuasion and Dirty Pictures predicting the cultural future are eloquent. Alan Clarke and his influence on The War Zone and Nil by Mouth, Henry Becque-esque reality cruelty gets my goat. The expansive The Telephone Box shit my shit out, the bottleneck tightness of The Guilty as well. Wake in Fright is ultra real, the film of our age, a millennial sludge trap ouroboros. Killing the nude woman with pop guns in Munich seems far more perverse than the filmmaker knew, a demonic scene. Rec 2 is the most vicious roller coaster jump scare experience I’ve had in a theater. Putney Swope is the foremost American comedy. Green Knight had me viscerally verklempt about how much potential it wasted. People at the theater were pulling their seats up in a rage, screeching far scarier noises than this weak millennial take on the legend could muster (I sense the director, so technically gifted, has never been hurt, one notch too abstract, but close, Black Death did the heavy montage literary ending better). The Grey is a more classic, but far greater disguised genre thing really about accepting death. When The Grey pissed stupid people off, I agreed with it, not them. Are there films that are reliable for inspiring your creativity? When a genre subverts itself well: Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, a secret treat. Upgrade is the best action film comment on millennials. Seeing Riley Stearns’s work, and others like Resolution and Luz released in the last few years, is heartening. There will always be a Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, The Corndog Man, Baxter, Habit, Underground, La Haine, The Ugly, The Cell, Seven (films that had no business being so good), sneaking way above every decade’s typical crap (we gotta hunt for them harder now). Maxx, Aeon Flux, and Ren and Stimpy formed my first artistic sensibilities. I Never Left the White Room back to The Last House on Dead End Street (and Watkins’s nonsensical, hyper-retro art pornos), the bottomless, pointless sadism of The House on the Edge of the Park and Hitch-Hike — perfecto.Which of your writings would adapt most successfully to film?Marat / Sade would be the only path to trying. Nobody’s gonna build me a Deadwood set. All for naught and just about impossible. Can you give some film recommendations for those who have liked your writing?My genealogy could start with tracking down the legendary Salo at fourteen, then later seeing Possession after realizing relationships aren’t nice. Man Bites Dog was formative, along with The Hitcher (throat slit Eric Red’s gnostic demon killers: this, Cohen and Tate and Near Dark) and von Trier. Bertrand Blier’s early work was huge to me, and the pinku genre, including The Embryo Hunts in Secret. Miike’s dozen absurd masterpieces after high school, Angel Heart before. Peter Greenaway and the uncanny ending of Twentynine Palms, both ideal, but closer to scope of potential for me might be something approaching an Alan Resnick short, maybe The Signal (2007) if I got lottery lucky. The Eric Wareheim video for that Tobacco song is one of the best shorts I’ve seen (and the superb videos for Liars’s “Plaster Casts of Everything” (innovative rear projection), Rone’s “Bye Bye Macadam” (with its Joe Frank-esque electrical cult worship) Lorn’s “Acid Rain”, Jonathan Bree’s “You’re So Cool”, Oneohtrix Point Never’s “Sticky Drama” (demented Salute Your Shorts), Liam Lynch, the Feral House zeitgeist of Longmont Potion Castle and Francis E. Dec’s Worldwide Gangster Computer God, the abstruse oddities Charles Carroll is up to, glad that Sam Hyde prospers), ditto the simplistic, impeccable bit Cronenberg did (“they sense the threat”) for his book release (he should stick to film). Pig was a recent masterpiece of refinement, a classical tour de force that I’m incapable of, but appreciate (am a Vampire’s Kiss guy). I’d reach for the genius of Killing of a Sacred Deer, paced to Little Murders, cut like Chinese Roulette, Hal Hartley blocking, as ferine as Kite, Aster’s short C’est La Vie acted by the girls of a Walerian Borowczyk flick (trauma of Blind Beast, Lady in a Cage, Onibaba, or the sensuality of Survey Map of a Paradise Lost and In the Realm of the Senses), writing with a Sword of Doom ability to clear a room, but falling flat once Mifune challenges — most likely I’d end up with Trailer Town. I’m okay with that.

Crow Jonah Norlander

GONE BABY GONE by Patricia Q. Bidar

December 27, 2021 · Fiction

Arthur and I are lucky. A client of mine on 110^th and Broadway—I clean houses—had a family thing and needed to leave the country for a few months. Arthur and I could stay.

It’s late morning. The door buzzer sounds and Arthur springs up. His old friend, Joey Chestnut. What we know so far is that Joey’s gotten clean, or at least a lot cleaner than the last time we saw him. He has a lady now. Maybe she’s a calming influence. Now Arthur and Joey are going on a fishing weekend. They’re traveling light because just yesterday Arthur’s Pacer was towed.

Aw, Jesus.

Aw, Jeez.

This is their Staten Island greeting. Shoulders are smacked. I say hey. Joey’s put on weight. This is good.

You want coffee? I say, and Joey says yes.

Where’s this woman you made up? Arthur asks, and Joey says she’s downstairs with her friend.

From the kitchenette I can look down and see. Sure enough, there are two women on the sidewalk in front of the stoop on the basketball court side, smoking. They’re both wearing fur-collared coats and platform shoes. Okay, so she’s real.

If it weren’t for my client needing to leave the country, I don’t know where we’d be, because of all the mess Arthur caused at our old building. The thing is, my client said, we've got to keep our noses down, avoid the other neighbors, and above all do not call the super for any reason.

So far, it has gone great. My client’s not a Richie. Part of her disability payment provides house cleaning. I don’t know where she gets the rest of her money. I mind my business. I have friends who get high with their clients. Eat with them. Not me.

—the best thing that ever happened to me, Joey is saying. You know where I was at after high school.

Arthur murmurs something supportive. And then Joey is saying he’s really gotten his shit together and all’s he brought for the whole weekend is chicken tranquilizers and a handle of Wild Turkey. It’ll be like the old days.

Now Joey is laughing—he actually pronounces the words hee hee hee—about our heavy door and our various locks. I guess he thinks this is our apartment.

Oh, this place is a regular Fort Knox, Arthur says. Self-important with his thick mustache and mutton chops. The river and Colombia are easy walking distance, he adds. St. John's too.

A real lord of the manor, I think but do not say.

Joey steps back into the hall, where he’s left his bag and the fishing rods. The door closes behind him with its heavy click. I’m always worried about locking myself out. We only have one key.

So, what do you think? I ask Arthur, and he says he thinks it’ll be okay.

What about those girls? They’d better not be coming with.

Nah, they’re just with Joey. They’re with Joey. Accompanied him here, is all. And I can hear now that the girls have come upstairs. Someone must’ve let them in. They’re talking fast and their voice bounce against the enameled walls. I can’t make anything out.

Arthur makes a big thing of taking my chin in his hand and tipping my face up to his for a kiss. He tries to hike my skirt up, but I’m wearing my quilted maxi and it’s a lot of fabric. I say Arthur’s gonna start pounding on the door and he says no he won’t. Arthur takes my chin and tips my face for a kiss. And then he’s hiking my skirt up. Oh, Arthur. The things he gets me to do. I step up onto the couch and sway strip-tease style, adding a dip to shuck my skirt and panties. Arthur throws them across the room. He’s kissing my tits and kissing my tits and it just lights me up; my whole body buzzes with want.

I say, Joey’s gonna start pounding and he says no he won’t and we’re kissing again. And I’m lying on the couch with my feet touching the floor when Arthur enters me with full urgency and oh. Oh. Then he’s finished, our bare chests, our rib cages, pressed together. I taste thesalt of his face. He pushes up, dips to kiss my neck saying thank you thank you thank you. I belong to this man. Oh, Arthur.

I wash the coffee cups and the pot, thinking about a job I have at three, a gay couple in the village. I switch on WNEW and it’s Patti Smith, a girl singer from New Jersey. If Arthur were here, he’d say turn that shit off.

That’s when I hear it: the next-door neighbor lady screaming: she’s been robbed. I run out to the hall and she’s there with her laundry from the basement machines, and she’s telling me she propped the door with a matchbook and down in the laundry all of ten minutes. And it hits me: I’m good and locked out barefoot in just my maxi skirt. Arthur’s gone baby gone, already hurtling on the sweltering A to Jesus knows where and the neighbor lady comes out with her baby which she left sleeping in his bassinet and she’s saying thank you thank you thank you.

Crow Jonah Norlander

THE GRANDE CALAMITY DIAMOND DESCENDS INTO THE MAELSTRÖM by Dolan Morgan

December 24, 2021 · Fiction

I needed a break. So when my brother gifted me the cruise ticket, it felt like he’d done something useful for once. But there was a catch.

“It sinks on purpose,” my brother said, laughing. “Like, while you’re on the thing. Straight into the ocean, down it goes. The whole big ship. And they don’t tell you when, it’s a surprise. One minute you’re over by the pool deck in margaritaville or whatever, and then—wham! The boat is sinking, just like that. You’re gonna love it.”

Byron worked in real estate and routinely ended up with promotional items that nobody could ever want outside the fever-dream of 30-year mortgages. Over the years, he’d given me a rubber ham you could heat in the oven to smell “authentic ham smells” and a golf club you can pee into discreetly, just like you’ve always wanted. Did I play golf? No. Did I love ham smell? No. But was I sure my brother loved me? Sort of. This season had been kind to him, which always meant his sort-of-love would be more pronounced, a trait he’d no doubt inherited from our father, another sleazeball if ever there was one, and he must have really fallen into some big commissions because he significantly upped his game and got me passage to this new cruise line experience where, apparently, the ship sinks while you’re on it and then you get heroically rescued.

A cruise is nice, but after the past shitty year—or decade if I’m being honest—what I really wanted was a whole new life. Sort of like the cowardly lion, tinman, and scarecrow all wrapped up into one: a new personality, a new body, and a new brain would be great, thank you very much. But for now, this ridiculous cruise would have to do. In some respects, the trip itself wasn’t such a terrible idea, I had to admit; by transporting everything about me into entirely new surroundings, perhaps I’d feel different by mere dint of the juxtaposition. That’s probably why people travel in general, I thought: not to see new places, but to fool themselves into thinking they’re new too. The artist Josef Albers could make the exact same blue look completely different just by putting it next to different shades of pink. I wanted that to happen to me. Maybe this insane cruise could be the shade that rendered my life anew. Like Dorothy, suddenly in technicolor.

“You’re gonna love it,” he said again, taking a bite of tortellini. “It’s pathartic.”

Pathartic? I didn’t ask Byron to clarify if he meant “cathartic” or “pathetic” because, while either option seemed plausible, my inability to discern the difference seemed especially apt. “Thank you,” I said. “I really appreciate this.” I might have meant it.

The trip commenced in two weeks. I needed to prepare.

I scheduled time off, packed “only the necessities,” a task that gave me no shortage of absurd anxiety—What are the necessities? What do I need? Do I really need a toothbrush? I think I do, but what does that say about me? Why can’t I rough-mouth it like a real man, like my ancestors?—and soon found myself standing on a crowded dock in a busy sunlit harbor, half-empty suitcase in hand, staring up at the gleaming white facade of the Grande Calamity Diamond, preparing to embark on “The Disaster of a Lifetime” and really wishing I had brought a goddamn toothbrush. What the hell. I’ll be the last person they rescue, I thought, if my screams emanate a week’s worth of theme-restaurant halitosis.

Maybe I could purchase one at some overpriced harbor store before departing? I scanned the seaport. Lines of people in cargo shorts, sandals, and floppy hats weaved around each other like thick ropes grinding into an ever-tightening knot of leisure and luggage. The glint of a newsstand kiosk reflected above the throng’s heads, but it might as well have been a hundred miles away. I’d have to get a toothbrush onboard at the Sink or Swim Souvenir Shop. Far out over the water, I saw clouds darkening the horizon, a storm headed north toward home. I was glad to be embarking on the cruise, headed south, away from all that grey into a bright new blue.

The embarking process was long, but soon I was settled on the ship and into my private cabin. I had a single bed, a desk, a chair, cubbies to stash my belongings, and a few feet to stretch myself out. A diminutive porthole afforded a view of sweaty tourists en route to their own ships, but soon it would cast about over endless ocean waves. I was genuinely looking forward to it. A horn sounded, announcing our departure.

Back at home, I’d watched orientation videos breaking down the cruise’s itinerary. With R having only just moved out, I welcomed any distraction from my thoughts. The basic parameters of the sinking were outlined by a man with a bright smile and light blazer. At a designated hour, he said, alarm bells would ring and the ship-wide intercom system would inform passengers of a critical hull breach. The catalysts differ each outing, but past causes included icebergs, coral reefs, and mythical creatures like kraken and kaiju.

In reality, a series of doors in the ship’s exterior are deliberately opened, allowing for the methodical intake of water followed by gradual descent into the ocean, a process monitored continuously by experts. Passengers can enjoy the excitement on deck, then gather on lifeboats, or float about with inflatable vests to watch the process unfold. VIP passengers can even stay aboard throughout, riding the boat deep beneath the surface in sealed rooms. A nearby contingent of medically-trained staff emerges on dinghies and helicopters after the spectacle is complete, ferrying passengers to a second luxury-class ship where the remainder of the itinerary can be enjoyed.

Unpacking my bags, I recalled the candid online reviews I’d read while trying to avoid the pile of things R left behind on the table. “It was amazing and life-altering,” wrote one woman in a 5-star review, “I honestly thought I was going to die.”

I tried to understand what could possibly motivate these people, myself among them now, to want this.

Tired from the sun, I dozed in and out of sleep as I recalled Edgar Allen Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelström,” wherein the characters feel drawn to a massive whirlpool near the edge of the world, desiring its depths despite the danger. Is this what I wanted? I recalled that as a child, I was obsessed by kidnappings. I thought about them often in grade school, their own maelstrom of strangers, hands, and cars. I carried impromptu weapons in my pocket: chains, pens, anything that could hurt someone if I was dragged into their vortex.

After what seemed like seconds, I woke suddenly, jerked by some force. Unsure of how much time had passed, I looked out the porthole and saw only ocean, the harbor long gone. A safety bell rang out, followed by static. Was this it? Were we about to sink? An announcement did not declare a hull breach; rather, the ship had diverted course to avoid choppy waters from the storm to our north. Was this part of the act? Still half in dreams, I stared at the waves. They looked motionless to me. “Be sure to try the salmon croquettes at the Reef Bar,” the announcement added. “Complimentary today only.”

The thought of eating reminded me: I needed that toothbrush.

I stepped out of my cabin and into the hall. Rubbing my eyes and making my way toward the main deck, I passed families encumbered by endless bags, elderly couples trundling bravely arm in arm, twenty-somethings well on their way to inebriation, dumbstruck kids covered in sunscreen and chocolate, giggling teenagers headed for the pool.

I didn’t realize kids were allowed on the cruise. I wondered if they’d appreciate the experience. Inspecting a “you are here” map, charting my route to the souvenir shop, I mulled the common conception that young people remain oblivious to existential concerns, a myth perpetuated by those who have forgotten the mystery and insanity of their own childhood. “Thin places” are locations where our world and other realms are supposedly closest together, where hauntings and strange traversals are most prevalent, and pretty much everything is a thin place to young people, I thought. I took a left at a large arcade, passed through an impressive casino, and ascended a chain of escalators. A frenzied crew member rushed past me as if pursued by an assailant, her blue polo shirt drenched in sweat. Two additional crew members, similarly harried, followed soon after, pushing me roughly aside as they passed.

My sleazeball father pushed Byron once when he robbed our house after my mother kicked him out. I must have been six or seven at the time. I arrived home on the bus to see my dad surrounded by police, blood dripping down his shirt. He claimed he was only there to take “what was his,” which apparently included my brother’s bike and my television. What if, rather than just random objects, I wondered, he’d thought of me and Byron as rightfully “his” as well?

For months I feared he would show up at school or while I was out playing. The fact that, at the time, I still loved him desperately—and could not comprehend his new absence—complicated these fears. Byron was home at the time of the robbery and absolutely terrified. He told the police he “couldn’t tell if it was really happening.” We never spoke of it. Afterward, he could only sleep with the closet door firmly closed. I think, more than anything, I was jealous of his proximity to that rip in reality, to that thin place. I wanted to be dragged through a hole in our universe, wanted the twister to pick me up and drop me in a new world, where I could become something else, too.

But become what? A shitty real estate agent?

I arrived at the souvenir shop and was shocked to find it much bigger than anticipated. Three stories tall at least and the width of a city block. Organization was chaotic, encouraging passengers to browse longer and purchase more, so I roamed the aisles haphazardly in search of a toothbrush. The items were the kind of crap that Byron would love. Stupid, corny, impractical. Yet, like Byron as well: clearly profitable. What would happen to all of these goods when the ship sank? Did they have some method for protecting it all? I did not understand the underlying economics of this cruise. Should I get something for Byron? I realized it was quite possible I had never given him anything other than a card, let alone authentic ham smells. The thought made me want to disappear. What would it be like to go missing here? I recalled a safety video I’d seen when I was six or so, a video that provided instruction regarding exactly what a child should do if they were lost.

I recalled, in fact, trying to orchestrate a scenario in which to enact those very instructions.

Browsing in a department store with my dad, who I did not yet understand to be a sleazeball, I waited for the right moment—and then fell quietly behind his stride. I slipped down an aisle when he wasn’t looking. Soon I could hear him calling for me through the shelves but did not answer. When I felt I was sufficiently “missing,” when I knew I had crossed over into that other realm, my own land of Oz where rules faded away, I took off as fast as possible toward the store’s information desk, where I could, as the safety video suggested, drag myself back to reality by requesting the woman behind the counter page my dad over the intercom. I recalled the thrill of that experience, of being gone from this world, and of the anguish in my father’s face—and my confusion at having caused it; I thought of R, too, and how I had fallen quietly out of step with her as well. How I wasn’t there when she looked for me. I thought of the anguish in her face, and my confusion at having caused it, as I pondered the cruise and its promise of disaster.

Still no toothbrush.

Rack after spinning rack of postcards, keychains, shot glasses, snow globes, and pewter dolphins called out to me, but there were no personal hygiene stands. Nor did there seem to be anyone working here. Or even shopping for that matter. I was essentially alone in this knickknack wasteland. An old fear gripped me in that isolation, but only gently. For the first time, I noticed that seat belts were built at regular intervals into the floor. They looked surreal and out of place. Like an ear growing from a back. Maelstrom of people, cars, and hands. Maneuvering myself around one of the spinning racks of trinkets, my body rotated like the hand of a clock as I tried to get a better look at a pair of sunglasses, and I recalled the only time I probably could have been abducted—were it not for my use of a similar rotating maneuver.

Eight or nine at the time, I wandered our quiet neighborhood alone, deep in summer, when a small red car began tailing me. Within, I could make out the face of a middle-aged man with greying hair. His car slowed to my walking pace. Anxious, I turned around and headed the other way, just in case. Moments later, I heard tires twisting in the loose gravel on the country road behind me. He had also turned around; I was the cause, or perhaps the prey. My suspicions affirmed, I ran ahead, around a corner, and into a tall stand of bushes near a field, slipping behind the leaves, only seconds before the car rounded the corner into view, trailing after me. The driver pulled up next to the bushes and drove forward to peer around them. I rotated along the tall shrub, staying just out of sight. He reversed to check the other side. I slid again in the opposite direction, always keeping the bush between us. We repeated this dance until he either came to the conclusion that I wasn’t there or tired of the steps. I ran home, terrified. The police confirmed that a man in a car of similar description had been beckoning young boys to ride away with him. What world awaited within the red car? Regardless of my fascinations, I cowered when faced with the actual prospect of abduction. I didn’t feel new. I didn’t feel changed. I felt awful.

I consulted a confusing store map, travelled up and down the floors, and eventually found the check-out register. The cashier, a small, bemused man of indeterminate age wearing sunglasses, was sorry to inform me that the Sink or Swim Souvenir Shop did not sell toothbrushes; however, he was delighted to share that a complimentary brush in the shape of a shark could be delivered to my cabin, free of charge. Armed with this assurance, I exited the knickknack wasteland. I emerged empty handed, yes, but also with relief, vowing never to return, and stepped into the late afternoon sun.

Except it wasn’t the sun boring down on me now—no, it was rain.

Heavy, hammering the deck in torrents.

I took shelter under an awning, but cold gusts of wind sent sheets of water horizontal, pelting my legs, soaking my shorts. Across an expanse of chaise lounges, wooden tables, and poolside chairs, half-naked passengers ran for cover, holding pool floaties and towels over their heads, signalling that rain had only just arrived. Clearly, the distant storm I’d seen earlier had veered off course and intersected the Grande Calamity Diamond’s route. Feelings of futility washed over me, a sense of inescapable greyness. There was no outrunning the clouds I thought I’d left at home, no land of Oz, only a farm covered in dust. R was right about me. No wonder she left. The same with my father. Of course he didn’t kidnap me. Who would? Lightning shot down from the sky into the water and a clap of thunder rose up over the roar of rain. I cringed at the cliche of my own mind. I still didn’t even have a toothbrush.

A brief sprint delivered me to the warmth and dryness of the Deep Dive Bar, a large room decorated in the style of an old dockworker’s pub, where I found a coterie of stunned passengers huddling in wet clothes. I leaned on a knotted table to catch my breath and turned back toward the open door, out of which we all could observe the downpour—in addition to a new phenomenon made plain in our stomachs: the tilting of the ship, its slow rise and lurching descent. I found the feeling worse when looking at the sea and so turned toward the bar’s interior. Heavy ropes, wooden barrels, and wide nets completed the ambience. Amid the small crowd, I spotted the same sweaty crew member who had hurried past me earlier. She looked terrified.

Over the intercom, a voice burst through static: “This is the ship’s captain. You may have noticed the inclement weather. Please avoid open-air common spaces until it passes. As well, out of an abundance of caution, we regret to inform you that this outing of the Grande Calamity Diamond will be unable to sink as planned, because the ship’s systems will require thorough post-storm maintenance before attempting any dive.” A wave of groans resounded among the sopping passengers. “Your safety is our first priority. Complimentary tote bags will be delivered to your cabin. Game rooms will be free for the remainder of the trip. Open-bar hours are hereby extended indefinitely.”

Above the din of bitter murmurs, the bartender called out, “Well, anybody want a drink?”

With nowhere to go, we all got to know each other over beers, but it was the frenzied crew member, Julie, clearly at the end of her rope and ready to share company secrets, who set the tone for the evening. She divulged the real reason our sinking had been cancelled—not merely “out of an abundance of caution,” but something much worse: our sister ship had capsized in the storm.

The one carrying our rescue team.

A ship just like ours, caught off guard in the same rough waters, now wrecked in the sea.

Luckily, they were able to rescue themselves, but would be unable to do the same for us.

That’s why she and her colleagues were running around so frantically earlier in the day—because they didn’t know what the hell was happening. And now look where we are, she said, waving toward the door.

Her transparency, along with a little alcohol and shock, loosened everyone up, and soon folks were describing why they had hoped to sink into the ocean. I mean, these things weren’t shared directly, but were shared nonetheless.

For example, one woman, empathizing with Julie, vented at length about her job, about the incompetent assholes that lorded over her, and the need to let off some steam; only as an aside did she mention her mother’s recent passing, the painful year that had preceded it, and the sense of mystery that still hovered over mundane tasks, the ethereal veil draped across her days and through which she could only barely seem to reach, and the distance that stretched between her and her children, her husband, her siblings. In the book, The City and The City, two different metropolises occupy the same exact space, each folded into the other. The woman's story felt much the same.

Or there was the young couple who cited a love of adventure, listing off various daring climbs, jumps, and glides they’d undertaken together. One might easily have missed the jokes the man made throughout, gags about the adorability of not understanding one another, the amusement of never seeing each other completely, with punchlines that felt innocuous on their own but which, in their steady accumulation, betrayed a kind of shadow mirroring how the couple’s hands never touched. As the storm bellowed onward, I had the feeling that the only true “thin places” were other people. Apparitions and strange traversals.

Even the older man who blathered on about his joyful desire to submit himself to the vast beauty of the natural world could not avoid referencing a quiet feeling of dissociation barely kept at bay by chasing some novel experience.

I tried to imagine what I betrayed about myself, other than my terrible breath, when I asserted to everyone that I was really only here because the ticket was free, mostly to appease my brother, and that I just needed a break after a hard year, and that I hoped to feel different, or at least to not feel like this anymore. I mean, could they see my fear, could they see my father standing behind me, always reaching his sleazeball hand around my face in the dark to pull me backward through myself and away from my life, from R, from Byron, from anything I tried to love? Or, rather, could they see that my father had nothing to do with it and that it was always my own hands that wrestled me from what I wanted? Was this pathartic? There was no telling—because in a moment we learned the sinking was back on, but not for a reason any of us could have wanted.

The frenzied crew member’s walkie-talkie foreshadowed the news. It beeped three times before an authoritative voice on the other end inquired if she was with passengers, then stated flatly, “Julie, we need you to usher everyone to the VIP hold—now.” Julie’s eyes widened and everything about her demeanor changed. In seconds, she was out of her chair, back straight, keys in hand. The intercom clicked on and the captain informed us that circumstances had deteriorated, the surface conditions in the water had become life-threatening, and we would shortly attempt an emergency dive in the hopes of waiting out the storm below.

Someone asked if this was really happening. Was it part of the cruise?

Julie assured us it was really happening. Then, after consulting her walkie, she outlined our emergency route to the VIP hold, a sealed space where we could ride safely into the deep. This VIP hold was apparently the one and only Sink or Swim Souvenir Shop, and reaching it involved a short sprint across the deck. The rain-soaked dash afforded a quick glance into the storm. Its scale resisted comprehension.

Under a green sky, strong currents dragged our ship horizontally, amid a procession of smaller boats and debris, hundreds upon hundreds, some tipped or sinking, in what looked like an enormous gyre, spiraling all in a great arc.

Despite there being over a thousand passengers, the Souvenir Shop easily accommodated everyone. Once within, Julie directed us to an aisle where we could lie on our backs and make an L shape with our bodies, our feet propped in the air against a shelf of dumb t-shirts. The shelving unit would act as our seat, she said, once the ship tilted vertical for its descent.

The ship will soon tilt vertically, she repeated.

The aft deck would be in the air above us, with the foredeck leading the way into the depths below. Sink or Swim Souvenirs is pretty close to the back of the ship, she added, so we’ll end up pretty high in the air. You’re going to feel it. The floor, which would soon become a wall, contained those same surreal seat belts I’d spotted earlier, safety features intended to prevent passengers from tumbling down to the store’s distant edge—soon to be fifty feet below us. The sound of a motor echoed through the space, and thick metal doors descended along the perimeter, sealing us in with a vacuum hiss.

The ship shuddered, and the shelves rattled flimsily. Staring straight at the ceiling, I fastened my seat belt and heard it click. My mouth tasted terrible. The seat belt was too tight. I felt for a moment like I was finally getting into that red car.

Then the ship began to lift.

It happened quickly, much faster than I thought it would. We arced forward into the air, as if catapulted in slow motion, reaching a zenith and hovering there only for a moment. Dangling. Silence. Like the top of a rollercoaster. Then, with a lurch, the descent commenced. People screamed.

Seated to my left, the man from the couple at the bar turned to me and said, “I think this is all just part of the act. This is what we paid for.” He was crying and looked as if he wanted me to answer a question that went unasked. I didn’t know what to say and certainly didn’t mention what I’d seen of the storm as we ran across the deck—the long, dark arc of some enormous gyre in which we currently spun, headed who knows where.

The image immediately brought to mind again Poe’s “Descent Into the Maelström.” How did that story end? Curiously, I recalled that the plot revolved around two brothers, and that both of them ended up in the maelstrom, slowly dragged toward its center on a small, powerless boat. I couldn’t help but picture the two as Byron and me. Trying to escape the spinning waves, one of the brothers figures out that the maelstrom functions like a sorting machine, dragging heavier objects inward and spitting lighter objects back out, returning them to the world. They would need to abandon the safety of their heavy boat and take hold of something lighter to escape. One brother stubbornly rejects this theory and hangs tight to the security and familiarity of the vessel. The other escapes by letting go—but helplessly watches as their sibling, gripping tightly, falls into the dark center of the world.

But which brother was I? Was I holding on or letting go?

I thought of my empty apartment, Byron’s dumb job and big smile, and I could feel my stomach rising upward as the descent quickened.

The man next to me grabbed my hand. I closed my eyes and squeezed back.

Five stars.

Crow Jonah Norlander

Whose Presence Joined With Ours Will Create Something Novel; A Review of Adam Soldofsky’s TELEPAPHONE by Evan Williams

December 23, 2021 · Interviews & Reviews

Take any version of the movie Freaky Friday. Now imagine it remade as a film noir. Now imagine it was written by Marshall McLuhan. Now imagine it isn’t afraid to lean into the philosophical implications a body swap has on the nature of selfhood. Congratulations, you’ve got Adam Soldofsky’s Telepaphone.

My first impulse upon reading the title was to rummage through my shelves for Mag Gabbert’s MINML POEMS, a book taking the torch of condensed wordplay from Aram Saroyan. The word “telepaphone” feels like it might fit in among Gabbert’s poems, sandwiched somewhere between “anammal” and “implocean.” While reading MINML POEMS I made a game of dissecting Gabbert’s pieces into their possible constitutive parts, beginning with the obvious combinations and extending outwards. What becomes clear in this practice is not only that the meaning of the poem can drastically change depending on its compositional permutation, but that the meaning of its individual components can be inflected in one direction or another by its partner(s); as one piece changes, so do the rest, so does the whole.

Motivational speaker Jim Rohn once argued that we are the average of the five people with whom we spend the most time. This idea supposes that our social surroundings construct us, though it elides, or, at minimum de-emphasizes our agency in the process. Our sense of self is not constructed for us, but by us, through and against those with whom we interact. Soldofsky approaches this idea, one of definition by inflection, and emphasizes not only the inflection itself, but its mode: the titular gadget, the telepaphone.

Described as “an amateur magician’s apparatus that, when worn by two individuals” might “facilitate telepathic communication,” the device is one that, on its face, allows for an intimate knowledge of another; it allows for a deeper, more genuine sort of inflective interaction.

The novella’s plot quickens when Adam Soldofsky—a failing-if-not-already-failed artist in a marriage brought to its deathbed by his alcoholism—and Axel Wilhite—an internationally-renowned artist with whom Adam attended art school—test the telepaphone. The machine’s instructions require the pair to sit facing with headsets “snug but unrestrictive,” set “about the crown of the head with the skull carapace sitting atop the head like a ballcap.” It’s worth noting that by this point in the book, the friendship between Adam and Axel is withering, if not spoiled. The meeting which has brought them to this moment was predicated upon Adam’s emotional decline, Axel visiting in the hopes of helping, or at least assessing its severity; the precipitant for the ensuing inflection of Axel on Adam, Adam on Axel, is one of imbalance. And, ultimately, a further imbalance is achieved: the telepaphone overshoots the mark, catapulting them past mere telepathy into a full blown body swap.

I won’t spoil the plot further but to say drama and dark hilarity ensues.

At the heart of any good body swap plot is the idea that having learned what another’s life is like, one walks away not only with greater appreciation for their own, but with an enlightened understanding of the daily hardship of their peer, and this is certainly true of Telepaphone. What is not common in the body swap genre, and what makes Soldofsky’s work so gripping conceptually and in its execution is its exploration of the leftover self, which borders on an assertion of an essential self.

What’s left of another person if your consciousness now resides within them? Their dreams, their muscle memory. Sporadically throughout the course of the story, Adam—in Axel’s body—falls asleep, launching into one of Axel’s dreams. When this happens, it’s not immediately clear in the text. Mostly, it is a seamless transition from Adam’s wakeful observations into his experience of Axel’s dreams, which he observes and comments upon as though he were outside of them. It’s in these moments that Telepaphone articulates most clearly the intimacy of a friendship—one brought on by despair, misfortune, and technological mishap. It’s tempting to argue that Soldofsky’s thesis is one aimed at touting the power of misery to bind.

It isn’t just a binding, however, just as sewing together the bits of two or more words into a single, condensed poem isn’t just a binding, it’s a generative act; the bits, linked together, allow for a new and surprising form to come forth.

As is established early on, Adam and Axel first found one another in art school, going on to achieve wildly different degrees of success. Adam painting in Adam’s body results in Adam’s work; Axel painting in Axel’s body results in Axel’s work; Adam painting in Axel’s body results in a fusion of taste, technique, and vision. It creates something not only wholly new, but something representative of the pair’s inflection of one another.

This is the point from which the potency of Soldofksy’s novella stems. Snared in the logistics of the body swap is the surface-level but often obscured fact that a body swap is fundamentally the creation of two new lives. Further, if we construct ourselves against those around us, then not only does the body swap afford its participants the opportunity to construct a renewed sense of self against their swap-ee, but, disembodied, they might form it against themselves as well. Intimacy brings forth new form. It’s this that Soldofsky both fears and celebrates, the harrowing trials it may involve, and the selfishness we must break past to give over our whole being to another.

I took it upon myself to dissect the word telepaphone as I dissected Gabbert’s poems. Yes, it is most likely that the word is simply a combination of telepathy and phone, evoking the sound of the word telephone as an added bonus. However, mirroring the definition of the self and the social network in which it operates, the book takes on new meaning as its constitutive parts change. Having spent far too much time considering the contributions of an assortment of possible words based on telepaphone’s syllabic makeup, and even testing out a few acronyms, I came finally to two alternative possibilities:

Telegenetic past phoneTeleological partner phone

I won’t decide between the two which is the right one, there is no wrong answer. If the first, Soldofsky has painted an elaborate portrait of our past—social, intellectual, emotional, etc—lives as being additives to not only our way of perceiving the world, but to our cellular composition. It is an articulation of the belief that that material is transmissible in a tangible fashion. If the second, then we need not worry. Body swap or not, there’s another we’re moving toward, another who will someday sit facing us, and whose presence joined with ours will create something novel.

Crow Jonah Norlander

LAST-DITCH EFFORT: A FAMILY DRAMA TOLD IN NINE CHAPTERS by Torrey Kurtzner

December 22, 2021 · Fiction

Flip a Coin

Christmas morning, 1999.

My mother and father were seated on a couch in our living room. Neither seemed to acknowledge the other’s presence. Instead, they both stared lifelessly at a nearby wall. Holiday festivities be damned; it was just another day in matrimonial hell for my folks.

My father awkwardly turned to face my mother.

“Merry Christmas,” he said begrudgingly, holding out an envelope. “It’s an Applebee’s gift card.”

My mother glanced at the envelope and sighed.

“I don’t think I love you anymore,” she said.

“Oh?”

“Yes. You’re not surprised, are you?”

“No, not at all,” he assured her. “It’s just that… I never loved you, and I always thought you felt the same way about me.”

Relieved, my mother smiled.

“I do feel the same way!” she said.

“Well, why didn’t you say that?”

“I thought it would be insensitive.”

They both cackled like hyenas. In twelve years of marriage, this was the happiest they’d ever been.

“This is great!” my father exclaimed. “I’m gonna get packing; I can be out of your hair in forty-five minutes!”

Overjoyed, he bounced off the couch like a loose spring.

“Hold up,” my mother called after him. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

“What, the house?” he said, his voice fading in the distance. “Keep it; it’s yours!”

My mother cleared her throat and motioned her eyes towards our Christmas tree, where I sat in a state of shock. Amid all the excitement, my parents must have forgotten that I, their six-year-old son and only child, was just inches away from them.

Upon looking me in the eyes, my father’s mood shifted from happy idiot to irritated scumbag. He turned back to face my mother, who was also visually bothered by their current predicament.

“Should we flip a coin?” he asked earnestly.

Growing Pains

As an adolescent, I would bounce back and forth between my mother and father. Despite not wanting anything to do with me, they randomly felt inclined to be parental in the most stereotypical ways possible.

“Do better in school,” my mother once told me while I was in the fifth grade.

“Why do you care about my grades?”

“I’m your mother,” she replied indifferently. “I’m supposed to care.”

Meanwhile, in a bizarre attempt to develop our non-existing relationship, my father would randomly visit me at school. I’ll never forget the day he dropped by my junior high school and pulled me out of math class.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

My father was holding two baseball mitts.

“I figured we should play catch.”

“Why?”

My father shrugged.

“Because I’m your father, and you’re my son.”

“Look,” I sighed. “I don’t get out of here until three o’clock.”

My father glanced at his wristwatch. His brow furrowed.

“That’s not gonna work for me.”

Ditto, pops. Ditto.

A Voice of Reason

Even after they amicably separated, my parents remained cold towards me simply because I existed. At six years old, I felt like a hindrance to their happiness. To get over this guilt, I wholeheartedly embraced the concept of detachment.

In my early twenties, I would meet a girl while attending college. Although I cared about this girl, I had a hard time expressing my feelings to her. Thankfully, she was sympathetic when I explained my unconventional upbringing.

“Christ!” she yelled. “That’s fucked up.”

I nodded my head in agreement.

“Yeah, it’s crazy. I don’t mean to be distant, but that’s just how I deal with things.”

“Have you ever considered therapy?”

I shrugged.

“I think it would help you rediscover your emotions,” she said. “If not for yourself, do it for our relationship.”

Her arm wrapped around my shoulder was all it took for me to agree.

Texts from the Big Chair

“Do you ever talk to your parents?” my therapist asked.

“We text.”

“Care to share these exchanges with me?”

I pulled out my phone and complied.

Mom

How R you?

Fine. Hbu?

Mom

I’m good. Thanks 4 asking.

“Is that it?” my therapist asked.

I nodded.

“I see…” he scribbled some text onto his notepad. “What about your father?”

Dad

Ever see Death Race?

Dad

Jason Statham flick.

I don’t think so.

Dad

It was amazing.

“...And?” my therapist asked, practically on the edge of his seat.

“Oh, I thought that was an organic stopping point for the conversation,” I said, straight-faced.

“Okay,” my therapist sighed, leaning backward in his chair. “I’m giving you an assignment. I want you to have meaningful, face-to-face conversations with your mother and father.”

“What should we talk about?”

“That’s entirely up to you. What are some things you’ve always wanted to ask them?”

Tough Conversations

Per my therapist’s request, I visited my parents during a three-day weekend. I dropped by my mother’s house first. Seated inside her kitchen, she puffed on a cigarette while we talked.

“Why did you and Dad get married?”

“It was customary at the time. I blame The Game of Life.”

I couldn’t tell if she was being metaphorical or simply referencing the popular board game. I didn’t bother asking; I had a much more consequential question on my mind.

“Mom… was I a mistake?”

My mother scoffed.

“Don’t be dense,” she told me through a thick cloud of secondhand smoke.

I asked my father the same question when visiting him later that evening. We stood outside his garage, basking in the moonlight.

“You weren’t an accident,” he said matter of factly. “You were a last-ditch effort to save our marriage.”

I took a moment to ponder my father’s words. Imagine being brought into this world to salvage a doomed marriage. Then, imagine growing up with the knowledge that you failed miserably. The psychological ramifications of coming to that realization would drive anyone insane.

For the first time since I was six, I felt pain inside my heart. But rather than free this pain, I pushed it down into the pit of my stomach.

“Guess I didn’t pay off, huh?” I uttered under my breath.

My father laughed while gazing into the black abyss of the night sky.

“No, son. You did not.”

Hammer Time

“Have I ever told you about the dream where I kill my parents with a hammer?”

My therapist nearly spat coffee across his desk. After a few seconds of coughing, he managed to recollect himself. I continued monotonously.

“I bash their brains in with a hammer, and the whole time, I’m waiting for them to say something, anything. But they just take it and die.”

“How does this dream make you feel?” my therapist asked.

I shrugged.

“Indifferent, I guess. Dreams are weird, right?”

My therapist looked me in the eyes with equal parts bewilderment and frustration. After several minutes of silence, he spoke up.

“Are you familiar with antidepressants?”

Uncomfortably Numb

My therapist was confident that antidepressants would help me relax and open up. If anything, they made me more withdrawn, like a comatose vegetable on life support.

“Why can’t you just open up to me?” my girlfriend tearfully asked.

“I’m trying,” I responded, albeit forty seconds later.

Shortly after this conversation, she would dump me. I couldn’t blame her.

Tougher Conversations

Several years passed. I would graduate college and move back home to be closer to my folks, who were both dying from different forms of cancer. Since I was no longer dating my girlfriend from college, I decided to ditch my therapist and his antidepressants. He was surprisingly grateful.

I tried to have one last meaningful conversation with each of my parents before they died.

“Mom, did you ever love me?”

My mother rolled her eyes.

“I’m your mother,” she replied indifferently. “I’m supposed to love you.”

“But what if I wasn’t your son? What if I was a stranger?”

“Well, that’s a weird fucking question,” she answered sarcastically. “I don’t love strangers. I tolerate them.”

In her final moments, my mother inadvertently summarized our relationship perfectly.

Regarding my father, our final conversation was a bit more eventful.

“I once dreamed about killing you and Mom with a hammer,” I confessed.

My father’s face lit up like a Christmas tree. I hadn’t seen him this excited since the day he and my mother announced their mutual disdain for each other.

“I think Jason Statham kills someone with a hammer in Death Race!” he exclaimed. “I’ve got the DVD on my dresser. Could you put it on for me?”

“Sure,” I said, slightly taken aback.

We proceeded to watch the film together. I don’t believe Jason Statham’s character ever used a hammer to kill anyone. Regardless, my father was grinning from ear to ear the entire time. I couldn’t tell if he was happy because I was there with him or because of the movie. I assumed it was the latter.

Death and Rebirth

My parents would die just days apart from each other. At the cemetery, my ex-girlfriend consoled me by their gravesites.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“You’re not gonna like it.”

“It’s okay,” she replied softly.

I shrugged my shoulders nonchalantly.

“I don’t feel a damn thing.”

I turned to face my ex-girlfriend. I could tell she knew I was lying. After a few moments, she nodded for me to keep searching for the right words. I sighed and continued.

“I feel… disappointed. I used to have fantasies about this day when I was a kid, shortly after they separated. I thought, ‘This will be the day that I’m finally free from their bullshit.’ I’ll be happy and relieved. Free of guilt. A different person.”

Despondent, I glanced down at my parent’s tombstones.

“But I don’t feel any of those things.”

Suddenly, a lump formed in my throat as hot tears began to roll down my cheeks. It was the first time I had expressed anything aside from apathy since the age of six.

“Dammit,” I sobbed. “Those bastards really did a number on me, huh?”

My ex-girlfriend wrapped her arm around my shoulder and held me as I wept.

Crow Jonah Norlander

TELL ME YOU’RE A HOT MESS WITHOUT TELLING ME YOU’RE A HOT MESS by D.E. Hardy

December 21, 2021 · Creative Nonfiction

I should have known it was a bad time to have a friend over. I was 15. My parents were divorcing, the house divided into a his/hers venn diagram, the kitchen being the overlapping space.

I should have foregone the offer of a snack, and led my friend straight to my room that was squarely situated on the her-side of the floorplan. Better, I could have suggested my friend and I walk to her house where we could have eaten whatever we wanted. Even in before-times, my family rarely had anything good in the fridge.

I should have shut the fridge door when I saw our side of the fridge contained a half-eaten jar of pickles and a deflated bag of bread with two end pieces in it, while my dad’s side was fully stocked with grapes and mozzarella sticks, a pack of cinnamon buns and half a pie.

I should have lied and told my friend she could help herself, that there were no sides of the fridge, I should have pretended there would be no consequences for taking my dad’s food, that there wouldn’t be a scene, that he wouldn’t penalize my mom by deducting the cost of whatever my friend might take—some juice, a glass of milk—from my mom’s next support payment, that she wouldn’t yell at me for being selfish, for making things harder than they already were.

But I didn’t have any of that kind of sense, and so I just stood there, confused, in front of the fridge that hung open like a cracked rib cage, watching my friend’s expression evolve, her eyes widening then darkening, as she realized I thought my family was normal, how in watching her reaction, I was only now learning it wasn’t.

Crow Jonah Norlander

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