MRS BEATRIX by Glenn Orgias

The Gimp BoxI lay in my apartment worrying about death and worrying that my constant worrying would eventually manifest in my sickness and death. So, when I saw a job ad looking for a “big guy” who was willing to “become anonymous” and to live in a “dungeon”, I said: Bingo. Because I really needed a place to hide out from Shovel. Mrs Beatrix’s place of business was on the cobbled streets of the Rossebuurt district, Amsterdam.“That house,” said a man, pointing at a terrace house. “The dungeon is below,” he said, with a terrible excitement. “Are you the new Gimp?”I said nothing. “How old are you?” he said in a whisper.“Twenty-six.”The man swallowed. “Mrs Beatrix makes the Gimps wear masks, so you never see their face,” he said. He looked crazy, but crazy in a way that I could handle. Not the pitiless kind that made Shovel a monster.   My first month working for Mrs Beatrix, I learned to hog-tie clients, and gag them. I learned that clients liked to laugh as they whipped me. And I began to feel like maybe I wasn’t as heinous a person as I had thought. This all happened strictly under contract, on Tuesdays through Saturdays, matinee and evening sessions. Mrs Beatrix turns the dungeon lights off at ten pm each night, and I get locked up in the Gimp box with Gary. I’m 6’4” so the box is tight, it’s wide enough but not long enough. Gary gets in first, curls up, and I spoon him. We sleep together like big puppies.Gary used to be an accountant. He is short and pudgy with grey skin and greying hair that’s flat almost as if it’s been ironed. He is teaching me the Gimp code. In our situation it’s good to stick together, he says. Follow the code, he says. He’s a good leader. You know? We live in symbiosis. We ablute together. We eat together. That shit engenders a closeness. Gimps are supposed to be occasionally “naughty”, sometimes we’re supposed to resist the clients and—but what happened was, I punched out a farmer from Nacogdoches, TX. Broke off his tooth.This farmer was strangling me. Not in an out of the ordinary way, but certain kinds of men remind me of Shovel. And this Nacogdoches toolbag reminded with more veracity than most. And I fucken lost it. À la his broken tooth.So after we get locked up in the Gimp Box, Gary says, “You’ve got a lot of repressed rage, buddy. You broke the Gimp code.”“I know, man. I’m sorry.”“Also, you breached your contract. You’re lucky Mrs Beatrix didn’t fire you.”“I know. Thanks for talking to her.”“The client wants to sue. Litigation, buddy. And we couldn’t find that tooth. Luckily, she’s got a soft spot for you.”“She fucken hates me.”Gary sighed...“I’m sorry man. I know you’re trying to help me.”“I’ve never seen a Gimp go ape-shit like that,” said Gary. “With one of your arms chained to the wall? No, I have not seen that. Just between you and me, that was impressive.”I didn’t say anything.“You’ve had some experience brawling, huh?”“Some,” I said quietly.“Buddy. Are you hiding from the law?”“The law? No. I got myself in trouble with a guy.”“And he’s not a good guy to be in trouble with?”“Yeah.”“It’s okay,” said Gary. “This is a good place to hide. You’re anonymous. But you also need to be submissive, okay. Calm.”“Yeah.”“Now, let’s go to sleep. And no more bad dreams, okay?”“Okay.”“Because we live in a nightmare world, buddy. A world of the dark and the depraved. And so our dreams are our freedom. So dream of white sand, untouched and serene, the ocean lapping warm over your feet, coming and receding like a heartbeat – Dum-dum, dum-dum....”Gary goes through the ritual, and I fall to sleep. Since I’ve been working for Mrs Beatrix, my nightmares have been less. They are almost gone, Gary says. He says it’s just training. You do the work, work hard on yourself, then you change. You change yourself. Rather than external shit changing you. Then you’re on a path to freedom. Doing the workThe dungeon has brick walls and slate floors. Easy to clean. It has a wooden door like a castle. It’s heated by pipes and is always warm. Sweating is important to the clients. Two Saturdays a month, Mrs Beatrix runs the beginner sessions. Mrs Beatrix has to work hard to get the newbies into the zone. Every new face, I’m looking for Shovel. Would he recognise me in this devil-horned oni kabuki mask? While I’m chained against a wall and getting limply cat-o-nine-tailed by a short fat guy with his balls duct-taped against one thigh and his dick duct-taped against the other? Gary is in a leather onesie that you crawl into via an ass-crack zipper. He has a red-fanged oni kabuki mask on and an elegant lady is tentatively slapping his bottom with a paddle.When Mrs Beatrix finally creates a suitable atmosphere of fear and adrenaline, when the clients enter the zone, what I see is: Gary is getting hot candle wax dripped on him by a bird-like male in a fedora hat. And Gary’s oni kabuki mask, is it smiling, or grimacing? I can’t say. But it’s just a mask, and under the mask Gary is calm, because Gary is on a white beach, feeling the sand between his toes, feeling the sun on his back, seeing the wonders that God hath made. The fedora hat man gets me in a choke hold and I’m gagging for air while Gary serenely submits to about twenty pegs being latched onto his nipples. I wish for that kind of serenity.What does the Gimp contract allow?-Open handed slaps,-Pinching,-Tickles and horsey-bites.Just for starters.Gary and I have different contracts. In my contract there’s no nudity. No sex. General cleaning duties. Light battery. Slapping, whipping, etc. Strangulation within reason, no blackouts. Those are the basics, which is good enough for most clients, apart from the more sickos. The sickos want more and pay more but are still never happy. That’s why I also have “security duties” in my contract. The idea is I’m a Gimp primarily, but also a Security Guard in the event of some sicko getting out-of-kilter. My safe word is Bananas. But if a sicko gets out-of-kilter and my role becomes Security, then the code word is Thunderdome.A hundred dollars an hour, plus board.But Gary’s got different clauses in his contract.Because Gary can take almost anything, submissively and contentedly.-Getting peed on, for example.At the same time as wrestling a client, Gary is watching Mrs Beatrix’s back to make sure no one sneaks up on her, and also keeping an eye on me—he can tell just from the pallor of my skin what my O2 levels are. I’ve seen him subdue volatile clients with little other than gentle patting; love basically. What Gary does, it comes from compassion. The clients come for Mrs Beatrix in the same way that fans went to see Nirvana because of Kurt Cobain, not realising that there in back was the hero Dave Ghrol.By the end of the beginner session, Mrs Beatrix is stepping on client faces, twisting her foot down on strangled balls. She is six-one and PVC-clad. Only wears black. She is visually ageless, and raven. How I see all of this is through a plastic bag over my face held there by the pale, hazy form of a plump patron. My hands are chained to the wall and there is a moment of panic but Beatrix pulls the bag off my head just before I call Bananas.She has a sixth sense for that shit. And she whips the frenzied plump guy into a corner and he begs for forgiveness.I will kill that fat shit if I ever see him in the real world.Oh I will. Oh my God, I am a killer at heart.I memorise the motherfucker’s face.Which, of course, is a breach of the Gimp code. Sometimes in the Gimp box, Gary coughs. He tries to muffle the coughs, but we are pressed together in just loincloths, so I can tell. I’m not sure why he’s trying to hide it. But the morning after the Saturday session I see a fine mist of blood adhered to the wall of the Gimp box.What does the Gimp code say about secrets?The same as every other decent code. So I wipe the blood clean and say nothing.  On SundayWe clean the dungeon. We use a high pressure washer. But first we scrub the walls with a Makita Power Bristle and a Bulk Blenz Industrial Cleaner that smells like Forest Pine. We mop the floor. We lubricate the chains and whips. Disinfect the swings, slings, cuffs, restraints, masks and gags (anything leather). Wipe down the nipple stimulators. Fold the laundered hand towels. And oil the dildo machine. This is all contractual.Afterwards we sit in the small courtyard out the back of Mrs Beatrix’s terrace drinking coffee. It is cold but sunny and I can sit out here without a mask. Gary says Mrs Beatrix is married. Her real name is Carol Smithers. “How long have you worked here, Gaz?”Gary looks up from the De Telegraaf, shrugs. “Ten years,” he says. Gary is wearing cargo pants and sandals. He is also wearing socks. “It’s been interesting work,” he says. “There’s always more to learn.”“Learn what?”“Inner peace,” he says, standing. “Let’s go for a walk.”I don’t know about that. No one knows me in this old part of the Dam. However, my likeness is easily described. Shovel has ways of finding people. There is an answering machine in an apartment that I still, theoretically, rent; and I called it not that long ago, and there was a message. Come see me, he said. Don’t make me look, he said, not indifferently but not without heat. The anguish of waiting, buddy, isn’t that worse than just plain blackness?“Come on,” says Gary. “We’ll be fine.” I pull my cap low and put my grey hoodie up over my head, and follow Gary into the gothic adventureland of De Wallen.The streets are one-way ruts made in Medieval times that are used now almost exclusively by Volkswagens. Sex workers in windows remove sleep from their eyes and stifle yawns. Gary buys a twenty-four pack of toilet paper and carries it around. In a church hall beside the Hash & Hemp Museum there is ballroom dancing on Sundays.Gary can dance.Waltz, Samba, Rhumba, Capioeria, Salsa, Tango, swing.He dances, portly Gary. He can lead. Good leading is invisible, unnoticeable. Gary maintains tautness between himself and his partner. When Gary and a new partner become synchronous, each surrenders to the other. Gary’s ability to surrender is his strength. It’s why he’s a good dancer and it accounts for the deftness of his fingers as he hogties a client, for his tolerance of fear and pain, and for his oneness with the revs of the dildo machine. HaircutGary wants to get his hair cut. I sit on the stoop out front of the hairdresser. “I’ll mind the toilet paper.”“I had a son about the same age as you,” says Gary. “He never made an effort with his appearance either.” Gary is smiling but there is pain there. The door bell chimes as he goes inside and sits and the hairdresser floats an apron over him.What I do with the info that Gary had a son is I wonder what if I was Gary’s son. Gary would be a great father. I lean back against the building and close my eyes.In my mind I see a debtor, a man so far in debt that it cannot be repaid by money alone. The man is on his knees, holding his forearm protectively across his face but it doesn’t stop the bat as the bat comes crashing down on his arm and his face and he lies shivering there, flat on the wet bitumen. Haha, harhar, goes Shovel. Again, he says to me, as I am holding the bat.When I open my eyes, a man across the road is staring at me. “You were talking in your sleep,” he says. He puts his finger to his lips and sits back into a shadow. I can see why I didn’t see him before, the building is grey and he is grey–grey face, grey beard, grey beanie, sitting in a grey sleeping bag, ready for the Arctic, but wearing black sunglasses and holding a bunch of dead flowers. This man is a chameleon against a wall, no predator would ever find. Perhaps this is a choice he made, to hide. Or, he has become like this through being forgotten. Does it matter? What it comes down to: he is no one.“What you doing with all that toilet paper?” he says. “You going to use it all?”“In time,” I say.But I get up and I give the man two rolls, and he asks how much money I have. I don’t like his smell, he smells like piss, I don’t like that I don’t like it but I still don’t, and for this reason I don’t lie to him. I tell him I’ve got fifty Euro on me. But I’m keeping it. I don’t know what you would use it for, but that’s not why I’m keeping it, I say to him. I’m keeping it because I’m selfish. I want it.“Well, thanks for the roll,” he says, holding the flowers and the rolls. “Happy dreams.”I take a mental snapshot of his face for this is a man who has seen me at my weakest and knows that I am vulnerable. Ampallang As I lay down with Gary and close the lid of the Gimp box, the dungeon door opens and Mrs Beatrix comes in. I can see her high heels through the breathing holes at the bottom of the box.“Hello boys,” she says as she sits down and crosses her legs. “How is buddy today?”Gary says. “He’s doing well, Carol.”Mrs Beatrix says, “He’s doing a lot better, lately.”Gary says, “yes.”I don’t speak to Beatrix. Gary is The Gimp Rep. Beatrix is negotiating an appropriate reparations deal with the farmer from Nacogdoches, TX. His dental bill was four thousand dollars. We don’t want any police or lawyers involved, so she is having to figure out a way to console him, financially. “What are you getting at?” says Gary.“Well, I’ve had a request that might help us with the finances,” she says. “A well connected, potential, new client, who is willing to pay extra if you were both to be ampallanged.”I feel Gary tighten. The tip of Mrs Beatrix’s heel begins to jiggle.“Body piercings are excluded under contract, Carol.”“Yes Gary. This would require an amendment. You’d be compensated. We’d all be well compensated,”“How well compensated?” “A thousand dollars, for each of you.”I try to advise Gary through touch that this is more than fucken okay with me.“I’m unsure if buddy knows what ampallanging involves Carol.”“Tell him it’s a male genital piercing that penetrates horizontally through the glands.”“A barbell through the head of the penis,” says Gary.My grip on Gary weakens.“Yes,” says Mrs Beatrix. “I’ll need to discuss it with him, Carol.”“Of course,” she says getting up. She pauses though. “Gary, this is an... important client. I...” she sighs.“It’s okay, Carol. Let me speak to buddy.”“Good night boys.”“Good night,” says Gary and there is a solemnity in his voice and great power, the amazing power of the unsaid and a kind of love. Gary says there’s nothing in the code that obligates a gimp to respond to non-contractual requests like this. But there’s the money though, Gary doesn’t mention the money. Gary’s question is: if it’s not in the contract, and it’s not in the Gimp code, then why (aside from the cash, I’m thinking), would we agree to this? This painful thing. And the answer for Gary is that Mrs Beatrix has been good to us and cares for us, and pain is just pain. Because Gary does things out of kindness. But I want the money, a grand might get me out of a good part of the trouble I’m in. A Bullet In The HeadThe body-piercing place is in a tattoo studio just over the Rokin. We have a booking under the name Carol Smithers. The receptionist’s eyes flick to my pants before she looks up. “Right,” she says, jabbing her thumb backwards. “I just need to get... Bear,” she calls.A bear-sized man comes out from the curtain, wizened and rough with scars. He assesses me professionally. “That’s some crazy ink, brother,” he says about my face. He slaps his palms together. “So, who’s first?”“I just need to sit down a minute,” says Gary, and he begins coughing.“You alright?”“Yes.” He nods, coughs. “You... go...”There is a white room behind the curtain. There are instruments. The young receptionist joins us. There is a big boned woman in there with a Maureen nametag in a nurse’s outfit who is wiping down tools with alcohol swabs.The Bear asks me if I want to sit or stand. He says that the young receptionist is going to do me. She hasn’t done genital stuff before, because she is a trainee, but that’s why we got the discount, he says, smiling.I stand in front of a waist-high workbench. The young receptionist puts a wooden block down perpendicular to me and I take out my dick and lay it along the block. Like a corpse at the morgue. She looks at it. Then she looks at Maureen. Maureen looks at it with a medical expert’s indifference. “Bear,” she says, “you want to take a look at this.”Bear comes over, raises an eyebrow. ‘Better use the bigger gauge,’ he says, and he selects a long, tri-bevelled, steel needle from a tray of equipment.. The average penis has a 3.2 inch circumference. You drive a 12 gauge needle through 3.2 inches of dick, then there is a scientific law from which you can deduce how much meat will be displaced by the needle. But displaced where? Out the side of the head? Like brains from a gunshot wound?The young receptionist holds the needle a half inch above my dick. The second before you shoot someone in the head for the first time, as the gun is shaking in your hand, that’s the moment you remember, the moment when you could’ve, in theory, refused. Through the back window I can see a timber Ferris wheel, its empty cages trundling up and over, the whole thing seeming to move like a giant cog driven by some mechanism of wind and time. The receptionist’s hands are trembling. “Just fucken do it,” I say to her.  Gary and I shuffle back to the dungeon like two critically ampallanged soldiers. There is nothing for the throbbing except to ice ourselves and become absorbed in a few rounds of Canasta.But, there is something wrong with Gary in the Gimp box that night. I wake up because he is so hot he’s burning me. He goes stiff, then his body becomes a bag of air, then it’s like the bag has wild rats in it. But I can’t wake him. I shove up onto my hands and knees and press my back against the Gimp lid. He’s convulsing. I slam myself upwards until the hinge gives. And I get out and Gary flails against the walls of the Gimp box. I bang on the dungeon door but it’s soundproof. The dildo machine weighs about 15 kilos so I grab it and ram the door open. Then I limp upstairs to the interior door that leads into Beatrix’s house. I bang my fist on the door. “We need help.”Bang. Bang. Bang.“Hello?”“Something’s wrong with Gary.”“Pardon?”I can feel Beatrix’s presence behind the door, strangely tentative.“Open the door Carol... Don’t make me bust it down.”The door opens a crack. There is a light behind the door and Carol–Mrs Beatrix–Carol Smithers is way older than I thought. She is an elderly woman. Dressed in a terry toweling robe, her hair in curlers, she looks fragile. Her eyes widen as she sees my unmasked, tattooed face, as she sees the version of me that I have long cultivated. I have worshipped all versions of the devil. “Call an ambulance,” I say. I carry Gary upstairs into Carol’s living room.  The room is cluttered by two skirted, overstuffed sofas in floral green and floor lamps with lace-fringed shades. In the corner is an ancient man in a wheelchair, Mr Smithers I assume. He breathes through an oxygen mask.Carol is on her knees holding Gary’s head in her lap, talking to him. The way she talks to him, and smooths his hair, it’s what Gary deserves, that love.  The Gimp Box Gary doesn’t come back the next morning. So I clean the dungeon. I clean it once so it’s clean and then a second time, because I’m in here alone but if I’m cleaning I’m not just alone I’m doing something.I’m sitting on the Gimp box icing my penis when there’s a knock on the dungeon door.“Buddy, can you get in the box please. I’d like to talk to you.”Beatrix comes in. She tells me that Gary is out of hospital, but he is not coming back. The doctor recommended against further Gimping.“What’s wrong with him,” I say. “Was it the ampallang?”“He’s...dying buddy.”“What?”“I’m sorry. He’s known for some time.”“What’s wrong with him?”“He said you’d ask that, but he doesn’t want anyone to dwell on it.”“Dwell on it... Well, how long has he got?”“I don’t know,” she says her voice shaking. “Not very long.”“Where is he?”Carol sighs. “He said you would ask that, but even if I knew I couldn’t tell you buddy. I’m bound by confidentiality.”“What, by the contract?”“Yes.”“... did he tell you not to tell me?”“I’m sorry buddy,” she says quietly. “It’s not about you or us, he wants to be alone.” Through the holes in the box I can see her heels and the shins of her leather pants. “I’ve known him since he was a boy,” she says. “I loved him, very much, before I met Alfred.”“Alfred. The old guy, with the tank?” “Gary says he doesn’t know if you’ll want to stay, if he is gone.”I don’t say anything.“Gary wanted me to read you something. Okay?”“Okay.”“Dear Buddy,” she reads. “I’ve known a handful of Gimps in my time and not ever have I felt as strongly for one as I do for you. I know you are a gentle man under all the smoke and mirrors, and I like that man. I know you hate the thought of yourself alone in the gimp box. But buddy, the sufferer is the liver of life, experiencing life as it is. The hedonist only ever searches for life. To live with suffering and worry is a learned skill like any other, to forgive is a learned skill too. And there is forgiveness in the box buddy. I found it in there. We live in a nightmare world buddy, but there’s a white beach somewhere with your name spelled out in its sands.”Carol folds the note. “You know I can’t do the shit Gary does.”“I know, we need to expand your capabilities.”“I don’t know about being in this fucken box alone.”“I know. I’m scared too. I’m scared of you. You’re a fearful creature. I want to do this though, if we can. I need to. Can I rely on you?”“I don’t know.”“Gary says I can,” she says.I can’t answer for what Gary says. I can’t say if Gary is right or wrong, all I can say is only Gary would say that.Carol tells me that she has done a deal with the farmer from Nacogdoches where we don’t have to pay his dental bill but...he wants to come back, with two Texan friends. For what she is calling a forgiveness session. “Is that something you could handle?”“I don’t know.”“It avoids any legal consequences.” “He looks like a guy I know. A guy I do not like.”“I’ll help you.” “Okay.”“Okay? Okay. I’m locking the box now buddy.” She’s had new hinges put onto the Gimp box with 40 mill screws. There will be no breaking them. I already miss Gary. I don’t want Gary to die. I don’t care about the Texans or the whips or the choking. What scares me is what is in this box.She locks the Gimp box and her heels click across the floor and the dungeon door locks. And what is in front of me is pure darkness and the questions that this darkness brings.“White sand,” I say. White sand.

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UNDERGROUND READS FOR FREAKS WHO CAN’T WAIT FOR THE NEW TOXIC AVENGER MOVIE TO COME OUT by Rick Claypool and Lor Gislason

Everything is fucked up, okay? Ask us what’s fucked up and if there was a gesture to gesture toward all of it, that would be the gesture we’d make. This deep, deep fucked upedness – which is also a wide, wide fucked upedness – means a lot of things. Geopolitical things. Authoritarian things. Environmental things. Toxic things.And you know what? We’re tired. And we’re guessing you are, too. And we’re just going to assume if you’re reading this that we’re all tired because we’re all doing our best fighting the good fight, doing what we gotta do, helping how we can help, protecting what we gotta protect.But at least the new Toxic Avenger movie is finally almost out, because as a reward for dealing with all the fucked upedness as best we can, we all deserve a little treat. And the treat we deserve is a remake of a low-budget horror comedy from the 80s about a twerpy, mop-wielding loser who is transformed into a hero by exposure to toxic sludge (aka the type of thing giant corporations describe to their shareholders as externalized risk). And that hero, of course, is Toxie, the ass-kicking superhuman mutant who defends the citizens of Tromaville, New Jersey from fascist thugs and corrupt politicians.Now it’s only fair that, while waiting for this treat you deserve, you reward yourself for doing such an outstanding job of waiting so patiently with – you guessed it – MORE TREATS. And the treats you deserve for so outstandingly waiting patiently are books.And the specific books you deserve are these, according to us (in no particular order): Behind Every Tree, Beneath Every Rock by Michael Tichy (Castaigne Press, 74 pages)Tichy’s kickass nature’s revenge novella answers the question, what if the Toxie and Treebeard had a baby, and that baby slaughters neo-Nazis. Maggots Screaming! by Max Booth III (Ghoulish Books, 342 pages)A father son duo find corpse copies of themselves in the backyard and decide to watch The Simpsons together, typical Texas activities! Max goes into every detail of decomposition and it's an absolute blast. Ghosts of East Baltimore by David Simmons (Broken River Books, 189 pages)John Dies At The End meets The Wire. David Simmons’ unique voice tells a deeply weird and extremely fun story in this horror novel that winds through the grittiest and grimiest corners of Baltimore where occult addictions and mechanized villains rule. My Dog Shits Cash by Luke Kondor (Bod Dot Press, 208 pages)We adore Luke's writing and we will shout about it from the rooftops. They're incredibly fast reads, that perfect Bizarro blend of absurdism, gore and humor. The latter half of this gets WILD. Transmuted by Eve Harms (Unnerving, 113 pages)Queer stories by queer writers! A back alley style gender affirming surgery goes haywire for our protag Isa in a big way. Eve’s descriptions are delicious. Lars Breaxface, Werewolf in Space by Brandon  (Spaceboy Books, 320 pages)  It's stupid fun riding along with badboy space werewolf Lars and his gang of misfits through the galaxy, causing mayhem and escaping from some of the most fucked up space enemies ever, including a variety of killer dildos. This book has a one-star Goodreads review that reads, “DNF - so ridiculously crude” and a five-star Goodreads review that reads, “So ridiculously crude I finished twice.” Slices: Tales of Bizarro and Absurdist Horror by Scott Cole (Black T-Shirt Books, 160 pages)Round out your toxie reading with a collection! The weird has its roots in short stories, and Cole is a master of hooking you from the first page. Huge variety here, so there's something for everyone. Bullet Tooth by Grant Wamack (Broken River Books, 164 pages)A VHS-entombed demon awakens and wreaks havoc on the streets of Chicago, manipulating people around a student artist named Caleb and stoking beefs to fuel gang violence and feed on the ensuring death. This is literary B-movie horror with a message that hits its targets dead on. Witch Piss by Sam Pink (134 pages)Sam Pink’s signature deadpan absurdist lens on everyday life turns the experience of hanging out with neighborhood oddballs into a series of strange adventures. Another Chicago story, the abandoned buildings and dead-end streets set the stage of this side-splittingly hilarious book where Pink’s reveling in bad taste and broken dreams calls to mind some of Troma’s best (worst?).   The Nothing That Is by Kyle Winkler (179 pages)A broke-as-hell employee of a small town catering business versus a cosmic manifestation of demonic greed. Love a likeable loser turned working class hero! Coyote by Max Restaino (Amphetamine Sulphate, 69 pages)A grim and grimy love letter to the forbidden horrors and pleasures of cult VHS gems, Coyote legit feels like a cursed and grainy lo-fi nightmare. Chaindevils by Matthew Mitchell (Weirdpunk Books, 128 pages)A propulsive post-apocalyptic splatterfest where meth addict warriors terrorize the post-apocalyptic countryside and wage chainsaw-powered war against all manner of menacing mutants. And there’s lust and love and a blood red anti-authoritarian streak running through it too! And finally, here are our shameless plugs for each other’s books, which we both genuinely love and which absolutely belong on this list: Inside-Out by Lor Gislason (DarkLit Press, 86 pages)Gislason’s debut novella gushes with lo-fi gore and goo. But don’t mistake Inside Out for nihilistic ultra-violence – the sympathetic characters and relatable emotional arcs make this not just gross, but fun. Is cozy body horror a thing? It is now. Skull Slime Tentacle Witch War by Rick Claypool (Anxiety Press, 298 pages)I'm in awe that Rick can make a story featuring a guy who pukes knives pull at my heartstrings. It's such a “this is what writing’s all about” inspiration. Live your best goopy life!So… yeah. It's easy to get lost in futility when the world is this fucked up on the regular. But that just makes the little moments of joy and weirdness even more important to hold on to. Watch a stupid movie. Read a demented book book. Tell your friend a bad joke. And take it one day at a time.

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DAWNS by Bright Aboagye

On some days, you’re a ghost to your own body. Some mornings, your bones feel borrowed. Never been yours. Just something you’re renting till it all breaks down. You lie still and feel every joint light up like someone lit a match inside your marrow.

***

 It’s 4:27 am and you’re staring at your laptop, trying to write a suicide note that sounds less dramatic than it is.All you’ve got so far is, I am tired.Three words. Nothing more. You backspace it and watch the cursor blink like it’s judging you. It’s the only thing in this room that has energy left. Your chest feels like it’s being stomped on from the inside, but you’re used to that.That’s the thing about sickle cell anaemia. It doesn’t kill you quick. It just… makes life a battle to survive. One crisis at a time. You were born on a rainy Friday in Accra. Your mother still says your scream sounded like broken notes on a piano. You spent the first two weeks in an incubator while your father paced the hospital halls, Bible in one hand, borrowed money in the other and watched for miracle. You almost died three times before you could crawl.By age 6, you knew the word “crisis” better than your own name.At 10, you learned to fake smiles in class when your fingers swelled like fat sausages and your spine throbbed like it had been crashed. Teachers called you lazy. Friends called you weak. You learned how to laugh it off.At 12, you wrote your first story. It was about a boy who turned his pain into fire and burned down everything that hurt him. You showed it to your English teacher. She said, “This is very… interesting.” She never brought it up again.Now you’re 25. A writer. Or at least you try to be.You’ve submitted stories to every online magazine. Most people never reply. The few that do send the same line, Your work is interesting but doesn’t quite fit our current needs. Or the usual, unfortunately we must pass it down. You used to believe that meant try again, edit the story and submit a better one. Now you just delete the emails without reading.One time, an editor told you, “Your writing’s too dark. Can you maybe add more hope? Readers like a little light at the end of the tunnel.”You wanted to ask her if she’s ever spent three nights awake trying not to scream because your bones were fighting each other. There’s nothing like hope in your journal. Just pain. Your friends say they love you.But they also say things like, “So, what triggers your sickle cell? Like… if you drink too much or what?”“Do you think you’ll live to 40? Have you thought about kids? I mean… would that even be fair?”Sometimes they say nothing at all when you tell them about the bad nights. They just drop emojis.A friend once said, “But at least you get to stay home and write, right?”Right. Stay home and bleed without screaming. Stay home and count your red blood cells like coins in a dying piggy bank. Stay home and write stories no one publishes and even if published, no one really reads. You want to die. You were more than tired. You just hate being the only one in your body who knows how much this hurts.You’ve thought about everything: Overdosing (you’re already halfway there with the meds anyway), slitting your wrist (but that might take too long, and you hate mess), hanging (but there’s no beam in your room that looks strong enough) and sometimes you think you’ll just will it. Just lie here and tell your heart, you can stop now. Just go.Last week, your old crush Dufie texted out of nowhere.“Hey stranger. Was just thinking of you. You, okay?”You stared at the message for two hours. Typed “yeah, all good” and deleted it.You almost told her.Almost said, “I wake up and it feels like my skeleton wants to escape.”“I haven’t written in weeks because my hands don’t always obey anymore.”“I think I’m losing the war in my body.”But you didn’t. Because Dufie likes pretty things. And you’re not one of them. You’ve never been attractive.The sun’s starting to argue with the horizon. The pain has reduced but your hands still shake. You start typing again.I’m tired. But I’m here. And I wrote this. That must count for something.You save it as a draft. Just in case you wake up tomorrow. You have a half-finished novel on your desktop called Sinking Life. It’s about a sick boy who becomes a famous writer and dies before his first book is published. You wonder if maybe you should finish it before you go. Or maybe leave it half-done. Let someone else write the ending.

***

It’s 4:48 am now.Your parents prayed for ten years to have you. Ten long, fasting, and all-night vigil years. Anointing oil on their foreheads every Sunday, candle wax melting into prayer mats, womb soaked in prophecy and mouths sipping holy water. Your mother nearly died giving birth, and your father named you, Nhyira — blessing.The irony doesn’t escape you. You were supposed to be a miracle. Instead, you became a calculation. A schedule. A lifelong stress no one clocks out of.“Don’t sleep without a blanket.”“Did you drink water?”“Take your folic acid.”“Have you eaten?”“Don’t strain yourself, remember your blood.”Every phone call is surveillance. Every visit feels like a check-up. Every hug is full of fear.You started noticing it in their eyes by the time you were fifteen. The look that says, if anything happens to you, we’ll die too. You became the air they breathed and the choking in their throats.Your father still tells people, “My son is a writer.”He doesn’t mention you haven’t published a single book. That you’re rejected more than you’re read. That you spend most of your days in a dark room, writing paragraphs you delete an hour later.Your mother is worse. She sends you Bible verses every morning. Sometimes five in a row. Psalm 118:17 is her favorite, “I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord.”You don’t have the heart to tell her that just surviving doesn’t feel like living.  And the good works is the death you keep waiting for to come. You tried, though. God knows you did.

***

You enrolled at the University of Ghana, studied English, made few friends and got good grades. Interned at a radio station. Had hope. Had plans. But pain doesn’t respect dreams. And crisis doesn’t care about deadlines.By your third year, you missed too many lectures. Couldn’t walk some days. Couldn’t even speak some nights. You almost died in a hostel room surrounded by empty ORS sachets and paracetamol drug to subside the pain. Your father drove from Tema at midnight. You could tell he wanted to be angry. He wanted to ask why didn’t you call sooner?But he just held your hand and said, “You’re all we have.”And that’s what broke you. So, you moved out.Rented a tiny single room in Dome. Far enough that your mother can’t drop in unannounced. Close enough that your father can still send Jollof with the delivery guy.  They didn’t understand it. Your mother cried for a week. Your father just said, “At least let someone stay with you.”You said no. You didn’t want a nurse. Or a cousin. Or a caretaker. You just wanted yourself. And a space where you could fall apart without making someone else bleed. You told them it was for your writing. But really, it was because you couldn’t bear to see them wait for you to die.Some days you wonder if your mother regrets praying for you. If she watches you limp into the living room and thinks, maybe it would’ve been easier if we never had him.You try not to think like that. But the thoughts come anyway.You are their answered prayer and their curse. You’ve tried to write about it before.A story about a woman who gets her miracle child and then loses her mind caring for him. You submitted it to a magazine in Nigeria. The editor replied, “This feels too personal. Too bloated. Can you give it up with some humor?”You laughed until you almost coughed blood. 

***

It’s 5:02 am now.You hear the muezzin call for prayer from the mosque across the street. A rooster screams behind your window. Your joints feel like they’ve been replaced with rusted bolts. You haven’t slept.You open your WhatsApp. Your mother has already sent you Psalm 118:17 again. You type, “Morning, Ma. I’m okay.”You delete, “I’m okay.”You type, “I’m still here.” Then you put your phone down.You hoped your mother wouldn’t reply instantly. Because if she did, it would be another trap. Another invitation disguised as concern.“You should come to church. The Legon Interdenominational.”“The drama group needs someone like you to write their plays.”You never told her that your heart has been dry for years. That the ink she sees in your stories is mostly pain. You don’t believe in miracles anymore. The first and only time you went to the church, you sat rigid (as if you were imprisoned) in the back row, counting ceiling fans and exit signs. The choir sang and you wished to be a part of them.  But you weren’t about to stand up there and sing to a God who hasn’t even blinked in your direction. The same God who lets you scream into your pillow night after night and never sends even a squeak back.You can’t write for a drama group when you’re living in one. And the script? It’s just hurt on repeat.The fan keeps spinning. The cursor keeps blinking.You close the suicide note; you’ve not changed your mind. You just want to finish one more story first. A second chance to live for few minutes. 

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RENTAL LEASE APPLICATION by Anna Koltes

Name: You almost write his surname in place of your own, a knee jerk response. You slap the mosquito that has landed on the back of your neck to feed. Upon assuming his name, you forgot your own. You grapple with the correct spelling. The vowels squish uncertainly inside your head, the consonants bumping awkwardly like soup dumplings. But this should be the least of your concerns. After so long together, your name isn’t the only possession you’ve left behind. Reason for moving: You can make something up here. It will be simpler. A barbecue fire that got out of control, a raccoon infestation, or neighbors who practiced with their heavy metal band. But surely that’s ridiculous. No one listens to heavy metal anymore. You chew the end of the pen even though it’s plastic and you leave mouse-like teeth marks like the others before you. You finally write something blasé, like work commute. You won’t say the truth because who does. You won’t give him the satisfaction. How long do you want to rent the property for: The last time you moved, it was into a home of your own. You felt grown-up and financially intelligent as you signed the mortgage papers. You took photos holding hands in front of the house. Look at her, look at him. So young yet so responsible. What great taste they have. There was a city skyline view from your kitchen window. You bought knitted placemats together. You invited people over for rosé and tartlets on the deck you built. You were proud. And then later just embarrassed. Look at her. She put so much into that house, just to lose it. Do you have any pets: You got a rabbit during lockdown. As a bunny it was adorable, cartoon-like with its gigantic floppy ears. But the bigger it became, the more it bit, tearing the flesh from your fingers every time you proffered carrot sticks. He watched and snickered when you flinched in pain, enjoying the punishment. Well, you wanted a pet, didn’t you. You brought this on yourself. When the rabbit escaped, you crawled in the dirt on your hands and knees for hours, while he only half-heartedly scanned the rose bushes. You always wondered how the rabbit managed to open the cage door all by itself. Do you have any references: You had friends, before. You were even described as ‘friendly’, on one or two occasions. But when you left his circle, few reached out. When former acquaintances bumped into you, they contracted sudden and debilitating prosopagnosia. They immediately forgot about your existence, as though you only existed in a specific storyline of their invention, in a universe where you were not an individual but a couple. Maybe you should have gone to that pottery workshop and made friends of your own. Instead you relied on him for social sustenance. Now look at you, reluctantly providing the number of an elderly neighbor who once called you ‘a nice young lady’. You don’t know if she will remember you, or if she’s even still alive to answer the phone. Do you have any children: He could never comprehend why you didn’t want to bear his offspring.  Come on, now. They would be practically genetic superhumans—with his creative wizardry, his culinary accomplishments, his knife-sharpening skills, his cutting-edge assessment of your flaws. And you…Well, you were strong, built for carrying heavy burdens. Remember that time you pushed the car all the way up the hill? Actually, you can’t remember his exact words. Instead you spent too much time wondering if that was all you truly provided—a sturdy pair of arms and legs, like a well-made table or a shoe cabinet. Have you ever been evicted: You wonder if it counts to be thrown out of your own house. Not physically, he never used his hands. His words were sufficiently sharp enough to peel the skin from your resolve, to fillet the soft and secret parts of your body and turn it into a dish of his choosing; a serving of perfectly seared offal. Your charred innards displayed on a hot plate for all the neighbors to see. You carried your own boxes of possessions to your car because remember, you were strong. You were made for this. At least in the physical sense.  Why should we rent to you: You list all the appetizing traits you think they want to hear: you are clean and tidy, you are quiet. Except the inside of your head feels like a burgled home, littered with the debris of your poor choices. You don’t feel like picking up the broken glass or wiping the puddles of your own blood. You fester in the same pair of pumpkin-patterned pajamas. You eat ice cream wriggling with worms. Nobody pays attention to your outbursts of sorrow and rage, or if they do, they politely turn up the television volume. You try to circle back to what you were like before him. You were a good listener. You were kind. Weren’t you? You had slick ironing skills. You could iron wrinkles out of the wrinkliest clothes. Thanks! We’ll get back to you ASAP! Slowly, eventually, you emerge from within yourself and wash your decrepit body and brush your foul mouth. You put on that dress you loved but hid away, that grasshopper-green one he called unflattering. You eat something extraordinarily carbfull. You finally call your sister back, because someone still gives a shit about you. You start to rediscover who you were once and what you liked doing and new cool things, too, like cutting up the socks you stole from his drawer with giant scissors. Then you pick up the key to your new apartment and your boxes are still heavy but you’re strong, remember? Look at you. You can do hard things, even when it sucks. 

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LUKE by Sam Berman

He was known as the best guitar player in the United States.Maybe the world.I didn’t know; I’d never met him.Luke. I had friends who knew him, had seen him play in the French Quarter, or they themselves had jammed with him in one of those hill houses in San Francisco when he was part-timing as a tour guide in Ghirardelli Square. They attested to his skill. His virtuosity.The word “singularity” was used.“Heaven sent,” got thrown around. I was told outside a restaurant that there was a girl in Morocco who was “nearly his equal.”Close in skill. But not better. “It was like watching a new element be created,” said my friend whose band had once opened for Luke at a club in DC, in some little dark bar down a long bright alley in Dupont Circle, where my friend said you could be almost-homeless and eat falafel and mujaddara indefinitely, sleep legally in the park with a blanket and pillow, and somehow see the Washington Monument over the tops of the Magnolia trees, all without the cops hassling you. “Isn’t that America?” my friend said. I pretended to scroll on my phone when he told me these things, and, honestly, stopped inviting that friend over for garden beers because he threw his bottlecaps in the peat soil, which upset the other occupants of my tri-plex—all of whom worked in the garden in the hot part of June and all of whom felt that my friend didn’t respect the effort that went into their dirt work. What surprised me.What really hurt.Was on a less hot day that same June, the new and wonderful girl I’d started dating said she knew Luke. She said they used to hang a bit. A little bit. For a time. She confirmed his irradiant brilliance and said his name only once during our conversation. Just one time. But it was enough to make my eyes tighten, my hands go cold, and my heart––hidden beneath a lidocaine patch because I’d pulled something in my chest while attempting to turn ground in the carrot bed––race with a sense of approaching, or possibly arrived danger. "He played a twelve-string Stratocaster made of driftwood and stolen car parts," she said one night while we lay close but untouching. “It sounded like God getting over something.”  Later, she said she could never really pin him down, that he was charming but chaotic. And that she now valued stability and emotional awareness in a partner over all things. Excitement. Spontaneity. Carnal attraction. She told me the end wasn’t bad with Luke.No.  He just ran off somewhere absurd like Finland or West Oakland.It was fine.Probably for the best.And she said all this like it would comfort me. Which.It didn’t, of course. No. And neither did her story about the last time she saw him, barefoot in a parking lot, playing "Blackbird" in reverse, which caused the nearby starlings and roof pigeons to fly in strange new ways, which then caused more than a few midair collisions.“He could twist time a little,” she said. “Even the birds got lost.”I laughed because it felt like The Move.  But she didn’t laugh back. No. She just looked out the window like the air might still have something he made in it.Time passed from there. Big fat time.In which: I ricocheted off something on my way to work, broke my bike, rebuilt it, planted squash too early, spinach too late, tried a joke I brought with me from California, watched the joke die in a meeting, had another meeting, wherein I pitched Activision a game where all the crops had died and we need to sell-off the farm equipment, the harvester, balers and dozers, the silos and snow movers, the endless braid of irrigation sprinklers that roll over the cornstalk, had everyone in the boardroom staring until I said I had other ideas too, had no other ideas, none, but to make it all better my caring girlfriend had made me my favorite dinner using a newer and healthier and much-raved about recipe on a night when I needed her the most, and needed everything to be old in a non-new way, but she insisted on change. Small change. But still, change. And I wanted to tell her.I wanted to say. That I shoved someone into a wall once.When I was seventeen. My girlfriend. Who’d made me so angry. And I was sorry, but it didn’t matter.And that this wasn’t like that.No.But it wasn’t not like that entirely either.   No.  She kept Luke’s pick in a velvet pouch in her purse. I found it when she asked me to grab her lipstick. It had teeth marks on the edge like something half-animal had gotten to it. It was a ravaged thing. “Did you love him?” I asked one morning, finally brave. She blinked slow, like it was a question she hadn’t heard in a while. Then she shut her eyes and prayed for a car accident.A bang.Something loud, possibly outside or down the street––something to break up the moment. It didn’t come, so we stayed quiet at the table.After. I learned the bass just to keep up.Joined a band that practiced on Tuesdays and sometimes Sunday but never performed. I wrote her a song.She said it was sweet but asked if it could be more truthful or more honest.Or more of both those things.    Then. One night.Months after we stopped talking.I heard this strange music outside my window. Something like thunder politely arguing with itself. Or airplanes kissing. Or mad earth. I went out in my boxers.I went into the garden. And there he was: a shape against the streetlight. Playing something that made me listen. He didn’t look up. No. Just played.And played.Until my body became like a water balloon that he was in charge of.  Then.He ended his song. And removed his capo from the 4th fret and dropped it into his proud bindle. He dipped his head to the late night applause: the clapping of the maple leaves and the yard dogs barking rowdily with delight. His long, untamed hair––which held more gray than I’d imagined for a man who I understood to be three years younger than myself––dangled calmly in the dark. He looked like one of the men who fished for trout off the top of the overpass.  Or.Like one of those simple types who worked the factories off Hasting Street, stamping out hubcaps and tailgates, hood ornaments and passenger-side doors.He shrugged his shoulders and cracked his neck. With his guitar slung over his back he suddenly looked very obvious. Very normal. Like a normal person.The kind you stand behind in line when waiting to order something.  His t-shirt holey and threadbare. Like a rag you’d use to plug a wound or wipe your dog’s paws with.He didn’t look at me.Not really. I was hiding in the garden between the hollyhocks I’d planted and let die. But I could see him. Luke. His eyes: blue, white, housed and brilliant in the almost midnight of my late street. He stood for another moment.Then another moment. And then.Then.He wiped his nose against the collar of his shirt. And he was gone. 

***

I called her the next morning and said, “I think I saw him.”And she didn’t ask who. And she didn’t ask how.No.She just whispered, “Yeah.” And then.“He does that.”

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OTTERS AND TIGERS by John Jodzio

I work part-time at a dry cleaners, but I’m mostly known for posting cute videos of otters that make people smile. Most people thank me for my work by liking and sharing my videos but some people, like two or three a month, ask me to post videos of otters having sex. When I tell them I don’t post lewd otter content, these people usually say mean things about my penis. For instance, how it’s microscopic. Or how it’s bent like a Russian sickle. Or how it smells like pot roast. If I could brush these comments off I would, but sometimes they really mess with my head and I have to take off my pants and double check my penis is not a tiny pot roast scented sickle.Yesterday I was in the bedroom and my girlfriend, Shelly, caught me trying to get my nose near my penis.“Jesus Christ,” she said. “It doesn’t smell like pot roast, it smells like pennies.”Shelly and I have been together for almost two years, but our relationship hasn’t been going very well lately. Shelly used to work as a bank teller and in her free time she would post cute pics and videos of tigers for the entire world to enjoy, but there were some people, like fifty or sixty every day, who begged to see her naked. For a long time she said no way, but these people were relentless and a week ago she said fine, as long as you pay me $79.99 a month.

***

Today I took a break from otter posting and stood outside Shelly’s office. Her door was shut, but I could hear her chatting with someone named Lawrence. I heard some sultry whispering and then some sexy giggling. Then I heard a bikini top being unstrung and tossed erotically onto the floor. You may wonder how I know what a bikini top landing erotically on hardwood sounds like through a closed door, but like most people I have incredible hearing when I’m super jealous. After her session ended, I knocked on her door. Shelly answered it wearing a tightly cinched robe.“When are you going back to posting tigers?” I asked.“Probably never,” she said.I could tell Shelly was annoyed I’d interrupted her again. Since she’d started her new job, I’d been interrupting her about twenty times a day to tell her how much I loved her or to tell her how beautiful she was.“People really loved your tigers,” I told her.“My tits are my tigers now,” Shelly said, tightening her robe and closing the door.

***

I hadn’t taken Shelly on any dates lately because I was saving up all my money for my leg un-lengthening surgery. I’d gotten leg lengthening surgery a year ago because Shelly wanted to wear heels without towering over me. The surgeons snapped my leg bones and screwed in some titanium rods and after my femurs fused back together I was three inches taller. Unfortunately, a few weeks ago, Shelly got drunk and admitted she loved me more when I was shorter.“I’m sorry,” she said, “but your old personality and your new height just don’t match.”I remembered how when I’d woken up from my original leg lengthening surgery, Shelly and my parents were all standing by the side of my hospital bed. I was pretty out of it, so instead of thanking them for being there, I asked my parents why when I was young and they wanted to have sex my dad threw seventy five cents out into the lawn and told me not to come back inside until I found a dollar.“Jesus Christ,” my dad said, “this again?”Fine, I’d brought this topic up a couple of times before, okay maybe like every time I saw my parents I said something about it, and sure, sure the last time I’d brought it up I had compared the quarters in the lawn to less shiny and less valuable blood diamonds which had made my mom cry because she was really against blood diamonds.“You threw those quarters into the lawn like twice a day,” I said. “Sometimes it was freezing out and that one time I got bit by those fire ants.”“Everyone in our neighborhood did that,” my mom said. “Even Pastor Curt’s kids were out there searching for quarters in their lawn.”“It was bad parenting,” I said. “It was an absolute betrayal of trust.”

***

My blood pressure was rising and my heart monitor started beeping faster and faster. Shelly knew where this was headed, so she pressed the button that controlled my pain medicine about 10 times and I drifted off to sleep before things got any more heated.

***

I met up with my friend Calvin for brunch. I told him how Shelly and I were going through a rough patch. Calvin had been against my original leg lengthening surgery and now he was really against my leg unlengthening surgery.“Your body is a unique tapestry and altering it to fit someone else’s desires is totally fucked,” he said.“Of course,” I told him, “but there’s also nothing in the world that says I love you more than having incredibly painful elective surgery. Everyone knows that it works way better than having a baby to save a relationship.”I told Calvin how I’d bought a wig and some sunglasses and a fake mustache and paid for an individual session with Shelly for later that week.“That’s a horrible idea,” he said.“Maybe what she’s doing isn’t as bad as I think,” I told him. “Maybe it is super innocent. Maybe I’ve got nothing to worry about.”“Maybe what she’s doing is way way worse than you’re imagining,” he told me.

***

I had my session with Shelly later that week. I knew I couldn’t be at our house, so I drove over to the grocery store parking lot and put on my disguise.Shelly came on screen, smiling, wearing a tiger print bikini. Unfortunately I had not cleaned out the back window of my car and all the otter stuffed animals I kept there were visible to her.“Ughh,” she said. “Take off the fucking wig and the stupid mustache. I know it’s you.”“I was just curious what you were doing,” I told her. “I just wanted to talk.”“We’ve talked enough,” she said. “I can’t do this anymore.”I started to plead with her, but she clicked off the session and my screen went black.

***

I drove around for a while and when I got home I saw Shelly had chucked some of my things out onto our yard. I gathered all my clothes and books and threw them into my backseat. Then I sat there in my car and cried while I watched all my favorite otter videos, otters swimming around and splashing each other, otters juggling rocks on their chests, otters chowing down on sardines. When I stopped sobbing, I drove over to my parent’s house to see if I could crash there.When I got there I found my two nephews, Kaden and Karl, on their hands and knees, crawling around in my parent’s lawn.“Grandpa threw five bucks into the grass and told us not to come in until we found it,” Kaden told me.While I stood there Kaden found a quarter, held it up to his brother.“Sweet,” Karl said.The two of them were laughing, they looked happy. I looked at my car, filled with all my belongings and then I got down on my hands and knees and helped them search.

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JUST ANOTHER FRIDAY by Stefanie K. Yang

When Gary died, nobody mourned—not even his siblings. Everyone agreed he lived like a ghost, practically invisible and emerging only when absolutely necessary. He had no children and accomplished very little. He wouldn’t be missed. Like many before him, Gary simply ceased to exist while time and the universe continued on.Yet, for a brief moment, Gary mattered. Gary was murdered. He was killed in his own home in his own bathtub on a Thursday evening between nine- and ten-o’-clock. The most conspicuous evidence was his severed leg. The killer left it in his bathtub in a shallow pool of water which hadn’t properly drained. Gary’s bronze leg lay in the center of the white basin, knee softly bent and brown hairs floating like drifting seaweed.The rest of his body was discarded in a heavy duty trash bag, which was securely fastened and propped against an overflowing bin beside his mailbox. Friday was trash day. So it was a young trash collector named Manuel who would end up discovering Gary the next morning. 

***

At approximately 7:15AM, just as Manuel was emptying bins and a couple of school children were boarding a yellow bus, the trash bag containing Gary split open and all of its contents spilled out, mortifying Manuel when a naked body tumbled out onto his right foot. The children stared with hands pressed against the windows. Stanley the bus driver, who was oblivious to what was happening outside his bus, pulled the lever that closes the door, pressed his foot on the accelerator, and shouted for the kids in the back to sit down. He could not hear over his own voice the sound of Manuel frantically calling for his colleagues on the garbage truck to come and help. Trash collectors were just as invisible as bus drivers. That’s why Stanley always had to shout to be heard. As the bus drove away, the children settled down and started lamenting about the upcoming tests of the week. Most of them hadn’t studied.That Friday was indeed a rough day. The traffic was long, the tests were hard, Gary was dead, and Manuel ended up quitting his job. The discovery of the corpse was the straw that broke Manuel’s back. He never wanted to be a trash collector. It paid better than one would think, which was why he took the job, but the pay was not worth the perception that his work belonged on the bottom rungs of society, somewhere between burger flipper and high school janitor. He would later explain to friends and family that he needed to quit; that they, too, would have done so if they, too, spent day after day driving down the same routes collecting what everyone else wanted to discard. How would they feel, he asked, if the dead occupant of 143 Blattodean Road landed on their feet? Would they tolerate the nauseating scent of decay, of blackened banana peels and moldy coffee grounds, while staring in shock at Gary’s sad state? They’d be ‘grossed’ and ‘freaked out’ and ‘fed up,’ too. No, he decided. Life was too short. Gary would have agreed—when the universe surprises you with an earth-shattering moment, you have to act! You need to take what you can and run, or die without having done anything.Those were the thoughts that crossed Manuel’s mind that morning. After cleaning up the contents of Gary’s trash bag, he climbed back onto the garbage truck and proceeded onwards to house number 141 with plans of submitting his resignation as soon as his shift was over.

***

141 Blattodean Road is the dilapidated bungalow of Mr. and Mrs. Withers. The couple lived in the same house for over a quarter of a century. It was where Mr. and Mrs. Withers once raised their children, but those children eventually grew up and moved away. With their human babies gone, they now devoted their resources to a Miniature Schnauzer, two Persians, and some chickens.Gary hated chickens, cats, and dogs, and the Withers probably hated Gary. It seemed inevitable that they’d be contentious neighbors, but because Gary often kept to himself and never once tried to cross paths with them, they were able to coexist without incident.On the night of Gary’s murder, the Withers were walking past his property with their Mini Schnauz named Percy. All evening, Percy had been pacing—wound up and restless, like he knew something extraordinary was about to happen. He needed a walk. So although the Withers didn’t usually stroll during hours they considered unsafe, the stars were out, the moon was full, and dinner had been indulgent. The rustling leaves outside beckoned them, so they walked their dog. And it was mostly nice. That is, until Percy started barking just steps away from returning home.Mr. Withers hissed, ‘Percy! For Chrissake, quit yer yappin’!’ to which Mrs. Withers asked whatever was the matter with him. ‘The hell I know!’ Mr. Withers replied, ‘He’s your damn dog!’ In times like these, Percy was never Mr. Withers’s dog.Poor Percy. If only he could speak human. If only the two most important people in his world stopped to listen sometimes. They might’ve understood him.‘Someone inside that house is screaming,’ Percy barked. ‘I hear screaming! Someone is screaming! We need to find out what’s causing that screaming!’‘I don’t understand what’s wrong with him these days,’ Mrs. Withers sighed as she watched her husband tug at Percy’s leash. ‘Maybe he’s getting senile.’Mr. Withers grumbled. He was hating the incessant barking, but he hated the idea of their dog developing dementia even more. Then as if remembering—‘What day is it today?’ And as if his wife could read his mind—‘Did you take the trash out? Tomorrow’s trash day.’Mr. Withers scowled. When he wasn’t able to calm Percy, he reached down, scooped the dog into his arm, and marched the rest of the way home. His wife followed suit, stopping briefly at her front porch to glance at the shadowy movements behind her neighbor’s drawn curtains. The wind rustled the leaves. Mrs. Withers hugged her arms for warmth, then went inside. She needed to make sure her husband hadn’t forgotten the trash again.

***

For the rest of that night, Blattodean Road was quiet. The Withers got their dog under control and the killer proceeded to kill Gary, emerging two hours later with a trash bag containing his stiffened corpse. The bag would sit all night against the curbside in wait for an unassuming trash collector named Manuel, who couldn’t have imagined that in just a few short moments, he would be shaken to his core at what would land on his shoe.But in the grand scheme of things, none of it would matter. Gary dies. Nobody cares. It’s just another Friday.And the woman who killed him with a broom slept through most of it on Gary’s bed, hungover from a night of wine and phone calls about what she had totally—like, ewww—done, and dreaming about a tussle in the tub and striking something over and over again.

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PRAYER BREAKFAST by Emma Ensley

I knew that downloading music was illegal, but my dad was the one who showed me how to do it, so I didn’t worry too much. I still prayed at night for God to forgive me, just in case.

***

The Australian's username was koala_rocks47 and he was thirty-two, though I didn't know that yet.I was eleven and three-quarters. I'd found the John Mayer fan forum through a Google search after Drew read the lyrics to "Why Georgia" in Literature class, during our poetry unit."am I living it right?" over and over again, while his hands shook.I wasn't living at all, not really. Not until I heard that song.

 ***

koala_rocks47: hey Why_GeorgiaGurl! saw ur post about wanting the Melbourne bootleg. I've got the whole show, soundboard quality. want me to upload it for you?Why_GeorgiaGurl: omg yes please!!! I only have the first 4 songs from limewire and they keep cutting outkoala_rocks47: no worries, mate. us hardcore fans gotta stick together. btw love your username - georgia's my favorite track too. how old are you?Why_GeorgiaGurl: 16

***

On Wednesday mornings, Pastor Jim drove the Presbyterian middle schoolers to Bojangles on Cleveland Highway. We called it Prayer Breakfast. At Bojangles I would order a cinnamon biscuit, a buttered biscuit, and a Mr. Pibb. I’d watch Drew across the restaurant while Jim asked us about our “faith journeys.” “Anyone want to share what God's been doing in their lives this week?”I could’ve shared that I'd stayed up until 3 AM downloading bootlegs with someone named koala_rocks47, who thinks I am in high school. Instead, I said nothing and watched Drew's headphones settle around his neck, wondering what holy music played through them.Last week on the bus, his batteries died and he asked to share mine. We listened to a live John Mayer show from Melbourne together. During “Comfortable” our arms touched and stayed touching for three whole songs.“Where do you find all these?” he asked.“The internet,” I said.

***

The next Wednesday his batteries worked but he asked to share headphones anyway. This time he played me Damien Rice and said "this will make you cry" and I pretended it did even though I was mostly thinking about how to make our arms touch again.

***

On the forum, I tell people I've been to twelve John Mayer concerts. I say my favorite was Atlanta because that's the closest city people would recognize. I talk about the acoustics at the Fox Theatre even though I've only seen pictures online. koala_rocks47: which was your favorite show of all the ones you've been to?Why_GeorgiaGurl: probably the one at eddie's attic. he played this unreleased song called “in your atmosphere” and everyone was dead silentI downloaded another bootleg. Hartford, 2002. The crowd noise sounded like prayers or waves or static between radio stations.

*** 

I burned Drew a mix CD and almost called it “Songs for Bojangles” but at the last second I wrote “Songs for Wednesday Mornings”. I included the Melbourne "Why Georgia," some Damien Rice, and other songs I thought sounded appropriately deep and romantic. Songs about longing and roads and being older than we were.

***

koala_rocks47: what's winter like there?In Georgia, winter meant maybe putting on a fleece. Maybe frost on car windows that melted by 9 AM. In Brisbane it was summer. Upside-down seasons.Why_GeorgiaGurl: cold sometimesI opened a new browser and googled the distance between Brisbane and Atlanta which was 9,272 miles.

***

Drew's mix CD got scratched. The Damien Rice track skipped on “still a little bit” over and over.“Still a little bit still a little bit still a little…”

*** 

That night I prayed. “Dear God, forgive me for lying about my age. And for downloading. And for the way I feel when Drew's arm touches mine during 'Comfortable.’”

***

Some girls hang out in Pastor Jim's office after school, taking photos on flip phones and listening to emo music that almost sounds like worship songs. I don't go because I don't get asked but also because when I mentioned it to my mom she furrowed her brow and said "I don't know about that."I rolled my eyes and told her it was perfectly fine and she said that it didn’t matter. That it was a bad look. I mentioned this to Drew, like can you believe this, and he kind of shrugged. He said, “I mean yeah, he never has the guys in his office.”

***

I asked koala_rox47 if he believed in God and he typed for a really long time before just saying “no”.

***

At Prayer Breakfast, Pastor Jim always sat next to whoever was newest. This week it was Anna from sixth grade. He asked her about her "walk with Christ" while his hand rested on her back.My Mr. Pibb tasted flat. I couldn’t finish my second biscuit. When Drew played me an unreleased Damien Rice song on the bus, I could barely pay attention to the words. I stared out the window watching the cars fly past us on Cleveland Highway and letting my mind go blank. 

***

My mom asked me again about Pastor Jim and I said I hadn’t noticed anything. She stared at me for a long time. I added this to my list of lies needing forgiveness. 

***

koala_rocks47 messaged me less and less. Or was it me who was messaging him less and less? 

***

I started praying with just the beginnings. Dear God, Dear God, Dear God, Dear God, Dear God, Dear God, Dear God, Dear God.

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HAUNT ATTACK: DENNIS COOPER AND ZAC FARLEY ON ‘ROOM TEMPERATURE’ by Jack Skelley

Room Temperature is the latest film collaboration by Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley. It focuses on a family-run, amateur haunted house and was shot on location in Southern California. The film recently screened at San Francisco’s Frameline film festival, and before that at Los Angeles Festival of Movies. It will soon show in Europe. Although the concept of co-directing a film is unusual, the rapport between Cooper and Farley is natural… as evidenced by how they often finish each other’s thoughts in this QA with Jack Skelley. And this reflects in the quietly supernatural vibe of Room Temperature, which is spare and cool, but with deep emotional undercurrents.  Jack: Can you describe the division of labor between the two of you? Dennis, one would assume that you’re responsible for the script and Zac is more responsible for directing camera angles, blocking, and those kinds of things. Is that true?Dennis: I’m not completely responsible for the text. I do the vast majority of that work, but everything is in consultation with Zac. He has lots of ideas that I can’t implement textually because I’m not as visually inclined as he is. But we talk about everything. And we’re so in sync about what we want that I trust him. Occasionally, I do question some visual decisions, but on the set, Zac is directing and I’m mostly there working with the actors and conferring with Zac. But as it’s being written, I’m basically the guy at the computer.Zac: The films are complete collaborations. We decide what we want to do and how to do it together. Neither Dennis nor I are classically trained filmmakers, so I guess neither one of us really knows how other directors make their films, but our collaborations feel both more complex and fluid than one does words and the other makes images. But yes, Dennis is a writer, a really great one, so I know better than to mess with his intuitions on that front. But we make all the decisions together. We do the casting together, for example.Dennis: And decisions about choosing locations are all completely mutual. But he is stronger in that area. So it divides up a little bit, but it’s always a back-and-forth.Jack: How often do these decisions happen on the set, in real time?Dennis: Oh, quite a lot.Zac: The goal on set is to be really attuned and responsive to what’s going on. We plan meticulously ahead of time so that we can feel free to react to a change in circumstances outside our control and to embrace happy accidents. There’s nothing more thrilling than something unexpected happening on set that supersedes our expectations, and to a certain extent we bet on and hope for happy accidents as part of the process. Both Dennis and I are particularly excited with working with the performers. Because we’re working mostly with non-professional actors, we cast people for what they can bring to the projects and welcome their own senses of intuition and insights into their characters. The film is really the result of a collaboration with the cast and crew that participated in bringing it to life. Dennis: When we’re shooting, it’s very common that a line we thought would work isn’t working. So we’ll cut the line or change the words. The same is true with the visuals: Yes, the films are storyboarded. But on set, we’ll realize a scene will be better if we change the POV.Jack: It was very interesting to compare the screenplay with the final product. A lot of dialog was cut. Now, having two directors is fairly unusual, right? Are there any models for this sort of dual relationship?Dennis: Well, there are the Coen brothers, Straub-Huillet, the Wachowskis … It’s not completely unprecedented. There’s never any confusion about that: We know what the other is capable of, and often one of us will back off and let the other person do what they need to do.Jack: Both of you are based in Paris, while Room Temperature was filmed in Southern California. It seems like a lot of effort to pick-up and relocate from your home base to California to do this.Dennis: We just set up camp at my Los Angeles apartment. We have the advantage of knowing a lot of people in Los Angeles. All kinds of friends to lean on. Our casting director Erin Cassidy and our main on-the-ground producer Luka Fisher for example, were based there. Zac: We made our two previous films in France, which was wonderful in that we could finance them in part with public grants. But to be eligible the films have to be shot in majority in the French language. Early on, we tried making Room Temperature in France, but it quickly became clear that this had to be shot in the United States and in English. Home-haunts unfortunately don’t yet exist in France, and while we had always envisioned Permanent Green Light (our previous film) as a French film, we wrote this one in a way where translating it into French would have done real damage. It was a challenge to shoot the film in the United States, but it was absolutely the right thing to do and we got to collaborate with some incredibly talented people. Jack: The collaboration between you is unusual and often feels seamless: The dialog is lean and punctuated by pregnant pauses. So is the visual framing with its own kinds of pauses. There are long, wide shots and slow pans. In this way, the film says more by saying less. Thoughts?Dennis: We have a really strong sense of the rhythm we want the film to have and how that will work. The dialogue is spare, but it has a lot of weight on its shoulders and the visuals are as important as the dialogue. Some of our favorite filmmakers such as James Benning make films with almost no dialogue to provide breathing room. Our films are poetic and formally surprising, but they provide time for the audience to settle-in to the pacing and commune with the characters.Zac: In a way, the rhythm and the pacing act as the glue that allows us to have sometimes wildly divergent tones coexist in the film. In a weird way while the film can feel somewhat slow at times, it’s actually incredibly dense.Dennis: This approach worked well with our Southern California desert location. It’s shot in the middle of nowhere with a family who is very isolated. They don’t have cameras or cell phones or computers, as far as we know. Not even a car. They live in a very closed-off world. So having all that space and silence reinforces the emptiness of the world they live in.Jack: Let’s talk about the differences between writing on the page and screenwriting: Writing on the page depends on the reader to provide some interpretation of the text’s dialog and imagery, while film, being more concrete and visual, presents the image more straightforwardly and the viewer is a less “active” participant in the experience as a work of art. Do you agree with how I pose this?Dennis: Yes, that’s obviously the way I think about writing. The novels don’t create such a solid world that the readers feel like they’re just an observer, right? They participate. And what’s interesting about film is it’s the exact opposite. Because the film is very solid, it does take all the responsibility. We try to open that up, so that the film is obviously a carefully made object, but at the same time it feels very translucent. It’s not so locked down that the audience is casually observing. They have to pay a lot of attention. We just saw the new Wes Anderson film. I love his films, but they are the most extremely fascistically visualized films. There’s no way our films are so completely locked up. But I feel a certain kinship with what he does. We do angle for images and shots that are very highly composed. So it’s weird.Jack: What is the origin of Room Temperature’s setting of a family-made haunted house? Dennis, knowing your obsession with neighborhood haunted houses, it must come from you. You even make Halloween pilgrimages to Southern California to visit many haunted houses.Dennis: Both of us are massive fans of them, and we think of it as an art form. On the surface level it’s just a family having fun and trying to do something cool and make their haunted house better than the neighbors’. But they put so much effort into something that is always a failure on some level… because they don’t have enough funds or because it’s just them and their kids playing with the concept of a haunted house. I love the amateurism of that. All of our films so far have been about people who can’t achieve what they want to achieve. We tried to capture that in this case using the setting of a haunted house whose aspirations are higher than the family’s imaginations and budget can realize.Zac: Yeah. It’s a shared fantasy that the characters have. But it’s also the individual fantasy of each family member. One kid will be really into the acting and theatrical part of it, while another member of the family will be into the architecture and fog machines. In terms of narrative structure, home-haunts are daring and experimental by default. You enter the first room and there’s a pretty classic introduction video explaining the premise of the haunt, but then you go walk into the second room and somebody was obviously just really obsessed with the animatronic ghoul they saw at the Halloween store, so they bought five and decided to operate them out of synch, and it doesn’t really fit with the surface logic of the haunted house, but the conflagration of the two is really generative. The visitor going through this haunted house can project narrative meaning onto something that wasn’t necessarily built to accommodate it, at least not in any literal way, and that creates the kind of openness that we’re seeking to have in our films. Haunted houses are like films in that they use acting, writing, music, architecture... In Room Temperature the house is a setting and a character, but it’s also a kind of analog for the film. Jack: In fact, there’s much discussion among the characters about whether the haunted house is succeeding. One of the first lines in the film is an outside character asking, “What’s wrong with your house!”Dennis: Then he says, “I’m not against it.”Jack  This seems like a statement on not just the artistic abilities of the families. Its an observation that can extend to the father character, who is like the creative director. And there’s definitely something very “wrong” with him. Now, in addition to haunted houses, you two share an obsession with theme parks. Symbolically, thematically, what connects these two art forms?Dennis: In a dark ride, the experience is out of your control. The car is devising your pace and each passenger sees exactly the same thing. Whereas in a haunted house you can hang around or go look at details that intrigue you. It’s not like everybody’s constantly being propelled forward, but there is a unifying quality that makes it a haunted house. You know, the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland in California is not completely dissimilar. In an earlier version of our script there was a point where people got in a little car and experienced a section of the house that way. It was impractical and overly expensive to realize, but we were very excited by that concept.Zac: There used to be a haunted house called Mystic Motel that had a ride-through component. It was created by a 14- or 15-year-old kid who was obviously very ambitious and excited about the mechanics of dark rides. He used one of those  electrified shopping carts designed for disabled people to navigate giant grocery stores. He had it follow a track in his basement and built a remote-control system so he could decide when it would stop and go, controlling your rhythm.  Dennis: Some of the big cities in Europe, such as London or Amsterdam, have the London Dungeon or the Amsterdam Dungeon. That’s kind of a combo because you walk through it, and it’s obviously much more professional than a family haunted house. For instance, in the Amsterdam Dungeon, at the end you get on a roller coaster that takes you through the final section of experience.Jack: Dennis, you are familiar with Sabrina Tarasoff’s concept for her “Beyond Baroque” walk-through haunted house – in the “Made in L.A. 2020” biennial at the Huntington Museum in Los Angeles. It focused on your writing and mine and others from 1980s Los Angeles. And originally it was to be a dark ride. Sabrina wanted something close to what you were saying, Zac, where you get in a little car that follows a track. And later, she and I wrote a piece for your blog, Dennis, about theme parks where we discuss Disney’s invention of the Omnimover: a shell-like, encased ride vehicle that directs your experience. This is unlike, say, dark rides such as Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride where you can look all around. The Omnimover points and targets your vision and experience.Dennis: The Haunted Mansion uses those, right?Jack: Yes. They are named Doom Buggies. Now Disney and other theme parks have more sophisticated versions of this. I don’t know where I’m going with this question: I just want to use the word “Omnimover!”Zac: It’s a really good word.Jack:  So, what are your feelings in retrospect about making Room Temperature?Dennis: It was an absolute and utter joy to make. Yes, it was exhausting. Sometimes on the set you were going until 5 o’clock in the morning. And it was often freezing cold. But we’re both very happy with the film. It’s not unlike what we hoped it would be when we wrote it. And the editing was a joy.Zac: Every time Dennis and I start a project, we set the level of ambition to a high point which we may or may not be able to achieve. This was much more ambitious than our previous films. And it was harder to produce for those reasons. But I think we managed to do what we set out to do.Jack: Another exciting yet subdued component of Room Temperature is the music. It is even more spare than the dialog. It appears only in very rare scenes. Who is the composer?Dennis: The music is by Puce Mary. In fact, the only pieces of music in Room Temperature are the sounds of the haunted house, created by Puce Mary, plus one song the character Andre (played by Charlie Nelson Jacobs) sings as part of the action. There is no music in the film other than that one song, the haunted house soundscapes by Puce Mary, and the end credits music.Zac: Dennis and I have been huge fans and admirers of Puce Mary forever. We have seen her perform live several times. She was our first collaborator on this film. She started drafting pieces of music – including the ghost sounds – maybe six years before we shot a single image. The song performed by Andre in the middle of the film is written and composed by Chris Olsen, who plays Paul the janitor. And the end credits music is a piece titled “Angel Shaving (L.A.S.E.R.) by 7038634357, a really brilliant musician. Dennis: It’s important to our films that we don’t use music unless the characters hear the music as part of the action. That’s why there’s not a lot of music in them. It’s not because we don’t like music. We just believe scores are often manipulative. We are not going to dress-up the experience to make it more dramatic or sad or weird than it actually is for the characters.Jack: This certainly fits the vibe of the film. What’s next? Is there another collaboration in the works?Dennis: We are writing our next film right now. We have a meeting about it tomorrow. Jack: Yeah?Dennis: Yeah, and it’s good!

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FOREVER by Spencer Lee

I’m sitting at the pool with the boys, listening to the gardener trim the hedges. The world right now is loud and whirring. When the gauze comes off, everything will be graceful and good. My surgeon’s a short man with steroid face–large, skeletal nostrils–but he has great taste in women’s faces. My face feels taut and ready for anything. Underneath the bandages, I swear that I’m smiling down at the boys. I lower my feet into the lukewarm water. The sun is injecting undulating crystals of white that look like ominous little spirits. Or Xanaxs. I wonder what my husband’s doing at work, likely sitting somewhere too: at a desk, a toilet. The boys are yelling, splashing each other, crying out. I get up and towel off my feet, before alerting the nanny to go make them a snack. Heading upstairs to reapply SPF to my limbs, I swallow myself up in the blunt white surfaces of my house. Avoiding the sun makes me feel a little purer, like I’m a kidnapped woman. Peace, quiet, and skincare.The gardener moves right under my window, whirring underneath me. I hear him stumble. The trimmer turns off, and he’s singing to himself. I think to myself that he must be drunk. Last month, there was an incident at the country club. I overheard ladies talking about it at the smoothie bar–a worker killed himself, accidentally, in some sort of construction accident, some sort of falling or impaling or crushing. One of the ladies said that she thought he was probably drunk, and that alcoholism is a disease and it is more omnipresent than we think. Her friends were not necessarily having it, so I went over and agreed with her. It’s actually an area of vulnerability for me. The hedge trimmer turns back on as I lay myself down onto my bed, bunions hurting. Against my will, I think of my parents' liquor cabinet, the largest one you’d ever seen, with the wood sanded down where it rubbed together on opening or slamming shut. I close my eyes and laugh to myself, pop an Ativan for the pain. I look inward. I let myself recount the story of my life through identities: plain schoolgirl, shy debutante, wife, Hollywood actress, wife again, mother. And then I think about my little sports-stars, little Nikes on, splashing away in the pool, and I think about the scalpel that nicked their heads during my C-section. The nanny raises her voice out the window–and I’m reminded of last week, when I got a call from the boys’ teacher, Miss Pappajohn. She had a lot to say. They don’t listen, they don’t relax. They’re doing things. To other kids, to small animals. They’re headstrong, they’re troubled, they’re suspended. When I look at the boys, all I see is a curious innocence. I have the wisdom to know that everything that they do wrong comes from the innocence of not knowing between right and wrong. But of course Miss Pappajohn can’t see that. She’s the one who creeps me out. She’s about my age and I haven’t heard her ever mention a family, or friends. She’s rude, always emailing at odd hours. I can tell her hair has never touched a lick of conditioner. Sometimes, Miss Pappajohn’s face pops up when I see chicken skin at the grocery store. I feel bad for the boys. They have to sit and watch her all day. I bet she keeps whiskey and limes in her dusty little desk drawer. She’s not a good girl. My boys are the innocent ones. Which is funny because of my thought, just now, that I was never really innocent–certainly not as an actress, no matter how approachable and commercial I was always told I looked. You know, that girl-next-door face can be stifling, especially when you’re sitting at home in your own living room and an agent comes by and tells you that you are actually next-door. But that’s what they want. And that’s why I got popular. They don’t want character actresses. They want you to be relatable. But now I’m not. I’m not that innocent girl.  Yesterday, I went into my husband’s home office and shredded the letter I got from my mother. The stationary had these cartoon drawings of plump strawberries and yellow happy faces. She was asking for money, I think. She was not innocent either. At the present moment, I have a hard time seeing my parents’ faces; their disapproving features are dwarfed by our distance in space, in time. The mom was short and the dad was tall. Not rich, not poor. They hated me for leaving. I can only imagine them in motion, in fuzzy nonexistent home videos. They’re eating large ears of corn in these home videos. The corn gets in the way of precise detail. I saw on Instagram that hurt people hurt people. I thought it was stupid at first. But lying here alone, I don’t feel like I’m the real cause of anything bad. I guess maybe I can be innocent if I think hard enough. Everyone can be. All the men, too, even. Silent rooms filled with them, black bow ties and woody cologne. That’s not even what they wore or smelled like, but it’s how I picture them.#MeToo has supposedly changed the industry. Now, it’s young men who have to watch out for the gay power-players. I was glad to take this work hiatus to gather my bearings, get in touch with myself, with truth, and now even with my own innocence. Maybe I’m a good girl with good bones when it comes down to it. I notice a pinstripe of sunlight feeling up the walls, then, I watch it disappear as I close the gap in the curtains. The gardener looks up mysteriously at me as I do it. I know I need to deal with him. Suddenly, footsteps. I turn around. “Mommy?” the boys ask. They’ve padded behind me to my room, dripping all over the floors like twin slugs. “Hello,” I reply, slipping the little orange bottle from my palm to my bathrobe pocket.“He’s mad at you.” One points to the other. “Mad?” “He doesn’t want your face to change. He wants you to stay the same and never die.”“Oh, sweetie,” I look at the boys, who are both averting eye contact. “Me too. This is all to make sure that I look the same forever.” The boys liven up, imagining this world I’ve created where mothers don’t age. Smiling, they say that they’ll stop eating so they can never age too. I smile back. Their minds are cute little uncooked hamburgers that only I know how to handle correctly. They’ve known me to get Botox before, and they always hate it because I look different. I’ve misled them in my way, but that’s what mothers are there to do: keep up the illusion of Santa, of no ‘bad guys’ who come out in the night, of a world that’s going to keep running smoothly for the next 100 years, just for them. What they don’t know is that I have to do it. What they don’t know is that looking different can sometimes be the only way to stay the same. If I posture just right, I can make it seem like I always looked like this. Because my new face isn’t stalling for anyone, not even the boys. My new face will not be plain, because plainness invites people to think that you are just like them, when you are not. My new face will not be aged, because looking in the mirror at a wrinkly face fishes out the bloated, drowned corpse of the past and turns it over into the future, which you also do not want. It’ll be that unique kind of beauty that you can’t forget. Which is to say that I will look fake.I’m finally ready to admit that I’ve always been fake. That’s what people don’t get–I’ve always been fake. Things roll off of me. I’ve schemed my way through life. And I’ve proudly worn blinders, because seeing everything in great detail makes everything strange and sad. I don’t want to be sad. But it's all okay now. This new face will let me rest my heavy little mind. It'll get me in touch with innocence. I’ll be on the outside what I’ve always felt like on the inside and it will be my repentance. Lately, I’ve been even considering trying my hand at acting again. This time, I could really disappear—line by line, frame by frame, into a good role. Be ruined and dramatic for a bit. Cry and beg for my babies back. Give a real smile when they do come back. No more Hallmark. I take the boys back downstairs. The gardener is packing up–and a strange feeling that I could have been unaware of something makes me nervous, realizing that something curious about this image does not come together correctly. I’m shocked to feel as though I’m sinking and the world around me is enlarging like a bright ballooning tumour. I gather myself. I approach the gardener, ask if he needs anything–water, a snack. While he answers, I inspect his face for puffiness, yellowing, and I inspect his eyes, too, for wandering. He looks back at me, blankly, as I take my time. He looks fine. I’m glad to see it. Now, I don’t have to do anything anymore. I don’t want to. So, I’m sitting at the pool with the boys, watching the gardener exit stage left. The sun is shining. The boys are screaming, with joy, and the adhesive under my bandages has never felt so tight and secure. Emboldened, I raise my face to the sun in satisfaction. My life is intact and good.

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