Fiction

OUTSIDE HUSBAND by Natalie Warther

April 9, 2025
The survivalist stuff started as a hobby for my husband. An attempt to disconnect from the tech-dependent modern world. But quickly, our renovated backyard started looking more like a trash dump than a place to entertain the neighbors. He just kept making “tools.” Dental floss snares. Crayon candles. Pantyhose fishing nets. Dryer lint tinder. Maple syrup mouse traps. He used every single trash bag in the house for the water collection system.  “Where are your shoelaces?” I called to my sons as they trudged towards the bus stop, flopping out of their sneakers.“Dad took them for his tourniquet kit.”When he wasn’t eating or sleeping, he was outside. “Are you going to help me with these dishes?” I called one night from the kitchen window as he crouched over his little fire pit, throwing Vaseline-soaked cotton balls into the crayon flame. “I’m tending,” he said.Frisbee plates. Paperclip fish hooks. Cardboard sun hats. Coffee can pots. He took all the condoms from the nightstand and stuffed them with twigs. “To keep the kindling dry.” I marveled at how quickly it happened. One day he was coming into the house, sweaty from a long bike ride, kissing my neck so the kids would scream, the next he was fashioning my black thong into a slingshot and hoarding the apple seeds and peach pits that came back in the kids’ lunch boxes. Now he lives completely outside. His new rule: no coming inside the house, no interacting with electricity, no modern appliances or food products. The part I don’t understand is, isn’t a frisbee just as man-made as a plate?Apparently the Super Bowl is an exception. He comes in at half time, leaving the backdoor wide open. I say, I thought you weren’t supposed to come inside, and he says, We could get a TV for the deck, and I say, I thought you weren’t supposed to use electricity, and he says, I’m observing it, not using it, and I say, Don’t sit on the furniture. His friend comes by to borrow a saw. “Is Jim home?” “Kind of,” I say.We meet our counselor in the park. She asks what I miss most about my husband. I say it was how he made us laugh. “I can still make you laugh,” he says. So now he does weird things in front of the kitchen window, like draw a smiley face in mud on his belly, or pretend he’s being beaten up by a ghost, throwing himself on the ground repeatedly. Mostly I pretend I don’t see him.“Is it a sex thing?” my girlfriends ask.“Right, like, what does that say, that he wants to eat mice?”“Did you try calling him filthy? A filthy animal? Did you try calling him a filthy, disgusting, animal?” I haven’t tried that.The boys play games on his old phone. I buy them new crayons. I’ve learned how to clean the grill, back the truck into the garage, file taxes, fix the TV, fix the garbage disposal, pleasure myself sexually, trim a steak, and snake the drain with a hanger. He’s learned how to shit in a hole and eat bugs.I write reminders for him with sidewalk chalk on the driveway: BEN–SEMIFINALS– SATURDAY 2PM. He walks to the rink. Stands on the dumpster out back. Watches from the window.I know for a fact that he drinks beer out there. He must be taking it from the fridge in the garage. The electric fridge that uses electricity to keep its man-made contents cold.We put his shoes and suits in the dress-up box and my sons pretend to be my old husband. “Can we show Dad?” Luke says, but their dad’s already in his shelter, a piece of bark propped in front like a door. I flick the porch light once, twice, three times, he pops out his head and shouts “GOODNIGHT!” The boys blow kisses, naked except for the suit blazers. “WE LOVE YOU!” They yell. I shut the door and lock it.On Ben’s birthday my husband eats cake on the porch and the kids take selfies with him through the window. They draw pictures of our family: me with a stick-figure boy in each hand, their dad in a tree, beard, no pants. My mouth is a colored-in half moon, sangria red, no teeth, all lips and gums. I could be screaming or bleeding. Luke asks, Is Daddy going to come home soon? And I say, You’ll have to ask your father that. He says, Daddy, are you going to come home soon? And my husband says, I live outside now, Buddy, and Luke says, can we live outside with Daddy? And I say, No, and he says, Why not? And I say, Because we’re people, not animals, and he says, Is Daddy an animal? And I say, Yes. “It’s got to be a midlife crisis,” my girlfriends say. “Did he try jogging?”“Did he try sports cars?” “Did he try strippers?” “Yes,” they say. “We could fix this with strippers.”I take the garbage cans out to the curb and there’s my husband, gathering sticks, wearing his Eagles jersey, no pants. A true outdoorsman. He’s rubbing his beard and glaring at the front lawn. I could teach you how to use the mower, he says, and I say, I don’t have time, and he says, Well, I could mow it. And I say, Oh no, Dear, I wouldn’t want you to break one of your rules. I clean the gutters.I set up the new soccer net.I carry our sleeping sons from the car to their beds.The grass in the front yard gets longer and longer. The boys love it this way; they call it “the jungle.” I carve the Jack O'Lanterns. Pop the eyes out of the one that looks most like him.“I’m sunburnt,” he says to me through the window.“Put some mud on it.”“I have blisters,” he says to me when I walk to the mailbox.“Put some mud on it.”I stop changing the lightbulbs and stop washing the car and I throw out all of his clothes. Change the garage code. Lock all the doors and blast the AC. Bring the beer into the house. Drink it all. The grass just grows and grows.
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COUSIN FRANCINE by Lynn Marie Rossi

April 7, 2025
All my cousin Francine wanted to ask about when I got to Georgia was 9/11. “You probably saw everything,” she said as we sat cross-legged on her bed.“I was seven,” I said. “That was a long time ago.” By then, I was ten, with only vague memories of that day: my mother talking my father out of packing suitcases; the sound of people shouting outside before my mother shut the windows, fearful of dust and chemicals. But Francine wanted falling bodies and clouds of ash. “You’re, like, right next to Ground Zero!” “We live on the Upper West Side,” I said. Geography meant nothing to Francine.  She was thirteen and sitting in her bedroom felt like being in the presence of a wild animal. She spoke flatly, tamping down whatever Southern accent she might have, wore bruise-colored eye shadow, and painted her nails matte black. Her bedroom walls were covered with bands I’d only vaguely heard of: Simple Plan, Good Charlotte, My Chemical Romance. Their images were cut from magazines or printed from school computers, all held up with Scotch tape, paper trembling in currents of central air conditioning. Below her oversized Taking Back Sunday hoodie, she wore tank tops and already had boobs. On her wrists, she wore jelly sex-bracelets, though I noticed she rolled her sleeves down to hide them whenever she was actually out in public. “Guys grab at the ones that mean the thing they want from you. The black ones mean sex,” she explained to me, “and the blue ones are blowjobs.”“What?”“Blowjobs. Those are when you suck on a guy’s dick.”I was only vaguely certain what a dick was, with little idea of what would happen if you sucked on one. “Have you ever done that?”She shook her head. “Not yet. But I practice.” She didn’t elaborate. After years of refusing the invitations of friends who vacationed in Florida, my parents finally felt obligated to say “Yes,” and left me at my aunt and uncle’s place outside Atlanta on their way. “Less than a week,” my father told me as he lifted my bags from the rental car trunk. My left ear hadn’t unpopped after the plane landed, and I opened and closed my jaw, barely listening.“Just four days,” my mother said. “Four long days.” The whole trip made her antsy and irritable in the same way as waiting in line in the grocery store. She had a native New Yorker’s idea of the South, made nervous by such “conservative” and “backwards” people. Dad pointed out that she’d grown up on Staten Island.My aunt and uncle’s house was a giant McMansion in a neighborhood full of them. Each looked cobbled from scraps of brick and fake stone and vinyl siding. Juliet balconies jutted from two-car garages. Pool pumps harmonized in backyards. The mid-August air was unbearable; nobody had trees and there weren’t any sidewalks.Inside, photographs lined the wall beside the staircase, one of which showed me, fresh-birthed in a hospital crib. “Can’t get over you becoming a young woman!” Aunt Jane stared at me as I dragged my suitcase up the steps. “Me neither!” I didn’t know what to do besides match her breathless energy. She showed me to the guest bedroom, where their dog, Pierre, spent most of the day. He was an old Bichon with perpetually wet, brown fur around his mouth. He hated me immediately, growling from his place on the bed. “Oh, P, stop it! Be nice to your cousin.” Jane shooed him away. He scurried, wheezing, off into the hall. “He’ll get used to it. Maybe he’ll try snuggling with you!”“Here’s hoping!” Within minutes of my uncle returning home from his car dealership, we were gathered at the table, eating Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese. The small crocodile on Uncle Chris’s polo was askew; Francine later told me she’d unstitched every one in his wardrobe after being grounded for downloading music on Kazaa. Jane did her best to reattach them, and Chris still wore the shirts out of spite. After sunset, my mother called to tell me they’d made it to Florida. “There was a snake in the condo. Your father threw a shoe.”“And missed.” They took turns complaining over the phone about their accommodations, never asking how things were with me. After twenty minutes of me saying “oh” or “mm-hmm,” we hung up. I found Francine watching an anime about pirates. “It’s really far along,” she said. “It'd be hard to catch you up on the plot.” Uncle Chris was asleep in front of one of their many other televisions. Aunt Jane sat at the kitchen island with a glass of wine and an issue of Better Homes and Gardens, staring intently at copper pots hanging above the stove.I snuck through the sliding glass doors and out to the back deck. Night was no cooler than day. I pulled up a chair to the edge of the pool and watched a dead frog float from one end to the other. For the first time, I sensed I’d been set up for a lifetime of comparing everything to New York. Once the others went to bed, I ventured back inside. Through the dark, I found my bedroom. I couldn’t figure out how to work the lamp on the bedside table, then cried for a while before realizing I had to pee and had no idea where the upstairs bathroom was. I panicked, shaking below the covers. Finally, seeing no better option, I squatted in a corner of the bedroom and went on the carpet. In the morning, everybody blamed Pierre, who took a scolding from Aunt Jane with his head down, drool dripping from his tiny lips. Uncle Chris scrubbed the carpet with Resolve, leaving a bleachy splotch.Breakfast was microwaved sausage and egg sandwiches, soggy and chewy. Aunt Jane had “so many errands!” so Francine and I got into her PT Cruiser with her and set off. The drive was all six-lane roads and chain restaurants. It wasn’t until we arrived at the mall that I saw a human being outside of a car.Aunt Jane dropped us off at the multiplex entrance. “Napoleon Dynamo starts in twenty minutes—here’s money. France, I’ll text ya.”The instant the car pulled away, Francine walked briskly through the mall doors, going in the opposite direction of the theater, texting on her cherry red Razr. “We’re not going to the movie?” I asked, trying to hide my disappointment. “No,” she said. “I already saw it. Mom just always forgets what I’ve been up to the instant it’s over.”“Oh.”“You can go, though.”“It’s okay. I don’t really want to.”“No, you should go. I’m meeting somebody.”“Can I come?”She sighed. “Look, can you just give me an hour by myself? Maybe a bit more? I can’t have some little kid following me around the whole time. We’ll meet back at this fountain?” She pointed at a bubbling monstrosity at the center of a large atrium nearby. People sat here and there at tables along its rim, eating buttery soft pretzels. I noticed a boy lurking among the fake palm trees. He stood with a hunch and wore baggy, black clothes, his pant legs criss-crossed by straps and a chain wallet. Hair dangled down over his face, but I saw his eyes lock on Francine.“Meeting that guy?” I asked.Francine looked panicked, then put her hand on my shoulder. “Look, I’m not telling you to fuck off because I don’t think you’re cool. I do. You’re my cool, New York cousin.  You can handle yourself. But that dumbass doesn’t know that. He’s just gonna see you as a little kid. Though you’re not.”I nodded. “Thanks.”“And because you’re cool, I know you won’t say anything to my parents.”“Of course.”“An hour.”“An hour.”Wandering around, I realized that I’d never set foot in an actual mall. I found an FYE and browsed the CD racks, picking one up now and then and listening to thirty-second song samples at a headphone station. The whole mall smelled like floor wax, burgers, and perfume. Pacsun kids loitered in Pacsun; Hot Topic kids in Hot Topic. For a time, I wandered the dark recesses of an Abercrombie, holding too-big spaghetti-strap shirts up to my torso.In the food court, I spotted Francine and the boy at a table, eating samples of orange chicken from small white cups. He held his hands out to her like he was begging for something. My cousin sighed and looked up at the skylights. Finally, with a tilt of her head, she gestured towards the restrooms, and the two of them walked together in that direction. The boy’s face was a grimace of nervous excitement; his slouch straightened. My first instinct was to follow them, but I didn’t. Instead I walked back towards the fountain. On the way, I saw a group of small children gathered around a Kiwanis Club-sponsored coin funnel, pennies circling as they slowly succumbed to gravity. While my aunt and uncle slept, Francine and I watched Invader Zim in the den. Pierre lay at my feet; I’d brokered peace at dinner by feeding him a chicken nugget under the table. “That boy you were hanging out with,” I said. “How old is he?”“Ha. He’s forty-seven. He’s my math teacher.”“Seriously.”“He’s fifteen. Met him at Chick-fil-A a couple weeks ago.”“I saw you and him going into the bathrooms.” “Yeah?” Francine kept her eyes on the TV, though I could tell she was worried about what I’d ask.“Were you doing drugs?”She laughed. “Drugs? No. Not that it’s your fucking business.”“Sorry.” When the episode ended, Francine flipped to MTV2 in time to watch a Fall Out Boy music video.“If you have to know,” she said when the song was over. “I was showing him my vagina.” My stomach went weightless. “He asked me to shave it for him, and he wanted proof that I did. So we went into a bathroom stall and I showed him.”I knew about pubic hair from everything I’d seen on the internet, and had been wondering about when my own would come in, but hearing someone talk about the subject of their vagina so bluntly threw me off. “Did he show you anything?”“No. He was scared. Told me to trust him, that he has a big dick, blah blah. Typical.” She turned to me. “Look, Marie. If a guy ever asks you to do anything like that, you don’t have to. If you don’t want. Don’t let him make you think it’s something you want, either. Okay? Just want whatever it is you want. Like, the minute I can get my nipples pierced, I’m gonna. But because I want to. Not for anyone else.” It was the most straightforward anybody had been with me about the matter of my body, or of the one I’d soon have.“Alright. Thanks.” I wanted to hug her, demand she teach me more, but stopped myself. Sometime after that, I fell asleep on the couch. When I woke up, Francine had wrapped me in a blanket and left a glass of water on the coffee table beside me, which tasted bubbly and odd in the early morning.  On my last day in Georgia, it rained. We sat around watching daytime television. Francine scratched at her crotch. Uncle Chris clicked around on the computer doing research for a fantasy football draft, commenting out loud every few minutes about how slow the computer had gotten since it had been used for all that downloading. Aunt Jane puttered around the house.“Alright,” she said just before noon. “We can’t sit around here all day. Summer’s wasting! If we have to stay inside, we can go to Babyland!”“Jesus Christ, Mom,” Francine said, furiously typing text messages.“Don’t.” “Why would we want to do baby stuff?”“Hey! Watch it.”“Right, Marie?” My cousin turned to me. “We’re too old for it?”I shrugged. “I don’t even know what it is.”“Cabbage Patch Kids place. It’s like a theme park of dolls. Out in an even more boring suburb than this one.”I remembered having one of the dolls as a little girl, with yarn hair and a blue dress. Once, I threw it up in the air the way I’d seen adults do with real babies and its plastic face knocked me in the face and split my lip. “I had one of those a while ago,” I said.“See, Mom? We’re too old. It’s creepy.”“What if I said that I wanted to go?” Aunt Jane asked. “Would that be enough? If I asked that you do something for me? Unless you feel like sticking around here with your father, hearing him mutter about pretend football.”Uncle Chris didn’t turn from the monitor. “Please, girls, go. It’ll make her happy.”“And we can have lunch at Bojangles.” Aunt Jane dangled her car keys off her fingers. Francine roused herself from the recliner with a sigh and I followed. Inside Babyland, dolls stared impassively from their shelves. Little girls squealed and ran from place to place, picking up their new toys and bringing them to a small office where a woman dressed as a nurse made them take an adoption oath, fingers raised in the air, swearing they’d take seriously the responsibilities of motherhood.Following the mass of mothers and daughters, we came to a nursery staged behind enormous windows, the glass smudged. . In bassinets, dolls wore cloth diapers. Aunt Jane looked delighted. . A mechanical stork twisted back and forth above our heads, beak chattering. When it faced us head-on, I saw that one eye blinked while the other stayed half shut like it was having a stroke. Finally, we got to the central room. Most of the space was taken up by a fake patch of dirt. Doll’s heads stuck out here and there like ripe cabbages on beds of leaves. In the center of everything was a tree, a plaster monstrosity whose limbs reached up to the ceiling. In its trunk were round television screens where gestating doll fetuses were visible, floating in green-tinted amniotic fluid. Tubing snaked from plastic IV drips into different points in the soil, their sloshing contents labeled IMAGINATION.“Have you been here before?” I asked Francine.“Every couple of years,” she said. “I was into it before I realized how fucked up it all is. Trying to make women okay with becoming, like, breeding cows.”“It’s just toys,” I offered.“Not down here, it’s not.”Another nurse appeared, speaking into a headset microphone. “Mother Cabbage is getting ready to have a baby!” She pulled out a large caliper and measured the tree’s trunk. “She’s five leaves dilated!” The doll heads writhed in place around her as she described a magic dust that fell invisibly from the branches above. “It determines whether she has a girl or a boy. Which are we looking for today?”The crowd of women and girls shouted for a boy. The nurse stuck a plastic speculum into a space in the roots, and with feigned effort pulled from the depths a naked doll with a full head of hair and rosy cheeks. “Looks like this one is gonna get a new home right away. ” She handed the doll to a nearby child who immediately held it close to her chest. Aunt Jane and the other mothers applauded. When the birth was over, we slowly retraced our steps back to the entrance. I followed Francine in a daze while Aunt Jane lingered at the glass cabinets displaying the vintage toys, then insisted on buying me a t-shirt I knew I’d never wear. Out in the lot, a child melted down; somehow, her brand new doll burst a seam somewhere between the shop and the car, and stuffing bled from the hole, blowing in tufts across the asphalt. 

* * *

 It wasn’t until years later that I saw Francine again. She visited New York for a weekend right before I finished college. I met her at a bar near Penn Station. She dragged a suitcase, ready to head to JFK the moment we finished. Gone were the hoodie and jeans, replaced by a tunic dress and leggings; she’d stopped hiding her accent, giving her words a drawl I found musical.I thought about bringing up that trip to Georgia, but couldn’t fit it into the conversation, not wanting to resurrect those girls we’d been. But I felt I owed her somehow. The advice she’d given me, while imperfect, was the first I’d been offered to guide me. By the time we met as women, I’d stumbled and fucked up plenty, and wanted to share it all with her as we sat, filling one another in on what we’d missed. If she lived closer, I thought, we might’ve been like sisters.I haven’t seen her since, of course. A month after that day in the cafe, she met the man who eventually became her husband. They live in Boulder now with two children. They send me a Christmas card each year.“Oh,” she said as she finished her drink, looking at her phone. “Plane’s delayed.”“Huh. Well. Anything else you wanted to see?” My life, New York City, all I had to offer: it all seemed insufficient.“What would you do with two hours?” Francine smiled, deferring to me, waiting for an answer, for me to open her world up in the way she’d opened mine.
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THE COIN by Rose Hollander

April 4, 2025
I spent my twenties working at a bike shop in a midwestern college town. The town was thick with rationality, overflowing from the university. Despite this, I believed in God. The strength of my belief shifted from day to day, but when I stood in church each Sunday my faith was strong again. My boyfriend, Don, agreed to come to church after two months of dating. “I can see it’s important to you,” he said. “So I’ll come. But don’t count on any sudden transformation when I hear the organ music.”And I knew that he was right, that his guard was up too high. To Don, faith was a failing grade in a physics class. “If God wanted me to believe in Him, He wouldn’t have given me the capacity for rational thought,” he would say. Sometimes Don’s lack of faith upset me. I didn’t want to fight, so I just tried to ignore this divide, this one thing we did not, could not share. I knew that trying to convert him would only end badly.Still, I couldn’t help feeling a little giddy that Sunday when he finally came with me to church. We walked hand in hand from my apartment to First Congregational. There was a light drizzle. Halfway there, it turned into a heavy rain. Don had come prepared; he held a purple umbrella over the both of us, and I barely got wet.  The service was beautiful. I always find it beautiful. Don fidgeted next to me, and I started to feel like a mother who was dragging her kid around.         Then he whispered, “The stained glass is shining right on you. It’s turning you orange, sunset orange. You look incredibly sexy,” he said, and I stopped feeling like a mother who was dragging her kid around.“Is a sunset really that sexy?” I said, barely moving my lips. The pastor was talking about the binding of Isaac. Don thought about that for a while. Then, as the pastor reached the conclusion that the ram was there the whole time, if only Abraham could see it, Don touched my shoulder. “A sunset is beautiful,” he said. “Because it reminds you that you’re not in control. That the Earth will spin no matter how you try to stop it. Even if you want to prolong a moment forever.”I took his hand, and I began to pray in earnest. I prayed for all the usual things: my health, and my mother’s, and my father’s, and Don’s. A promotion at the bike shop. World peace. And, gripping Don’s hand in mine, I prayed for that moment to last just a little bit longer. After the service there was always a small reception. Each week, one family was tasked with bringing pastries and soft drinks for the congregation. This week the Robinsons had set the bar high. On the white plastic tablecloth lay donuts, danishes, bagels, muffins — it was almost too much. I had to look away. “Nice spread,” said Don. He was eyeing an everything bagel. “Find me something, okay?” I said. “I’m going to find a bathroom.”When I got back, Don was nowhere to be found. I saw an abandoned everything bagel on the table. It had one bite taken out of it. Where was he?Someone coughed and I turned. It was Pastor Baumann, with Don at his side. “You’ve got a nice friend here, Miss Brown,” said the pastor. He had a smear of yellow mustard on his upper lip. “Mr. Wilson and I just had a very nice talk.”He gave Don a pat on the shoulder. “I need to thank Mrs. Robinson for this spread. But I’m glad to have met you, Mr. Wilson. I’m sure I’ll be seeing you again.” And he was off.“Aw, I’m sorry Pastor Baumann cornered you,” I said, putting my arm around Don. “He can be a little intense.”Don looked at me oddly. “No, I liked him. We had a really interesting talk. I’ll have to tell you about it later.”I thought he would tell me about it when we walked back, but we didn’t talk. The rain stopped and started again, and Don remained  deep in thought.  We didn’t talk about the trip the rest of the day. Don left for the library to do a problem set, and I made some tea and watched TV. During a commercial break, I got a call from Don.“Marie,” he said. “I’d like to come with you to church again next Sunday. Would that be okay?”“To church?” I said. “I mean, of course that would be okay. But, why?”He was silent for a moment. “I don’t know. I just spent three hours working on an econometrics problem set. The whole problem set, the whole course, is based on the assumption that statistical distributions hold over frequent trials of an experiment. But the pastor…”“Baumann’s not that charismatic,” I said. “I don’t know what he could have said to you…”“It’s not exactly what he said,” Don said. “He showed me something.”“What, his new book?”“No,” said Don. “He showed me that I’ve been wrong. That’s everybody’s wrong, he showed me-”“What the hell,” I said, but he didn’t seem to hear me. “He showed me evidence,” Don said, passion rising in his voice. “That statistics, physics, biology — that they all present an incomplete picture of our world.”“Baby, you were with him for ten minutes. What the hell did he show you?”Don sighed. “He flipped a coin. He flipped it again and again, and he knew what it would land on every time.”“Well, it was weighted,” I said, without really thinking about it. “Obviously.”“Marie,” he said. “It was my coin. I had change from when we got coffee the other day…”“Let’s talk about this later,” I said. I hung up. I was shaking a little, but I didn’t know why. Don wanted to go to church again. That was good news, right? Don was realizing that science presented an incomplete picture of the world. This was what I had always known. God controls everything. But (and this was important) God controls it in a consistent way. Not breaking all His worldly patterns for some random pastor from some arbitrary town in the Midwest. And surely He hadn’t. Surely Pastor Baumann had just tricked Don. But why would he do something like that?  When I called Pastor Baumann and explained what had happened, he was silent for a moment. Then he laughed. “I’m glad my little explanation had such an effect on the boy,” he said. “But, to be honest, I don’t understand why it works.”“Pastor Baumann, I already come to church every week,” I said. “I already believe. You don’t need to pretend you have magic powers to recruit me.”“Pretend?” said the pastor. “Marie, you hurt me. I never lie. As King David wrote in Psalms, ‘The righteous hates falsehood.’”“So,” I said. “Just to be clear. You’re claiming that you have magic powers over quarters?”Baumann chuckled. “Well, not exactly. But probabilities go a little wonky around me. A 50:50 coin flip turns into 70:30, or a 1:6 dice roll becomes 1:2. I haven’t tested it comprehensively, it’s just something I’ve noticed that newcomers to the church, like your friend, are often interested in.”“I don’t understand,” I said. “How do you know the changed odds?”“Well, I don’t really know,” said the pastor. “But if I call ‘4’ on a dice roll, it usually comes up on the first roll.”“It doesn’t sound like you’ve tested it at all scientifically,” I said.Pastor Baumann laughed again. “Well, Marie, we’re not really in the business of scientific testing here, are we?”The call turned to small talk, and I put up water to boil. When the tea was ready, I turned on the television to watch reruns. There was a small pile of change on the coffee table. “Heads,” I said. I tossed a quarter in the air; it came down sloppily, glancing off my arm and skidding onto the floor. It was heads. My heart beat sped up. Maybe Pastor Baumann was telling the truth, but he didn’t know the full story. Maybe God had temporarily altered the laws of probability for everybody. I flipped the coin again. “Heads!” I caught it neatly on my inner arm. Visions flashed through my head: I could go to the casino, make a thousand dollars. I could buy a new mattress, or take a class at the university. It was tails. Maybe it had been tails for Baumann, too, and he had cheated, somehow. My explanations were getting more pathetic.Don had left one of his physics textbooks on the couch. It weighed about five pounds. I flipped to a page in the middle. “For a point mass moving in a circle of radius r in the xy plane, we have the planar symmetry,” I read, before the rest of the page became blurry. There was nothing in here that was going to help me understand Baumann’s claim. I would have better luck going to the library and looking for books on magic tricks. A small voice inside of me coughed. They said the same about Jesus, it said. They said he was just doing magic tricks. But the pastor wasn’t the younger son of God. I was sure of that, if not much else. Pastor Baumann, with his habit of getting mustard all over his face, had to be mortal. The pastor was just lying. But why would he lie? If he was lying about this, what else was he lying about?  This line of thinking gave me a headache, so I was glad when the doorbell rang. It was Don. He was disheveled. His shirt was wrinkled, hair matted; there were bags under his eyes. And he was beaming from ear to ear.“Baby, I’ve been in the library all day,” he said. He took my hand. “I read everything. I read Lewis and Chesterton and Torrey, and God, I get it now.” I took a step back. I didn’t know what to say. “Okay. Okay. Let’s just watch some TV, yeah?”“TV!” He scoffed. “How can I watch TV, when I want to just– go outside and breathe it all in, all of God’s creations. The fresh-cut grass and the new flowers and– and you.” He took me in his arms. “I love you,” he murmured. “I love you I love you I love you. And I love God, for thinking you up.”I leaned into him, unable to speak. We were so close we may as well have one person. Then he stepped back. “Let’s pray now,” he said. “I want to pray with you.”“I’ve always wanted to pray together,” I said, but I didn’t quite know if it was true. It felt odd, kneeling beside him, thanking God in silent sync. How much overlap was there between our prayers? I didn’t know what to believe now — what Don learned in his classes or what I had believed my whole life. Could either system of belief co-exist with the pastor’s professed gift? I felt like Don and I were little kids in daycare, playing next to each other with different toy trucks. But maybe, just maybe, as we knelt together, eyes shut tight, we were asking God the same questions with our silent prayers.  Don and I broke up about a month later. He read more and more about Christianity until he wouldn’t talk about anything else. The bylines on his books shifted from Lewis and Chesterton to Scott Hahn and Jerry Falwell. Soon First Congregational, my church, was too laid back for him. He wanted to go to the Catholic church by the river. He wanted me to wear more modest clothing. He didn’t want to have sex. When he stayed over, he would sleep on the couch. If I walked by him in a t-shirt and underwear, he would sigh, or make a big show of covering his eyes. “Thanks a lot, Marie,” he’d say. “You’re really helping me out here.” His tone hurt more than his words.  So I moved on. I got a promotion at the bike shop, but I knew I didn’t want to stay in this town forever: constantly meeting new college students in the coffee shops and bars, finding it harder and harder to talk to them the older I got. I didn’t go to First Congregational every Sunday anymore. I didn’t know what to believe. I peeked in from time to time. The people filling the pews looked so confident, so sure of themselves and their God. And Pastor Baumann spoke to them as seriously about the fall from Eden as he had spoken to me about his powers over probability.  One foggy April Sunday, about a year after I broke up with Don, I was walking to the coffeeshop. I was on my phone, scrolling through Zillow, when I heard someone call my name. “Marie,” he said again. It was Don, only partially obscured by the fog. He looked different; older. He had a short beard, and wore a suit. “Don,” I said. I didn’t really have any questions for him. “How have you been?”“I’ve been good,” he said softly, and I said the same, and that was that. As I continued walking home, I felt uneasy. It was like speaking with a different person: a stranger. We used to talk all night. We used to share so much. I felt a sudden anger towards Pastor Baumann, as if he had stolen something from me. I stopped short. I wasn’t going home. I crossed the street and began to walk to the church.  There was a service going on. I checked my watch; it was 10 o’ clock. Most congregants sat in the first few rows, except for a little boy and his mother. They sat in the last row. The boy sat straight and proud in a stiff little suit. The tie was all wrong. He stared straight ahead, so he didn’t notice his mother’s sideway glances. I could see the pride in her eyes. Her little boy, grown up enough to behave in church. When they got back home she would ask him what he thought of the sermon, and she would act surprised by whatever he said. “I never thought of it like that,” she might say. “I bet Pastor Baumann hasn’t either.” The anger that had reared when I saw Don came up into my throat. It closed up my throat and I couldn’t breathe.  Two hours later, I knocked on the door of the pastor’s office. “Marie, what a pleasant surprise,” he said, beaming. “Come in, please.”“I need to know,” I said. “I need to know if you were telling the truth. I lost someone who was important to me. He’s a different person. His life is on a different course. You’ve done so much damage, you don’t even know-”“You’re babbling,” said Baumann. He got up and closed the door behind me. “Sit down, and I will tell you anything you want to know.”“Flip a coin for me,” I said. “Show me that everybody else is wrong.” The pastor raised an eyebrow. I fished in my pocket and handed him a dime. “If you’d like,” he said. “But you shouldn’t take so much meaning from it.”“Just get on with it,” I said, and he looked mildly shocked. “Fine,” said Baumann. “Heads.” He flipped the dime and I craned to look at it, resting on his forearm. Roosevelt grinned back at me.“Again,” I said. The pastor sighed and called tails, it was tails.“Again.” He called heads, and it was heads.“Again, again.” “Tails.” The coin flew through the air and Baumann smacked it on his forearm. I saw an olive branch and started to tear up. “Tails,” he said, and flipped again. It was heads. I thanked God and walked out of that place, into the dense April fog. It started to rain and the droplets fell down into the grass, just like they were supposed to.
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SOLITUDE by Sebastian Castillo

April 2, 2025
The purchasing of books is life’s finest pleasure. And while I often have a stack of them unread, they are read eventually, and therefore this habit does not seem excessive or indulgent to me. It is perhaps a bourgeois affectation—there is something embarrassing of an over-large personal library—but there are certainly less healthy ways to spend one’s money. I am no stranger to that, certainly. If God and constancy may will it, that period of my life is closed shut, like a book I’d like to forget entirely. Those pages are wine-soaked anyhow, grainy with drug-powder, the words to those many stories smudged and barely legible. Yet unfortunately, I had upset an important balance: I was buying too many. If I bought, say, four books, I would read three of them immediately, and leave the last for some later time. But now I was acquiring more than ever. While I am a prodigious reader, I couldn’t keep up. Yes, I am one of the top admirers of literature in the world, currently, and anyone in my life (the few, that is) can attest to that. So, as you can see, this position of mine had gotten the better of me. I could count at least 150 books in my possession I had not yet read. Many of these books were purchased during various publisher’s and bookseller’s flash sales, when a $18 paperback can be purchased for a measly six, shipping included. It’s hard to stop oneself in those moments, erratically clicking on as many attractive titles as memory allowed me to recall. And now, well, 150 books! That’s simply too many left unread in one’s possession, and so I promised myself I would buy no more until that pile had shrunk by half. And, in the case I badly wanted to read a book I did not have access to, very badly wanted to do this, then I would either have to wait, or see if it was available at the public library. God, grant me constancy!I went to the library to acquire Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal. This book had been recommended to me by a well-meaning friend. The recommender, the doorman of my building, said it read to him like something I would dream (I often tell him my dreams, for he is the only friend who tolerates this, always a smile on plump Horacio’s cherubic face). Well, of course I found this comparison flattering, and felt I needed to read it as soon as possible. Sometimes books announce their presence to you, like some vagabond courier knocking haggard upon the castle walls with an important message. Leaving the library with the slim volume (it is a mere 80-page novella, among the best kinds of books there are), I flipped through its pages and was left agog: the prior library patron had annotated it. And not merely lightly annotated—they had underlined, circled, and written words in the margins of almost every page of the book. It is a public book, and they had made it private. My reading, effectively, had doubled: not only would I read Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal, but I’d have to read this phantom reader’s version as well. I considered returning it. I did not want this person’s version of Too Loud a Solitude. I didn’t even know them. What if they had very bad ideas? I feared their version of the novella would merge with the one printed by the publisher, and they would, unknowingly, from the past, destroy the effects of this book on me.I tried to ignore this phantom reader’s pointing and gesturing as I read. The plot of the book was simple enough: an old man destroys books using a hydraulic press. It is not clear why. He is completely insane and an alcoholic. But why did this phantom reader insist on underlining the fact that this drunk and insane man had worked at this hydraulic press for 35 years? The narrator repeats this fact, it’s true, yet this reader felt it necessary to highlight the number of years every time. I could not feel anything but contempt for this version of Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal. It does not matter that this old man has been at this work of destroying books for 35 years. It could have been 40 years, or 20. The effect would remain the same. The author had merely made an arbitrary decision. 35 years. Yes, authors enjoy doing a bit of this all the time: the marquis went out at seven in the evening and so on. The curtains in my room are blue (they are white).This phantom reader-cum-writer (for now, they had written their own version of Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal, which we could call Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal 2, or perhaps, My Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal by Anonymous) had many things to say about the book in question. Some of their marginal notes said: “love for destruction” and “destruction” and “against common sense” and “discovery” and “loneliness in society” and “weird tenderness to work tools” and “power of books” and “USSR?” and at the end of the book were a series of furious notes, completely and utterly illegible.Was this person fucking stupid? Were they just a fucking complete fucking idiot? A total degenerate moron? They had heavily underlined or added multiple stars (drawn as if the person holding the pen were in fact an illiterate child or a mental invalid) to the following words or phrases: “slaughterhouse” (heavily underlined, starred), “too loud a solitude” (heavily starred, if you can believe it), “the heavens are not humane” (underlined multiple times), “too loud a solitude” again (heavily starred, again). When I had finally reached the end of Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal, I felt annihilated. Not by the novel in question, no, but by this phantom reader-cum-writer’s new version of the book. Their stupidity, I found, was so boundless I felt certain then that the human project was completely doomed. Completely, utterly doomed. Nothing would ever get better. Things would only get worse. Every day, I realized, was a testament to this fact: life itself was the experience of being surrounded by entropy, atrophy, and necrosis. But most importantly, it was a testament to boundless stupidity. Nothing should have existed in the first place. And in fact, it was the stupidity of nothingness to have created existence by accident.I realized, then, there was only one thing left for me to do. I would either have to hang myself (the thought of which turned my stomach), or I would have to kill this person. Anonymous. For they had done something of irreparable harm: they had forever damaged Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal which had led me to lose complete faith in the human project. I could not merely go out and buy myself my own copy and read it again, unsullied by this silly and ridiculous and more importantly, very stupid person. That initial phantom reading will have forever imprinted on me, and therefore, completely and utterly destroyed Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal—a book, incidentally, I did not really like, which is in many ways beside the point. The only punishment I could fathom was to end their life. Because then I could say we will truly have had a tit-for-tat: I will have altered the course of their existence (by ending it) in exchange for their having ruined my experience of Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal, a book I didn’t like, and more importantly for causing me to lose faith in the human project. It’s possible I would have liked this book much more had I not first encountered it in this fallen state, and perhaps then, I could have gone on living in a satisfactory manner. The human project could have seemed salvageable. I could have continued to eat breakfast and so on, I could have continued to make love with beautiful women and so on, but now I had lost complete faith in the human project, and everything, utterly everything, had become equally ruined.But, of course, I first needed to find out who they were. This proved trickier than I imagined, the more I thought of it: I had assumed, perhaps incorrectly, that it was the previous library patron who had done this. But in fact, it could have been the patron before that one, or the one before that, or the antepenultimate lender. The more I thought of this possibility, the more I felt enraged: they had not only permanently ruined this book for me, but for, perhaps, an entire population of readers. There could, by all rights, be a small city of now permanently damaged readers, who are to walk around for the rest of their lives with this version of Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal residing within their forever diminished personhood. So, in fact, one of the reasons the human project was doomed, utterly and completely doomed, could have been for the fact that—given so many readers had read this version of this version of Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal—they too had given up on the human project, and they too had lost the will to improve the conditions of life in any achievable fashion. And if this were to happen to several people, all from the same source, then that hopelessness would spread like a bacterium. And as we know, when something of that nature goes untreated, it’s over. It’s completely over. In many ways, I thought to myself, it was conceivable that this version of Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal could be the inaugurating gesture of the human apocalypse itself. If I did not do something about it, if I did not stop it right then and there, I would be allowing the annihilation of all that was good and true and meaningful on our planet. I was so overwhelmed by the realization I felt the need to consume my third bowl of chocolate cereal for the day (I would typically admit only two), and this I always did in my study, which I called my suicide den, where I kept all my books, hundreds of them scattered in idiosyncratically designed piles for reasons which I cannot address.It struck me, then, that the passage of my thinking had led me off toward an unexpected detour: while at first I thought I had lost all faith in the human project—and, indeed, I had—I was now, quite ironically, put in the position to save the possibility of the human being by ensuring that no other person would ever read this book. If some of the damage had already been done, and surely it had, I could at the very least stop it dead in its tracks. And so, of course, while some people, a small band of citizens, surely, will have been permanently damaged (and I forever would be one among their number—their leader?), I had the power to prevent this insipid disease from spreading, and in that way, save the possibility of the human being. And yet: I felt a profound sympathy for my fellow comrades. Who were they? Had they all hanged themselves? Perhaps they were spreading their necrosis—no fault of their own—in our little community, irreparably poisoning all with ears to hear. So now, I realized, my labor had not doubled, but grown exponentially: not only would I have to kill Anonymous, this phantom reader-cum-writer, but I would have to kill all who had read this volume—out of pity, and diligence, of course—so that they could not spread their human necrosis as a result of having read Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal by Anonymous.This would be much easier than I had at first anticipated. My only other friend in the world, besides Horacio, was Sherman, the steward of our public library. Now, this might strike one as curious. How could such a prodigious purchaser of books be on good terms with a librarian? Surely, one might think that the average librarian would treat me with a bit of suspicion: I was a profligate and erratic purchaser of books. But no, this was not the case. Sherman was my next-door neighbor. I live in 7-H and he lives in 7-G. In fact, it was Sherman who had convinced me to come to the library in the first place: I was carrying inside a bundle of books that had recently been delivered to me, when I complained about the excess of my habit, in passing. Sherman, ever the perfectly polite neighbor, chuckled and said, “You should stop by the library, then,” he said, “not that you’ll need it, it seems.” I admit to having found this last remark a little distasteful. Not that I would need it? One always needs books. More and more books… For there is nothing but books. (People are disposable. The human project is doomed, after all. But books are something else, and of course literature is better than life.) I forgave him for his careless comment, but I have not forgotten it. In the morning I knocked on Sherman’s door. He had just finished his breakfast and was preparing to leave for work. I sheepishly submitted to him my request: is there any chance he could tell me how many people had rented out Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal, and, if so, could he give me their names? I crafted an excuse: I wanted to do an art project, I said (an art project!): I would photograph, and interview each prior patron who had rented the book, and I would have an individual discussion with each of them. This way, I said, all of these prior patrons will have unwittingly been in a book club, in the future, without knowing it; and by sharing their unique perspective on the book, the art project would demonstrate the importance and trans-historical value of literature, that great unifier of the human project, I said. Once finished, I would collect these interviews in a book, which I would call Solitude. “I’m really not supposed to do that sort of thing,” he said. I could see Sherman was chuffed. Bits of flax seed stuck unattractively to his teeth, and I could hear his toddler child sing a dullard song to herself from the living room. She threw her toy at the toy dog. “But that’s such a great idea. I’m sure our director would agree. We’re always trying to find some way to drum up interest in the library. I would have to get his permission. Come by later, and I’ll see what I can do.”I was thrilled. Little did he know, of course, that he had just quite literally signed several people’s death warrants. For indeed I would seek out each one of these patrons, and need to kill them all. My logic was: if I confronted Anonymous about his scribbles, if I approached this strange idiot man at his house with a copy of this version of Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal and, shaking the slim volume, asked, “Did you do this? Did you mark up this library book?” he would naturally lie. There is no denying he would lie. And so, as a safety precaution, I would have to kill each and every single one of these readers of this version of Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal, to ensure the success of my plan. I would be the last living being poisoned by this text, I would have to suffer that my whole life, but I will have stopped an inchoate bacterium from spreading any further than it needed to, and by doing so, I will have saved the possibility of the person. I returned to my quarters and took a nap. I no longer had to work, because of my lottery winnings, and subsequently had taken on an irregular schedule: I would wake very early in the morning, read 60 or 80 pages of whatever book was currently on my pile, then take my breakfast and sleep for three or four hours. In the late afternoon I would rise, and either visit the park, read more, or begin my long and slow dinner preparations. Then I would eat, and read even more until I felt my eyes grow heavy in their sockets, and sleep for the evening. But today things would be different: I needed the extra rest to gather my strength for my forthcoming travels and revenge plot.As I was leaving my building, I was struck by a horrific thought: had Horacio—who first recommended this book to me after all—acquired this book from the library? Would I have to kill my poor friend, dear Horacio, a wonderful and cherubic man, a stalwart of all that was valuable in the human project, etc.? And, indeed, if he had read this library copy, and had somehow survived its assault, perhaps my calculations were in error? Perhaps it was only I who had been so damaged by Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal by Anonymous, and my entire revenge plot upon which I was to embark was an unforgivable calumny against these innocent souls (save for, of course, Anonymous, who deserved death no matter what). I stood in my building lobby and wept. Please, no! Horacio was sitting on his stool looking at something on his phone. It was surprisingly sunny outside, despite the time of day, though perhaps I had been indoors for too long. I could barely manage a word to him.“Good afternoon, Mr. Sebastián,” he said to me, bright and cheerful as always.“Horacio,” I said, “I have a very important question to ask you. It is of too much importance I can scarcely tell you… Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal. How did you read this book?”“I started on the first page.”“No, no, Horacio… Where… did you get this copy?”“Oh. My cousin lent it to me. He’s getting his degree and had to read it for a creative writing class. He said it was too crazy and made him laugh too much.”“So, you didn’t get it from the library?”“My cousin lent me his copy. Did you like it?”I embraced Horacio and kissed him on the lips. He would be saved! The human project! Ah! “You’re crazy man!” he said, laughing, and pushed me off him.“Horacio! The human project! Ah! I will make you its king, my good man! I will make you the governor of a little ínsula, just like Sancho Panza! Except actually! Ah!”“Thank you, Mr. Sebastián,” he said, and returned to the endeavor of his phone.My walk to the library felt blissful and light. I was doing something important, finally. I had been reading all this while as preparation, I now realized. Literature was the preparation, and I was preparing myself for something. And finally: here it was. The future of the human project, in my hands. I would have to do something awful, something unbelievably violent, depraved, and disgusting, but it would be for something far, far greater than I could have imagined. The possibility of the human.The library was mostly empty. Though I had been inside it but a few days prior, I had somehow forgotten its incredibly high ceilings, its battered bookshelves and threadbare reading chairs, its trademark musty smell—almost like tobacco, though no patron or worker had smoked a cigarette inside its walls for many decades now. Sherman was by the computers, helping an elderly woman with the device. She was pointing at the screen, and yelling at him. Yet his face was the picture of warmth and composure. Sherman, the human project! Ah! I tarried by the front desk.“Sebastián!” Sherman said, once he was finished, approaching me. “I’m glad you could make it. Unfortunately, I have some bad news.”I feared this possibility. The director was onto me, then. He saw through my ruse. He must have taken a glance at Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal, and probably felt sick to his stomach, seeing how marked up it had been, and then realized what an effect something like that could have on a future reader—indeed potentially driving that reader to an unforeseen madness that would transform into bloodlust. He knew what I was after. He had now become my new enemy. The director. I would have to devise a different plan of attack.“I didn’t even have to speak to the director,” Sherman continued. “When I checked the records, it looked like the book had only ever been rented out a single time before you, by one of our long-time regulars, Harold Pinter. Funny about the name. No relation to the writer, of course. Anyway, yeah, Harold sadly passed away last year. He was quite old.”“Passed away?” “Well, he stopped coming in, which we all thought was strange—he was practically here every day—and then Shannon found out he had died in his house. One of his neighbors found him. His wife had died a few years back and he became a real regular, as I was saying. He was pretty lonely. He had a terrible habit of marking up all the books he took out from us. I politely admonished him but he just smiled. I didn’t have the heart to do anything about it. He just wanted to be around people. Poor guy. Don’t know if he had children. Anyway, I double checked and it looks like you were the first person to check out this book since him.”“Are you certain?” I asked. “Sherman, are you absolutely certain no other person has read this copy of Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal?” I was once again nearing tears. The human project. The possibility of the person.“Yeah, it’s a shame,” he said. “No one reads anymore.”
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POOL RULES by William P Adams

April 1, 2025
The below-ground swimming pool in our neighbor Robbie Garvin’s backyard was ready. Robbie’s father, the beneficiary of a large insurance settlement, wasted no time improving the Garvins' status in the neighborhood. I heard my parents talking about it; they used terms like ‘not above board’ and ‘possible fraud,’ which I knew nothing about. The pool was heated and had a diving board – enough said.Robbie let on at school that he would throw a start-of-summer pool party on the first Saturday after school was out. He bragged that there would be unlimited food and drink and bikini-clad girls from our junior high. I was beyond stoked for the party.Saturday came. The early summer sun was beating down at noon when I arrived at the pool. The only girls were two eight-year-old neighbors splashing in the shallow end. No food in sight, just a six-pack of store-brand soda. Robbie and two pals started a cannonball contest off the diving board, scaring the little girls from the pool. I sat poolside, drinking warm pop. A sign on the shed where Robbie’s dad kept the pool equipment read: WE DON’T SWIM IN YOUR TOILET—PLEASE DON’T PEE IN OUR POOL. I finished the soda and slipped into the shallow end, lazily back-floating with my eyes closed. As Robbie and the others cannonballed into the heated, chlorinated water, I added to the warmth, letting twelve ounces of fizzy cola stream from my young loins, imagining Robbie and his buddies swimming in our toilet.
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WOLF IT DOWN by Billie Chang

March 31, 2025
I push Ally’s note clean into the corners of my mouth, the motion wet and slow, the ink kissing molar. Finn is in the shower. The bathroom door splintered last week after Mr. Rutabaga ran into it, full force and head-on, in pursuit of a fast spider. We drove him to the on-call vet. He sits now in his doghouse with one less tooth and a tender snout. I can hear Finn’s motions through the wood-chipped cracks: the stumbling as he raises his leg to wash the bottom of his foot, the collapse of water after he pools the drops and cups them to his face. I swallow. The wad is thin, mushed-through, tickles my esophagus. Binder paper goes down smoother than, say, cardstock. And when lined with a three-hole punch, I like to start by pressing my tongue clean through the holes, make a game of it. The shower squeaks off. Steam erupts, slowly escaping.Finn is not technically my boyfriend. The neon “O” in JOHNSON’S BAR was flickering in and out, one night a month or so ago, and he was there standing under it. The glow made the stubble on his chin shift from dark to light. Feeling bold and bright from the pregame and in want of the cig in his hand, I’d gone up to him. Now we see each other intermittently: He knows my roommate by name but I’ve never been introduced to his. We’re doing a dance, where we both don’t talk about the unspoken thing, and I don’t ask because I’m scared to lose the attention. But if someone new were to come up to me, their head halo-d by the club lights, and press their face close to mine, I’d turn away. I feel loyal to Finn. When casualty becomes punctuated by nakedness, it morphs into something else entirely. The intimacy of a mark, sleeping skin-to-skin. It’s a mower to lawn, all my fine prickles picked and collected. The door unlocks downstairs. Must be Gloria with the cake. It’s her birthday today, 23. She’s always been particular about her cake, an 8-inch tres leches from a quiet market in Rockridge. Louis, the baker, delights in this annual cycle. Every year since I’ve known her, she returns with a Happy Birthday, Beautiful Gloria, iced on the cake in Louis’s thin cursive. Gloria sleeps next to me, two twin beds separated by a desk, in a cramped one-bedroom. We’ve been roommates since the 49ers won the Super Bowl, an event which, coupled with Mom’s death, catalyzed my move to SF.Gloria and I have only fought once, after my last boyfriend. He was hard to forget. He left me his childhood stuffed teddy, brown and made of pilling cotton. It took Gloria and I five days to finish and a bottle of Frank’s RedHot. The stuffing was bloating, glue-like. Each piece went down in big gulps, lumping together in our throats, like tens of Adam’s apples. I split the teddy with Gloria because she kissed Reef, once, while we were still dating, and regretted it fully. This betrayal was so shocking that when Gloria first confessed, the sidewalk where they’d kissed erupted and split right down the middle.  

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Gloria places the cake on the table. She’s wearing her favorite dress, all-black with polka dots. She glances at the shoe rack. “Finn is here?” she asks. “He came over early to help set up,” I say. I pad over to our standing cabinet, a heavy wooden thing Gloria found on the side of the street. We dragged it to ours, down Rincon Hill, the concrete smoothing the wooden feet out into patchy bulbs. We keep our party decorations in it, a few nice plates and a sword. For intruders, Gloria said, when she unpacked it. “Are you finally done with Ally?” Gloria asks. I nod Yes. Ally is my community theater director. She left me a note, after she’d given the part of Baker’s Wife to Emma Rose, a preppy girl I hate. Sorry, I know you wanted it, she’d written. Fuck her. Down the hatch she went. When I want to forget someone, I eat and digest whatever they’ve left, things they’ve given me. Gloria is the only one who knows. She’s no stranger to the process; sometimes, she’ll do the same. But it gives her hives and makes her throat itchy, so she’s more selective, has more baggage to carry. It must be hard to walk around so heavy.For me, the gut is its own biome, a paradoxical landscape where digestion means complete erasure. My side of the room is white-wall bare. Everything once meaningful exists instead in my stomach, deep down and feathered by acid. Letters, rings, Mom’s photo album. The hardest was a key, one time. The ridges burned all the way down. I hand Gloria the balloons and we take turns blowing air into them. Finn walks in, his hair all wet. He rubs my shoulder and kisses the skin.  

–

Evening and the birthday party is in full swing. Gloria is drunk and so am I. The kitchen light is on, but the rest of the apartment stands dark. I’m chatting in the corner with Hanna, a frilly girl with asthma, who’s in Gloria’s roller derby club. “Hannaconda,” she says, pointing to a word on her sock.“What’s that?” “My roller derby name. I had them specially made.” I big-belly laugh, pressing my glass of wine to my forehead. “What would mine be? Wait, no. Do Finn. What would Finn’s be?”“Who’s Finn?” Hanna asks. I smile and look around, trying to point him out. I see two seconds of a man-body rush into the kitchen and have an urge to follow. “Right there. He’s my guy.” “Finndiana Jones,” Hanna decides, and then I giggle-collapse to the floor, too drunk to leave.Thirty minutes later, Hanna presses me about singing and says, "It’s the perfect time. Gloria is in the kitchen." I light the candles and cup the little flames so they stay lit. I lock eyes with the people around. Press a finger to my lips. The quiet spreads and then it’s only breathing. We stalk over in a mass towards the kitchen. The light is still on and a shadowy blob swells on the tiled floor. I hold the cake out in front of me and turn in, Happy Birthday on the tip of my tongue. But then the blob reveals itself and on a chair, Gloria sits straddling Finn, her fingers cupping his face. He’s looking at her, soft. Then the mass begins the chorus and the two pull away from each other, all guilty. Finn’s eyes sweep down to mine, his gaze troubled, and with the candle flames bouncing the light, he looks like he did the night we met, stubble and all.  

–

It’s no shock when the apartment splits in two, right down the desk. The plaster separates and the house-bones shake. The rip is so big, it cracks the ground and halves the dirt, all the way to the center of the Earth. If I lie down and lean over, my stomach flat against the second floor’s hardwood, my head peeking out above the cavern, I can see stalagmites, bats, Hell. I’m working on finding a tarp so that I can cover my half of the apartment without having to see Gloria across the ravine. She’s trying to fashion a bridge to mine, already threw a can on a string and missed. I should call my landlord. Maybe my rent will be less.I haven’t talked to Gloria since she untangled herself from Finn. When he left our place, his shoes hanging loose in his hands, I stood tall and still on the doorstep and told him how much I cared for him. "I’m surprised," he said, his voice low. "I feel like I don’t know you at all. You’re all blank." 

–

Before this, Gloria meant trumpets blaring and pop music coloring the background – my weak memory placing her onstage in that dark karaoke bar, all confidence and a soft, lilting voice, on our first night out as roommates. I started work at the seafood house early the next morning, a prim and proper waitress, shucking oysters and recommending white wine to pair with Tilapia. Gloria had gotten to the bar early and signed herself up for karaoke in slot #2. It was a few days before Halloween, the 25th or 26th, and so all the windows were colored with cobwebs. Gloria was in a big bedsheet. Ghost Gloria can sing, I said after, my hands buzzing from applause. She stretched her legs out onto my lap, piling the soft points of her heels into my thigh, and smiled big at the attention, establishing then some sort of need to prove herself worthy. “I’m dressed as my mom,” she laughed, her eyes ablaze. “She haunts me.” I stilled, because I had come here to start again, to try and erase my history. But feeling the alcohol snake its way up my chest and knowing, truly, that memory is inevitable, water to a sinking ship, I coughed and said, "I lost my mom too." And then we spilled open, craft scissors to the hippocampus, remembering things we long fought to forget. A few hours later, we both took to mouth our first memory. For me, a picture frame. For Gloria, a pill bottle. Her mother’s. 

–

About a week passes and I’ve got the tarp up. But it’s cold in SF, and the wind presses the sheet outwards, making gaps. Eventually, a paper airplane finds its way in. The front says Please forgive me in Gloria’s careful scrawl. I don’t open it, because otherwise I’ll have to sit in the hurt, like I did when Mom died, all the pieces of her life staring empty and back at me: clothes, a toothbrush, her will. God, it’s so much easier to prepare a feast. I take out the seasonings– pepper and salt, some parsley for a green. I go around the house and start the pile. When I’m done, Gloria’s things fill my room. She is in every crevice, from ceiling to floor. I put on a song, let it boom around, and crawl my way to the top. I start with the paper airplane– crumple it up so it’ll sink down smoother. I take big bites and try to forget. Even with the music blaring, I can’t help but listen to the slippery sounds of it all entering my belly. It tastes cozy. Like warm apple pie.The next day, I’m feeling big. I take Mr. Rutabaga on a walk. As we’re climbing up a rounded hill, I feel something grumbling upwards, from deep in the gut. I let go of the leash. Mr. Rutabaga runs ahead, his body disappearing in the tall grass. After a heavy breath, I heave forward and throw it all up. Salmon against the stream.
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SWORDFISH STRIPS by Michael Brooks

March 24, 2025
Emily spots her strutting up to the hostess stand: a willowy curl of a woman, Asian and raven-haired, white blouse tucked into a black pencil skirt at her narrow waist. Her eyes are sharp as blades, bright as the silver chain about her neck. She grips a Prada handbag that fins from her side and points with a slender finger to a table at the wide bow window, in Emily’s section. Nothing in her face or posture wavers.A man strides in behind her—maybe fifteen years her senior—a graying swoop of hair roofing a scrunched face and thin-framed glasses. He lacks the woman’s flash, sporting a blue button down, slacks, and simple leather shoes. Pocketing the keys to a BMW, he puts a hand on her lithe lower back. It remains there as the hostess weaves them through the sea of green-checkered tables, the woman’s jet stilettos clacking against the herringbone floor. Only once they’re seated does Emily note the vacant space on his wedding-ring finger.She lets the clumsy busboy fill their waters, waits for the ice to settle before gathering herself and approaching. The bow window overlooks a bluff beyond which sand dunes stretch like bloated bellies skyward. Past them are the liquid plain of Lake Michigan and a lowering sun that honeys the crossed thigh poking from the side slit of the woman’s skirt. The leg is smooth and lean-muscled, making Emily remember the donut she downed for breakfast, the way the jeans she’s worn since sophomore year have tightened as of late.She greets them, offers her name, asks, “Anything I can get you folks besides water to drink?”“The demi sec,” the woman says without hesitating. Her voice is low, even. Outside a mass of clouds swells over the lake. “And you, sir?”The man surveys the menu before glancing up at Emily. His cheeks flush when he does, but without wavering, he says, “Do you recommend one merlot over the other?”The woman gives a curt laugh. “Tom, you see how young she is. I bet you can’t even drink yet, honey, can you?” She bores her gaze into Emily, who looks away and feels her face warm. Emily is nineteen. A year out of high school with no more direction than she had last June when deciding to delay the college decision. She dreamt of going into business, growing chic and commanding, like the woman before her. But she never left southwest Michigan. The comment peels her confidence away like the thin shell of a boiled egg. “The 14 Hands blend is popular with our guests,” Emily says when she lifts her chin again.“I’ll have that,” Tom says.Emily nods. “I’ll go put those drink orders in for you.” She starts to turn, but the woman says, “We know what we want to eat.” Emily takes a silent breath. She laces her fingers together and looks at Tom.“You go first, Annie,” he says, scooping a menu from the table.“The swordfish strips,” she says. “Light on the butter. Make sure there’s a lemon on the side. And a garden salad too. Aren’t you gonna write this down?”Emily crosses her arms. “I have a good memory.”“I’ll have the lake perch,” Tom says.“Chips or fries?”He adjusts his glasses. “Do you have sweet potato fries?”“Just the ordinary kind,” Emily says. “Yellow, thin, and crisped.”She feels Annie’s scathing gaze upon her but doesn’t break eye contact with Tom.He gives a bored half-shrug. “That works I guess.”Emily nods and collects the menus. She brings the drinks out minutes later and sets them on the table. Neither of them acknowledges her. Annie rolls up her sleeves, revealing an indigo birthmark on the inside of one forearm, the only blemish on her otherwise flawless skin. Far over the lake, curtains of rain begin to fall.Emily attends to her other table, asking a young couple what they think of the Angus burgers they ordered. “They’re perfect,” the dark-haired man says. His wife offers Emily a kind smile. Their green-eyed daughter mashes the remains of a French fry over the wooden table of her high chair. When Emily waves at her, she gives a high and bell-like laugh.Emily braves a glance at Tom and Annie. The sun has lowered, hovering just above the advancing rain clouds. It casts Annie in a citrus aura and turns the blacktop before the bluff’s edge to dark marble. Their wines trap the light. Annie’s glows like tree resin, Tom’s like blood collected. A tiny lamp stands between the glasses, its shade like an umbrella, unable to shelter more than the salt and pepper shakers. The clouds outside swirl and seem to ripen.Later in the kitchen, Emily retrieves the couple’s plates, ensuring Annie’s holds a cloven lemon. She shoulders them on a serving tray across the dining area to an old stand whose black straps sink from the food’s weight. She serves Tom first, sliding the perch between his flatware. Annie’s swordfish strips encircle a creamy dip in a small, porcelain bowl. Sear marks stripe the lean strips of meat. Sour fruit halves flank them. Emily places the dish before her then offsets the salad plate.“Why didn’t you bring this out first?” Annie demands looking at the crisp arugula. “And where’s the dressing?”Emily’s mouth dries. “My apologies for the delay, ma’am. What kind of dressing can I bring you?”“Honey mustard. But I don’t want it on the side.”“Very well. I’ll take that back.” Emily reaches to retrieve the salad, but Annie slides it from her reach, toward Tom.“This one’ll be on the house then, right?”Emily bites a corner of her lip. Tom ignores them both, forking into his perch. It takes Emily a moment to muster, “Of course.” At her other table, the baby cries, two spaced out sobs that give way to wailing.When Emily passes, the dark-haired man says, “Sorry about the noise.” His wife scoops their daughter from the chair. “Can we snag the check when you have a second?” Mauve shadows show beneath his otherwise gentle eyes. “Thanks!”By the time Emily rings up their orders, pockets a generous twenty-percent tip, and brings Annie her dressed salad, the sun has disappeared, swallowed by the approaching storm. The first fat drops of rain cast liquid streaks across the windows. Annie has already devoured the swordfish strips and cleaned the last of the creamy dip from the cup.“Much better,” Annie says, eyeing the golden-glazed arugula. “With that kind of follow-through, you’ll be more than a server someday, won’t you?” A crooked smile lingers on her face. “I’ll have another glass of wine. And we’ll split the chocolate ganache for dessert.”Emily manages a nod. Her hands start to shake. She wanders through the kitchen and into the walk-in freezer, letting the door clamp shut behind her. She takes two deep breaths and feels the air’s chill. Vanilla ice cream tubs engulf the top shelves. Thick cuts of meat slump across remaining racks. The stainless steel door reflects her blurred figure. Her hips and waist look wider than she remembers.When she emerges, there is the sous chef, scraping silver scales from a fresh-caught walleye, fillet blade tight against the gills. “What the hell were you doing in there?” he demands, already galled about the extra salad. His cheeks stay as red as the raspberries on the chocolate ganache she carries out minutes later with a second glass of demi sec. She sets them both before Annie. Gooey chocolate oozes from the crinkled lava cake. The dining room is quiet now, without the crying baby.“Enjoy,” Emily says without eye contact. She wanders to a corner. The busboy clears the kind couple’s burger plates and hefts away the high chair. The storm outside spews rain. Tom clicks on the tiny lamp, which reflects in Annie’s necklace. She eases her thin figure back in the chair, tracing a pearl nail along the bony shoulder of her blouse. Emily bites her lip.They clean the dessert plate in minutes. Annie takes generous gulps of the sweet wine. Emily stares between her model-thin waist and the crumbling remains of the lava cake. Tom tongues the last of the dark cream with a spoon. With her front teeth, Annie bites a scarlet berry.“Anything else I can get you folks?” Emily asks when she approaches minutes later.Tom’s wine glass is empty, but a rogue tint colors its curved bowl. His eyelids have a slight droop. He looks at Emily’s face and then other parts of her.“The check,” Annie says.When later they saunter toward the door, Tom’s hand rests upon her rear. He gives it a squeeze. On the table, chocolate crumbs pepper their dessert plates. The wine glasses are empty, and the untouched waters condense, forming liquid rings on the checkered cover. Past the undressed salad neither of them touched, Emily discovers the receipt and the too-small tip—not even in cash. She grinds her teeth together. The sky outside is crow-colored. Clouds obscure the moon and stars. Rain patters on the roof with a sound like a hornet swarm.Not wanting to brave the sous chef’s wrath, Emily ventures to the bathroom near the front of the house. She looses a pent-up breath when she finds herself alone, the two stall doors slightly cracked. She thinks about rich Tom pawing Annie’s slim hips and studies herself in the mirror. Her straw-colored hair looks unkempt and her plastic earrings cheap, childish. She tries to stand with Annie’s poise, but instead of a sleek pencil skirt, she wears a server’s apron over broad hips. Blue pens poke from it like hairs from a mole. She grimaces, reapplying lip gloss, when she hears a guttural kecking.“Hello?” she says.The noise sounds again. Emily peers through the far stall’s open door. She sees the stilettos first, pointed like brandished knives toward her. Past an onyx skirt, a ringless hand pulls a mass of dark hair fin-like back from a thin body. A line of vomit needles from cracked lips. Then animal eyes, zipping back and forth, like those of a fish forced from the water. Kneeling, Annie writhes and twists looking sickly. She slides two hooked fingers from her mouth.“Are... are you ok?” Emily asks.Annie leans against the toilet paper dispenser to pull herself upright. When she does her necklace unclasps, peeling from her paling skin, sliding to the tile. There it stays, its tiny links glinting as the gaunt woman stumbles from the stall.“Wait!” Emily calls pointing at the floor.Annie ignores her. She missteps in her stilettos, catching herself on the vanity. She gasps for breath and angles away from Emily and the wide mirror, floundering out the bathroom door.Emily scoops up the shimmering string and follows Annie’s skeletal figure, crying, “Your necklace! You lost your necklace!”Annie doesn’t look back. Her handbag thumps against her ribs as she rushes out the restaurant’s front and leaps into the passenger seat of a waiting BMW. It loops along the bluff’s edge before speeding into the dark and soaking night, leaving Emily in the vestibule, clinging to the cold silver chain.
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ROSE BOOKS READER VOL 1: GROUP INTERVIEW

March 19, 2025
The Rose Books Reader Vol 1, “Primal Scream,” publishes March 20th, full of “prose that explores characters or narrators somehow on the edge or on the brink, in chrysalis or transition, in various states of emergency or desire, struggling to cope with the realities of our contemporary world in real or surreal ways, with some success or no success at all…” that is “an engagement with emotional extremes or environmental collapse or feelings of bodily entrapment…that is desperate, unhinged, hallucinatory, hormonal. In keeping with Rose Books’ mission—“we believe in taking risks for the sake of beauty[.]’” I asked the contributors to answer a question on the theme:What primal person, place, or thing are you most interested in, and why? 

ESTHER ALTER

Transfemininity extrudes from the flesh and tapers into a spear tip aimed at the throat of this awful country that I live in, for I have made my body a political weapon. I am the patriarchy divided by zero, and I will write rage and beauty until you all go fuck yourselves. 

KATE BARSS

Birth.  

ERIC BOYD

I’d say that creativity’s role in society is becoming more primal. Major labels, studios, and publishers are all flirting with AI while churning out “content” whose greatest value is filling empty space. The screenwriters at Netflix are told by the execs to make sure characters in their productions verbally announce their intentions because they understand most viewers are fucking or folding laundry while the app is on. To combat this I think real art is becoming less obvious, more neurotic. Increasingly feral; imperfectly human. Evidenced even by Rose Books’ call for this anthology, I think there’s a need for artwork which challenges people, even if that means alienating many.I think this is true on the audience's end as well. The worst thing a piece of art can be is “mid.” People want to love things or hate things. They want to care. I read an article the other day about the rise of “anti-fans” who enjoy hating certain stars / films / artists as much as they might enjoy loving them. This mindset ends up flattening most art. Nothing is allowed to breathe anymore. A movie comes out and if it doesn’t make a bazillion dollars on day 1 it’s dead on arrival; if it doesn’t shake you to your very core then it’s bad. You don’t get to think, “Well, I didn’t like that at first but the more I think about it it was kinda good!” We’re living in an artistic age of homeruns or strikeouts, despite the fact that most games are won by a healthy mix of singles and doubles. I’d rather hear songs, see films, and read writing that's good at one or two specific things instead of beating me over the head with its omnipresent greatness, which is usually short lived. 

MICHAEL BUCKIUS 

The U.S. Interstate Highway System is a primal place. It connects the wide open spaces in this country. In many patches, it’s a strip of concrete surrounded by nothing. And then, a town blooms, barely watered and ragged around the edges. The LED beacons of a truck stop pierce through darkness. Often, there are moments of silence. Crickets. Then the howl of a big rig like a wounded beast. The windows of an old farmhouse rattle. Tragic accidents, big, smoky, and smeared. A clogged artery. Flyover country it’s not. It’s fly under country because everything feels under the radar, attached to a feeling, and not any particular moment in time. Here in the U.S., we have more roads connecting us than any other country on earth, but we remain, in many ways, completely disconnected from each other. The deterioration of these roads is too obvious a metaphor, but it’s there, like a giant billboard promising salvation through Christ.Recently, I visited my hometown of Lancaster, PA. I drove down my old street, stopped in front of the house I grew up in, and took a few photos. Then I curved around the block and turned down the potholed alley I rode my bike through thousands of times. There was one thing that was noticeably different. Thirty years ago almost every backyard was open. Now, nearly every one had a fence built around it. I still rememberwhat it felt liketo ride away from homeas far as my legs could take mepicturing great distances and what promise lay beyond them… 

DANIELLE CHELOSKY

Sex.   

CHRISTINA D'ANTONI

Sunbathing! Growing up in the early 2000s, every movie seemed to have a poolside montage, girls in threes rubbing on tanning oil, holding their foil sheets towards the sun. Studies show that sunbathing is addictive, a biological mechanism from when people lived in caves. We developed this sun-seeking behavior when our Vitamin D dropped too low.In my writing, my characters tend towards the indoors. It’s where they battle their brains, boil eggs, take a phone call from the toilet, sit and stew. It’s only in moments of sheer desperation that they seek the sun’s rays. I’ll open up their landscape, introduce a lawn or a porch. I like these settings because unlike parks or campgrounds, there’s nothing to do. The sun obliterates all. I’m similar to my characters—as soon as sunlight hits my skin, I remember that apricots exist. Tie-dye, daffodils, sidewalk chalk exists. From there my brain speeds on to sensations: tree-hugging, sipping a fruit-infused iced tea, wearing the good clothes. A friend offering you satsuma slices in the grass, plenty to go around. Sunbathing feels like catching up on lost time, all the days wasted pacing inside. Suddenly your endorphins have you racing towards anything else.I think about that popular painting Morning Sun by Edward Hopper often, especially in the colder months. A woman enjoys the sun’s rays from her bed. There along with the sun patches and her pink dress are the shadows, the worry on her face. The melancholy of the cave. If only she would stick her head out the window, engage in her primal instincts.  

NATALIE WARTHER

Berries. Specifically, jumbo blueberries from Trader Joe’s. Just like the ones my ancestors scavenged for. Sort of.Did I pick these berries from a bush? Definitely not. But I did fight valiantly for a spot in the parking lot, which is, in some ways, a primal chore. Man vs man in the wild, etc.What do jumbo blueberries go with? Yogurt. Cereal. Ice cream. Have you ever pitted a date and stuffed it with two berries the size of a racoon’s fist? Because I have. Do I eat too many jumbo blueberries? Maybe. If scanned in an MRI I suspect my insides would light up blue like a bear’s. Or Andrew Huberman’s.What makes them jumbo? Science, probably, or chemicals, which normally I’d be against, but in this case I selectively ignore, given the rich antioxidant content of the fruit, which may or may not be compromised by the jumbofication process. But probably not.  

ERIN DORNEY

Noticing—and then picking up—a pretty rock. This is a part of human nature that has existed forever & I love knowing that I'll die before my collection is complete. 

KATE DURBIN

I first wrote about Hugh Hefner back in 2011, when I published a series of poems based on The Girls Next Door reality show. The poems are a tour of the Playboy mansion, where the women have all vanished, their rooms occupied only by their objects and the ghostly echoes of something bad that happened. (What that bad thing is, is never named).I wrote the poems years before #metoo, before Holly Madison’s tell-all, and the recent The Secrets of Playboy doc. Back when social media was something very different than what it is now, and tabloid culture reigned. Now I know my intuitions of just how fucked life at the mansion was, how trapped the women there really were–intuitions I picked up on by writing through the show–were spot-on. They’ve been publicly confirmed by the people who actually lived there. And now there is all this new material, in various forms, from the women of Playboy talking about their experiences directly–podcasts, Twitter threads, YouTube channels, books and documentaries, etc.And so I wanted to go back into the mansion again, after poring through all these new materials, and from inside the nightmare of this new Trump era. HUGH HEFNER BEDROOM FURNITURE, my piece, takes its name from the online auction that sold off all of Hef’s stuff after he died (he was a hoarder). It’s a tour of Hef’s bedroom. All the stuff in the poem is Hef’s real stuff. All the things that happened in the poem are the things that actually happened–that, in a way, are still happening. 

OWEN EDWARDS

The primal is the first. It precedes rationality and language. It's a sort of energy whose consequents include desire and hunger. The primal is unmediated, amoral, taken for granted but never absent. It sticks around and demands ventilation. The basic needs that drive you around provide a framework for all that thinking that wants to get done. Sometimes you bump along the edges and glimpse where it starts and ends–everything within the pure requirements for life.The word calls to mind a pre-historic animal, a time before civilization. Primates are like wise older siblings, or a part of yourself you forgot but always knew was still kicking around. See an infant monkey eating fruit and lounging in a stream. Noteworthy cases of the primal include when you eat bone-in wings, let desire take over your life, abide power and allure, pick up a heavy object, wander in the woods and come across an animal, or speak without hesitation.Buster Keaton had primal intuition. His movies are direct and chaotic. What he does on the screen is understood without explanation. Keaton pursues love, shelter, money, brute survival. But the gags are meticulous and illusory. He was effortlessly inventive, which makes his work immediate and free. He makes you wanna do some crazy shit. When you're watching him, you almost think he's invincible. (The day before he died of cancer, he played cards with friends and paced restlessly in his room, waiting to go home. He was never told his illness was terminal.) You get a close-up of his pale face. People say he was stoic, but his eyes reveal measures of fear, sadness, and shame. Is that what they call bravery? He just breaks your heart without a word. 

JULIET ESCORIA

Myself. Not because I think I am especially interesting or "primal," but because our own behavior is often the most difficult to understand. 

JULIA HANNAFIN

Sea glass keeps showing up in my fiction, forged by the ocean and the primal force of its tides. Lately I’ve been seeing less sea glass, more mangled strips and beads of plastic. I miss the soft and clouded pieces I found at the beach as a kid. My mom taught me to watch for sharp edges—if the sides of a piece of sea glass hurt, it was too soon to collect. Back into the waves. I like the idea that force and time can soften us, not do the opposite. Resisting a defensive response to change.ORGhosts. Shadows of death, our maybe most primal experience. We miss the people who die. We fear the ghosts that return. I keep thinking about the ghost perspective—pissed that they’re stuck halfway between this world and the next, unsure why the living are so afraid of them. I most hear of ghosts as unwanted visitors, as if their longing to stick around is to blame. But what if it’s us, the living? If it’s our grief, forcing a natural process to halt? I have more compassion for the ghost, then, as if they must pat our backs as we process what they already know. 

JAMES JACOB HATFIELD

I’m interested in primal instincts in regards to emotions and thoughts because it gives my life meaning.There are different definitions of primal. For me, when I hear “primal” I think caveman. Pre-conscious animal. This proto-human base layer.Most notably in the form of knee-jerk internal monologues right before logic and context come in and rewrite them—the split second where your mind is completely naked before deciding what mental attire to wear in response to the weather of this moment.In every interaction I have that small space where I am able to decide how I respond. I can ask myself “who do I want to be in this moment?”In that liminal space between stimuli and response, I am nobody. Which means I have the highest potential in terms of creativity.So in reality, I'm creating a new self for every situation. Which means I have no idea who I am.And the unknown always excites my curiosity. So it’s an endless well of interest.But through practicing awareness these thought protocols can be rerouted and actually reprogram my instincts. Over time, with effort, I can do the “right” or best thing in the moment without expending too much energy, similar to a near-automatic reflex.So technically, through effort and required maintenance, our primal can be updated; we create what is innate in us over time.After I’m done with a project I am ritualess and insane. So I like to use that excess RAM that was dedicated to the recently ended project to update my primal and become post-caveman in small areas, like doing laundry, until the next story comes along.And it should be said, I have far too much time on my hands to think about this. Go read Rose Books Reader. Let’s have fun. 

J. KEMP

12/31/18, I made a vow with myself to squeeze accountability from the world. With only 3 letters and 4 numbers, I found out more than just the name of the rotten apple of my eye.Asher wasn’t laughing like he was when we first crossed paths. He was too fixated on how long Ihad waited in the parking lot to answer my simple question of why he waved his middle finger.His wife unloaded all the groceries while he locked himself in their 2014 GMC Sierra that they had owned for 408 days, now 2644 if they still do. The sale price is still more than I make a year.My persistence led to Asher telling Jess to call 911. Instead she just sped off.I stood their let down, like I had finally built enough courage to call the number I dog-eared in the phone book just to have a father get back on to tell me she doesn’t want to talk. I’d always pout briefly then forget it, but not with Asher.With him, I still fantasize about sitting at his desk. He makes little jokes during small talk, our foreplay. My eyes lay on a white mug on his desk that has a big-box insurance logo on it. In the bundle of too many pens, a letter opener calls to me with its shimmer. I cannot take it slow any longer. I make the mistake of asking him why after impalement, he just whimpers while trying to get his hand unstuck.The obsession to help someone who not only doesn’t want help, but also doesn’t even remember you. That is primal, isn’t it? 

AMY LYONS

I’m interested in home and in how people decide where to live. I’ve lived in five different states and I am constantly experiencing the tension between wanting to go home and wanting to run away from home. 

AMELIA MANGAN

Two days before I sat down to respond to this question, I was bitten by a spider. I'd already made vague plans as to what my response might look like: something quick and clever, something I hoped would make me sound thoughtful and incisive and witty, some funny little quip about the only subjects I ever tackle in my work being Sex and Death.A tiny red eye watches me now from beneath my upper right bicep; this is the arm that leads to my writing hand. Dark pink threads trail from each corner of the eye; this is the venom attempting to trickle down my veins, to embark on a voyage throughout my bloodstream (the attempt will be fruitless: the spider, dead now, was tiny and non-lethal and nothing will happen save my feeling like hell for another day or so before I am in the end returned to myself again: Thoughtful and Incisive and Witty). There is a thin, smudged veil between my brain and my world and my typing fingers; everything seems underwater, up in space, echoing, changed and charged.These altered and transformational states. These sudden shifts in what we see and seem. It occurs to me, at this addled moment, that this is the primal state my work returns to, over and over again: something, or someone, changed and charged. Sex and Death, yes; and venom boiling in the blood. 

SHAY MCINTOSH

When they dug up the Egtved Girl, the thing everyone noticed was her outfit. Matching separates in a brown knit: miniskirt, crop top, freeboobing it. Blonde bob, short nails, pretty dykey. Chunky jewelry. All of it vintage—3,000 years old, in fact. She’d opted for a green burial (no embalming, just a hollow tree), but the bog had preserved her anyway. She was buried with some hair accessories and a bucket of beer. She was a teenager, after all. RIP angel, you would have loved Claire’s.As a 20-year-old irresponsibly wearing crop tops to my internship, I got obsessed with the Egtved Girl’s fit. Turns out, in the grand scheme of things, our centuries-long detour through hoop skirts and corsets was just a blip. Don’t lecture me, Dad, you’re eating paleo and I’m dressing Bronze Age.Like all European cool girls, she lives in Copenhagen. She doesn’t even have to pay rent—she’s got her own room in the National Museum. Pay her a visit sometime. She’ll remind you that some things, like a bare midriff, are timeless. 

SHELBY NEWSOME

I am most interested in our internal landscapes, the primal and, often, hard-to-decipher feelings that drive our movements through life. As someone who is late-diagnosed neurodivergent, has struggled with mental health, and is a writer, I am in my mind a lot. I’m picking apart my behaviors and emotions, exacerbating my worries—but I know these aren’t unique to me, which is why I’m so drawn to these kinds of characters in my work. I want to see our messy interiority splayed out on the page. I want to understand our idiosyncrasies and how they inform our construction. Because at our cores, we’re all operating with the same set of emotions, regardless of how we let them instruct us. And this intrinsic likeness provides solace and brings about a sense of being less alone. 

BREEN NOLAN

The primal part of me is interested in dissecting the idea of who I think I am to uncover what's really there. 

JOANNA NOVAK

Bodies of water, man-made or frequented by humans, fascinate me. They appear in my fiction over and over again. In the story I contributed to the Rose Books Reader, the narrator finds herself on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean, on a rocky beach in Brittany. In the story I wrote prior to that, a very dejected husband of a man stews by a hotel pool. For a while now, I've been trying to figure out how to write a certain story set in a bath. What could be more primal than water, analogous as it is to amniotic fluid? I like pools, hot tubs, dark water rides, lakes, rivers, peopled ocean areas, ponds, creeks, waterfalls––all of it. And, while we're talking water, let me recommend Leanne Shapton's wonderful memoir-ish meditation on aqueousness and almosts, Swimming Studies.  

GINA NUTT

Nature—the natural world, human nature, all of it. Though isn’t it all intertwined? In the garden, disappointments aren’t personal, growth isn’t hubris; they’re part of a pattern in which death—or hibernation—is the only certainty. Memories of the stray who used to hang out on my patio exist alongside the knowledge that the cat was never mine (RIP Bones). How nature’s indifference reminds us our presence is finite, so too are joy, suffering, relief. I love the gentle, peaceful surprises that transform loneliness into solitude: when I’m out with my dog early in the morning and a rabbit darts out ahead of us; rounding a corner and finding a deer, or several, snacking on bushes. How private acts of observation inspire connections with others: voice note full moon reminders to friends, dividing plants and saving seeds to give away. How curiosity grows into fascination, simple care becomes intention. How worlds weave: nonhuman and human animals, insects, plants, environments. And so, too, do behaviors, consciousness, and being. Harmonious intersections and disastrous collisions; the humbling unpredictability. Longing and desire tangling thick. The moon and tides, so mysterious, grounding, and ancient. Anyway, what’s lonelier than your own voice echoed back when you call out? What’s more hopeful than a seed? Doesn’t survival ask of the living a certain amount of surrender? 

ZOË RANSON

I connect to sounds, movements expressions and gestures we make to communicate that ultimately manifests as language. Syntactical curiosity is my daily excavation into how, in poetic forms, we are able to skip over the linking nuts and bolts - those tired instructional manoeuvres that claim to be essential in anchoring an audience - and use experimental form to tesselate and transmit the unconscious.Uncertainty is the usual state Isn’t it possible to win over and deeply connect to other human spirits without them understanding materially where they are? Through an embodied connection to making, I explore methods of portalling to Open Space, a glitch in proceedings that allows: the reader to experience the poemthe listener, or the audience to derive meaning from what is unsaidfor silence to hold - a negative space that connects the individual to something unseen that is both of language and more colossal than it.  

BROOKE SEGARRA

The orgasm. It often doesn't stand on decorum and its strength, ferocity, and mysticism often disturbs. I'm fascinated with how close pleasure can look to pain, how pain can lead to pleasure, and how pleasure can shatter pain held in the body, mind, and spirit. 

NICOLE SELLEW

I was going to be cheeky and just say sex, but I think that's reductive. Lately I've been obsessed with attention, which Simone Weil calls "the purest and simplest form of generosity." There is no divorcing either attention or sex from the economic conditions of late capitalism, though. It can never be that pure and simple. Engels writes that monogamy is “the first form of the family to be based, not on natural, but on economic conditions – on the victory of private property over primitive, natural communal property.” I would probably define monogamy as deciding that you're only going to pay sexual attention to one person for the rest of your life. Is it primal that we should all live, own, and fuck communally? I don't know. I mean primal in the sense of ancient, but also as prime: best, optimal, excellent. Prime like Amazon Prime. But I’m getting off track.My story in the reader is about a woman in her late twenties having a dalliance with a teen boy, but really she's having a crisis of attention. Young women are sexualized—that's the way in which people pay attention to us. As we age, that attention wanes, and that drives some people crazy. Capital is another way of commanding attention. But attention is so, so slippery. It has this almost mystical quality ("Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.” That’s also Simone Weil). But now I’m not sure I even answered the question. I should have just said sex. 

CATHERINE SPINO

Breaking apart a rotisserie chicken with my bare hands. Reaching orgasm as a trance state. Large cats. Open wounds. Accidentally putting my car keys in my mouth and the way they tasted. Mold. The first time my gyno measured my cervix. Jackson Pollock’s One: Number 31. Wanting more from a kiss. The fact Mary Shelley lost her virginity on top of her mother’s grave. The body as a piece of meat. Sobs of immense grief. The final scene of The Piano Teacher. Roadkill. The line “Ever seen a human heart? It looks like a fist wrapped in blood.” from Patrick Marber’s Closer. And dreams, always uncontrollable dreams. 

MARY ALICE STEWART

My answer—Wile E. Coyote, or my rabbit, Buster, or the ocean, or sun faded, partially mossed over roadside signs, the ones eroded by weather and time, or sickness (of mind, of body, of spirit), or spirituality, or when people sing together. 

GINA TOMAINE

Probably the dinosaurs from 1993’s Jurassic Park. Jurassic Park has been my favorite movie since I saw it at the drive-in when I was 6. There was something irradiating about it, something I didn’t understand as a kid but knew I loved. Of course I idolized Laura Dern as Ellie Satler, who sticks her entire arm into a pile of triceratops shit without a thought, rolls her eyes as she walks off into the jungle alone to turn the park’s power back on, saying, “We can discuss sexism in survival situations later,” and finishes Jeff Goldblum as Ian Malcolm’s musing of "God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs…” with her own edit: “Dinosaurs eat man. Women inherit the earth.” But it was more than that. All the dinosaurs in the film are bred by scientists to be female, but halfway through, it’s discovered that they’re gender-bending—they’ve found a way to naturally reproduce together and are breeding baby dinos in the park. “Life, uh, finds a way,” Malcolm notes. The dinosaurs are the movie’s “villains,” in the sense that they’re eating everyone, but they’re also not the villains at all. The dinosaurs, a stand-in for nature, are respected by Malcolm, Grant, and Satler, even as they terrify. There’s a sense of reverence for the unknowability of certainties in the world. Sam Neill as Allan Grant says succinctly, “We’ve decided not to endorse your park.” T-rex roars; nature overcomes the film’s actual villain: Ingen, the billionaire-funded bioengineering start-up, and its lack of humility, loss of touch with humanity, and ineffectual attempts at exerting control and categorization over what is primal—the inherent fluidity, violence, unpredictability, and beauty of everything alive. Life finding a way. Plus, Samuel L. Jackson saying, “Hold onto your butts.” 

FELICIA ROSEMARY URSO

There’s nothing more primal than gut instinct. Mine told me to say Aileen Wuornos.  

ADAM VOITH

There’s a studio apartment on Boren Avenue at the bottom of Capitol Hill in Seattle where my friend James lived in 1998. I was in Seattle for a few weeks that summer, before moving to California, and spent a lot of time at James’ place. James was starting a record label and running it from a desk in his closet. He rented an extra closet in the common hallway from the landlord to warehouse CDs and 7”s, and his rented mailbox was in a shop on the same block. He still had a day job at another label, but hardly paid attention there anymore.I’m trying to get my head back in that apartment for the novel I’m working on. The place was heavy duty for me in 1998, I was aware of that at the time, and it’s held that weight all these years. I’ve got photos and they almost get me there, especially this pair of Polaroids my buddy Kyle and I took of each other. We’re both leaning out the windows in the front of the apartment. In the frame you see the chipped paint of the widow frame moulding, the classic brick of the building’s façade, and our young heads and skinny torsos, leaning towers of dipshit, surrounded by the Pacific Northwest summer-blue sky. We’re high as fuck, happy as hell, and we’d left the Midwest.  

RAY WISE

Masturbating while driving.
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ACREMONIUM by Shira Moolten

March 18, 2025
Gina didn’t believe Sam when he said he’d discovered mold inside the air duct. “What do you mean, mold?” she said from the couch, not looking up from her phone. “It’s probably dust.”Sam got down from his perch on the bar stool. “I’m going out,” he said, then went to Walmart and bought painting masks and rubber gloves and vinegar. Within 20 minutes he was back, reexamining the duct in their condo with a flashlight. “It’s everywhere,” Sam said. “Come look.”“That’s okay,” Gina said. She was reading a really interesting New York Times article. Besides, Sam was always on about something. If it wasn’t mold it was chemicals, or bacteria, some foreign agent that would consume his brain and make him unrecognizable to the people he loved if he didn’t root it out and kill it first. He’d recently stopped kissing Gina because she didn’t use mouthwash. Her mouth was a bacteria incubator, he explained. She hadn’t wanted to do anything about it. “No kissing, fine by me,” she’d said, then shut her incubator mouth and went to sleep.Sam put on the white mask and gloves and took off his shirt so it didn’t get contaminated. He looked like a sexed up exterminator. He asked Gina to hand him paper towels, which she did without looking up. Then he scraped mounds of white dust into a trash bag before dousing the whole duct with vinegar. Finally he returned to the ground from up above, sweat glistening on his forehead.“Phew,” Gina said. “Glad it’s over.”“It’s not,” Sam said. The remaining mold was now volatile, loosened from where it had clung to the walls. If he turned the air conditioning back on, it was going to shoot out everywhere and fill their lungs. Did she not realize how dangerous that was? So he left it off. The whole condo became hot and began to smell like vinegar. Finally, Gina looked up from her phone.“Can you turn the air on?”“I just explained why we can’t do that,” Sam said. “We need to get a hotel.”“I’m sure it’s fine,” Gina replied. “If it’s mold then it’s probably not the toxic kind. Most mold is harmless.”“Okay,” Sam said. He went to the bedroom and began to fill his suitcase with clothes.“So you’re leaving me to die then?” Gina said, for even though she had no inclination to join him, she felt vaguely that this was not how boyfriends should behave.“You don’t want to live, you just want me to die with you,” Sam said, then walked out into the night, alone. Gina got up and turned the air on. Nothing flew out, of course. She settled back into her article, where a scientist was explaining why moose numbers were dwindling in Vermont. Even if there is mold, she told herself, I’d rather breathe it in alone than share a hotel bed with him, have another argument and not get any sleep.Sometimes Gina wondered how things had gotten so drab. Sam used to kiss her like he was eating a dense piece of chocolate cake, take her on walks and lift up rocks and show her salamanders he had found, cupping them in his hands as they breathed rapidly, afraid. As she reminisced, her throat began to itch. Psychosomatic, she thought.The next day, Sam came back with a mold remediator, a muscly guy in a wifebeater who seemed like the no-nonsense type.“Oh good,” Gina said. “Are you going to fix it? My boyfriend won’t spend the night until it’s gone.”“A little mold never killed anybody,” the mold remediator said. Finally, someone with sense, Gina thought.The mold remediator told them to leave for an hour while he sprayed a chemical into the duct that would slowly starve the mold. Then it would be good as new.Relieved, they waited, walking around the neighborhood. It was October and still extremely hot. They talked about the lack of seasons, how that made Gina sad but Sam didn’t mind.When they returned, the mold remediator was gone and the condo smelled violently chemical, like a Sharpie.“Please just try,” Gina said to Sam, though the smell had already given her a headache.“I can’t,” Sam replied.Gina opened her mouth to speak again, but before she could, something lurched inside the walls and the air conditioning came on with so much force that the grate flew off. Chunks of white dust shot out all around them like snow, snow that tasted bitter, burning their lungs and eyes. Sam lunged for Gina, who stood frozen under the duct, white flecks landing in her eyelashes and hair. She blinked as if just waking up, then followed him, coughing, down the stairs, into the car, all the way to the hotel, where they showered until they were red and raw and brushed their teeth and gargled mouthwash and spat it out again and again like a lifetime of nightly rituals. Then they put on fresh white hotel bathrobes and closed the curtains and got into bed even though it was the middle of the afternoon. The sheets felt good on their bare, clean skin. After a little while, Sam gave Gina a kiss. As he leaned over her, his minty breath cool against her lips, she wondered for a second if she should refuse him, give him a taste of his own medicine. Oh, what the hell, she thought. There wasn’t much else to do in the dark room. They had no home to go back to and nothing else to destroy, only each other’s bodies, breathing, like the beginning.  
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TICK by J. Eagleson

March 17, 2025
You are a tick. You fly through the air on an arc of static electricity, in hopes of landing on something alive and real. Your travel is always a courtesy of others, or an unexpected spark of nature. Purgatory for you is a blade of grass or a dark sock that renders you a shadow in the night as you crawl towards your heaven of soft flesh. You latch onto the shadow of her ankle, monosyllabic in name and purpose. People around here tend to wear socks — she does not. A waft of odor floats up from her shoes, but you are not picky. (It is, in fact, almost attractive to you.)Feared for your promiscuity, you extend the two rods slowly from your mouth — the left with its two hooks, the right with its three. You lost one in a final confrontation with your last lover, a testy deer, who in its final moments, blind and searching, kept trying to scrape its remaining teeth against you, largely in vain (except for your lost hook.) But you only left when you were good and ready.It is difficult to love life so much, or to be so strongly motivated by the primal urges you were born with, that you risk your life with every expression of it, at risk of being burned to a crisp by a lighter, smothered in vaseline, or scraped off and left precariously dangling. To cling, to follow, to have their life in you — there is no more intimate connection. But you are also feared for the intensity of your love.There is a sonic boom in the air that shakes you. You feel the two of you - you and her - falling towards the ground. There is some soft sensation in your body screaming that there is life nearby — she is not alone. There is someone else there. The hope of a new love. You feel a warm shroud of air cover you as he gets closer. Yes, yes! Your body vibrates — there are spikes coming from his mouth too, but they are words, not hooks. Though perhaps you are both embedded in her in some way.For you, time is measured by the number of your lovers. A new life to take on each time- their body, plus you. You do not care for gender or age or species— you love all equally.Sprinkles of dark fall across your body like rain. They are all around you as well — on the floor, on the edge of the light chair. There is one drop dribbling down across the corner of your eye. But they do not smell like the sterile sand that you were born in — they smell hopeful. Beautiful. They smell of life. Of life leaving her. The drop teases you as it caresses your face. If only you had that pink and fatty organ that the animals do, that they lick things up with. At least the taste lingers in your mouth for longer— the taste of love. You imagine her and you swimming in it, swimming in love, kin forever. Your brown shell glistening with it. You will never need to risk your life again for another host, another partner. She will always be there waiting for you. But there is always an urge to move on, always a feeling at some point that it’s been too long. Your little half-a-centimeter body is not big enough to contain and drink in the love of the whole world, but it will try.There are sharp and bright noises coming from her now, buried somewhere deep within her neck, exiting quickly and piercing the air. Maybe there is something else latched inside of her? She is beginning to move now. Quickly. She is beautiful and large with soft steps. She has learned to camouflage herself as well, to disappear. Her presence echoes against the hollow steps as she quickly makes her way up them — you are jostled frantically up and down. She secrets herself away in another room, reflexively, loudly, defiantly slapping the door closed. You hear a click. Just the two of you now. Her blood is thicker now, sweeter now, rushing more quickly. You wish it could always be this way, but soon it slows and she sleeps. Her silence and unknowing lulls you to sleep as well.There is the sound of fumbling and then that high-pitched click again whose sound hurts your body. He is here. You can smell him. Your body begins to loosen, the hooks move back slowly into your mouth and away from her, as they always seem to eventually. They reluctantly linger as they cherish their last grazing of her ankle.There is a softness now, little movements of her mouth are creating suctions of air. Whispers or kisses or something else. The man’s voice is not spiky anymore— it is low and dark and deep. Barely there, but his presence fills the room. (To you, he is the edge of the universe.) She is there too, breathing slower now, blood pumping slower now. (This is what you know from your last taste of her.) Her light ankle is resting on his now as they sprawl across the dark sheets. They remind you of the vein of moonlight cast on the beach that you were born under many lovers ago. (You are full of her now. You do not hunger for her anymore.) You crawl across the desert between them, pulling yourself towards him. You detect some delectable beads of sweat buried within his seagrass hair. In the dull sound of his exhales, you have found the ocean again. You have found someone new to love. (Love is in your nature.)
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