Fiction
THE LAST GREAT NORTH AMERICAN HOCKEY TEAM by Eric Subpar
I awake on a Saturday. It is my birthday. All my friends are here. My wife is telling me about the preseason. Kevin is still coming. Don't blow out the candles until Kevin arrives. I won't, dear. Her father tells me about the Los Angeles Kings. I unwrap a Los Angeles Kings jersey. I’m a fan of the L.A Kings. My son asks if we can throw the puck around a bit outside after the party. That'd be great, son. My wife's father asks me about the roster. Think we got a shot this year? That rookie's a phenom. Sure as hell is. The candles burn, and Kevin arrives. Hello. My wife embraces Kevin. My son embraces Kevin. I embrace Kevin. I am jealous of Kevin. His ability to enter a room. He tells me to make a wish and I make a wish and I blow out the candles. Tell us what you wished for, Dad! Can't or it won't come true. We all laugh. I bet you wished for something like this. Kevin hands me a present. No bigger than my hand. I open the present. Season tickets for the Los Angeles Kings. For you and the whole family, Kevin says. My wish has come true. I wake up on the first day of the season. Time for the hockey game. I pull on my gift jersey. I help my son into his jersey. My wife puts on a Kings sweater. It fits tightly. I drive to the hockey game. My son sings the Canadian National Anthem. Do you think the Kings got a shot this year? We got a rookie. Do you think the other teams think their rookie is a real phenom? I try not to think about it. But it's our rookie who is a real phenom. First class potential, right? Right, son. I feel bad for the other teams. Me too.Great seats. Kevin spared no expense. He's quite a friend, isn't he? The best. Right near the penalty box. But our guys won't spend too much time there. Not our guys. During the American anthem, the players of the Los Angeles Kings and the players of the away team stand at attention. This is the first time I lay eyes on the rookie. His hair is styled in a rolling black mullet. He has a thick beard. His smile lights up a room. He has bright green tape on his stick. Hank Bang. Number 11. That's the rookie. I see someone in the crowd holding up a sign, Will You Marry Me, Hank?! A bit premature, I think. But I don't tell anyone. The puck is dropped. The Los Angeles Kings are dressed in all black uniforms. The other team in white. Nobody scores across the first couple of lines, but their play is exhilarating. Hypnotic. As though sourced from a dream. I smile. I bang on the glass with my fists. My son waves an inflatable noise maker and bashes it against another inflatable noise maker. Then Bang's line enters the ice. The rookie on the fourth line. Right Wing. The Center passes the puck along the edge of the ice, but Bang is laid out by the opposing Defense Man. Slow to get up. Following the action, Bang returns a hellish hit upon the opposing Center cutting through the middle. The Defense Man, the Bruiser throws down his gloves. Bang follows suit and the two tussle, before Bang unceremoniously levels his fist across the Bruiser's jaw and sends him to the ice. I howl in delight. Bang is ushered to the penalty box and I've never felt closer to God. After his five penalty minutes are up, the game is all Hank Bang, laying hits and scoring goals. Ending his first NHL game with eight points. A rookie record. The Los Angeles Kings Have Found Their Star all the papers say. On my drive home, I am ecstatic. Excitement pulses through me like electricity. I sense my son loves me more. So does my wife. Revelatory. This is one of the greatest days of my life, and I can't wait for the next game, my fingers fidgeting over the pages of the book I read to my son just before bed. With such a tremendous initial outing, I expect even better from the rookie phenom as his skills grow. The sky is the limit. First Class potential.The days fly by. I again awaken on game day, buzzing with excitement. I put on my jersey. I help my son. My wife wears her sweater. We drive. They wear their black jerseys again. The other team in whites, but different whites, or perhaps the same whites with different accent colors. The puck is dropped and our team scores ten goals to the opposing team’s two and they win another one. Two and Oh. Helluva a start to the season. Exhilarating. Bang is awarded First Star again. He records his first hat trick. And is already appearing in the radio sports chatter for the Calder Trophy, the award awarded to the most phenomenal rookie each year. A bit premature, wouldn't you say? I don't know, my wife answers. Kevin seems to think he has a shot. When did you see Kevin? The day after the last game. After work. I told you. I don't remember, I say. Well, it was a busy week. I carry my son's sleeping body in from the car. Poor guy. Tuckered out.By the end of the first month of the season, Hank Bang is a front runner for the Calder. Bang is also starting Right Wing for the Los Angeles Kings, who have yet to record a loss. My team is like an extension of me. They are winning. I am happy. I couldn't be happier, in fact. When the zamboni runs its circles, I try to think of what could make me happier, and that makes me sad, but then my son arrives with the popcorn and the Los Angeles Kings return to the ice to lay down another thrashing.For weeks, the same. The Los Angeles Kings in their black uniforms. The other team in their uniforms. A walloping ensues. Hank Bang leads the league in minutes played, goals, assists, penalties, plus/minus, hits, penalty minutes, short handed goals, power play goals, hat tricks, fights, and blocked shots. He's a real phenom for sure, dad. Sure is, son. Say where'd your Mom run off to? Don't you remember, Dad? She had her dinner tonight with Kevin. Oh yes. He's a real pal. The best a dad could have, ain't that right? Think they'll win tonight, son? If the Goalie stays true. Can't outscore Bang though. On the car ride home, I listen to sports radio. Hank Bang is a generational talent, they say. A bit premature, I tell my son but my son is asleep. He should win the Calder. At home, my wife isn’t there. Dinner must have gone late with Kevin. He’s a real talker. And a hell of a listener to boot. I tuck my son into his bed. I ask if he wants me to read to him but he shakes his head no. And before I know it, it is already the NHL playoffs. The Los Angeles Kings exited the regular season without a single loss. Top of their division. Top of the league. Eighty-Two and Oh. Forty-one of those wins, I was present for. Never missed a single home game. The team has broken every statistical team record, while Hank Bang has broken every individual record. Two hundred more goals than the previous record. A plus/minus above 500. I am so proud of him. I wear his jersey to every game. I feel instrumental to his success. My jersey makes a contribution. I turn to ask my son if he thinks they will win the Stanley Cup, but his seat is empty. Oh, that’s correct. He didn't come with me to the game. He must have had a prior engagement. Season tickets are a full-time commitment. Not for the faint of heart. Not everyone can love the Los Angeles Kings like I love the Los Angeles Kings. Not everyone can love Hank Bang.The Los Angeles Kings have won their first playoff game. A real shellackin', sports radio called it. I drive home faster than the speed limit to share with my family. The excitement. But my family is not home. My family hasn't been home since I left for the game. When was the last time they were? They’re missing an all-time season. Sports radio says the playoffs are another beast entirely, but the Los Angeles Kings beat their opponent handedly. Perhaps, this round's opponent just isn’t up to snuff. But there must be a challenging opponent coming up, right? The beast awaits. I begin to wonder what the other playoff rounds look like. I turn on the tv. It is a game between the Montreal Canadiens and the Tampa Bay Lightning. The Lightning players are dressed all in white. The same uniforms he'd seen them play in, but the Montreal Canadiens, to my shock, are not wearing their usual white uniforms with red and blue flourishes, but instead their entire uniforms are made up of that garish red and blue. It hurts my eyes to see. I watch the game, nonetheless. The Montreal Canadiens’ Center scores a goal. The camera zooms around the arena and settles on a trio of celebrating fans. They look strangely familiar, and as I stare longer at the family, I recognize them to be my son, my wife, and Kevin. All three in garish red Canadiens gear. I am upset. I go to bed. The Los Angeles Kings have made it to the Stanley Cup. I admit I was doubtful, but I knew we had a phenom for a rookie. And Hank Bang is absolutely that. The other team in the Finals are the Montreal Canadiens. I hope to see my family attend the game. But they only attend the home games when their team wears that red and blue. I almost vomit. But the Montreal Canadiens aren't a good team. Same as the other teams. No match for the Los Angeles Kings. No match for Hank Bang. The Los Angeles Kings win the first three games of the series by a wide margin, but the final game of the season is in Montreal. I watch the game on TV. Sure enough, my wife and my son and Kevin are at the game. My son in a Montreal Canadiens jersey. My wife in a Montreal Canadiens sweater. Kevin in a Montreal Canadiens jersey. My son banging red and blue inflatable noise makers. How can they not see that it is in fact the Los Angeles Kings that is the greatest North American hockey team of all time? How can they smile and laugh rooting for the Montreal Canadiens when the Los Angeles Kings will clearly win the game? A travesty. I feel good watching the Los Angeles Kings demolish the Montreal Canadiens. The Kings, led by Hank Bang slice agile lines across the ice, lay a succession of glass-rattling hits along the boards, and unleash a firestorm of shots upon the opposing goalie. Pure domination. Never even close. And as the players celebrate, I look in the crowd for my wife and my son. I want to see the distraught look on their faces. A look they never would have had if they’d stayed loyal to the Los Angeles Kings. But they aren't present. They must have driven to their home already. A different home than the one I sit in, watching the game on the television. Still, I await their arrival. Perhaps, now that the season is over, I can figure out where it all went wrong. But when I check the mailbox, I find an envelope from Kevin. Inside are tickets to the upcoming season of Los Angeles Kings hockey. Another season. I can't imagine what improvements the rookie phenom will make in his sophomore season. How much better could it get?
July 2, 2025
Interviews & Reviews
BOOKS THAT NEEDED TO BE SAID: I CAN’T STOP THINKING ABOUT. Recommends by Shane Jesse Christmass
Why did I choose these books? Perhaps because, to me, they represent literature that stands apart from the hegemonic literary marketplace … operating outside the structures of commercial garbage publishing, which prioritises market-driven narratives and commodifiable claptrap stories.They resist assimilation into the literary industrial complex, which often seeks to sanitise or manipulate raw human experience for consumption. Instead, these texts engage in an unapologetic exploration of obsession, identity, and the dissonance between desire and self-destruction. These writers embrace a nonconformist aesthetic, their works subvert the conventional expectations of plot resolution and character redemption. The protagonists are not mere vehicles for moral lessons, but complex figures navigating the contradictions of human existence: power, alienation, and emotional rupture. Their novels interrogate the performative nature of relationships, questioning how much of our identity is shaped by the gaze of others or by societal pressures. Furthermore, the texts address the commodification of identity itself, particularly in the way desire and personal agency become entangled with market-driven forces.Their place … especially Moore, Durbin and Chelosky … outside the conventional literary canon … positions them as crucial, albeit uncomfortable, interventions in the landscape of contemporary thought.And, of course, my choices also prove that I have impeccable taste. Now, let’s begin, motherfuckers. Danielle CheloskyCheat (The Waiting Room, 2022). show me your face (The Waiting Room, 2023). Watching the world get right with itself by reading Pregaming Grief by Danielle Chelosky has been an agreeable thing. That book deserves every bit of its massive audience. Chelosky is one of the rare writers whose work I’ll devour without question … whatever she publishes, I’m there. Her writing is a seismic bomb, a carnal rush, a primordial teenage ooze. Raw, unflinching explorations of youth, desire, the blurred lines between love, obsession, and self-destruction. Bodily attraction is in the dirt, the convenience store-soaked chaos, clubs / bars smeared with lament and sweat. Chelosky doesn’t ask permission. Chelosky’s characters often obsess over others in ways that blur the line between love and control. She pushes us to consider how much of our identity is shaped by the people we fixate on. Chelosky has a new book out, Baby Bruise, but for now, I want you to read her earlier chapbooks. In Cheat, Chelosky crafts a fragmented memoir that reads like a dream-drenched brain-fog … disjointed, urgent, painfully honest. The narrator … caught in the chaos of a love triangle … navigates intimacy, betrayal, and the intoxicating pull of self-destruction, our emotional wreckage laid bare. Where does power lie in relationships, especially in undefined dynamics? Chelosky dissects the fluidity of power … who has it, who loses it, and how it shifts in moments of vulnerability.show me your face pushes this voyeuristic intensity even further, dissecting ambiguous teenage sexual relationships with an unsettling clarity. A collage of encounters, text messages, and confessional prose, Chelosky forces us to sit with the complexities of power, submission, dismissal, sorrow, agency, the murky space between affection and exploitation. It’s uncomfortable in the best way … an unfiltered look at the desperation to be seen, to be wanted, to define oneself through others, to be defined by others moving though you, how we self-destruct in the pursuit of connection. Her work often explores the compulsion to chase intensity, even when it leads to ruin, asking why we crave the pain of wanting. Chelosky suggests that love, in its rawest form, is messy and consuming, and she forces us to sit in that ache.Chelosky strips everything down to goosepimple skin and White Claw-scorched throat, just an aching need for connection, for rejection, extracted in prose that lingers like a somnambulist bruise. I can never remember my own name, nor to whom or when or where I’ve said this, but this … Chelosky’s earlier work, not to be mistaken for lesser work … holds weight, holds thought. The weight of silence in digital communication, the tension of waiting, the power play of who responds to text messages first … her writing magnifies these seemingly minor interactions. She dissects the way intimacy shifts when it’s performed versus when it’s private, exposing the performative nature of some desires. In tangled relationships, her characters wrestle with guilt and responsibility, but not always in a way that leads to redemption. Her fragmented style mimics memory itself—half-formed, fevered, unreliable—forcing us to question how we piece together our own histories.Chelosky isn’t interested in neat answers. She’s interested in the mess, the halfway space. All of it is essential. All of it gets my full, undivided attention. Her writing is a gift. Receive it. No replacement will do. No stand-ins allowed. Only this will work. There’s no one better to capture the chaos of chasing love. Thomas Moore.A Certain Kind Of Light (Queer Mojo, 2013). In Their Arms (Rebel Satori, 2016).Another writer I’ll read without hesitation, Thomas Moore has a way of capturing the weightlessness of disconnection, the slow drift of a life untethered. For this, again … I’m looking back at some of his earlier work … the first two books of his I read nearly a decade ago. Moore’s settings are often faint spaces … sterile apartments, anonymous bars, strange city streets … where everything feels slightly off, mirroring the protagonist’s emotional state. Dialogue in his work is often stilted or drained of substance, emphasising the disconnect between people who should be close but aren’t. Thomas Moore’s A Certain Kind of Light and In Their Arms are meditations on alienation, identity, and the quiet despair of searching for meaning in a world that offers little in return. Moore has numerous novels released since these two, predominantly on Amphetamine Sulphate, including his newest novel: We’ll Never Be Fragile Again. In A Certain Kind of Light, Moore follows a teenage boy suspended in his own existence, detached from family, friends, even his own interests. The novel distills that eerie sensation of moving through the world as if behind glass … where nothing feels entirely real, and everything remains just out of reach. His prose is sparse yet immersive, drawing the reader into a space where existence isn’t about being seen or understood, but about grasping at any feeling at all. His characters go through the motions … work, socialising, sex … but instead of grounding them, these routines only reinforce their sense of emptiness. Many of his characters look back on their lives with a kind of yearning, but instead of offering comfort, these memories feel like faded versions of something that was never quite real to begin with.In Their Arms deepens this theme, centring on an art journalist suffocating under the weight of his own apathy. Employment, friendships, even desire … all become indistinct, reduced to habit. Seeking solace in fleeting sexual encounters, he only finds the void widening. Moore writes with a cool detachment that mirrors his protagonist’s emotional numbness, making every moment of longing, confusion, and solitude feel starkly real. If we feel disconnected from our own lives, do we still have a self? Or are we just reflections of the things that once mattered to us. His characters seek intimacy, sex, or art to fill the void, but these pursuits often leave them feeling just as vacant as before.These novels refuse resolution. There’s no grand epiphany, no comforting arc of redemption … only the raw, unvarnished truth of what it means to feel lost in your own life. Moore doesn’t just depict alienation … he immerses you in it, makes you sit with it. And that’s why his work lingers … unsettling, inescapable, unforgettable. Moore’s protagonists often move through life like traces, their relationships shallow, their emotions dulled. He asks what happens when life feels less like something we live and more like something we observe. Is meaning something we find, or something we fabricate? His novels suggest that meaning is neither inherent nor easily discovered. Instead, it’s something we desperately try to construct. Thomas Moore’s writing interrogates alienation, identity, and the numb drift of modern existence. His work isn’t about finding answers … it’s about sitting inside the uncertainty, feeling the weight of detachment. Moore’s work doesn’t offer easy catharsis. He forces us to sit inside estrangement, stripped of all the cinematic polish, leaving just the quiet dread and factual weight. It’s detached, it’s weightless, and it’s devastating.I love Thomas Moore’s work because he nails that quiet, suffocating feeling of being stuck in your own life … disconnected from everything and everyone around you, these petty, miserable existences. Édouard Levé.Suicide (P.O.L., 2008)Suicide by Édouard Levé is less a novel than a quiet, haunting reckoning … a stark and unflinching meditation on despair, alienation, and the slow erosion of self. Written as a confessional monologue, it unfolds in a voice that is both intimate and distant, tracing the contours of a mind unravelling. There is no conventional plot, no external conflict … only the relentless introspection of a man examining his own existence and the quiet inevitability of his decision to end it. Levé examines whether taking one's own life is a surrender to suffering or a final assertion of autonomy … a decision as rational as any other. The novel presents a man not just through his death, but through the fragments of his existence. Levé asks what it means to be remembered … whether a life is defined by its end, or by the details that preceded it.Levé strips away sentimentality, offering a portrait of suicide not as a moment of crisis, but as the culmination of a long, slow drift toward nothingness. The novel is chilling in its simplicity, thought-provoking in its restraint … a work that does not seek to explain or justify, only to lay bare the depths of mental anguish. Levé explores the idea that identity is as much shaped by absence as by presence. How do others hold onto us when we are no longer here to define ourselves?Levé’s Suicide lingers in the quiet, intimate spaces of existence, asking how the smallest details … a hobby, a gesture, a fleeting thought … add up to form a person. The novel subtly questions whether suicide is an act of selfishness or selflessness, leaving the reader to wrestle with the weight of absence. It explores the unsettling coexistence of detachment and suffering, as the narrator speaks of his death with eerie calm, challenging the assumption that deep pain must always be outwardly visible. Silence and omission shape the narrative as much as what is said, forcing us to consider what is left unsaid and what that absence reveals. Ultimately, Suicide questions the very limits of language … can words ever fully capture the complexity of choosing to die, or do they fail in the face of something so final and unknowable? Considering the novel revolves around suicide, it’s also unexpectedly funny.Given Levé’s own suicide shortly after delivering this manuscript, the novel blurs the boundary between fiction and reality, making the reader question whether artistic expression can ever be fully separate from the person creating it. Is this the pinnacle of autofiction, unmatched and never to be surpassed? It’s not just about suicide … it’s about the quiet, slow burn of a life fading, and how the smallest things can shape who we are, even when we’re no longer here. Derek McCormack.Castle Faggot (Semiotext(e), 2020).Derek McCormack’s Castle Faggot is a mysteriously mocking, deeply unsettling descent into a world of desire, artifice, and excess … a grotesque, glittering funhouse. The novel follows Louie, a man drawn into a surreal, nightmarish wonderland … a castle-like mansion populated by eccentric, twisted figures who reflect and distort the anxieties of gay identity, masculinity, and commodified sexuality. As Louie drifts through this uncanny realm, the boundaries between fantasy and reality collapse, leaving him trapped in a world as seductive as it is suffocating.McCormack’s Castle Faggot probes the uneasy relationship between queerness, consumerism, and spectacle, asking whether identity can ever exist outside the forces that market, regulate, and distort it. He examines the thin, unsettling line between camp and horror, revealing how exaggerated performance can be both a celebration and a trap. Through a world of excess and grotesque artifice, the novel questions whether queer identity is something authentic or something constantly consumed … by culture, by capitalism, by the self. Beneath the satire, Castle Faggot forces us to confront an unsettling possibility … that queerness, in a world obsessed with spectacle, risks becoming just another product … one that entertains, shocks, and sells, but never escapes the systems that define it. Are we bonded to Faggotland, haunted by Count Choc-o-log?McCormack dissects the ways fantasy distorts self-perception, forcing us to question whether our desires shape us or if we are merely chasing illusions. Through Louie’s journey, he explores how performance … whether through camp, drag, or artifice … can be both freeing and suffocating, a means of self-expression that risks turning into a caricature. The novel’s biting humour masks a deeper horror, blurring the line between resilience and denial, making us wonder whether laughter is a shield or just another layer of self-deception. As Louie is pulled deeper into the castle’s bizarre world, the question of escape lingers … whether from the constraints of identity, the expectations of culture, or the endless cycle of spectacle and consumption.McCormack layers his narrative with biting wit, subversive humour, and a queasy blend of camp and horror, crafting a book that feels like a neon-lit carnival ride through the absurdities of desire, self-image, and cultural expectations. Strange, unsettling, and unrelentingly bold, Castle Faggot is both a satire and a spectacle … an exploration of queerness that is at once deeply unsettling and wildly entertaining. I’m here for the suffocating nature of spectacle.Maybe I’ve gotten this all wrong, but this book pulled me into a cavalcade-land where everything about identity and desire got twisted and turned inside out, forcing me to confront how I / we perform ourselves and how easily that performance becomes a deception. Kate Durbin.Hoarders (Wave Books, 2021). Kate Durbin’s Hoarders is an arresting exploration of compulsion, accumulation, and the emotional weight of objects. Blending poetry and nonfiction, Durbin crafts a series of fragmented narratives that delve into the lives of individuals consumed by the need to collect, revealing how hoarding becomes both a coping mechanism and a source of deep isolation. Through a sharp, empathetic lens, she examines the intersections of mental illness, consumerism, and the personal histories embedded in material possessions.Durbin explores how the act of hoarding reflects broader cultural issues such as consumerism and materialism, questioning whether the compulsion to collect is a deeply personal disorder or a reflection of a society that places value on accumulation. She probes the role of possessions in shaping identity, asking what it means to find meaning in objects and whether they can ever truly satisfy emotional or existential needs. Durbin also examines hoarding as both a symptom of isolation and a way to assert control, exploring whether it’s a desperate attempt to stave off abandonment or a misguided effort to maintain personal autonomy. Ultimately, she raises the question of whether objects can offer meaningful connection, or if they instead create a suffocating prison, leaving individuals trapped in their own attempts to hold onto the past or to make sense of their lives.The book offers a haunting meditation on the ways people attempt to fill emotional voids with things, capturing the desperation, obsession, and quiet heartbreak of those who struggle to let go. With a style that is both poetic and incisive, Hoarders gives voice to a misunderstood disorder while holding up a mirror to a culture obsessed with excess.Durbin’s style is deliberately disjointed, mirroring the fractured lives of those consumed by accumulation. The poetry here functions less as a linear exploration of language and more as a raw, unfiltered examination of human desperation and the psychological toll of hoarding. By employing a fragmented, almost documentary-style approach, Durbin creates an intimacy that transcends typical poetic abstraction, allowing the emotions and struggles of her subjects to resonate deeply. Her work isn’t just poetic in form but in its ability to convey truth and experience through vivid, often painful snapshots of life.The way Durbin mixes poetry and raw storytelling creates this deep, unsettling connection to the emotional wreckage … making you feel the weight of each item and the lives they entrap.
July 1, 2025
Fiction
A LIVING SOMETHING by David Nutt
My wife looms at the ledge of the bed. The cold meat of my brain, freezer-burned with slumber, is still in defrost mode. Meanwhile, my wife has already risen, showered, powdered, dressed, breakfasted, read the morning news, cried about the morning news, genuflected and regurgitated, and undressed again. Now she stands naked in the middle of the room, like an unflappable art-class model, waiting for her indolent husband to get up and do something meaningful, and maybe felonious, with his life. I can’t fake it anymore. I get up and go to the closet, where we keep the new suit piled atop the canoe cushions we used at four months, the pillows we passed off as five.I try to chirp the theme music from some public-television programming—the kind of children’s show that takes place in a psychotropically colorful wonderland populated by ragged hand-puppets and a smattering of adult actors, always in supporting roles, who teach sensible, low-impact morality lessons while struggling to beat back the melancholy tide of time. I whistle three trilling notes. My wife interrupts me with a dejected sigh of her own and reaches ceilingward. “Just strap the fucking thing on,” she says.I glide the foam mold over her upper body, negotiating its blunt juts and bony angles, her knuckled spine, the curled shrimp of her ribcage. She resembles a famished insect sliding into its shell. Sure, she could do it herself, but it’s the collaboration she needs. A co-conspirator. Someone to share the secret and blame, and maybe, too, some kind of vestigial love. I double-knot the flesh-colored straps and tuck the washing-instructions tag inside the hollow bowl of her armpit. “How do I look?” she asks, draping a floral-print maternity shroud atop the big belly. The shroud is sized extra-large to create a bit of ambiguity about the duration.“Like six months,” I say, a little too hesitantly.My wife fixes herself in the mirror and turns smoothly, like a showroom automobile on a rotating stage, something too glossy to believe, let alone buy. Her face empties. The lower lip starts to jiggle. “I look like I’m nine months,” she says. “I’m ready to rupture.” Me, I am doing my usual hangdog grovel, the one look in my repertoire I do not have to falsify or embellish. “They only had the one size in stock. You still appear ravishing to poor cretins like me.”She takes my loose face in her hands and lifts it, me, to the light. Semi-sweetly, she says, “Who are you fucking kidding?”“There is literally a shell of ice around my brain. If you give me a few minutes to thaw—”“We are so hopeless,” she says.I lie: “I don’t think that at all.”She releases me but holds to her reflection, glaring hard at the boyish hips, the vitamin-deficient skinny and pall. “You’re going to be late for work.”“I’m not going to work.”“You’re still going to be late,” she says.
***
That first slothful winter: I sat in my car, the heat low, the radio off, depriving myself of the commuter life’s few amenities—in lieu of legitimate penance, I suppose—while the car sat in one undistinguished parking lot after another. I wasn’t looking very diligently. I just stared at the slabs of opaque frost my breath left on the windshield. How spectacular, the things the body did when nobody was paying attention, when nobody cared. Instead of music or talk radio, I listened to the clamor of my shivering organs and somatic departments, tabulating the chattiest offenders. Curdled fluids, tired fibers, damaged loins. All my spooky nooks were gossiping about me. I etched my initials in the frosted glass, X’d them out, then wrote different initials. When I returned home at the end of the day, my wife was on the couch, beta-testing a new breed of pout, one that combined compassionate disappointment with compassionate disgust.“What happened?” she asked. “Huh?”“You’re limping.” “My leg got crampy from sitting all day in the car.”“You were in the car? How can you get one when you’re sitting in the car?”The television was muted, flickering in the dark. I tried to flutter my eyelids to synchronize with the strobe. All any of us want, I guess, is an allegiance with something. Even something inane.“It’s like an arctic expedition out there,” I said, peeling off my itchy mittens and wool scarf and false beard. “They’re bundled up and getting pushed in strollers, or they’re leashed up and dragging their parents across the frozen tundra. I’m not fast enough to chase sled dogs. I can’t loaf around the stores like those do-gooders from the Salvation Army.”Her pout solidified, aged, fossilized. I could count the gloomy pocks and cragged ridges now imprinted across her frozen tundra. So many ancient, incredulous creases.“The office called,” she said.“What did you tell them?”“I told them there were complications. I said the doctor sent us to the hospital, and the hospital was sending us to a specialist.”“That’s smart.”“I feel like we’re the stupidest people alive.”“That, too,” I said.I left my goulashes in a puddle of muck by the door, and I joined my wife on the couch. She was watching her wildlife program again. This episode featured a pride of lions gorging on a buffet of eviscerated zebra carcasses. Black-white-red stripes striated the screen like an experimental test pattern. Our clandestine panics and emergencies seemed to be articulated so purely in the wobble. The most unnerving part was the lack of sound. All that ferocious churning, the lazy and thoughtless carnage, zero repentance, not a single groan or complaint or scream of thanks. I turned to my wife and tried to find her face in the dithering half-light. Her lips were stained brownish, as if she had been feasting on chocolate mousse. Better than the wallpaper. She was balancing a mug of hot cocoa on the stuffed koala that was bulging out of her sweatpants—the second of her stomachs. The hand towels kept slipping out.I laid a hand in her lap.“Please don’t touch me,” she said.I nodded. “Because of the complications. We’re going to see the specialist. We are living the role. Just like those TV lions with their talent agents and SAG cards and publicists.”“You should ice that leg.”“I’ve had enough ice for one day. Can I get you anything?”“Yes,” she said. “Please get off the couch.” “What else?”“Go out.”“Where?”“Try another parking lot. Maybe an elementary school or playground or pediatrician’s office. If you stay here, we’ll never get pregnant.”***
Springtime delivers its own silver platter of ripe disappointments. I spend my mornings loitering on a half-acre of grim, sun-scalded blacktop outside one of five Discount Utopias in the tri-county region. I avoid the popular supermarkets because their parking lots are populated by squads of embittered teenagers in dirty khakis and too-large smocks who tend the shopping-cart corrals and pretend to look competent. Discount Utopia has no such extravagance. The clientele is a mix of whiskered retirees living on fixed incomes and young unwed women who cannot possibly bear the thankless burden of motherhood alone. Best of all, management is too miserly to refurbish the outdoor sodium lamps or install security cameras. This rankles me as a citizen and potential customer, but as a needy, skulky father-to-be, I am content to exploit the lapse.I never venture into actual stores. Sadly, I no longer have the disposable income to make superficial purchases that justify my public sharking. My wife and I live off the dividends of her dead parents’ stock portfolio, which is not as robust as it used to be. I can barely afford to put gas in the car that I can barely afford to lease or insure. I’ve been on alleged paternity leave at work so long, I don’t think I have a job anymore. I also don’t think I have the chutzpah to call up my company’s HR hotline and ask if I can have my old position back, or maybe get a different position, or at least pay the office a perfunctory visit and box up my things. It’s midday. I’m hunched at my car’s front left tire, pretending to fix a flat. Occasionally I stand up and sulk around, scratching at the cheap nylon wig that hugs my head. Nobody stops for me. Nobody offers any help. Certainly no Good Samaritans with small, fledgling Samaritans in tow.After a while, I notice a bagboy with an unflattering flattop and a face of pusillanimous acne, lingering at the corner of the building. He’s sneaking a cigarette on his lunch break. I imagine this violates some stodgy corporate protocol, but I am probably not the best person to lodge a complaint with his shift supervisor. Maybe this makes us allies of a sort? Maybe not. The young guy coolly observes my helplessness charade, his lank fame leaned against the brick wall like a bracket too loosely screwed, his sloughy potato face leaking smoke. The kid’s dawdling makes me nervous, and I decide I better flee. I kick the tire a few times. I shrug like it’s no big deal. But I can’t find the keys to my car. I’ve misplaced them. When I glance up again, the kid has flicked the butt and is wiping the ash off his apron as he strolls over. He wants to give me a few helpful pointers.“That tire isn’t flat.”“Thanks,” I say.“Look at that tread. You’ve barely driven on it.” He has a particular gloat in his voice, but there is something uncertain in his expression, a weird fissure or breach. His eyeballs are skittering in their sockets.“Anything else?” I ask.He scans the expanse of the parking lot, formulating some special notion behind those rootless eyes. He sidles up next to me. “I get it,” he whispers. “Pretending your car is busted and you’re stranded here, so some lusty lady will pick you up, take you home, and serve you a dish of piping-hot poon. It’s a good shtick.”He winks at me.“You’ve got the wrong idea,” I say. “I have a wife.”“That’s cool, man. Did you skeez up on her in a parking lot, too?”The kid flashes a nervous smile. He tries another wink.“Stop winking at me,” I say. “You look diseased.”He slouches against the adjacent car, a station wagon with more rust than paint, and fusses his nametag: Karl. Maybe this is just me, but I find something greatly destabilizing about spelling Karl with a K. He lights another cigarette and tries to smoke in stoic solitude. I can tell the hypotheticals are niggling him.“I met my wonderful heterosexual wife,” I explain, “in one of those comedy improv classes that were all the rage a few years ago. The point had been impressed upon me by several colleagues and supervisors that such a class might help me burnish my social skills, which apparently needed a whole lot of burnishing. I had big dreams of being a normal human being.”“Did it help? The class?”“Of course not. But I met a strange, pretty, shy woman who was just as lonely as me, and just as unfunny, and we started a hopeless, laughless life together.”“My folks met in Al-Anon—” “I’m unspooling a narrative here, Karl-with-a-K.” The seventeen-year-old gives a stiff nod, worldly and resolute, as if bluffing knowledge is the same thing as knowledge itself. Maybe that’s true, and this bagboy career is but a springboard to some loftier trade, like bagel slicer or latte flunky. Either way, he hasn’t traded the agony of adolescence for the agony of adulthood just yet, and those sour teen years bring a wisdom and pain of their own. We’d all do well to heed the lessons of the Karl-with-a-Ks of the republic. They will be the ones, after all, who will usher us into assisted living facilities, ladle out our pills and morphine drips, and launch our ghastly ashes into space.“The narrative?” he says, urging me on.I tell him she wanted a child more than anything, probably more than she wanted a husband. But there was a minor problem. I’d already had the procedure done.I point to my groin.“You got circumscribed?”“Yes,” I say, grinning. “Circumscribed. Exactly.”It had been an extreme course of action, perhaps, but I had been a pitiful bachelor for so long. The loneliness may have deranged me. I wasted most of my twenties and early thirties going to craft fairs, yoga retreats, prochoice rallies, anywhere single women might congregate and need companionship. But they must’ve smelled the desperate pheromones wafting off me, and they stayed away. I thought I’d be alone forever and that’s what I deserved. The vasectomy was a form of revenge against myself. Then I met this sweet woman who suffered a crippling sadness and believed that having children would fix the terrible, broken thing inside her. I didn’t want to disappoint this woman. I didn’t want to lose her. I acted as if everything was fine. Maybe a miracle would stumble along and save me. It had happened already, my meeting her. Maybe it could happen again.The kid rubs his haircut, so short and unforgiving, I can tabulate the dents in his scalp. He also has this weird cauliflowered ear that seems a consequence of some barbaric junior varsity sport.“They can reattach them,” he says.“Huh?”I look down. He’s doing the groin point, the unseemliness of which is now apparent to me.“I wasn’t castrated, Karl. I’m not livestock.”He nods evenly. “Science.”“Anyway I already tried that. There was this dodgy surgeon in a strip mall. I should’ve found someone more reputable, someone with steady hands who wasn’t quivering on gin. This hack was all I could afford. He hacked me up, all right. Now the machinery is totally kaput. I didn’t tell my wife about that, either. What could I say?”I catch him side-eyeing the store entrance. His interest is flagging, but I’m not ready to let him leave. This confession stuff is invigorating. Unfortunately, I can’t speak this way to my wife. Her brittle constitution just couldn’t handle it. Ergo, I need to purge every last ounce of honesty from my system before I get anywhere near hearth and home.“It’s strenuous work, pretending you want a child,” I tell him. “You don’t happen to have any younger siblings or cousins, do you?”The kid chuckles and gives his patchy skull one final rub, then traipses off, back to the store, before I can grab him and wrestle him into the trunk.I locate my car keys, glinting, on the ground. Maybe I have a gaping hole in my pocket, the same size and shape, roughly, of the gaping holes in my head and loins and life. Maybe all of me is one large rupture, too tatty and moist to ever be stitched back together. I grab the ring of keys and—I don’t know why—I pitch them overhand, with mild fury, at a nearby car, not realizing the car isn’t empty. Some haggard guy pops up from the backseat, where he was evidently napping. Is he homeless? Jobless? Familyless? Is he an unfortunate guy or a lucky guy? What are the odds he’s a disgraced genital surgeon looking to redeem himself with a little pro-bono work?I shrug and meekly wave. Then I do my funny, joggy walk of shame to fetch the keys from underneath a battered hatchback. I notice this vehicle is also occupied: an old dowager wielding a pair of scissors, clipping coupons from the local pennysaver. I check another car, and another, and another. Dozens of people are sitting in dozens of vehicles, their postures cramped, their faces vacant, everyone waiting for some miracle or accident or statistical fluke to restore order and comprehension to their day. In the last car, I see a glazy, hunched shape in a rainbow-striped shirt and corduroy dungarees, tiny and alone. I scrunch closer. But it isn’t an abandoned child. It’s a CPR doll that some sadistic prankster has buckled into the backseat. The molded-plastic face looks a thousand years old. The decal eyes gaze back at me, an expression of blank, readymade oblivion—and the awful joy of it.I hustle home.***
My wife is in our bedroom with four years’ worth of funeral wear spread flat on the bed. I’m not sure what she’s trying to tell me, standing there, silently reviewing all that mournful black. I’m in the doorway with a wine-in-a-box that I’ve been ferrying around in the boot of our car for months. Neither my wife nor I drink. Honestly, we don’t do much of anything aside from bicker and grieve the loss of a future that was never ours to claim. Now she’s afraid of leaving the house, and I’m afraid of her fear. I sometimes wonder how it would look on TV, a wife who likes to play dress-up to baffle her biology, confuse her uterus, into fertility, and a husband who lurks the world’s loneliest parking lots, too cowardly to steal children he doesn’t really want. I don’t know if we’re living a harmless sitcom or one of those vulgar true-crime shows.It’s late evening. Despite a fine selection of morbid clothing, my wife is still wearing her cheetah-spotted bathrobe. No preggers suit, no plush belly. She gives me this tolerant yet terrorized look. There’s a great frenzy of eyelash involved. “What’s going on?” I ask. “Nothing.”“Honey? Baby?”“Don’t call me that.”“Tell me,” I say, trying not to stutter the words. “Is this…another miscarriage?”My wife folds her arms and ekes out a low moan. Near the baseboard behind the bed, where she thinks I won’t bother to look, is a strip of pink sirloinish paint that resembles a living organ, a living something, where the wallpaper has been finagled and peeled away. My emaciated wife is secretly stripping the house bare and cramming it down her digestive tract. Then she vomits up the chewed chunks, along with her meals, her sadness, her spite. I have heard that pica is a risk for pregnant women, but their disconsolate impostors, too? Perhaps there is a special degrading flavor in wallpaper that we all long to taste. Here’s another fear: The more our little prenatal ruse gets drawn out, the sicker and weaker my wife grows, so I must prolong the ruse, if only to protect her from reality, making her even sicker, weaker, etc. The destructive urge? I understand that. It’s the cleanup that confounds me. We bury another bedraggled bath towel in the backyard, and we start again.***
This morning belongs to a field trip of senior citizens who are bused in from a retirement enclave outside of town. I watch their leisurely parade across the blacktop with their twinkling wheelchairs and chrome walkers, a coagulated mudslide of tweed, pilled flannel, garish polyester. By lunchtime, the housewives arrive in their shapeless muumuus and defeated sweatpants, and several hours after that, the five o’clock business crowd, i.e., my people, their neckties loosened, shirttails untucked, trailing their usual draft of smothered despair. In between the clusters, I spot several truant teenagers, a few runty, genderless individuals of ambiguous age. No children, though. The daylong sun is cooking me into my vehicle’s upholstery, and in a fit of heat-infused delirium, I fantasize about grabbing one of the old folks, lashing it like a Douglas fir to my rooftop, and speeding home. Maybe I could fasten a pink bow around the senior’s skull and make it shout “Mommy!” as I drag the poor thing kicking and crying through the front door. Then, I don’t know, maybe I reward it with a lollipop or pension or something?Eventually, I get so restless I climb out. I walk around the car. I walk around the lot. I walk all the way into the store. I know I should sidestep the one-way mirrors and hidden cameras and loss-prevention experts masquerading as incognito shoppers, but I’m just too tired for any more subterfuge. Assorted customers amble in the aisles, aloof and distracted, trying to desperately suppress their pitiable dreams long deferred, the cravings and nostalgias and wry hopes that have both buttressed and doomed their lives, and mine. I don’t encounter any abandoned carts or deserted offspring. These people have watched too many news programs. They’ve seen too many horror movies. Right now, their children are safely at home, locked in the basement with electronic monitors clamped on their ankles, GPS chips imbedded behind their golden smiles.Then, as I’m standing in the party-supply aisle, mired in reverie, I’m nearly T-boned by a woman navigating an overloaded cart. She grumbles an apology, and I step out of the way, whereupon I notice, rather helplessly, the child slotted in the cart’s foldout seat. I feign interest in a rack of crepe streamers and bend around to get a better look. What I see mortifies me. The toddler has a face so mean and crumpled—red meaty cheeks, wet chin jutting—so utterly judgmental, I could almost be staring at a picture of myself.I’m already sorry it is happening: I clench up, set my feet, rear back, and I smack the child so hard it tumbles sideward into a bin of holiday tinsel. The shouting is instantaneous. They tackle me from all sides. Customers, shelf stockers, managers, cashiers, custodians, the lone security guard waddling out of the restroom with his pants half-hitched. The entire world descends upon the party aisle—upon me, screaming, too, at the bottom of the heap—and everyone begins pulling me apart, ligament by ligament, broken piece by broken piece, and I feel like finally, finally I must have done something right. June 30, 2025
Fiction
HITTING THE BOARDWALK AND THE BEAT: AN INTERVIEW WITH JESSAMYN VIOLET by Rebecca Gransden
These actors are cracked. Out from under techno-creep overseers rise the rejects, the dropouts, and the freaks. A counterculture funhouse, home to strung out hedonists, underground musicians, magic practitioners, and those just looking for the next party. With Venice Peach (Maudlin House, 2025), Jessamyn Violet creates an alternate reality that seems too wild a proposition and yet right around an interdimensional corner. Politics and show business intermingle in new and strange ways, as LA’s free spirits are put to the test. I spoke to Jessamyn about this unruly book. Rebecca Gransden: Step right up here, Pop Stars and Punkers...Welcome to the Strangest Show on Earth.The world of Venice Peach is one of spectacle. It speaks the language of the sideshow, of show business and the circus. What draws you to the carnival?Jessamyn Violet: The two most primal draws to the carnival are A) knowing that you are also a freak and wanting to be with your people, or B) the fascination with freaks because you secretly wish that you were freakier. For me, I was a freak AND a geek from an early age, and that’s why I enjoy living in and writing about the carnival atmosphere. It’s always a little off-kilter; you can feel the dysfunction lurking close beneath the surface. There’s an intoxicating mix of fun, pride, and production magic in the air. When I first moved to Venice, there was the original Freak Show on the boardwalk, which was more of a weird, dusty cabinet of curiosities. They had the two-headed turtles and snakes out front to draw a crowd. Over time, some reality TV money came in and it grew into a full-fledged performance featuring an electric lady, a guy who would put a fish hook through his nose, a bearded lady, and more. Some crazy stuff went down, and it basically disappeared overnight. The boardwalk really hasn’t felt the same since. I ran into the bearded lady at a dive bar in New Orleans this past fall and she still didn’t want to talk about it. RG: When did you first have the idea for the book? How long did it take to write?JV: This book came to me in the early fall of 2016 in a way no other book has. We were facing that election and I could sense what was about to go down. I wanted to go to a place in my head where all the worst had already happened and the characters were on some sort of wayward, weary “uptick” again. It was my version of pressing an ambiguously optimistic fast-forward button, I suppose. I wanted the characters to feel hope, and to feel sexy, and to also be inevitably doomed. The first draft came to me faster than any before, in just over two months. Of course there have been years of revisions since, but the “first take” came out from somewhere pure and almost prewritten. I had the “lightning fingers.” Just like it’s supposed to feel, but hardly ever does. RG: A strange and wonky energy tugged and pushed at all those wandering the Venice Beach boardwalk at dusk. Drifters and vagrants scattered in search of shelter. Robotic security scanned the souvenir shops as the owners shuttered their doors and windows, preparing for a tumultuous night of hot gusts blowing in from Santa Ana. Airborne grit and grime coated the heaping piles of abandoned technology and covered benches and turbo-tennis courts like dirty snow. Outside gyms and the silicone skate bowl grew littered with fallen palm fronds and feathers.Venice Beach is your location. How did you settle upon this place as the main focus of the novel? In what ways does the version of Venice Beach shown in the book differ from the reality?JV: Venice Beach has always had a profound effect on me. I moved clear across the country in 2006 just to take a chance that I’d be able to live here, and I’ve held on tight ever since. It’s a place that helps me make more sense to myself, gives me a deep inner peace…. Basically, a soulmate manifested as a place. And since I couldn’t marry it, I wrote a fictional tribute to it. My only hope was to be able to capture it in a way that conveyed the full range of the colors, art, creativity, characters and electricity in the air, here; that demonstrates the freak haven that it is and will hopefully always be. You can go out wearing absolutely anything and people don’t bat an eye. As someone from a small town, this feels endlessly refreshing. All types of people can be found in Venice Beach, making it arguably the best people watching in the world. The juxtaposition of the boardwalk and Abbot Kinney Blvd, as gritty as it can be glamorous. Venice Peach’s version of Venice is kind of like the real one on hallucinogenics. I wanted the book to be a trippy reflection of it – a place where bizarre people collide and accept each other for their differences, but distorted enough that you could believe you were in an altered version of it. RG: Until recently the idea of a robot president would’ve horrified most voters of whatever political persuasion, now it doesn’t seem an unreasonable option. How do you view the president’s role in the book?JV: The weirdest part about the robot president role, President TBD 3000, is that I wrote it before AI took off… Back in 2016, I’m not even sure I’d heard the initials yet. It was just a funny (in its awfulness) idea to me. I could never have guessed that it would become so much more relevant – and maybe even possible. Hard to comment much more without spoilers, but… I think that President TBD’s role in the book holds up eight years later, miraculously. RG: A juicy peach with dark glasses adorns the front of the book. What’s the story behind the cover?JV: The cover art is the work of Venice muralist/street artist Muckrock. Her artwork is everywhere in Los Angeles, especially Westside since she lives here in Venice. I’ve been a fan of hers as long as I’ve lived here, and Muckrock is someone who shows up for her community in pure punk rock fashion. My band Movie Club collaborated with her in 2019 for a music video, and she was so cool about it that it became my dream to have her design cover art for my Venice-based book. I gave her no real direction, as it should be when you hire a master of their craft. I just said, “Do your version of a Venice peach,” and Muckrock spray-painted this icon onto a wall in an alley here in Venice Beach in about 20 minutes. You have to work fast when you’re a street artist. And as expected, she nailed it. It has since been covered up, sadly, but that’s how it goes in the world of street art. But it will live on forever on the cover. RG: Magic practice and the act of divination is part of the Venice Peach world. What led you to incorporate the ideas of witchcraft and Tarot into the book?JV: Venice Beach has as much dark magic as light, and is a potent place for witchcraft. Tarot readers are all over the boardwalk. Psychics are posted up on corners with neon signs. Tourists love to get their futures told and palms read here. Sacrificial animals have been found on the beach. A raw food cult used to have a members-only “garage” here, and I got to peep it a few times because I was trying out the raw food diet and hanging out with members with names like Pineapple Head and Vanilla Bean. There are all sorts of interesting stories about the now-abandoned cult/church structure on Rose Avenue that a famous actor from the 90s used to own. Sexy cult stories… No one has bought it since. I’m practically dying to see inside, and have often imagined posing as a buyer just to get the tour. RG: All together, there was an effortlessness to their sound that made Tiny Tin Heart an analog band that the locals had come to know and love like they were the next big thing – though it would be near impossible to reach that kind of status because the live music scene had almost completely died out. Most venues had transformed into sports bars or DJ-fueled nightclubs. And it was known that fame, in general, took longer than ever these days, thanks to the oversaturation of Everything On Earth. Music, and the music industry, plays an important part in the novel. How has your individual experience in that world fed into the book?JV: I’ve been playing and listening to music as often as I write and read books my whole life, and I often feel compelled to write musician characters that include perspectives on the music industry. I try to include a lot of angles – from the characters who do it as a hobby, to those relentlessly driven by burning passion, to the ones primarily in it for fame and fortune. Being on the frontlines of the indie music scene, I often marvel at its advances and setbacks. Too often, things get lost in translation. It’s wild to see how many talented performers struggle and sabotage on platforms because they don’t get the results/response they feel they deserve. Artists can do backflips for attention and only sometimes get it, and even then, the translation to lasting fans, ticket sales, record deals and profit margins is far from guaranteed. Big agencies keep reviving the old days of music – reunion tours, giant nostalgic festival lineups – because back when music was only sold in tangible form, people would listen over and over to the same bands and the songs came to really mean something to them. Nowadays, it is truly difficult to make a lasting and sustainable impact. We see more and more small venues folding, and that is a hard thing to watch. But we must continue on in the face of adversity, and hopefully inspire others to do their part to never let the indie music scene die because community support keeps people putting themselves out there. There’s a rare form of connective energy that is passed through the early stages of growth that is absolutely essential to both the performers and the listeners. And that is the point that Tiny Tin Heart is at in the book, they’re creating that energy through their music, fueled by community support in an illegal underground speakeasy.RG: Did you listen to music while writing the book? Are there bands or artists you would recommend to Venice Peach readers?JV: I almost always listen to music while writing… During this first draft I was obsessed with Frank Ocean’s Blonde, which had just dropped at the time. I had Warpaint’s entire repertoire on heavy rotation. These quirky Canadian bands I’d discovered called The Unicorns and Mother Mother. Tame Impala’s first two albums. “Lo-Fi Hip Hop Beats” Youtube playlist as well. RG: The titular Venice Peach is revealed to be a juice and smoothie place. What is your best ever smoothie?JV: OK, I am lazy when it comes to making smoothies and I reeeeeally don’t enjoy paying $20 for one, so I don’t really drink them often… but if there was a Venice Peach Specialty Smoothie, these would be the ingredients:-Frozen white peaches-Almond milk-Dash of fresh mango-Dash of cinnamon -Coconut cream vegan yogurt-2 scoops protein powder-Bee Pollen-Maca Powder-CBD oilAnd it would inexplicably cost $8 so everyone could afford to GET SOME!RG: Your characters face encounters with robotic police, and many aspects of society function under surveillance. They confront the dilemma of whether to reluctantly kowtow to a technocracy, or consider resistance. What is your own relationship to the technological aspects of contemporary life? What, if anything, do you resist?JV: I’ll try to harness my tendency to rant on this subject… but I resist nearly everything. Even dumb things. I’m contrary by nature, and decidedly a luddite. It’s in my blood and my star chart, I think. I’m a triple Taurus. I’ve never used any form of AI that wasn’t forced on me (Google, Meta, looking at YOU). Updates drive me insane and I delay until forced, and then see red about being forced. I’ll never own a Siri or Alexa and only speak to them if absolutely necessary, and they seem to sense my hatred because they never do what I tell them anyway. I fight to do things the hard way because I am a stubborn bull, and I don’t want to get soft, spoiled and lazy, or forget how to do things myself. RG: Bobobo was deeply devoted to a female duck, but she was unfortunately not faithful to him, as she couldn’t resist having offspring each year. It drove him wild but he stayed by her side (or usually in the murky water underneath her).How do you describe your creation, Bobobo? JV: Hehehe… Bobobo is a paranormal creature who willed himself into existence. For years, I’d been playing around with this idea for a children’s book, “Cassandra and the Canal Creature” – but every time I tried to write it, the canal creature just came across as creepy… Venice Peach was finally (and shockingly) the right home for the concept. It turned out to be the complete opposite of a children’s story, the storyline mounting to perhaps the dirtiest scene I have ever written. There is a certain vibe to the canals that I’ve always felt could produce a uniquely magical being, and the canals are both pretty as well as pretty scummy and dirty, and I guess that had to come through in the being’s personality as well. I could not tell you where the name came from. Absolutely no idea. And for some reason, in my head his voice has always been that of the great narrator of Winnie the Pooh, Jim Cummings. RG: It was probably nothing. But the part had come to mean too much at this point. Gerard’s entire future depended on landing this role. The director, Ty Beck, was one of the last few directors worth working with. The industry had completely gone to shit and most productions out there were written by algorithms starring holograms. Gerard was only interested in doing the real thing, and therefore hadn’t sold his image, voice and likeness profile off yet.Which movie would each of your characters choose as their favorite?JV: Really fun question. They’d have to all be classics… Odessa’s favorite movie would be Natural Born Killers. Stevia’s would be Return to Oz. Auggie’s would be Dude, Where’s My Car? Dr. Phil’s would be the original Blade Runner. Bobobo’s would be E.T. Cassandra would dig Tank Girl. Gerard would love industry meta flicks like Tropic Thunder and Bowfinger. And Matt Bogart would claim a tie between Pulp Fiction and Swingers. RG: Classic band tensions and twisted dynamics plague the novel’s group Tiny Tin Heart. Clashes of personality, ego, and music direction arise, as is a common story. How did you approach this aspect? Any real-life bands or artists an influence?JV: Hah! Too many to count … Yes, a life spent collaborating with and observing all sorts of musicians has influenced the way I portray the band members. All writing is a collage, I think, of life experience, your hopes/fears, and what the plotline benefits from. But as far as the matter of whether there are any direct references here, there are not. Each of the members of Tiny Tin Heart is entirely unique, and also a mass conglomeration of musicians who came before them. RG: Venice Peach introduces the concept of superdoom. How does superdoom differ from ordinary doom?JV: I had a lot of fun with the concept of “superdoom on the supermoon…” Feels very SoCal. It’s intended to be silly, but also feels very real as far as the hyperspeed humanity has been entering of late. As a millennial, it has truly been wild to watch the acceleration within the span of my own lifetime. Ordinary doom was for people to speculate about humanity in the 1900s. The 2000s increasingly feel like a superdoomed time, a period in which having optimism for the future gets more and more hard. I look back on my college years and think about how differently I got to envision the future than the kids in college right now, and that feels both sad and special, you know? The world was still holding itself together a little more tightly back in the early 2000s. Then I graduated and went into the previously thriving magazine industry, and things took a downward turn. So I parlayed into film and TV production, which is also somehow in an insanely tumultuous state right now. And that’s just my own experience. So many people in so many industries have been doing the same shitshow shuffle at lightspeed lately. And I feel for the newer generations who may not get to have rosy optimism at any point in their youth. To me, that is the real definition of what superdoom is. RG: Auggie was pissed off. During the Venice Pier portion of their afternoon walk, Cackles the cursed seagull had latched onto Auggie and Rusty. It was understood through local folklore that whomever the gull latched on to would fall victim to hard times. The ugly bird trumpeted his terrible caws of doom while hovering over him and his poor dog, thoroughly creeping them both out. Fishermen pointed and clucked at them sympathetically while the gull’s grim shrieking painted everything with a dark and ominous foreboding.Rusty the Dog, Fonsie the Snake, Cackles the cursed seagull, Pansy the cat: Venice Peach is a damned menagerie. Your animal creations are gifted with some of the most memorable scenes in the book. How do you view the animal presence in Venice Peach?JV: It is an odd and funny animal cast in Venice Peach! I’ve always been obsessed with animals. When I was little, I used to want to be a zookeeper. Animals hold so much charm in their personalities and presence, and I just wanted to honor their contribution to the overall Venice vibe. I have always been a firm believer that animals make everything better and think that certainly extends to fiction as well. Another thing about animals is that they’re hypersensitive, but also immune to our politics and social bullshit, so they are the most clear and unbiased readers of the room, and it’s always so fun to play with that. RG: Venice Peach presents a warped, funhouse mirrored version of contemporary politics and social trends. What roles do satire and absurdity take in your work?JV: A big one, I’d say. I grew up enamored with Mark Vonnegut and Tom Robbins, and their styles imprinted deeply into me. In my opinion, there’s no better way to make sociopolitical commentary than through satirical fiction. It’s a language all of its own, a timeless way to present the times. It’s kind of like drawing a caricature of society, enlarging certain aspects and adding weird flourishes. And as for the absurd – everything is already so absurd these days, it only seemed natural to piggyback off of that. For me, there is terrific tension when you realize you are suddenly immersed in a world where anything can – and probably will – happen. RG: Two months later, his wife had announced that she was having an affair with his best friend and leaving him. That was when Philip officially gave up on partaking in emotions altogether. He surrendered to the betraying nature of human beings, the crushingly individualistic, overwhelmingly capitalist society he lived in, and the numbness that the societal structure demanded in order to survive. He wanted nothing more to do with anything even slightly related to caring. Underlying the wildness of the book is a sense of aching dissatisfaction, and your characters express mixed feelings on the world they inhabit. They are reared on devices, in therapy, struggling to relate to others on even a basic level, and hungering for intellectual stimulation. What do you view as the dark heart of the book?JV: Ah, poor Philip… The psychotherapist who is tragically unable to fix himself. He does, however, make some attempt to break through his own walls eventually… I suppose the dark heart of the book is that humanity is pretty screwed, and things will surely get even more grim, but the truth is that we’ve never really figured it out, have we? No one can point to a time in which things were “sympatico” here on Earth. Even the dinosaurs seem to have done something fatally wrong, hah. So why not break through our innate discomfort and inherited despair to make our best, most honest and brave grab at joy that we can? We shouldn’t let anyone or anything repress our ability to do what we love and be who we truly are. It’s just like the Beastie Boys said, you have to fight for your right to party, you have to fight for your right to get a good vibe going and protect that flame. RG: Ever since the Hollywood zombies had almost captured and converted Gerard into their gruesome and feral kind, he’d been on a junk food sex spree to end all junk food sex sprees. He’d gotten off with only a fractured ankle, and the titanium air-cast he wore to heal triple-time turned out to only help his game. Sympathy was apparently a major turn-on for some women. And he had major survival horniness. It all combined into one perfect sex storm and suddenly there weren’t enough women in the world to satisfy him.Freaky characters mean freaky sex, and your characters approach this with gusto. How did you approach this aspect? Are there any scenes that didn’t make it into the book?JV: Hey, now… Sounds like you want a Venice Peach “Deleted XXX Scenes” black-market chapbook, here. I guess I should get on that in case what’s already in the book isn’t spicy enough for *ahem* some people… No seriously, the coolest thing about publishing with an indie press is that 9 times out of 10, they are down to keep all the good parts. I’ve gotten lucky twice in that department. I’m someone who is always disappointed by authors who skip forward to the next morning right as a scene is getting good, so I like to “put out” in the literary sense. It’s all in there, baby. As for how I approached writing the dirty scenes, it’s hard to say. The sex lives of these characters feels like just another facet of their personalities that’s already there and I’m just pulling up the curtain. RG: Do you have an ideal reader in mind when writing?JV: I think most indie fiction writers are writing for their own amusement, then crossing their fingers and praying that what they enjoy is somewhat marketable and relatable to others. When shopping this book around, one small press told me it was “more on the commercial side” than what they publish. It weirdly gave me hope, even though it was still a rejection. Originally, I wrote this to compete with Netflix and HBO shows on an entertainment and pacing level, because let’s face it, they are the most popular storytelling platforms out there. It’s a good thing writers can easily compete with their budgets, as our imaginations can do anything for free. RG: When you reflect on the writing of the book, what comes to mind? Are there associations of place, people or time?JV: Absolutely. As mentioned, the first draft was born in the fall of 2016. I had shattered my leg skateboarding that previous spring and was finally somewhat healed, so there was a strong feeling of gratitude to be in motion, to have made it through that hard time. I was in love with the show Bojack Horseman, and had never before wished I had been in a writing room to that extent. I was working in production, and some of the people and experiences were inspirational to the book to some degree, so I will always remember what I was working on at the time. RG: Venice Peach is released by Maudlin House. What attracted you to work with them and how have you found the process?JV: I first came upon Maudlin House and publisher Mallory Smart through her very cool calling card; her podcast called Textual Healing. It’s all about the music we listen to while writing, and I was delighted when she agreed to have me on the show. It was spring of 2023 at the time, and I was gearing up for the release of my first novel, Secret Rules to Being a Rockstar, which is about dysfunctional Hollywood musicians in the 90s. It was a great chat, and Mallory was truly supportive of my mission. It left me with a feeling we should work together more. I was excited to blurb her music-centric book I Keep My Visions to Myself last year. Then we got together with two other authors who write about musicians, Claire Hopple and Kirsti MacKenzie, and recorded a group episode of the podcast Rock is Lit thanks to the amazing host Christy Alexander Hallberg. It only seemed like a natural fit, by this point, that my weird book with three musical main characters would find its rightful home at Maudlin House, a music-loving indie press with the motto “Keep Maudlin Weird.” Mallory and her partner (and husband) Bulent have been very open to my ideas on the cover design as well as interior edits. Publishing is such a grueling industry, so it feels like such a gift when you find people who are chill to work with, responsive, and down to go the distance to see your dream through. RG: Fuck the future. Join the freak circus.What’s next for you? JV: I’m actually going to be living in the freak circus all summer… I’m also a drummer and my band Movie Club is going on a “Psychedelic Circus” tour to celebrate the book release. We have dates in Venice (Townhouse, 6/10), San Francisco (Make-Out Room, 6/11), Eugene (Sam Bond’s Garage, 6/12), Portland (No Fun Bar, 6/13), Seattle (Baba Yaga, 6/14), Olympia (The Crypt, 6/15), Bend (Silver Moon, 6/17), Santa Cruz (Sub Rosa, 6/18), and Culver City (Village Well, 7/12). We're also producing a Maudlin House x Movie Club Musical Reading for the 40th anniversary of Printers Row in Chicago at Gallery Cabaret on Saturday, Sept. 6th, 2025. The event will feature over a dozen rockstar readers performing spoken word over Movie Club's live instrumental rock n' roll. The goal behind these “Psychedelic Circus” events we’ve been putting on in Los Angeles (six pretty epic ones so far) is to incorporate a sense of broader community in live events, joining talents that usually get separated in one rocking variety show of sorts. Why shouldn’t writers get to read to live rock music? Or theremin players get to sit in for full band anthems alongside burlesque dancers? Each date will feature local special guest performances, plus I will be doing short readings from Venice Peach over ambient guitar. I hope to meet many fellow freaks fighting the future out on the road. Godspeed.
June 27, 2025
Fiction
WE FOUND AN ENORMOUS HOLE by Quinn Adikes
We happened upon the enormous hole by chance. It was a tremendous hole. The largest I have ever found. Perhaps twenty feet in diameter and located in some woods along the Southern State Parkway. The walls of the hole were perfectly flat and thus of unnatural design, although I cannot say who would have dug such a thing. I could not see to the bottom. I threw a rock in and listened to it bounce against the walls, and listened to the sound grow fainter and fainter and eventually vanish altogether. Of course I urinated in the hole. My need to urinate is why I happened upon the hole in the first place. I found the lack of report unsatisfying.Bladder cleared, I trudged back through the tall grass. Stewart waited in my car’s passenger seat. I give Stewart too much credit: it was not We who found the hole. The hole finding was done by Me and Me alone. If Stewart says otherwise, know that he is a liar and that his generation is brain damaged from lead poisoning. I told Stewart through the window to hold on a bit longer, I needed to make a call. He did not look up from his phone, but gave an okay sign with his thumb and index finger. P. answered. She said, Yes? I said, The hole you are looking for is eastbound off of exit 42. Beyond the grass. Watch for the swaying pine. Then I hung up. Being cryptic was a running joke between P. and I.I returned to the car and told Stewart of the enormous hole. Obviously he wanted to see for himself. I assumed this would be a quick thing, so I trudged again with Stewart in tow. The swaying pine which would possibly not be swaying by the time P. arrived swayed over us. Presently, this pine swayed quite a bit. More so than the other pines, at least. Its plumage was robust. Stewart and I stood at the edge of the enormous hole and gandered.“It makes me wonder,” Stewart said. “This life is full of beauty and mystery and there are so many things that we’ll never find.”Waxing poetic again. There was little in the way of mystery in regards to this hole and even less in the way of beauty. I said, “Howsabout we go back to the car and get out of here. I would like to eat. I am withering away.”“But who would dig this thing?” he asked. “I do not know, Stewart.”“I can’t see the bottom at all.” He went down to his stomach and peered over the edge of the hole with his phone flashlight. “Me either, Stewart.”“I’d like to climb down there and have a look.”“I’d like to leave, Stewart.”“Somebody dug this hole for a reason and I, for one, am itching to discover that reason.”I would never have told Stewart this, but I wished to be long gone before P’s arrival. P. and I have a speckled past and I still to this day find it best to avoid her in person at all cost. Stewart in the mix compounds things. Based on where P. lived and her style of driving, I estimated her arrival to land within the next twenty minutes.“I have three hundred and fifty two meters of climbing rope in my backpack,” Stewart continued. “This pine tree is more than thick enough to support me. Although I don’t like how it’s rocking.”Before I could respond, Stewart began tying the rope to the pine. The pine swayed in a way that could possibly have been interpreted as annoyance, if pines got annoyed. “What is your plan for getting back up?” I asked. The sides of the hole were near perfect in terms of smoothness: this hole-digging was the work of a professional. “I reach the bottom, you untie the tree, you retie me to the car hitch, you pull me out. I thought you were the college boy.”I often grow tired of Stewart, but an unfortunate fact is that we will be together until the bitter end. And I will admit a fantasy of this bitter end glided across my mind as Stewart donned his climbing harness, as he slid the rope through the appropriate hooks and carabiners, as he pulled the rope taught and leaned back against the edge of the hole, and as he hopped back and descended into the cave. Yes, the wicked fantasy glided in a most elegant way as I listened to his feet slap the wall. But despite the occasional fantasy of Stewart’s death, I still love the guy. Those things are not mutually exclusive. I would never, say, loosen the rope from the swaying pine and listen to Stewart plummet to his doom. No, I stood on the edge of the cave and watched him hop his way down. I yelled, “How’s it looking down there, buddy?” My voice echoed and his voice echoed back, “Like a cold, dark hole.”“It is enormous, is it not?”He said, “This hole is of a depth unencountered in my years of hole-diving.” Which is something I knew to be true. “I want a photo next to it when we’re finished,” he said. There was silence, and then he asked, his voice growing feint, “Do you ever wonder if there are irreconcilable differences between the generations?”I lied. I said, “I am unsure, Stewart. I would prefer not. I would prefer that you and I are basically the same. But who knows, the world changes and with it so do we.”I could not make out Stewart’s reply. It grew dark. A red Corvette pulled up behind my car. This red Corvette belonged to P. She got out of the car but kept it running. She stepped into the headlights and I felt small eruptions in my gut. P’s hair is the color of Autumn. She always smells like a fresh batch of snickerdoodles. I still to this day find the scar on her face pleasing in an unconventional way. She paused in the headlights and sashayed. She knew what she was doing. Then she pushed her way through the tall grass and said, “We’re going to have to check ourselves for ticks.” She noticed the climbing rope. “Why in the name of the lord Jesus is Stewart doing that now?” Just then, the rope went slack. For a moment, we thought there had been an accident, but several tugs on the rope indicated that Stewart had in fact reached the bottom. “I admire Stewart’s bravery,” P. continued. “He’s a man who doesn’t shy from risk. A man who knows just what excites a woman. A man with arms muscular from a life of hard work. I’d like to wrap myself around a man his age and climb him like a primate.”I walked to the edge of the hole. I spread my arms out wide. I closed my eyes and fantasized about leaning forward, the rush of wind parachuting my clothes and watering my eyes.“Don’t be ridiculous again,” P. said. “I’m only talking ish.” “I’m just hungry,” I lied. “We can hit that diner you like so much. The one with the pork flambe.”Stewart’s rope continued slacking and tightening. The pine continued to sway.“Don’t you have work to do?” I asked.“A hole this enormous is going nowhere,” P. said.“What do you think is down there?”“Probably a hole lot of nothing. Get it?”Stewart’s rope slacked and tightened in an impatient manner. I find the older generation pushy. They want what they want and they want it now. I untied Stewart’s rope from the swaying pine and retied it to my car hitch and P. showed me how to tie a figure eight. I wanted to yank Stewart out of this hole and be done with the night. I was hungry for pork flambe. I wanted to feast. P. remained at the hole to supervise.Stewart left my car radio on a vintage jazz station. Velvety trombone filled the cab. I switched to four wheel drive and crawled along the shoulder of the parkway. Every couple of feet I braked. If the rope went slack after braking I would know Stewart was out of the hole. I figured that part out by myself because Stewart was right about me being a smart college boy. I turned the jazz off and rolled the windows down so that I would be able to hear of any developments from P. The commuters had already gone home. Cicadas buzzed, a bat skittered overhead, a light breeze carried from the south. It was overall a peaceful scene. In the rearview, I watched Stewart’s rope lit up by my tail lights. The rope pulled against the non-swaying trees and created a sort of pulley system. Stewart only bought quality rope and so there was no worry of fraying, but if I floored the accelerator, something tragic would have happened, or even if perhaps I simply untied the rope. I hit the brake. The rope was still tight. I shifted the car to park. Yes, both options were tempting. But Stewart and I will be together until the bitter end. I shifted to drive and continued on at a steady ten miles per hour. I braked once more and the rope went slack. I got out of the car and heard P. and Stewart calling my name.
June 26, 2025
Fiction
ORCAS, or LIFE & ART & MAGIC & BEAUTY by Aaron Burch
My buddy Pilot comes to visit. Says it’ll do him good to get out of town for a couple days—new scenery, change of pace, leave the normal life problems and complications and stresses behind. But also we’ve been wanting and meaning to hang out for a while. The new scenery and change of pace and leaving behind of life’s problems and complications and stresses are all bonus. Icing on the cake, cherry on top. All that. It’s sunny out, blue skies, warm. It is beautiful, in that way that can feel unique and special to the Pacific Northwest. We make pizzas. I got Lili a pizza oven a couple Christmases ago, which means I got us a pizza oven a couple Christmases ago; we’ve made pizza once, sometimes twice a week, every week since. Mostly for ourselves, but also when entertaining. When friends come to town and we replace life’s problems and complications and stresses with food and ease and friendship.Pilot raves about the pizza, and we say we know, because we’ve gotten good at making pizza and we know it. Still. When he raves about it, it makes us proud. We eat and drink and share stories and volley compliments back and forth and round and round.Making food for your friends. Sharing time with loved ones. Beautiful, warm, sunny, Pacific Northwest blue sky days. Getting good at something. Sharing that thing with others. Friends giving you honest, proud compliments. Friends, in general. Gifts, all. Life can be gifts, all the way down, when you let it be.Lili asks Pilot how his summer has been so far, and he says he’s been writing a lot. Lili knows that, because Pilot’s been sending me new stories as he’s been writing them, and I keep telling her about them, but she nods and tells him that’s great.I can’t publish any of them cause they’re all about my divorce, Pilot says. But it's all that's coming out right now, he says.I remember that, I say. Meaning, getting divorced. Meaning, it being all I could think or talk about. They’re really great, I say. Each is more fun and stupid and inventive than the last, I say. As a compliment to Pilot and also to Lili, though she knows. I’ve said that to her before, too. We have a few more beers, and tell some more stories, about writing and divorce, about friendship and food, about life and art.
***
The next day, we have a lazy morning. In the afternoon, we walk down to the waterfront for happy hour. Oysters and tuna tartar and beef skewers and pineapple shrimp and cocktails. It’s happy hour, so everything is discounted, but we’re on the waterfront and so everything is expensive. We complain about the prices, while ordering more than we can eat and second and third rounds of drinks. We each agree when someone else says how beautiful the day is; we each, when it is our turn, say how wonderful life can be. Full and a little tipsy, we walk along the waterfront and Pilot says he really wants to see an orca. Do you think we’ll see an orca? he says. How magical would it be if we see an orca? he says. I guess it isn’t really orca season, is it? he says. I kinda feel like it would solve all my problems and complications and stresses and be magical if we get to see an orca, he says. I can’t remember if I’ve ever seen an orca here along this waterfront. It feels both like I have and haven’t. It feels both impossible and likely. I tell Pilot we’ve seen a few seals swimming around in the water and that always feels special. He asks if there’s sea lions here too, and I say I think there are but I can’t remember for sure. We don’t see an orca.We don’t see any seals or sea lions either. It’s ok. We go out for tiki drinks, and we share more stories and we re-share the same stories we’ve already shared and we recap everything from earlier in the day, and the night before. Lili is giggling her drunk giggle and Pilot is glowing like he doesn’t have a care in the world and my face is warm like I probably got a little too much sun.At our table inside the tiki bar, we’re on an island, or in a boat, or under water. Maybe all three. We’re pirates and sailors and explorers and mermaids and mermen and sea captains. We order another round. We cheers orcas.The walk and the day and our lives and the the view of the water and the sun on our faces and the tiki bar and sharing stories and sharing meals and getting drinks together and escaping our lives for a couple of days and friendship—ours, specifically, but also just friendship, in general— and getting to tourguide a friend around somewhere you love? Gifts. Magic! There can be magic anywhere—everywhere—if you know where to look. That isn’t really what this story is about though.***
Revisiting this story months after first writing it, I’m unsure what it really is about. I’m unsure if I knew at the time, when I first wrote it, and have since forgotten; or maybe I was always unsure and I wrote that sentence as something of a reminder to figure it out at some point during revisions; or maybe I was unsure, but I was ok with that, and I wrote the sentence just because I liked the sound and feel and idea of it.I’m leaving it now.I like the sound and feel and idea of it.And what it’s really about isn’t really up to me, anyway. That’s for you. To decide, or to decide that it isn’t up to you either and that it doesn’t really matter.That’s ok, too.***
The next day Pilot returns home, and Lili and I take the ferry to one of the nearby islands. She’s never been on a ferry before, and I’m reminded how special it can be to experience something with someone for their first time. The ferry ride is fun and cool, and the views are beautiful, and it all feels a little like make-believe. And then watching all of that through Lili’s eyes, reflected on her face and in her smile and radiating out from her whole body, makes everything even many-fold times true. On the island, we drive along the coast and comment on the tide being so low. We walk through a farmers market; we eat lunch and have a drink; we walk through the downtown like tourists to whom everything is new and discoverable and anything is possible. We drive across the island to a park and we go on a hike through the woods and then we walk along the beach. We see a sign about local sea animals. The sign tells us about the seals and sea lions and porpoises and orcas in these waters. The sign places them on a scale of how frequent they can be seen, from common to occasional to seldom. We drive back across the island and get another drink and another meal. We drive along the coast going the other way and comment on the tide now being so high. Magic! we say. Magic! we both believe, in this moment, even if not in others.***
In that previous draft of this story, Pilot was Kevin. Because the stuff in this story that actually happened, happened with my buddy Kevin, when he came to visit.I’m unsure why the change.When I first wrote this story, I was in the middle of a burst of writing. Every few days, and sometimes every day, I’d write a new short story, inspired by something Kevin, or our other friend D.T., texted to our groupchat. I’d copy and paste it into a Google doc and use it as a springboard into another 600-1800 word piece of autofiction about us, and writing, and friendship, and telling stories and life and seeing art and magic and beauty everywhere you look. D.T. texted that he needed a break from life, and so I wrote a story about a guy quitting his job and driving around the country, visiting friends and meeting strangers, buying a boat and learning how to sail, becoming a follower of different religions and denouncing others, all looking for meaning and for purpose. Kevin texted that divorce was like God sawing off parts of your body, and so I wrote a story about God telling a woman to saw off her partner’s limbs, adding in narrative references to the story of God telling Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. God didn’t tell the woman in my story to sacrifice her partner, only to saw off his limbs, and also He didn’t stop her at the last minute like He did with Abraham. When I told my girlfriend about that one, I expected her to make fun of me for writing story after story after story after story where Kevin and D.T. keep popping up, but instead she glommed onto the surreal body horror part. Which surprised me, because normally she looked at me like what the fuck are you talking about? when I described one of my more surreal or speculative stories, but also because I’d forgotten that was even what the story was about. I’d gotten so distracted by how Kevin and D.T. keep popping up in them. She told me she used to have this idea for a story about someone cutting off their skin so it would grow back healthier and blemish free.I could write that story! I said, and went and got my laptop and opened up a blank Google doc and started typing. In the story, the narrator cuts off his skin so it will grow back healthier and blemish free. He works from home and orders delivery and never leaves the house, waiting to reenter the world as a whole new version of himself. But his skin never grows back. He doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t know what to make of this miscalculation. Doesn't have any idea how to make sense of this world at all, now that he thinks about it. He has an idea. He sits down and writes a story and when he gets stuck, these two characters, his friends, Kevin and D.T., appear out of nowhere in the story and tell him what to do next, or they do something funny, or they say some non sequitur that doesn’t literally tell him what to do next and isn’t technically funny, but it makes him laugh and gives him an idea for how to proceed. He finishes the story and sends it to the Kevin and D.T. in his story.I sent the story to the Kevin and D.T. in my actual life.Is this your whole thing now? D.T. texted.I like it, Kevin texted. I didn’t say I didn’t like it, D.T. texted.I like it, too, I texted. They’re fun. I keep trying to write something fun and stupid and inventive, I texted. But every story just keeps ending up being earnest and nostalgic and open-hearted.But that’s fun and stupid and inventive, too, Kevin texted. That’s just your version. I wrote the bonkers version and yours is just a little happier and like you had a good day, he texted.Are they just dumb and repetitive though? I texted.They feel like iterations, but not really repetitive, Kevin texted.And so what if they are repetitive, D.T. texted.The so what and also the word iterations gave me another idea and I wrote a story about a guy writing a story about a guy writing a story about a guy writing a story. I lost track of how many levels or layers of story-within-a-story it was. I told my girlfriend about the story, describing the story itself and also my writing it, and how I sent it to Kevin and D.T. and they said it was earnest and nostalgic and open-hearted, and how that surprised me. I told her about how writing is weird, how you’ll have one idea and start writing it, but then it will become something else without you meaning it to, sometimes without you even realizing it, and she looked at me like I was stupid.She knew all that.I’d told her some version of that a million times.I kept writing stories like this. I didn’t know what to do with them; they felt too meta for anyone else to care, but they were so fun and Kevin and D.T. said they were fun and when I told my girlfriend I finished another and described it to her she’d roll her eyes and look at me like you’re so dumb or like what the fuck are you talking about? but also she’d say it sounded fun, and she’d laugh, and it would light up her face and the room and our lives and the world and God would smile down on us and say, Aaron, that one was even more fun and stupid and inventive than your last, and also even more earnest and open-hearted.And then, time passed, and I revisited these stories. This story. I again feared it was dumb and repetitive, but I also liked the idea of it being in conversation with some others I’d written. So I changed Kevin to Pilot.Pilot is the name I sometimes use for a best friend character in my stories. The Pilot character is usually a fictionalized version of one of my friends, though not any one of them specifically. It rotates. Sometimes it's an amalgamation. It’s never my friend who is a pilot, though. That would feel too on the nose. In the last story I wrote about a character inspired by my friend who is a pilot, his name was Matt. That isn’t his name, though it is the name of another of my friends. My friend Matt has appeared in a couple essays I’ve written, but I don’t think ever a fiction, so I’ve never changed his name to anything. He made an appearance in a piece of fiction by my ex that was kind of about me, and she changed his name to Luke. He jokes about that sometimes. But then, I couldn’t help myself, so now there’s all these sections that are still and again about Kevin and D.T.It is kind of dumb, and repetitive. Or iterative. And I don’t know what it’s “about.” But it feels fun. And just might be the bonkers story I’d been chasing. Though maybe even just thinking that means it’s actually the most earnest and nostalgic and open-hearted. It’s the most everything. Which is maybe what the story is about. Fun and stupid and inventive, or earnest and nostalgic and open-hearted, every story seemed to be about how, every now and then, if you’re paying attention, if you’re open to it, the whole world can be about anything and everything.***
On the ferry ride home from the island, Lili and I go to the top deck and watch the island recede behind us. The sun is starting to set and it’s bouncing off the water and everything is lit up in gold. There’s a whale off the right of the ferry, a voice alerts us over a loudspeaker. Everyone on the ferry runs to the right side of the boat, hoping to see the orca. My girlfriend gets there first. I saw it! she says. I saw the whale!We’re all staring at the water, staring into the sun bouncing off the water, looking around, looking for a quick glimpse of something to prove that magic is real.I see something in the water. It submerges, surfaces a little further away, then submerges again. A seal or sea lion, probably; a fin of a porpoise, possibly; an orca, maybe even. I keep watching and watching and watching and watching and watching but don’t see anything else. I wonder if Lili saw the same thing I did, or something else. I wonder if she saw the orca and I missed it, or if she saw a seal or sea lion but wanted it to be a whale and so believed it was, or if I saw a whale but am too doubtful and so believed it wasn’t. The same voice over the loudspeaker now tells us that we are almost to shore and to return to our vehicles. Our trip and our journey and our day is almost over.But first I close my eyes. I feel the sun on my face and the crisp air on my skin. I’m silent and still and unthinking.I open my eyes and see an orca, and then another, and another, and another, and another. They’re everywhere. Cresting, submerging, spraying water up through their blowholes, swimming all around us. I watch and I smile and I laugh.I close my eyes again, and when I open them, the whales are gone. Just like that. We return below deck and get in our car and wait to be told when it is our turn to exit the ferry, back to the mainland, back to our normal lives. June 25, 2025
by Mike Topp
$25 | Perfect bound | 72 pages
Paperback | Die-cut matte cover | 7×7″
Mike Topp’s poems defy categorization. That’s why they are beloved by seamstresses, pathologists, blackmailers and art collectors.
–Sparrow
