ZAC SMITH Archives

THE END by Zac Smith

September 22, 2020 · Fiction

The seasonal jobs came back to town aboard a gleaming, diesel caravan. We all stepped up to carry water and dirt and to do all the other things that would be asked. Brought our resumes, our lunch boxes, our good gloves. Someone was going to see us, buy our labor for a week or month—see something useful in the junk, like Giacomo did as a dropout teen, buying a rusted-out chainsaw to bond with mom and get it running again. And just like that ideation, we’d take off for somewhere else full of better promises. This we knew, believed, felt,…

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PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION by Zac Smith

June 15, 2020 · Fiction

Emo Phillips stands on a train. He thinks about all the fucked-up people he knows and wonders if people think he’s as fucked-up as he thinks other people are. The train conductor/engineer/driver person clicks on the intercom and thanks everyone for riding the train. Emo Phillips feels like he has never been thanked for riding public transportation. “Hey, am I fucked-up?” Emo Phillips asks. “What,” says Dan Brown. Dan Brown is looking at an advertisement for furniture. The train conductor/engineer/driver person clicks on the intercom and apologizes for the slow pace of the train. Emo Phillips takes off his mittens….

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I FIRST MET ZAC SMITH IN A BARN by Giacomo Pope

December 17, 2019 · Fiction

I was 250 miles from the nearest streetlight, and my shoes were covered in horse shit. In the centre of the barn was this dude standing on the stacked hay. He was foaming at the mouth and shouting at overfed livestock. Zac was watching these chickens try to kill each other and they were making all this noise, but over the top of it, you could still hear the poems crashing against cracked red paint. The chickens were the stuntmen from Die Hard, and I was reaching into popcorn between my legs. I was sweating. The bigger chicken was digging its face into…

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BUGS by Zac Smith

September 22, 2019 · Fiction

Every day I went outside to find new bugs. I found bugs on the ground. I found bugs on the street. I found bugs in the garbage. I found bugs on a dead skunk on the road. I found bugs writhing around the inside of a tree that had split in half during a windstorm, in the middle of the night there was this incredible cracking sound, like thunder, but there was no rain, it was just the tree snapping in half and then it crashed onto the ground. The inside of it was a network of narrow passages and…

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GARGOYLE by Zac Smith

January 28, 2019 · Fiction

I sit on the front porch to get out of the apartment, to watch the children practice soccer in the field across the street. My neighbor comes in and out with his dogs. Every time, I pet the dogs while he tries not to make eye contact. He is out of shape. Tall, but bloated. I see this. I remind him by looking at his body. When he looks at me, I look at his stomach. His gut, how it pokes out between the drapes of his flannel shirts. As I look at his gut, he looks at my gut….

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FLIPPED by Zac Smith

September 11, 2018 · Fiction

Brad flipped his car after hitting a fire hydrant, right downtown, right on Fifth Street, right near our old apartment, the prefurnished one with the broken window and the red wall and the kitchen that had bookshelves instead of cabinets, he was driving, something happened, who knows, he hit the hydrant and the car went upward, upward, from the height of the hydrant and the height of the curb, and the car veered upward and over the hydrant, and the hydrant’s base cracked under the weight and pressure of the car and the angle of it, and the cracked base…

Zac Smith