2020s Meditation: A Tantric Practice to Prepare for the Coming Decade (7 minutes)

March 17, 2021

Pascal Terjan Pink Pony, 2007 — Pascal Terjan
*Pink Pony,* 2007

text by Gideon Jacobs

Settle into a slightly uncomfortable position. For example, hold your arms above your head as if you’ve just finished the ascent of a rollercoaster and are about to begin the descent, or bite your cheek hard the way some nervous people do when they’re nervous, or cross all of your fingers like a child desperately hoping to avoid retribution for telling a lie. Most meditations suggest the meditator find a neutral posture, but neutrality is a halcyon myth for our species. So, today, we’re not even going to pretend, not even going to kid ourselves.

Instead, we’re going to be realists and practice a version of what the charlatan at your local yoga studio calls “self-acceptance.” That is, we’re to accept that this is going to hurt, that the Buddha was right about dukkha, that Saint Paul was right about original sin, that your mother was wrong about everything. So, again, settle into a slightly uncomfortable position, some way of being that is vaguely tolerable now but will almost certainly, if held for the duration of this meditation, become unbearable. And close your eyes.

Let’s try a traditional visualization exercise, except in place of a deity, guru, or mandala, let’s visualize the famed Byzantine emperor Leo III. Or, more accurately, let’s visualize the digital image of an old painted portrait of him that the Google algorithm spits out first when you search his name. Study Leo’s solemn, poorly-scanned face with your mind’s eye. Observe his expression: a worrier, a warrior. Use all your empathic powers to feel the sorrow he must have felt when an enormous volcano erupted in the Aegean Sea in 726 AD, causing tsunamis that brought catastrophic death and destruction to his kingdom. Put yourself in his royal red shoes—only the emperor was permitted to wear red footwear—and imagine, in the wake of the disaster, a lightning bolt of clarity hitting you in the middle of the night: your people’s misfortune was a judgment from God for their veneration of images.

Try to know deep in your bones, as Leo knew in his, that the disaster was punishment for a pervasive societal disregard for the second commandment, for an obscene collective flouting of that sacred directive that has passed via broken telephone from God’s lips, to Moses’ ears, to the Church of England’s pen, to Wikipedia’s servers: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness [of any thing] that [is] in heaven above, or that [is] in the earth beneath, or that [is] in the water under the earth.” Think of innocent Byzantine children drowning in their beds with a gulp, gulp, gulp, and let Leo’s guilt wash over you.

Now, we’re going to further embody Leo by turning his edict of 726 AD into a mantra. There’s actually no record of the exact wording of the edict, but historians do know that it was written in Latin and that it called for the destruction of all objects adorned with the likeness of religious figures. So, let’s practice for a few minutes with a rough English approximation of the edict, utilizing it as a semantic object that can help us focus our energy and attention.

First, just think the following phrase in your head over and over again—No more phonies, just real ponies. No more phonies, just real ponies. No more phonies, just real ponies. Now, without losing your rhythm, keeping continuity with the internal verbalization, mouth the words without speaking them—No more phonies, just real ponies. No more phonies, just real ponies. No more phonies, just real ponies. Now let’s move this mantra into the sonic plane by whispering the phrase repeatedly—No more phonies, just real ponies. No more phonies, just real ponies. No more phonies, just real ponies. Now push it a little further by saying it at a normal speaking volume, and speed up a little—No more phonies, just real ponies. No more phonies, just real ponies. No more phonies, just real ponies. And now get loud, screaming the words as hard as you can, as fast as you can—No more phonies, just real ponies. No more phonies, just real ponies. No more phonies, just real ponies. Keep going. Keep going. Keep going. And then, when you feel your entire body reach a breaking point, when there’s no breath left in your lungs and no thoughts left in your head, shut the fuck up.

Take a few seconds to let your heart rate normalize. Unclench your sphincter. Relax. You’ve just experienced an intense rebirth of sorts, a rearriving into the present. So, we’re going to wrap up this meditation on a tranquil note, and put some spiritual balm on your natal wounds. Keeping your eyes closed, imagine you’re on the world’s most beautiful beach. Feel the sand between your toes. Hear the waves lapping against the shore. Smell the sweet and salty air.

Look out into the ocean—the sun is setting. Admire the colors in the sky, the impossible shades of red, orange, and pink that would compel any sane person to stop what they’re doing and attempt to have an experience of awe that reminds them of what really matters. Stare directly into that blazing ball of fire as it approaches the water, following its incremental movement down, down, down until its bottom edge is eclipsed by the horizon. Watch it lower further until it’s halfway gone. And then, when the very last ray of its light disappears from view, take a final deep breath. On the exhale, listen carefully and you just might hear a guttural rumble, an earthly growl that could either be your stomach experiencing some minor indigestion, or something much larger, louder and, for now, further away.

This essay was included in Autre Issue 9: The Decade of Influence Winter 2019/20

An Excerpt From Françoise Hardy's Memoir On Serge Gainsbourg From Autre Spring 2018

March 11, 2021

Venice, Italy, September 1966, © Steve Schapiro, courtesy of A. Galerie Paris

Françoise Hardy’s memoir
The Despair of Monkeys and Other Trifles
published in English for the first time by Feral House.

Since his break-up with Jane Birkin at the end of 1980, we had been seeing a lot more of Serge Gainsbourg. He was smitten with Thomas and telephoned me regularly as a distraction from his gloominess. I always more or less managed to lift his spirits although I don’t know how. After a bit of random chatting on one thing and another, I would hear his little short laugh, and the battle was won. Temporarily. His existential angst was an innate part of him and Jane’s departure had multiplied it tenfold.

My small crew was completely flustered and our graphologist overwhelmed the day he stepped into the RMC studio to take part in our show. He had gotten out on the wrong side of the bed that day, but our assistant Nelly, in awe at seeing him in the flesh, recklessly asked him how he was doing. He gave her a long dirty look and then mumbled “terrible.” The tone was set. His ostensible efforts to restrain an underlying aggressiveness throughout the interview made me ill at ease. He expressed himself so curtly and with so much dead air between words that the producer spent hours editing his remarks, bringing each word and phrase closer together to make them capable of being understood. When it came time for Anne-Marie Simond to read his remarkable graphological portrait, Serge vented at her. It was complete carnage. He refuted her statements one by one with his customary bad faith, and in his gem-like, reductive, and destabilizing way. Anne-Marie’s intellectual confidence was temporarily annihilated by the stress this caused and she did not sleep a wink that night.

Pleading exhaustion, Jacques had begged me not to bring Serge to the house. Despite my intention to return right after the broadcast, I felt obliged to accept his pressing invitation to get a drink at the bar of the Plaza, which was right in the neighborhood. His doctor, whose prescriptions he totally ignored, had forbidden him to drink and smoke, but he ordered two Singapore Slings right away. We had hardly settled in when he gazed at me in a most unfriendly way and blurted out: “Jane left me because of my polygamy, how do you deal with it?”

The sky came crashing down on my head again, even though I was clinging to an interview in which several years earlier Serge had said that it was the monogamy they had in common that brought Jacques and he together. I reminded him of it and acted as if I took his insinuation lightly. However, I felt devastated and he did not refrain from driving his point home: what was my secret? How did I manage to tolerate what Jane had never accepted? I only remember drowning in my emotions and not how I defended myself in order to save face. When the time came to bring him back to the Rue de Verneuil, Serge, apparently unaware of the havoc he had just wrought, began talking to me about a recently acquired firearm that Bambou,4 his new companion, had made him get rid of. She had saved his life, he swore, and his mood suddenly softened by this recollection because the temptation to use it was recurring and he would have succumbed to it sooner or later. Obviously, he felt he was in that kind of mood that evening. After mentioning his loneliness and his inability to stand it, he insisted that I stay with him. Moved by his distress, I brought him to Rue Hallé, where, on seeing us, Jacques muttered, “I knew it!” We chose to go out to the restaurant of the Hotel P.L.M. Saint Jacques, where we often went and which has since changed its name.

Once we were there, Serge got it into his head to create a cocktail requiring hard-to-find ingredients that took the sommelier a long time to bring him. When he finally had everything he wanted in the shaker and began shaking it, he dropped it, spilling its contents on the carpet. Thomas had to go to school the next day, and I was already renewing my attempts to speed things along when Serge finally deigned to cast an eye at the menu. But it was only to study the wine list, none of which, of course, he found suitable. After the unfortunate sommelier had managed to get permission to open the cellar, Serge headed there with a delighted Thomas while I was distressed at seeing the time we would actually dine receding further and further away. We left the P.L.M. around eleven o’clock and were packed in the car like sardines, when Serge, whose mood had visibly dropped, asked all at once if he could sleep at the house. Jacques dropped me off with Thomas before going to park the car, and I rushed to prepare a room. While I was moving into action, Jean Luisi, a family friend who had spent the evening with us, told me on the ground floor that Serge could not sleep without sleeping pills and they left to buy some at the drugstore.

During this period, it was impossible for me to go to sleep if Jacques was still out. He came home around five in the morning! This had given me time to ruminate over the revelations on his alleged polygamy and to get angry that he had not bothered to warn me not to wait up for him and Serge, even if it meant inventing some sort of pretext. His customary silence to my criticism exasperated me so much that I ripped the glasses from his face and threw them out the window. Incensed in turn, he swore that he would not be caught doing that again and he would stop seeing Serge. In fact, Serge had managed to drag Jean and Jacques all over the city, including a Corsican restaurant where his thoughtless provocations had aroused the murderous impulses of a customer who was a native of the Isle of Beauty. At their next stop, Castel’s, Serge threw an ashtray at someone’s head and almost started a brawl. We would later learn that he never slept that night and showed up at the scheduled time—nine o’clock in the morning—to film an advertisement. Like Jacques and Johnny, he was a real force of nature, and the saying that “a strong body is a calamity when it has the upper hand” applied to him as well—at least partially.

During the following week, Serge sheepishly invited us to dinner at Vivario, the Corsican restaurant where his lack of tact could have proven costly. His daughter Charlotte’s presence would oblige him to act reasonably, he assured me. Jacques stubbornly wanted no part of it and I don’t remember the miracle that allowed me to change his mind. When Serge showed up at the house, Jacques quickly told him that it was because of their nocturnal excursion that I had thrown his expensive glasses—worth five thousand francs—out the first floor window, which he had not been able to find. Like a true gentleman, Serge immediately wrote a check for this amount, which later became an exasperating subject of dispute. Jacques obstinately maintains that the check was written out to me—which was illogical in its own right—and that I cashed it, even though he knows full well that I am incapable of this kind of dishonesty or carelessness!

The dinner at Vivario ended as poorly as it started off well. Dead drunk, Serge and Jean climbed up on a chair and without caring in the least about the presence of the children, Thomas and Charlotte, performed a perfectly scandalous, obscene pantomime for us. But all of us—me heading the line—admired Serge’s artistic genius so much that we forgave him everything when he was sober again and had once again become a disarmingly courteous little boy.

Françoise Hardy in Paco Rabanne France, May 19, 1968

Among the noteworthy memories left behind by this enfant terrible were his dinner at Rue de Verneuil, to which the two Jacques, Coluche, and I were invited. While Serge was busy in the kitchen, we realized that he fully intended to serve us dinner on the low table around which we were sitting uncomfortably. This was hardly to the taste of my companions, all bon vivants for whom pleasure could not coexist with discomfort. In a matter of seconds they stripped a more suitable table of the art objects cluttered on top of it, knowing full well the sacrilege they were committing: the place of each object had been meticulously thought out by Serge, whose aesthetic sense was stamped by his absolute intransigence. When he came out of the kitchen and saw how greatly we had disturbed his order—in his eyes this amounted to finger painting over the canvas of a master or breaking a precious vase—he turned pale and had to make a visibly superhuman effort to not toss us out into the street. This was fortunate, by the way, as the evening turned out to be a great success.

Around this same time, I fell in love with “Ces petits riens” [Those Little Nothings], a marvelous song of great subtlety that Serge had written and composed in 1964. I wanted to cover it and Gabriel had the audacity to suggest another musical bridge of his own, with different harmonies. Serge balked at this but showed proof of a moving humility by accepting Gabriel’s changes—which truthfully, were welcome ones—when he heard them.

Serge’s superb book of photos of Bambou, which had recently been published, gave me the idea of asking him to take a photo of me for my record jacket. The session took place at Mac Mahon Studio on the Rue des Acacias, where Jean-Marie had toiled for the magazines Salut les copains and Mademoiselle Âge tendre, so I felt right at home. However, the impression that Serge’s assistant was doing nearly everything in his place worried me. My worries were justified, as the slides from this session were distressing. It is not easy for an amateur to master the finer aspects of flash photography. The lighting was poor, as were the photos. Luckily, after examining them carefully, I saw that there was one—only one—that would make a superb record jacket, and I felt an intense relief. How would I have ever told Serge, who was so sensitive to compliments, that nothing of what he and his assistant had done found favor in my eyes. His honor was safe, as was our relationship. No one who sees the elegant front cover of the album Quelqu’un qui s’en va would ever imagine that it was a miraculous accident!

At the end of August 1988, when I returned from Corsica, Serge Gainsbourg invited me to dinner. In the taxi that brought us to the Nikko Hotel, where he had reserved a table at the restaurant Les Célébrités, his incoherent and repetitive speech gave me the impression he had lost his mind. How many times had I heard him say he “would shoot” himself if he went senile! He had reached that point but obviously did not realize it. He first insisted on going to the bar and, once again violating his doctor’s orders, ordered two cocktails. When we went to our table, he ordered me a Petrus and a Cointreau for him. In dismay, I told him that quality wine was much less harmful than liquors and he would do better drinking this sublime grand cru from Bordeaux that to my great regret I would not be able to finish. This was a wasted effort. I remember it as an extremely heavy atmosphere. Serge never touched his plate and I did not know how to cheer him up. Moreover, he seemed to be blind and deaf to everything, a prisoner of the angst eating away at him.

Several months earlier, he had performed at the Zenith in front of a large and enthusiastic crowd. Serge enjoyed considerable popularity; he was the uncontested pope of French song, which he had revolutionized by making words sound like no one ever had before (among other things), and his hypersensitive, highly intelligent, talented, provocative, and break-all-the-rules personality was as fascinating as it was emotionally moving. But he was not a showman and his last performance was pathetic. Barely had his concert ended, when he sent someone to get me, and I found myself alone with him in a luxurious dressing room, which had been arranged down to the tiniest detail according to his instructions. He was obviously impatiently waiting for me to compliment him while I was having a devil of a time saying the opposite of what I thought. I only remember how profoundly awkward I felt, not how I escaped this impasse. All the love Serge received from his audience this evening did him a world of good, but when he was shown the video of the performance, he was so devastated by what he saw that I have often wondered if it might not have been better for him overall if his Zenith had never happened.

In the beginning of 1989, his doctors detected a small lump in his liver. They diagnosed it as an abscess and planned to remove it a month later. One evening when we were dining with our respective spouses in an Italian restaurant on Rue Le Sueur, Serge suddenly worried: what if he did have a cancer of the liver? “If that was the case,” I exclaimed, “they would not have waited so long to operate on you!” The logic of my observation reassured him and the evening proceeded as normal. But on Monday, April 10, Bambou called in a panic. She had just been told that Serge really did have liver cancer. The doctors had not spoken of it to anyone to avoid any leaks that might give him ideas. Moreover, they had not operated on him earlier because of the extremely poor condition of his heart, which was at risk of giving out under anesthesia.

His heart did not quit, and the length of time needed to revive him and for him to leave the hospital was quicker than anticipated. I saw Serge at the Raphael Hotel bar, where he enjoyed hanging out. The elimination of alcohol had restored his spirits and the pounds he had dropped made it seem like he was floating in the odd, too-short blue jeans he was wearing. I can still see in my memory his silhouette moving from the back: he had the air of a little sixtyyear- old boy whose fragility leapt out and touched my heart. He survived two years following his operation never dreaming he had cancer. I was constantly expecting to hear the news of his death during this time. When I thought about him, when I found myself in his neighborhood, a great sorrow flooded me that every day brought us closer to the day when he would no longer be there.

There was a memorable evening with Étienne Daho and Bambou. In the middle of the meal she became extremely anxious because Serge did not answer the phone though he was coming down with the flu. We interrupted our feast to go immediately to the Rue de Verneuil. Serge had not yet returned, and we waited for him in the entrance of the Galant Verre, the restaurant facing his building. When he finally returned and opened the door to let us in, I was shaken by his appearance: his complexion was waxy, he was perspiring, and he had the air of a zombie. We took a seat in his living room/museum and were unable to prevent him from emptying a half-bottle of port, although he was taking antibiotics. All at once, he brought his hand to his chest and started groaning: “My heart, my heart ...” while a clear fluid began spilling from his mouth. It was like a nightmare. Bambou ran to get a napkin, while Étienne and I stoically prepared ourselves to witness the final moments of our illustrious friend. He refused to go to the hospital, and it was only when we had Bambou’s assurance she would remain with him for the rest of the night that Étienne and I, quite shaken, took our leave. We thought we would learn that he had died in the night, but when I talked to Bambou on the phone the next morning, she told me that Serge had woken up singing (Cloclo) Claude François’ hit “Alexandrie, Alexandra” at the top of his lungs.

On Saturday, March 2, 1991, several friends came to have dinner at Rue Hallé. One of them, Gilbert Foucaut, a music programmer for television, called me around two in the morning quite devastated. He had just heard on the radio in the taxi taking him home that Serge was dead. No matter how much we were expecting this news, hearing it caused an unimaginable shock. Several days earlier, Thomas had gone to Vézeley, and Serge had enthusiastically told him about the new album he was putting together. Rumor spread that he had died in his sleep and only the certainty that his health problems would have assumed intolerable proportions if he had lived longer softened our pain. It is a terrible thing to say, but at the point he had reached, dying this way—quickly and apparently gently—was the best thing that could have happened to him. There were assuredly quite a few of us who felt his departure signaled the end not only of an entire era but also our youth.

Chapter 12: When You Exit A Room You Just Enter Another One

December 15, 2020

Over the course of 2020, Brad Phillips and Gideon Jacobs wrote a 12-chapter "serial novella" for Autre. Click here to read Chapter 1: G and B.

text by Brad Phillips (and Gideon Jacobs)

Gideon did a great job above finishing his last chapter of this project. You can see that right? Don’t take it for granted that Gideon has talent.

He wrote about the beginning and the ending of things. When you exit a room, you end the experience of being within it, but of course when you exit a room you just enter another one. You are never not in a room.

This is the end for me. Everything has an ending, even an ending. This is the end of my ending. On Monday though, I’m starting Wellbutrin after almost a decade of not taking antidepressants, only mood stabilizers and Clonazepam. I am weaning myself off Clonazepam. Clonazepam, ironically, increases anxiety over time. I have been taking it for twenty-six years, never once having missed a day. Anything soothing will, after a span of time, become terrifying.

(For a while I had a literary agent who was an idiot and when I sent him the first draft of my first book he seriously thought I should replace the word CLONAZEPAM with the word KLONOPIN for American readers. And he also seriously thought that I should drop the U from words like colour and labour so as not to alienate American readers, and this is the utter stupidity you sometimes have to deal with in life, and I stopped working with him when I saw his high school yearbook photograph and he was wearing a bowtie, and then I saw his Instagram and he was STILL wearing the bowtie.)

I’m wondering about NXIVM. About Keith Raniere and what about the women in his house who died of cancer from rat poison, why is nobody talking about that? I want to know what’s happening to him in prison and I hope it’s rape and beatings. In Canada there’s an allergy pill called NEXIUM. I want to send it to Catherine & India Oxenberg for their allergy to poor people. I’m writing my first novel. I thought it would be out by now. My first book was published on my birthday in 2019. I turned 45. In February I turn 47. I basically just started a writing career. I’m worried a gap of more than two years between books will damage my possibly ascendant career. And I worry about the book itself. All the time. I’m writing about science-fiction and basically everything my first book wasn’t about, cause I don’t want to repeat myself. But I want to make money, and I don’t want all the ‘fans’ of my first book (who are numerous and loyal and generous and thank you) to be disappointed or feel alienated that this new one isn’t about BRAD AND DRUGS AND BLAH BLAHAHLAHA. I couldn’t be more boring as a subject—this should be apparent by the end of this paragraph. I wrote a detective novel that’s an irritatingly postmodern book within a book. I hate postmodernism. I’m trying to figure out how to incorporate it into the structure of the larger novel. It’s fifty-five thousand words, the detective book, which is already the word count of a short novel. If I insert it periodically in the structure of the main novel, I worry people will lose track of the larger novel, become frustrated by the interruptions, or only read the detective novel which is admittedly more gripping. The best solution I’ve come up with is to insert each chapter as an endnote at appropriate points throughout the novel proper, but as soon as you think about endnotes you think about David Foster Wallace and I really hate the idea of what would likely be ALL writing about the book to be about Infinite Jest and the endnotes. Cause Wallace himself got super bored of that and irritated (even though everything about Wallace is obnoxious and fake and performative and of course he loved the endnotes and the talking about them), but I’m not like him. I wouldn’t get bored, I’d get upset cause I don’t want to be compared to him or have people think I ripped him off. I’ve been painting a long time and nobody can say I ripped anyone off. But with your first novel if its got a lot of endnotes people can say you ripped of Wallace, especially someone like me: a soon to be 47 oooh 12 step meetings type wears a thing on his head all the time white asshole with a chip on his shoulder or a seeming or perceived chip on his shoulder and even now this sentence sounds like Wallace. I hate David Foster Wallace. He threw Elizabeth Wurtzel out of a moving car.

People say they like the ending, they savour the ending, they wait and they wait, and they postpone the ending cause it’s so bittersweet this ending, but ultimately they want it cause they have to move on. But death, everyone is scared of that ending. That’s why religion and Jesus and the virgins and reincarnation and all the lies people tell themselves about a new beginning which is really not a thing so much as a choice one makes every day.

I am supposed to be working on a novel and making paintings, but I ordered books, some suggested, some chosen by me, and they sit in front of me telling me, “Brad, fuck work come read” and these are the books
- The God Molecule by Brian Clegg (or Particle, some aren’t right in front of me)
- The Superrationals by Stephanie Lacava
- The Incest Diary by Anonymous
- Child of God by Cormac McCarthy who I never read and who everyone says you have to read
- Serotonin by Michel Houllebecq which I ordered an advance copy of the translation and thought it’d take a lot longer to come out then when it came the other day I was like, shit now the Houlellebecq book is here and I really want to read it but also it’s a bad idea to read it cause his writing style might somehow influence me and then I’d be ripping off yet another shitty white guy with bad hair.

(I feel worried and upset that by listing the books above people will think I’m attempting to appear smart, or well read, or intellectual, or that I’m posturing or showing off.)

My hair is also thinning and I bought Rogaine and am so ashamed and can’t believe I’m writing it down.

“2020 WAS A HARD YEAR EVERYONE LET’S PUT IT BEHIND US”

You don’t want an ending. I don’t want an ending. I want to be forever beginning, but I’m not an idiot child who shits his pants and leaves food on his face so I’m forced to face the facts.

You do not have to be forced to face anything. You can shit your pants and leave food on your face and be accountable to nobody so this is what I’m offering you at the end with very little energy left wearing a pair of red Nike sweatpants that people think are ‘cool’ but really were just cheap and I bought them at an outlet mall by my parent’s house and they’re actually the sort of sweatpants that high school jocks wear in the suburbs. I’m wearing a hat because I’m scared to see my hair and my wife Cristine’s shirt which has a big circle with a stripe through it spray painted on the front like a NO or CANCELLED sign cause I’m cancelling myself before anyone else can or demonstrating that I know I should’ve been or should be cancelled.

So it’s this:

Turn to Chapter 4 if you want Brad to quit painting and devote his time solely to writing.
Turn to Chapter 7 if you want Gideon to quit editorial writing and devote his time solely to writing fiction.
Turn to Chapter 1 if you want this to be published in some manner.
Turn to Chapter 6 if you secretly shoplift things like beef jerky from gas stations and nobody knows it.
Turn to Chapter 9 if you’re obsessed with Tao Lin but pretend like you’re not cause you’re frightened of judgment.
Turn to Chapter 2 if you don’t want this to be published.
Turn to Chapter 5 if you’re considering Christianity in spite of having seen dinosaur fossils in museums and can’t reconcile the creation story of Adam & Eve with what you know of science but still want to really give Christianity a shot.
Turn to Chapter 8 if you want Gideon and Brad to live long healthy lives.
Turn to Chapter 4 if you’ve ever been happy and the end of that happiness did NOT bring you suffering but somehow, illogically, did not hurt you.

For more from Brad Phillips, follow @brad___phillips on Instagram. For more from Gideon Jacobs, follow @GideonsByeBull on Instagram.

Chapter 11: Penultimate Chapter Meditation

November 16, 2020

A Meta Method for When the End Draws Near (7 minutes)

Over the course of 2020, Brad Phillips and Gideon Jacobs are writing a 12-chapter "serial novella" for Autre. It will be written Exquisite Corpse style — they will alternate who writes each month's chapter, and won’t have access to the previous chapter until it has been published. Brad and Gideon have not discussed plot, structure, format, themes, characters, etc, and promise not to do so even once the project is underway. The idea is to react to each other's work, and hope the final Frankensteinian product is something that deserves to exist. If the authors like what they've made when it's done, the editors might publish it as a "zine." Installments will go up on the 15th of every month. Click here to read Chapter 1: G and B.

text by Gideon Jacobs (and Brad Phillips)

People emphasize the importance of beginnings and endings. One always wants to “get off on a good foot,” “go out with a bang,” “start strong,” “leave them wanting more,” etc, etc. These truisms are, at their core, about manipulation, and manipulation is, at its core, about control. If our “exquisite corpse serial novella” has taught you anything, which it really shouldn’t have, it’s probably that control is for suckers.

With beginnings, we go from nothing to something, crossing the threshold into the experience in question. Examples: meeting someone, walking into a room, opening a book, etc, etc. We all know that the nature of this threshold crossing is the foundational stone on which the experience will be constructed. Change is what we notice. This is why we feel acceleration and deceleration, not velocity. This is why we place such a premium on first impressions.

With endings, we go from something back to nothing, crossing the threshold out of the experience in question. Examples: breaking up with someone, exiting a room, finishing a book, etc, etc. We all know that the nature of this threshold crossing is the taste left in our mouths as we move on to other experiences, including that of telling the story of the experience in question to ourselves and others. In a sense, endings are valued because they so heavily inform the beginning of what’s next: our processing of what just happened.

All that said, it’s the moment just before the ending begins, the gray transitional zone that marks the conclusion of the chunky middle, that tends to go underrated and overlooked. It’s here that people are most comfortable and, therefore, vulnerable, with the finish line finally in sight but enough race left to run that there’s no anxiety about what lies on the other side. It’s here, when we are simultaneously hyper aware of the finitude of the experience in question and still very much inside it, that we can really relax.

So, relax. Soon, when things are officially almost over, you can start thinking about what you’re going to do when it is, in fact, over, but for now, just relish the purgatorial peace, the limbotic lull. Did you know the word “lull” has roots in middle english and latin that mean, “To quiet a child?” Whether you knew that or not, let your collicky inner child be soothed by the calming energy available in this unique moment of our greater narrative arc. Bask in it. Suck it like a fucking pacifier.

Good. Now that you’re sufficiently relaxed, your defenses down, we can focus on the real goal of this meditation: to prime you in a way that allows for optimal enjoyment of the final chapter of our “exquisite corpse serial novella.” This process isn’t simply about getting you into a good mood so that you’re more likely to enjoy whatever comes next. No—what we’re going to do is have you prepare a positive expectation of how incredible the final chapter will be, and pair that expectation with a positive sense memory of how good it was. In a sense, we are going to create a mold in which your near-future experience of reading the final chapter can be shoved into.

This might make it sound as if by predetermining the quality of your reading experience we’re robbing your future-self of agency, but that’s paranoid thinking. What could be more empowering than choosing your fate? What could be more enjoyable than guaranteeing your future enjoyment? Don’t be spooked—this is just what guru’s are really talking about when they talk about “manifesting.”

So, let’s assign the final chapter a color. It can be any color, but be sure to choose one that you associate with good feelings, maybe love, excitement, comfort, peace, strength, etc, etc. Once you’ve chosen your color, imagine the final chapter not as a bunch of cold words on a page or screen but as a kind of warm, amorphous ball of energy that is, inside and out, your color. Anticipate how good it’s going to feel to enter the ball of energy, to cross the threshold between the penultimate chapter—your current experience—and the final chapter—the ball.

Now, once you feel like you’ve spent enough time immersed in your color, once you feel your body and mind have been totally saturated by it, imagine exiting the ball of energy and finding yourself plopped into a beautiful home in the middle of a dinner party. There are a handful of your favorite friends there, and a few very attractive strangers too. The table is lively with conversation but you’re having trouble finding an opening to throw in your two cents. This makes you feel self-conscious, weak, timid, impotent, childish, etc, etc.

Just as you’re about to give up, about to resign yourself to spending the evening sulking rather than participating, the most charming of all the dinner guests, maybe sensing you’ve been a little quiet, redirects the flow of the conversation toward you. Now, you have the floor as all eyes and ears at the table are wondering, “Have you read anything good lately?” “When was the last time a piece of writing really moved you?” and most specifically, “What’s a novel or novella that really nails its ending?”

Normally, this much attention would cause your voice to tremble a little with doubt, anxiety, uncertainty, panic, etc, etc. But when you open your mouth, you suddenly feel like you’re back inside the ball of energy, or more accurately, it now feels like it is inside of you. When you speak, your voice doesn’t tremble. Much to your surprise, you sound confident and self assured as you tell your little audience that it is so funny they should ask because you have, in fact, just read something good, something that moved you, something that managed to both end with a bang and leave you wanting more.

For more from Gideon Jacobs, follow @GideonsByeBull on Instagram.

Chapter 10: First Class to Basel

October 15, 2020

text by Brad Phillips (and Gideon Jacobs)

Hi Summer and Oliver,

Thanks for this. I don’t like when people ‘break the fourth wall,’ but maybe Gideon and I have done that already?

It’s ironic, because when you sent me this document, before I even opened it I said I didn’t know if I'd be able to get my part done in time because I’ve been so mentally fragile lately. And then you wrote that you were worried about our mental health. So this is, really... I can’t imagine a sign of better editors, in that you seem to have predicted my current state of mind. I don’t know how Gideon is doing, he hasn’t responded to my texts for a few weeks, but I do see that he looks at my stories on Instagram.

The book that I published last year dealt a lot with suicide and mental illness etcetera, and it was ‘autofiction,’ but really, that was just a sort of way to cover my ass if people didn’t like certain content—ultimately none of it was fictional. I ended up in the psych ward of the hospital twice after it came out, and if my new book wasn’t science fiction/incest based, then it would probably be about the story of an aging man who published a successful book, hoping it would ameliorate his mental suffering, only to find out that in fact not only was it unhelpful, it actually made his (my) mental health worse.

When I was thirty-three I had a solo show at Liste, a satellite fair for younger artists attached to Art Basel in Switzerland. I’d had a really bad year, my marriage was in the toilet, a lot of other things were going on. So I did this thing I often did (and, knowing what I know from the past should not still do, still do), where I put all my hopes for mental recovery into the success of my show. My ex-wife and I went to Basel, my dealers were billionaires and flew us both there first class, put us in a hotel room larger than my current apartment, gave me a daily stipend of five hundred Swiss francs, etcetera. That first day, I had to go to the building where the fair was taking place and help hang my paintings. Before we patched all the holes in the wall, Ivan Wirth and Manuela Hauser, who own Hauser & Wirth Gallery (which all my life I dreamed of showing with, and still do to this day) came and bought the entire show, seventeen paintings, hours before the fair even opened. This should have been good news...I mean objectively it was. I made close to sixty-thousand Swiss francs. My dealers put their Christian Louboutin shoes up on the table, smoked Marlboro Reds and drank Veuve Clicquot. They looked triumphant, and also a bit like they’d won the fair—like they were better than everyone else. And I performed ‘thrilled’ as long as I could then went down to the bar with my ex and ordered a beer. Once it arrived, I just started bawling my fucking eyes out, in full view of dealers I wanted to work with and artists that, back then, I felt intimidated by. Because what I’d wanted had happened, but I didn’t feel any better. I’d stupidly put all my hopes into the idea that selling out my show (or even having it go well) would fix my depression. When it didn’t fix my depression, I felt even worse. Because then it became, what’s it going to fucking take? That day I understood success was nothing more than a big shiny balloon. It looks pretty and floats around, but when you pop it, it’s just hot air and cheap plastic that settles on the ground like dead skin from a colourful animal.

Worse still, was that I now had a lot of money, and back then having lots of money was very bad for me. I didn’t save money like I now do with my wife Cristine, using it intelligently to invest in the stock market or get closer to buying a home—I just spent it on dope, and Prada shoes, and similar bullshit. So while I want this to be good, what Gideon and I are doing, I know that whether it turns out well or not, it’s not going to make me ‘feel better.’ Mental illness isn’t contingent on outside factors like success or failure (although failure can certainly exacerbate it). I’m working on my first novel right now, and if I’m lucky, I write a paragraph a day. I don’t know if it’s procrastination or self-destruction. I know that, but maybe I’m wrong and think ‘I’m worse off than him,’ that Gideon is more mentally sound than me. Maybe he isn’t, though. I mean, I worry about him not having texted me in weeks. I’d reach out to him but don’t have much to say, like words of comfort or platitudes that mean nothing, and that to intelligent people usually read as insults rather than expressions of concern.

When I buy a house I’ll be happy. But then there’s the renovations. When I have 50k in the bank I’ll be happy. But, then there's the taxes. When I show with David Zwirner, I’ll be happy. But then I’ll have to churn out paintings.

I’m not even sure I know what happiness is. I know what relief is, and sometimes confuse it with happiness. What I know, I guess, is the absence of fear, and the absence of anxiety, and the absence of depression, and those things register to me as happiness. I suspect though that happiness is something different, like bubbling joy and delight at the world. I don’t know those feelings. Joy is just a name from the ‘70s, and delight is the second work in a candy I enjoy that it seems no one else does—Turkish Delight.

You can print this, add it to our project. It’s honest and real, and maybe this is the only honest and real thing I’ve contributed to this project so far.

If you reach Gideon, tell him I love him, and I hope he’s okay, and that he can call me any time if he wants, but that if I don’t pick up, please don’t try calling again five minutes later.

I hope you’re both okay. Today they said Trump caught the coronavirus, so my face muscles moved into that expression people called ‘smile.’ This must be an improvement of some kind, no?

XOB

For more from Brad Phillips, follow @brad___phillips on Instagram.

Chapter 9: Time For A Check-in?

September 15, 2020

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text by Gideon Jacobs (and Brad Phillips)

To: Brad and Gideon

From: The Editors

Dear Brad and Gideon,

To start, we want to thank you for writing your “exquisite corpse serial novella” with us. When you mentioned the concept back in winter, we were immediately intrigued. It sounded like the perfect sandbox for writers like you two to play in, a recipe for something unusual and surprising. Over these months, it’s been fun to watch you ping-pong the novella back and forth, unaware of the other’s intentions and ideas, fingers crossed that it will result in something cohesive and whole. We’ve laughed out loud at some point while reading every single chapter.

All that said, we’re emailing today just to express a few concerns. The first is that we’re a little worried that in December, the final chapter will be published, and the cohesiveness and wholeness we were all hoping for might be, well, lacking. We’ve spent the last few days reviewing the story as it’s been written so far, and to be honest, there’s just not much of a story to speak of. The chapters are individually compelling, but there’s no real traceable connective tissue or logic between the chapters. Sure, sometimes a character will appear more than once, but often these appearances are more confusing than they are orienting, and the reader is left a little out to sea.

I know the point of this experiment was for you two to not have a plan, to not communicate, but after much discussion, we’ve come to the conclusion that it would do the project a tragic disservice if, when it comes to an end, it has the feeling of an experiment that failed. We’re not recommending that you guys tie a neat little bow around the narrative—that would also do the project a disservice. There doesn’t need to be a linear plot. There doesn’t need to be a plot at all. What there needs to be, in our opinion, is some small payoff for those who have been following along, some kind of ending that makes the project feel justified and complete.

Maybe the issue here is more philosophical than it is editorial. Do we owe the reader anything? Is it our obligation to reward them for their time or our prerogative to do so? Is the goal of this project to make something “good?” It seems that you two have been more focused on process than product, which is, in a way, exactly what you should have been doing—we never like writing that feels like a means to an end. But, that said, it’s our job to focus on product, our job to make sure the result of your guys’ process is something we’re all proud to have worked on.

OK, so now, with the business out of the way, our second concern is of a more personal nature. Basically, we just wanted to check in about your respective mental states. While both of you are known for focusing on dark themes, sadness, and suffering, often writing about life and death with a kind of nihilistic flippancy, there has been kind of a lot of mention of suicide in several of the chapters. Suicide is a fascinating subject, totally fair game, and we wouldn’t be bringing it up at all if you hadn’t started referring to this project as a “groundbreaking innovation for the murder-suey industry.” That line caught our attention, had us worried that you two might, in fact, have had a plan for how this thing ends after all, just not the sort of plan we had in mind.

If this novella has, in any way, become a negative force on your mental health, we would like to pull the plug immediately, and make sure you both have the psychological support you need. Frankly, the idea that this project may be even vaguely serving as a container for suicidal ideation or stoking depressive flames makes us sick to our stomach. Your wellness comes first; the work comes second. We mean it, and to be very clear, we’re not just covering our moral and legal asses in case you guys aren’t kidding about the “murder suey.” We care about you both and are legitimately concerned.

So, in short, please tell us how you are. We would greatly appreciate it if both of you could write us back letting us know if you’re OK, and if you are, then we’d also appreciate it if you sent over a few ideas as to how we might end this project in a way that renders it a creatively fulfilling success.

Looking forward to hearing from you. The Editors

For more from Gideon Jacobs, follow @GideonsByeBull on Instagram.

Chapter 8: Just Like a Crime Novel

August 17, 2020

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text by Brad Phillips (and Gideon Jacobs)

Hey Buddy,

So to be clear, what I write next will be chapter two? I can do that. I feel very tired. Only Cristine knows but I got picked up for stealing a Hyundai Elantra last week cause I was manic and ended up in a holding cell for three days, so I heard some bits of crimey type stuff from other assholes who were there, but all criminals lie. I’m hoping I can use bipolarity as an excuse for grand theft auto btw. But this is all going to be a lie. Art is a crime really. I always thought of visual art as - well wait. The last time I saw my dad he was in prison, and I was just beginning to get successful as an artist. I told him that. He was proud of me and said I’d found the ideal con, because art is like any other con - you create this thing which the world doesn’t need, and you tell them they need it. Then validation inflates prices, rumour inflates prices, and this thing which is inherently dumb and only clogs the world with more stuff becomes valuable. He was in prison for doing this water-filter scam, where he’d go to conventions with his friend Cecil with a pamphlet for a high tech water filter (this was twenty plus years ago) and a single prototype. They’d take tonnes of orders upfront then skip town to the next home show or whatever - there was no actual water filter. You said this,

“…citing that ubiquitous yet totally nonexistent study that claimed men think about sex every seven seconds…”

I used to be a harsh hypochondriac, and I think that was in part driven by severe physical and emotional neglect as a child. I wanted nurses to touch me and care about me, so I faked maladies, but over time I began to believe they were real, because of the trauma of neglect. It got complicated obviously. But, that line about men thinking about sex every seven seconds - I went to a walk-in clinic when I was twelve and said I had mysterious pain in my leg. They knew me there already. I took a pamphlet (I loved medical pamphlets because they helped me do research) on hemorrhoids, and it said that the hemorrhoid sufferer thinks about their hemorrhoids every six to seven seconds. At that moment I told myself it would be better to get cancer. Then in my thirties I got a hemorrhoid once and I found it was true, how often I thought of it. But, during the seconds I wasn’t thinking of the hemorrhoid, I was thinking about sex. Then I’d sometimes vomit because of the commingling of hemorrhoid preoccupation and visual imagery of tall women with small breasts. I grossed myself out.

I told someone who I respect (or who people I respect respect) that my new book was a crime novel, or literature hung on the skeleton of a crime novel, and she said that ‘genre fiction is trending’ and I got really upset. But I’m already eighty-thousand words into it. For sure I’m gonna feel like an asshole when it’s out, and even now I think if I chose a genre, I should’ve gone with Western/Cowboy, cause nobody’s gonna use that one. Literature people are the fucking worst. I don’t want to reiterate what you said, I’ll just say I agree. People love to be confused, and I do get some sadistic pleasure from the fact that if people don’t understand a painting I make or something I write, they feel that they’re wrong, or not smart enough. This is a total falsehood obviously, but being an artist or writer, you can really make people feel like shit, and that’s comforting to me, cause if I’m going to (and you as well) feel like shit just for waking up, then someone’s gotta pay for that. So this would be chapter 2? I admit to being confused slightly because I’m coming down on my Lamotrigine which is hard so I’ve upped my Clonazepam which I’m also supposed to be coming down on, so I’m sorta fogged out — but let me know if i’m getting this right. Also, I don’t want to speak for you either, but just want to make it clear I feel that I’m definitely too stupid to make any exquisite corpse type thing work. Even when I do have a broken bone, I come up with an elaborate story for my doctor that makes it sound more reasonable that I broke the bone, instead of telling the truth, which is that I woke up, stepped on the floor and the toe broke. I say I kicked a dresser. Oh and you do the sex writing, I can’t do it anymore. When I turned 46 my left ball suddenly dropped an inch and covered part of Garfield’s head on this tattoo I got too close to my nuts, and now I feel like I can’t write about sex cause of what happened to my nuts and Garfield.

CHAPTER 2?

He Married his Murderer

Chapter 7 - Just Like a Crime Novel

(I could be fucking this up because I’m doing what you asked and going true crime, but since I don’t know the story at all, I’m just making up a chapter that SOUNDS like it would come from a crime novel.)

Bobby ended up robbing the house on Granville Drive the night he last saw Gabrielle, the house with the asshole husband. The husband had turned out not to be an asshole but instead was married to one. The couple had done that thing television advises of saying their names; “Gloria” and “Brian”, to humanize themselves. They’d done it this way.

“Brian, I love you.

“I love you Gloria. We’ll be okay.”

They recommend that when dealing with rapists and murderers you say your name or your kids names, talk about them - “Our son Oscar just started walking!” They even suggest telling your attacker you’re pregnant when you aren’t, which Bobby didn’t like the dishonesty of. When he robbed people he told the truth about what he wanted and what might happen and preferred his victims be honest in return. Considering the circumstances he knew it was an unreasonable expectation. The personalization strategy made sense objectively. Criminals who aren’t set on murder could possibly change their minds in the heat of the moment if their victims could transform themselves from objects into subjects.

What he’d liked about Brian, what made him seem unlike an asshole, was that after “Gloria, I love you,” all he’d said was…

“Jesus pal, I was really looking forward to golfing tomorrow.”

That was honest. No my wife’s pregnant shtick (she was clearly too old) or any of the standards: “I’m not ready to die, I’m scared to die, You really don’t have to do this, I promise we won’t call the cops, I just finished chemotherapy, I’m a veteran.” Just some straight from the hip frustration at maybe missing out on a day of golf.

Bobby tied Brian to a radiator and took the wife, Gloria, upstairs. While he bound her arms and legs she said something that shocked him, that almost made him want to go golfing with her husband.

“Fucking kill him. He doesn’t know I have a huge life insurance policy on him the dipshit, cheats on me and thinks I don’t know. You kill him tonight, leave me an email address or something, and I swear once I get my money I’ll give you half. You’d be doing me a big fucking favour.”

Obviously she could’ve been lying, stupidly thinking Bobby would give her his email address which she’d then pass onto the cops, but, maybe she’d been serious. He knew it was strange that it bothered him since he was there to rob them and kill the husband since men needed to be exterminated. But he didn’t like this Lorna’s informal bluntness, plus she hadn’t helped herself by using the personalization strategy. A girl named Gloria had snubbed Bobby in college and he’d never forgotten it.

He told her she was a shitty wife and stuck a sock in her mouth. Then he placed a stack of dishes on Gloria’s back and told her if she moved he’d hear it, and he’d come blow her brains out. She seemed appropriately scared so he went downstairs and untied Brian. He told him to go sit on the couch. Then Bobby, for the first time during his spree took off his mask. He sat opposite Brian and asked him if he wanted a drink or something. Brian said there were beers in the fridge, then apologized that they were Bud Lite, saying Gloria’d told him to get off regular Bud cause he was getting a “fucking spare tire.”

“That’s bullshit, I don’t like that,” Bobby said on hearing this, “you look good to me.”

“Thanks, and I mean yeah, she’s no Julia Roberts.’

Bobby’d never found Julia Roberts attractive, Cameron Diaz was more his type, but the point was clear.

A pack of Marlboro’s sat on the table. Bobby took out two and offered one to Brian, who accepted. Still wearing his gloves he lit both their smokes then leaned back, grateful for a cold Budweiser - the king of beers. He made a mental note to leave the butt and bottle in a pot of boiling water before he left so there’d be no DNA.

“I was sorta expecting this to happen,” Brian said. “The cops came by here a couple of days ago asking if we’d seen anything unusual. They were canvassing the neighbourhood.”

It dawned on Bobby that of course this would've happened since he’d targeted such a small area. He’d need to be increasingly careful.

“What did they say?”

“Not much other than had we seen any strange people lurking around, that sorta stuff.”

“Did they tell you anything about me, that they had a lead or any evidence?”

“No, actually one of the detectives said they were frustrated, that you were good, a pro or whatever, knew how to get away with it. He said they thought you might be a cop or an ex-cop then his partner told him to shut up.”

“That’s good to know, thanks for that buddy.” Bobby said sincerely.

Brian asked Bobby if he could tell him something and Bobby said sure.

“In a way I admire you, you know, living outside of society the way you do. My whole life I’ve had this dream of just like stealing a car and buying a handgun and driving across the country robbing banks. I’ve wanted to fuck truck stop waitresses with meth head boyfriends and ex prom-queens with bipolar disorder working at Piggly Wiggly. That’s America to me. I’ve never got to feel truly American, cause I’ve never got to live the way you live.”

Bobby was enjoying drinking and smoking with the guy, it’d been a while since he'd had a conversation with a man that wasn’t about work. Brian seemed alright, laid back. Under different circumstances he imagined they could've been friends.

“Look buddy I gotta be honest with you here. Your wife, I don’t like her, and she sure as shit doesn’t like you. You know what she just said to me up there? She said to kill you, said she’d split the insurance money with me.”

“Are you fucking serious? I’ve been taking care of that bitch forever. Wanted to be an actress, the whole cliche - wide-eyed girl from Missoula takes the bus to Hollywood, ends up tending bar at a Hard Rock Cafe which is where I met her. In ten years she’s had one gig, sitting at a table with a cop in the background of a Law & Order episode. Zero lines, just sitting on her ass like she does here. Closest she ever got was she fucked Cliff from Cheers. Unbelievable. I guess situations like these, you find out who you’re really married to.”

“It’s really true. Buddy….”

Brian interrupted him, “You know you meet someone and you fall in love. Then one thing changes that was a crucial component of your initial attraction, of what seduced you so effectively. Once it’s changed, the remainder of your life becomes a compromise borne of not wanting to hurt your partner for having changed the one thing. Cowardice about hurting others causes so much suffering. Why I care about hurting this woman’s feelings, this I don’t know.“

Bobby agreed one hundred percent then continued,

“Buddy….”

“I think about this shit,” Brian said, “you know here I am in this fucking disaster of a marriage. That’s me, that’s the life. I don’t have the guts to stop myself from living. But I could be living on a fucking houseboat in Arkansas with a seventeen-year-old wife allergic to bras with a thick accent and a cute lisp, fishing all day while she sells PCP at her high school. I could be a bachelor in Hawaii fucking lifeguards, and skin diving, and drinking beers with the locals, and going to dogfights. I could’ve been anyone. Why the fuck I chose to be this person I’ll never know.”

“ I hear you buddy, I do. Could you just shut up for a sec and grab two more beers from the fridge.”

“Sorry, it’s been a while since I’ve been able to talk to anyone about anything real.”

Once Brian was up and walking towards the kitchen Bobby shot him in the back of the head. A disc of skull spun into a framed photo and broke the glass. He dropped like a bag of hammers and Bobby heard his arm snap from landing under his own weight. Watching the blood pool around Brians’s head, Bobby thought that people likely don’t know this happens. Typically when you fall you prepare yourself, move your limbs or protect your face. Without that awareness sometimes bones break under you. So much can happen in the brief transition from standing up alive to falling down dead.

After the shot he heard Lorna let out a squeal upstairs. Bobby dropped his cigarette butt and beer bottle into a crockpot in the kitchen and set it to boil. Ordinarily he’d be transporting the stereo and whatever else he’d stolen outside but wanted to go say goodbye to Gloria first. He put his mask back on, lazily smashing and ransacking whatever was in reach as he approached the bedroom, where he found her surrounded by broken flatware. She was trembling and moaning, it was repugnant. He knew if he pulled the sock out of her mouth she’d give him the same spiel about cutting him in on the money. He wanted to leave her with some permanent reminder of their encounter. It wasn’t anything he’d done before, which would have the positive effect of confusing the police. Her eyes were pleading the way all eyes plead when they think they’re about to lose their ability to blink. Standing over her he pointed his gun in her face. She pissed herself, which is normal. Adjusting his hand, he pulled the trigger so the gun went off directly next to her left ear, the bullet exploding a pillow on the bed creating a bloom of feathers. She’d never hear out of that ear again which satisfied him as a gesture to Brian, who she’d so shamelessly offered up to slaughter.

(I’ll use the B and G thing again but we can change this. Also, does this mean that Chapter 3 now has to follow the narrative of this Chapter 7 and become Chapter 8? Do what you want I guess, I’m sorta lost but this is normal.)

For more from Brad Phillips, follow @brad___phillips on Instagram. Click here to read Chapter 7

Chapter 7: An Outline of Chapters 1-6

July 16, 2020

text by Gideon Jacobs (and Brad Phillips)

Chapter 1

I’ll write the first chapter, but please know that I am very wary of being someone who takes charge of group projects, someone who breaks the silence after the teacher asks for a volunteer to captain the science olympiad team with an earnest “I’ll do it,” or even worse, an “I’ll do it” of feigned reluctance. I was never that guy in school. No way I wanted to do that much work. But I also didn’t want to be associated with any projects that I considered poorly executed, so unless my “I’ll do it” volunteer was smart, I tended to give so little effort that I could not, in any scholastic court of law, be considered a bonafide collaborator.

I assume you weren’t and aren’t a group leader either. Maybe that has something to do with why we get along OK. But our similarity in this regard, our relative non-assertiveness in group dynamics, leaves us in danger of playing a game of beta-male chicken in which we both insist on deferring the alpha position to the other. So, to save us from such a fate, I’ll bite the bullet, feign reluctance, and get us started.

I think it would be good to begin with a handful of vignettes of pretty straight narrative prose that seems freighted with meaning and significance. It doesn’t matter much if it’s actually freighted with anything at all. I guess that makes “seems” the key word here. I suggest this mode of writing because, in my opinion, this is what everyone wants pretty much all the time, to like art and not be totally sure why they like it. To be clear, I don’t mean this as a negative quality in a reader. I see it more as having something to do with our desire to feel stuff rather than know stuff, to sense that there’s more rather than having the “more.” It makes sense. We are a species that, at its core, doesn’t trust itself, and so, a desire to keep reading that can’t be explained is much more likely to succeed than one that can.

With this in mind, why don’t I make all these vignettes in the first chapter about pairs of characters whose names start with the same letters as ours: “B” and “G.” This will likely have readers assuming that I’m trying to say something about us, or authorship in general, or trying to send you a coded message, or all the above. The whole exercise will be nauseatingly self-referential, but nausea is only painful when moderate. Once nausea gets to a certain level of acuteness, one usually purges and feels better—it hurts more to bend than to break. Let’s get our audience puking right away.

Chapter 2

So, as you’ll be writing this chapter, feel free to do whatever you want and ignore this “outline” entirely if you so please. That said, I think this is where we really need to sell the exquisite corpse element of the project, to satisfy our readers' curiosity as to how this little experimental writing conceit of ours is going to work. It doesn’t have to be too complicated. Maybe it’s as simple as picking up a couple threads that I began in the first chapter and running in surprising directions with them. That’s the pleasure of the proper exquisite corpse game after all, to extrapolate incorrectly in ways that leave you with a Frankensteinian drawing in the end. Let’s give people the Frankenstein they want, the Frankenstein they deserve.

Also, maybe you should switch genres here. Like, if my first chapter is pretty straight literary fiction, you could take a hard left turn into Raymond Chandler territory, or even better, John Grisham land. Isn’t the book that you’re currently working on kind of a pseudo hardboiled novel? Or just vaguely pulpy? Am I misremembering? Either way, it seems that genre fiction is very hip right now, one of those things that is so inherently uncool that it’s cool now, so lowbrow, shameless, and unabashedly manipulative that the literati are beginning to fetishize it. I would be very pleased if you make chapter two something worthy of a lonely top shelf of the proverbial airport Hudson News.

Chapter 3

I’ve been wanting to write some sexy stuff, so maybe I’ll do that here. I’ll choose a character from chapter two and devise some scenario that gets them fucking and sucking. I really like writing about sex, not because I like sex more than the the average fucker and sucker but because, as discussed, I am easily distracted, easily bored, and sex seems to hold my attention.

For example, writing this little outline was starting to turn into a bit of a chore (and I’m not even halfway done!). After I quickly wrote the first paragraph, I purchased some socks on the internet, drifted away from my desk and took a nap. When I woke from the nap, I didn’t feel like finishing this outline, so I ate a snack. When I finished the snack, I still didn’t feel like going back to the page. Then I had the idea that we could write some sexy scenes into our project, and I drifted back to my desk. It was that cause-and-effective.

I’m not trying to say something hideously cliché about the allure and power of sex, not trying to make the kind of wink-and-elbow observation that bozo uncles of the world tend to back up by citing that ubiquitous yet totally nonexistent study that claimed men think about sex every seven seconds. But I am pointing out that sex, maybe better than anything in this world, can grab a wandering mind. That is, sex sells not because we’re all so goddamn horny, but because flesh is, in a way, always the shiniest surface in a room.

Chapter 4

This is where I imagine you pull back the curtain and start writing about us writing this serial novella. Sure, even our most forgiving critics might cry that, right here, in chapter four, is where things got a little too “postmodern” or too “meta,” but frankly, there was no way we were going to avoid talking about ourselves in this project.

Why is that? Well, I think we’re both a little self-oriented. Apologies if you don’t like that label. I know it doesn’t sound very nice. I’m not calling us narcissists, though. I just think, knowing you a little and knowing myself a lot, that we both suffer from distinct psychological issues that share the similar symptom of having our respective outward gazes constantly turning inward.

I’ll stop speaking for you now, and just say that my periodic bouts of crippling depression are what have made my brain my most urgent interest, my most compelling project, my most relevant subject. I am very preoccupied with how I think and feel. I am obsessed with my own experience of the world, not because I think my experience is significant or important, but because my capacity for mental anguish is a product of my thoughts and feelings, and my mental anguish is, by far, the most weighty force in my life.

Actually, now I’m rethinking my previous claim about flesh being so “shiny.” Pain is shiny. Pain is loud. Sure, it’s hard to do long division while your penis is in someone’s mouth. It’s impossible when there’s a knife in your thigh.

I’ve never had a knife in my thigh. I’ve actually never had a broken bone, never even needed stitches. (When people are aghast at these facts, I usually respond that I’m simply very graceful.) The point is, we both suffer from diagnosed mental maladies, and these maladies make us a little self-obsessed. So, in short, let’s do what we do best, and write about ourselves.

Chapter 5

We’re both pretty into suicide, huh? Maybe in this chapter I’ll introduce the idea that this whole project is actually wrapped up in some plan for some kind of murder-suicide performance piece. Maybe I’ll also reveal that we’ve been cheating this whole time, that I attempted to a rough outline of the project. Maybe I’ll even hint that the outline will be included in chapter seven.

Chapter 6:

As you can probably tell, this outline has started to feel like a chore again. I’m tired. I’m bored. I want to go eat three bosc pears in under two minutes.

Write about whatever you want in this chapter. We’ll figure it out.

For more from Gideon Jacobs, follow @GideonsByeBull on Instagram. Click here to read Chapter 6.

Chapter 6: Imposter Syndrome

June 15, 2020

text by Brad Phillips (and Gideon Jacobs)

Dear Ms. Jacobs,

If you’re reading this letter it means your son is dead, along with a much older man named Brad Phillips he was working with on some obscure writing project - a project which I think tested their endurance for suffering, a test they seemed to have failed. Typically, when you receive a letter like this, it will say, ‘If you’re reading this I AM dead,” and comes from a loved one in the form of a suicide note, or it comes from a friend or family member who is being stalked by the American Intelligence Apparatus (see Danny Casolaro). I wish for your sake your son had it together enough to write an ‘If you’re reading this’ (Dear John becomes Dear Mom) letter himself, but please try not to judge him too harshly — only now am I beginning to understand the amount of pressure he and his friend Mr. Phillips were under to — as they described it somewhat pretentiously — ‘revolutionize contemporary literature’. Attached is a letter Mr. Phillips wrote to your son Gideon. Perhaps more letters will be unearthed. I wish you the very best and am sorry for your loss.

-Detective Leslie Morris

[Letter postmarked 01/15/20]

Dear Gideon,

Hey buddy. The bit about Ellen Page and Juno really fucking made me laugh. The hamburger phone, Bradley Pepperino etc. You really nailed that perfectly. I resent that I paid to watch that film in the theater where strangely, I don’t regret paying to watch The Blair Witch Project. I don’t know why I am connecting the two. I dated (married) a woman once and broke up with her in large part because she called sandwiches ‘sammies.’ Ellen Page is Canadian. Cristine is always, as are most Americans, surprised at how many celebrities in Hollywood are Canadian. But save Phil Hartman and Alex Trebeck (RIP x2), they’re almost always an embarrassment - Ryan Gosling, Justin Bieber, Rachel McAdams, Celine Dion, Harold Ramis - it’s endless. Sometimes I still get very upset at Phil Hartman’s wife for murdering him but who can I take that anger out on? I think William Shatner might be Canadian and many people believe he killed his wife, who ostensibly drowned.

Knausgaard. To use the argot of your people, oy vey. I tried it, I couldn’t get past the seventeenth page of him detailing how his father both bought him a guitar and showed him how to use it. (by the way I’ve never been anywhere more terrible than Norway - they push reindeer meat on you like crack dealers push sweet crack rock). In my head I thought this - Fuck you, you had a dad. And this - Fuck you, you had a dad who gave you presents. I think of the writers I truly admire, and I don’t want to out myself as a cliché male reader (I love Octavia Butler!) but, Nabokov, Houllebecq, Martin Amis — I think the most I can recall of any of them describing characters sounded like...I’ll try to break it down by writer, and remember as is often the case with me, I might be totally wrong or misremembering. Nabokov would say, “He had a limp and a cane he used with more labour than was truly necessary so that it appeared to be an accessory, an eccentric flourish, not a functional and needed item (I’m not quoting here, I’m impersonating). No his hair was brown his eyes were blank he was tall he was short - just a limp and a cane and you filled in the blanks. Houellebecq would be more like, “I’m pathetic and I like little girls. I’m damp and ugly and painfully aware of it. I feel as if I emit a strange odour that keeps people at bay, and know that my penis is unusually small and that my flabby stomach is too developed for a man my age. In short, I know I am a disgusting man, yet nonetheless, for reasons unknown to me, I’m able to maintain the attention of the occasional beautiful woman. Life is a mystery in this way, and the only mystery in this world that holds my attention is what draws a woman to accept the presence of my penis in her mouth or vagina.” With Amis, and it’s been a while, it would be more along the lines of, “He was rich and he was fat and he was terribly South London.”

I think everyone is supposed to like Proust for the same reason people like Knausgaard, and they valorize Proust almost obscenely yet I’ve never read him, and I can’t say I honestly know anyone who’s read Remembrances of Things Past but you always see it on people’s bookshelves (maybe yours buddy). Most people think they can get away with saying oh yeah Proust and that Madeleine Cookie (sp) at a cocktail party or something, and that seems as if they’ve read him. Nobody reads him. Nobody reads Chaucer, and nobody likes light operettas except maybe psychopaths, or people obsessed with hot air balloon culture.

I was relieved once, and I don’t remember the quote, reading an interview with Stanley Kubrick where he said something like the most tedious and unnecessary part of making a film is the DESCRIBING of places and people and things. EXPOSITION. I felt better when I read that, because I agree, and because I like Kubrick, but not in that fanboy way, and I don’t think they’re are all great and that in reality that space one is total garbage, and Barry Lyndon while being good is still not fantastic and if I’m going to watch a film over two hours I’d prefer it be a Bryan Singer X-Men one to be totally honest.

Who knows if either of us can write. Sometimes as with art I think I’m good at ‘performing writing’, but this is also known as Imposter Syndrome and many artists suffer from it. Cristine will tell me I made or wrote something good, and I’ll immediately tell her she’s biased, or that I just — this I actually say often, “My paintings, it’s just a bunch of tricks. I don't actually know how to paint.” — anyway we’re trying our best and this is what matters, if you believe that trying matters. Sometimes I say, “Trying is Lying, or Deleting is Cheating” and it sounds like it means something but in the end I don’t believe it does. This is possibly true of all the work I do. But you Gideon write essays and criticism for magazines and they’re full of information which people can use to make decisions so your writing is inherently more valuable in an objective sense. I’m not putting myself down here, just being honest. I tell Cristine that too, I say, “Look babe, you’re a better artist than me, it doesn’t mean I’m being self-loathing or not saying I have talent, it just means I’m saying you have more talent, and that doesn’t bother me or make me feel bad, it makes me admire you.”

We do both know how to do one thing, ramble. Or maybe it’s just me, I can take that on. Do you like the expression ‘dark passenger’? Like, “his gambling addiction was his dark passenger”...

I remember meeting you. I would describe you this way were I writing about it in a book — Gideon seemed trustworthy and robust, and you got the sense that if your kid was trapped under a car, he’d be the guy you could rely on to pick the car up with his bare hands. He tucked his t-shirts in, which I liked, and often wore this same mustardy coloured one, which worked well for him. He had a nice voice that was calming while being inquisitory and when he asked you questions, for the most part you felt he really was interested in hearing the answers. He bought me a mattress, and he prized tidiness, but not in a way that was anal or you felt like he’d yell at you if you didn’t use a coaster, although probably he’d secretly hate it that you didn’t, but was polite enough not to express it. This made me wonder though, maybe Gideon secretly hates me or my work, or my presence, but is just so polite he won't say so, and then I’ll remember your parents or that one is/was a shrink, and become paranoid that you have tricks to make me feel safe, while in fact i’m unsafe and hated. The tenses are wrong here but you get the idea, and that’s just how I feel today, not always, but you can see, besides the shirt and the robustness, no eye colour, or height, or style, or whatever. And that’s a true and full picture of you.

But to get to the point, yes we must cheat. I like cheating. I like Clifford Irving’s fake biography of Howard Hughes and Elmyr De Horys (sp) forgeries. I like con-artistry more than I like sculpture. We don’t, please don’t be offended, we don’t I THINK have what it takes to do this as we (you) proposed. I thought about it, then became super overwhelmed and watched True Detective Season 1 again. So yeah. Summer and Oliver at Autre are super nice, and I mean so fucking nice it makes you wonder, like how can they be so nice (maybe they’re Scandinavian)....but I think they’d understand, and also maybe because they’re smart, not even care. It’s like a wall label in art, and this is how my perspective is the right one — if you read the label about this work we’re doing, you’d know or become suspect that something was up. But if you just read it, you’d enjoy it for what it is and not leave worried that someone sorta picked your pocket intellectually.

So send an outline. I have some ideas too, but I’d prefer to defer to yours because lately I’m not so sure of my instincts (outside the bedroom lol)....Not in the bedroom either….

When I lived in British Columbia there was a very famous mystery about the half century old corpses of two teenagers found deep in the woods in northern BC whose skeletons were holding hands and there was an old rusty .22 rifle next to them. Maybe we can be like that. Although, it does bring up certain issues related to Kurt Cobain, because unless one of those romantic kids could manage to pull the trigger with their foot, how the fuck did they shoot themselves in the head with a long rifle?

Mother’s Day is coming (it’s always coming, Xmas is ALWAYS around the corner), so Happy Mother’s Day to your mom. And whatever you’re doing today, I hope you’re enjoying it. I knew I could trust you from the moment I spoke to you, so I trust you still now, over what, a year later?

There’s a newish movie I watched called Burning by Lee Chang-dong I think you’d really like.

Yours,

Brad

For more from Brad Phillips, follow @brad___phillips on Instagram. Click here to read Chapter 7.

Chapter 5: Cheaters

May 15, 2020

text by Gideon Jacobs (and Brad Phillips)

Dear Ms. Jacobs,

Below, see a transcription of one of many handwritten letters Gideon sent Brad in the days leading up to what the two writers were flippantly referring to as their “groundbreaking innovation for the murder-suey industry.” It seems they weren’t exactly following the rules of their exquisite-corpse serial novella, and were secretly corresponding behind their editors’ backs the whole time. I hope these words give you some insight into their mental states during this period, and that some insight affords you some solace.

-Detective Leslie Morris

P.S. For the record, we’re still figuring out who did the murdering and who did the suey-ing. It’s…complicated.

[Letter postmarked 01/01/20]

Bradley,

I hate that I sometimes call you Bradley. It’s what Ellen Page’s character in that movie Juno would call her best friend if her best friend was named Brad. She’d pick up her hamburger phone, dial your number, and do a quirky dance while waiting for you to pick up. You’d pick up, and say, “Hello,” like a normal person, and she’d say, “Hello, this is Juno MacGuff’s assistant. May I please speak with Bradley Phillipino?” in a kind of faux formal voice. Then you’d have to decide whether to be a good sport and go along with the bit—“Hello, this is Bradley Phillipino’s assistant. Can you please put Ms. MacGuff on the line? Mr. Phillipino is a very busy man.”—or be a buzzkill.

I could go on with this scenario, and maybe go on so long that I accidentally write a very bad sequel to the movie, which, in spite of its Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, is already very bad, but I’ll shut up about Juno now, mostly because I know that you know exactly what I am getting at and, therefore, know exactly how much I hate myself for sometimes calling you Bradley, Bradley.

But Bradley, (how annoying is this?) the real reason I’m writing to you today is to talk about writing. (“Keep moving, nothing to see here, just a couple writers talking about their fucking CRAFT.”) In short, I don’t think I like it. That’s such a cliché, to hate writing, and if we’re gonna talk about that we might as well murder-suey now, before we even embark on our “exquisite corpse serial novella.” (Did you know George Eastman’s suicide note ended with the beautifully sincere question, “Why wait?) But I’m serious, Bradley. Cliché or not, I don’t like writing. Maybe it’s not that I don’t like writing—I definitely don’t though—but that I don’t like boring writing, and approximately 95% of all writing I encounter, both others and my own, bores me terribly. I start many books and finish few of them. I write every day but usually quit after an hour or so.

I am especially bored by all descriptive language. My favorite conversation we’ve ever had about writing was about how neither of us really cares about description. We agreed that we don’t really give a shit what stuff looks like unless it’s directly relevant to the story. Do you remember that conversation? Did I dream it? Just in case I did dream it, I’ll reiterate that while it seems like all good writers spend a lot of time painting a picture, setting the visual scene, my eyes tend to speed read straight through those chunks.

But I don’t know. Maybe we’re wrong. Maybe we’re weird. Maybe if we spent more time writing descriptively people would like our stuff more. Maybe I should start the “exquisite corpse serial novella” like this:

“I met Bradley on a very classically gross summer evening in New York City, the sort of night when the city stinks and everything is slightly muffled by the heat and humidity, as if the air’s moisture is rounding the edges of every sound, or maybe it’s not ‘as if’ that’s what’s happening but that’s what’s actually happening and I just don’t understand the physics of it. Bradley was tall and thin, so I guess that would mean lanky. But the word that comes to mind is sinewy, a build Jesus might have if Jesus had a pretty moderately used Crunch Gym membership. Bradley was also heavily tattooed and bearded, a look that, in artsy corners, allows him the flexibility to look like shit if he feels like looking like shit, or look good if he feels like looking good. I’m not sure how to explain that specific aesthetic phenomenon. I guess it is, in a way, also kind of Jesus-y, in that Jesus could easily blend in with the sick and poor, but, in a different context, could pass as the Son of God, the King of the Jews, The Light of the World.”

Etc, etc, etc. OK, I’m not saying that the paragraph above is good. Please don’t judge it. I wrote it very quickly to prove a point, the point being that, if I ever throw that kind of paragraph into a story I’m working on, it is probably out of some perceived literary obligation to do so. Maybe what I’m really getting at is that, when it comes to art, I just don’t really care about details. This is partially why Knausgard’s books sound like my worst nightmare. From what I understand, that guy spends like 50 pages describing what’s in his fridge. I like that as a concept, but I don’t need to actually read those 50 pages, as the concept, his insane and meticulous commitment to mundanity, is the art. I’d get more out of listening to a smart person tell me about his book for ten minutes than spending a summer struggling through Knauzy’s big ol’ struggle.

This actually reminds me of another conversation we once had about wall text at museums. Do you remember that conversation? I was interviewing you for that magazine. Or did I dream it again? Basically, we realized that although we are similar in some ways, we are very different in others, one of them being our policies around museum wall text. I read all wall text because I need an intellectual entrypoint in order to enjoy art, as thinking about it is half the fun. You don’t read wall text because you think it’s VISUAL art, and if you can’t LOOK at it and get something out of it, it’s probably very bad. Different strokes for different jokes.

Bradley, I think it’s time to cut to the chase of this letter. I can feel that we’re reaching that point, kind of like when you’re hanging out with someone and you realize you’re both ready to stop hanging out, or when you’re on a date and you realize it’s time to kiss. But we shouldn’t kiss, for the sake of our friendship, so I’ll cut to the chase instead: I am about to start writing the first chapter of our “exquisite corpse serial novella,” a phrase I continue to put quotes around because, although I came up with it, I hate it, and it’s good to mock what you hate, otherwise IT MOCKS YOU.

What I’m wondering is if it behooves us to, well, cheat, to make some kind of masterful grand plan for this project, to outline a story that is very epic and very good, and then execute it in a way that appears to be totally spontaneous. This would, of course, require us to keep the writing raw and unpolished, to throw in lots of deadend plot lines, having characters weave in and out of seemingly unrelated realities. We’d have to make efforts to keep up the exquisite corpse ruse.

Personally, I think this is the way to go. If you agree, my next letter will be a possible outline of the entire fucking thing. What do you think? If it it doesn’t work, if people start to realize that this improv show is, in fact, a well-reherased routine, who fucking cares. If the whole project is a dud, also who cares. We’re going to be sipping daiquiris with Yahweh and Lord Vishnu by the time the sticks and stones hit their targets.

Happy New Year, -Gideon

For more from Gideon Jacobs, follow @GideonsByeBull on Instagram. Click here to read Chapter 6: Imposter Syndrome.

Chapter 4: A Eulogy For Brad & Gideon

April 15, 2020

text by Brad Phillips (and Gideon Jacobs)

Here is a list. I’ve yet to meet a person who does not like a list. In fact, a person who does not like a list seems, to some extent, unhinged.

Bahrain & Germany

Barbados & Greenland

Guatemala & Bolivia

Georgia & Benin

Botswana & Greece

Bhutan & Guyana

Gabon & Burkina Faso

Gambia & Belgium

Brunei & Grenada

Bulgaria & Ghana

Guinea-Bissau & Brazil

Gabon & Burundi

Ten Minutes Later

Good & Bad

Beautiful & Grotesque

On discovering the text, the repeated use of names starting with G and B (obviously signifying Gideon & Brad) was seen as clever. Were they both still alive to read that adjective, ‘clever,’ one can only assume that Jacobs and Phillips would most likely feel hurt, as to many writers and artists, being called clever registers like a punch in the stomach — but only if the intellect is stored in the gastrointestinal system, where it most obviously is not. Writing allows these nonsensical connections. Nonsensical connections generated much of the text they wrote together. We must do our best to explore the elasticity of language and meaning! (a corny line seen in an early essay written by Phillips on the work of New York based photographer Daniel Arnold, who was a personal friend of Jacobs’). In reality, there’s nothing particularly bad (and on further examining the text, it can be seen that the two writers hint at Buddhist ideas of good and bad, right and wrong, being nothing more than constructs; constructs that have no moral or critical purpose or value. Two white guys talking obliquely about Buddhism — I’m certain were they given the opportunity to reflect, both would agree the writing could’ve been more successful without those esoteric tangents about being clever. Clever is fine, so long as it functions as an ornamental flourish attached to words like: genius, insightful, intellectual, transcendent, prescient, and brilliant.

In the world of coding, gaming, no one faults the most gifted game designer for throwing in a few ‘easter eggs.’ Clever is a signature, and its manifestations can be seen as simple gifts, offerings — generous and kindhearted acknowledgements of the game players commitment to the game.

Spot the B in Barack (chapter 3) — Gideon is tipping his hat to Brad, as well as thanking the reader. Spot the G in Gordon (chapter 2) — Brad is tipping his hat to Gideon, as well as thanking the reader.

These two writers, talented or as untalented as time will judge them to be, were, if nothing else, grateful for having been read. They sought to please their readers while also challenging themselves to produce quality literature. This seems like a kind and pleasant thing to do, but god knows that considering the audience is often viewed as tantamount to blatant pandering. Were she still alive, Michiko Kakutani might’ve focused on this desire to be kind and pleasant to the reader as a means to eviscerate the entire project; to label Jacobs and Phillips as hacks. Of the two, one might’ve been able to endure such an assault. Having known them both to some extent, I can attest to the fact that Burundi, as opposed to Guatemala, would most likely perish from the insult. Within any type of couple (including a couple of writers), as much as people don't like to admit it, there is always a weaker member of the team. Phillips being much older than Jacobs and far less robust, Jacobs being much more fit, both physically and mentally — I feel safe in assuming that Phillips wouldn’t have been able to weather the blow, whereas Jacobs, full of the buoyancy of youth, would’ve found a way to soldier on.

Ms. Kakutani. You remain forever the prettiest girl in high school. We want you to notice us, even take us up on our offer to carry your books, but the likelihood of your rejection is so terrifying that few are able to muster the courage and make the gesture.

In early February of 2020, Brad and his wife Cristine spent a week in Gideon’s spare room, Gideon having offered it out of kindness, as Cristine had an art exhibition open on Henry Street, and Brad (along with Gideon) were part of a reading at Honey’s Brew Pub just blocks from Gideon’s home in Ridgewood. They wouldn’t have been able to spend a week in New York without Gideon’s generosity. Brad and Cristine were able to have dinner with Verne Dawson and his wife Laura, and the next day visit some galleries uptown with Verne.

Verne had long been Brad’s favourite painter, and he’d recently published an essay on Verne’s work for Autre Magazine. Brad ‘looked up’ to Verne, but not really, but also — sort of he did. He and Cristine enjoyed hanging out with older people, and while Brad was past the age at which one is susceptible to starstruckedness, he did feel a not insignificant sense of frisson being near someone—being listened to and fed by someone—who he’d admired so much two decades before. Verne had also finished Brad’s portrait, which he’d begun in October. Brad liked the painting. Verne said that he thought Brad looked like Saint Jerome in it, and Brad nodded and smiled and agreed, with no idea whatsoever of what Saint Jerome looked like. Later he asked Cristine if it were even possible for there to be an agreement about what a saint might look like, seeing as they all existed before photography. Cristine’s reply on the train back to Queens was,

“Let’s thumb fight.”

For more from Brad Phillips, follow @brad___phillips on Instagram. Click here to read Chapter 5: Cheaters.

Chapter 3: Luridly Liminal / Liminally Lurid by Gideon Jacobs (and Brad Phillips)

March 16, 2020

text by Gideon Jacobs (and Brad Phillips)

There are basically three ways to acquire a nickname.

The first way requires patience. You have to just go about your business and wait for the pack member most likely to be a nicknamer—usually a jokester, a talker, someone inclined to build intimacy via power plays disguised as teasing—to come up with your nickname. For example, say you work in an office building and the lobby floors of your office building have just been mopped, and while running to catch an elevator, you slip but regain your balance, narrowly avoiding a banana-peel pratfall. When you enter the elevator, the nicknamer says something like, “Close call there, Slippy,” in front of a handful of your colleagues. They laugh. Now you’re Slippy. After this, you will gradually lose your office identity as John. Your colleagues will think it’s funny that most new hires don’t even know your real name. Every so often, you will be asked to explain the origin story of Slippy, and you’ll have to tell the origin story, or lie and say you don’t remember it.

The second way to acquire a nickname requires planning. It’s similar to the first way, except in this case, you have at least some chance of choosing your nickname. For example, if you would like to be called “Ham,” you can increase the chances of that happening by packing a ham sandwich for lunch every day, and when people ask what you’re eating, don’t reply, “A ham sandwich,” but instead just say, “Ham,” with a mouthful of half-chewed ham. This would still leave a lot up to chance, though. If you’re really set on a nickname, it’s best to manufacture some overlapping meanings. To increase the likelihood of acquiring a nickname like Ham, you could make a habit of telling funny, theatrical, and embellished stories, as this might prompt one of your colleagues to say, “John, you’re such a ham,” in front of the nicknamer, who then will probably put the pieces together—John is a ham who loves ham. After that, the nicknamer will do what he does best.

The third way to acquire a nickname requires persistence. Most people think you can’t give yourself a nickname. The conventional wisdom is that nicknames only stick if they are arrived at organically and assigned by others, but the conventional wisdom doesn’t account for a pathological kind of obstinance and a socially inappropriate level of compulsiveness. That is, you can be sure to always introduce yourself as your nickname, and if anyone asks you what your real name is, you just matter-of-factly say your nickname again. And if anyone calls you by your real name, you kindly but firmly correct them. And if anyone calls you by your real name even after you’ve kindly but firmly corrected them, you make it clear there are repercussions for doing so, that physical violence is a strong possibility. Essentially, you just function like good totalitarian governments do, bludgeoning the old narrative out of existence with consistent and relentless messaging of a new narrative, and of course, literally bludgeoning anyone who won’t allow the old narrative to expire.

This third way of acquiring a nickname is how I acquired the nickname Liminal Phil. I chose Liminal Phil because a few years ago I found out what the word liminal meant while using the internet in the computer room. According to Wikipedia, there are many complicated meanings of liminal, especially in anthropology, psychology, and religion. I really like all of these meanings, but I mostly like the more general concept of liminality when it refers to an in-between space. As far as I understand it, these sorts of spaces aren't really spaces at all because they have no definition, no spatial identity. They exist somewhere that doesn’t officially exist, in the theoretical split second when you have left one zone but have yet to enter the next one. This ontological—another word I recently learned in the computer room—paradox raises a lot of questions: Where are you when you’re neither here nor there? Do you disappear when in a liminal space? If so, where have you disappeared to? What realm are you in?

It was when I first finished reading the Wikipedia page about liminality on some quiet weeknight a few years ago that I started believing in God a little bit. I hate believing in God. Believing in God is very dumb and very embarrassing. But that Wikipedia page got me thinking about how all the really wise people in history lived in liminal states. I hate to use Jesus as an example because using Jesus as an example is also very dumb and very embarassing, but the miracle of that guy was that he lived in between the earthly world and the divine one. He was simultaneously walking amongst us mortals and walking amongst the divine. He was, as they say, both man and God.

So, in one of my more dramatic moments, I decided, right then and there, that I too was going to be both man and God, flesh and spirit, a two-passport-carrying dual-citizen of this world and the next. I didn’t want to join the clergy though. I like to fuck too much for that. So, I started meditating every morning, reading the bible every night, and began the process of acquiring the nickname, or maybe more appropriately, rebaptizing myself, Liminal Phil. My name is John though, but I knew that if I kept any remnants of my old identity the new one had no chance of sticking.

Here’s another “intellectual” porn—this one rejected by Luridmax—for you to masturbate to or, depending on your sexual proclivities, just read and wonder, “What kind of person masturbates to this?”

Gary was interviewing a young man named Barack for a job as an accountant at his crumbling creative agency. This was an interview he would normally have conducted with his best friend/founding partner, but a few months ago, his best friend/founding partner was coked up enough during a morning meeting to believe that she could surreptitiously blow a bump of coke in a morning meeting. When Gary confronted her about the incident, she said, “I’ve just been under a lot of pressure lately,” an explanation so cliché and pathetic that Gary saw it as a greater transgression than the incident itself, so he offered to buy her out of the agency right then and there. They made a handshake deal, and now Gary was stuck interviewing Barack alone, while his best friend/founding partner spent her days meditating and surfing.

Barack was just out of college, and had a lanky build, slumped shoulders, and a manipulatively soft, eager-to-please smile that made Gary certain that he was both hyper intelligent and sexually deviant. For the first few minutes of the interview, Gary did his best to euphemistically explain that the agency was in trouble, that their books were a mess, that he needed an accounting whiz for the price of a summer intern. Then, when he started to properly interview Barack, as in, ask questions for Barack to answer, he began to see flashes of the young man climbing underneath the desk and slowly licking his dick from base to tip, base to tip, base to tip. These flashes didn’t feel like fantasy, though. They sat in Gary’s mind’s eye in a different way. They were more vivid, less malleable, as if he had stumbled across them rather than authored them. Gary wondered if the visions of mid-interview felatio weren’t fantasy, but prophecy.

Gary tried focusing, tried to come up with good questions—“What’s it like to share a name with the most popular president in recent memory?”—but the image of Barack’s tongue sliding down the length of his dick was simply too loud to be competed with. So, he just sat in front of Barack, folding and unfolding his resume, biting his lip and shifting in his chair. There was an inappropriately long silence. Barack was concerned and confused.

Then Barack saw it: wedged between the fabric of Gary’s pants and his left thigh was an above-average sized, objectively handsome-looking hard dick. Barack stared at Gary’s erection, and Gary stared at Barack staring at his erection. Gary held his breath, squirming, waiting for Barack to raise his gaze so he could exhale, but Barack kept his eyes trained on the dick, not just because he was enjoying looking at it, but because he enjoyed making the man squirm.

In these few seconds, the power dynamic of the room shifted so drastically, it was as if there had been a change in some basic law of physics. Barack, who was previously on the edge of his seat, trying to look attentive, now leaned back in his chair. Gary, a heavy man who took up a lot of space, now seemed blimpish, still taking up a lot of space, but possibly vulnerable to a stiff wind. Any nerves Barack had felt going into the interview were gone. He felt utterly in control. He could take a shit on the floor and the job might still be his.

But Barack didn’t really want the job. It would clearly be six horrible months of overwork and underpay. So, still staring at the dick, thinking he might be able to see it visibly pulse if he looked closely enough, he began to do a few simple calculations in his head: What was the probability that someone would walk into this room in the next ten minutes? Maybe 20%. What was the probability that this balding, middle-aged man would accept a blow job from him right now? Maybe 50%. What was the probability that he would regret giving this man a blowjob right now? Maybe 80%. What was the probability that, regardless of the results of all these calculations, he was going to climb under this desk and begin licking this man’s dick, base to tip, base to tip, base to tip? Maybe 100%.

For more from Gideon Jacobs, follow @GideonsByeBull on Instagram. Click here to read Chapter 4: A Eulogy For Brad & Gideon.

Chapter 2: Guillermo's Funeral By Brad Phillips (and Gideon Jacobs)

February 17, 2020

text by Brad Phillips (and Gideon Jacobs)

It could reasonably be posited that Bernardo’s statement at Guillermo’s funeral; “It’s true, there was no suicide....has anyone seen a body?” was in fact a true statement.

This is why Guillermo, as is the case with many people who like keeping their families on their toes, had made it clear in his Last will & testament that he would not abide an open-casket funeral. Just those seven words alone — ‘would not abide an open-casket funeral’ — implies that the putative dead person could object in the middle of the ceremony, raising themselves by sheer force of ab muscles, to demand that their casket be shut. Obviously, to be able to shout out from your casket that you’d prefer the lid closed would indicate that death had not entirely ‘taken.’ Open-casket funerals, whether by choice of the dead or their families, are ideal for those who’ve bought into the notion of that one, most problematic idea of the late, Oprah-influenced 20th century: the idea of closure.

Closure in relation to a casket is linguistically accurate. Closure in relation to the dead is psychologically silly.

Consider the expression often heard at funerals: “The dead live on in our memories; in our minds.” How truly frightening is this idea, and how much terror must it strike into the minds of grandchildren, now wary to experiment with masturbation should dead Uncle Dwayne or Aunt Cathy be watching from that place where they now reside; the mind of a horny child?

Guillermo had only ever given two pieces of advice to his two sons in their times spent in the dynamic. Bernardo had always thought his dad was ‘joking around.’

1. If you must drive drunk, eat a large spoonful of peanut butter before getting in the car, as this complicates the standard breathalyzer test.

2. If you cannot beat the breathalyzer test (or for any other reason are in the company of police officers) and are subject to a lie detector test, do not despair, you can beat that as well. It’s as simple as this: no matter what the question (the one you’re meant to be honest about—your name. The one you’re meant to lie about—did you mutilate the corpse), once that query is nearing its end and your answer is meant to begin, clench your asshole like you’re trying not to shit your pants on prom night. When we focus all of our attention on that one, tight sphincter muscle (the one most associated with shame and to some extent, relaxation and satisfaction), all systems regulate to assist in maintaining its closed status. You may appear to be sweating, you may have an elevated heart rate—you may show any of the signs that interest an expert polygraphist. Unless they’ve been trained by the Central Intelligence Agency, they will not be able to differentiate between the markers exhibited by liars, and the markers of someone who just happens to have high blood pressure and hyperhidrosis. “What is key,” he told his sons, “and this part is fucking important, is that no matter what, don’t think about the lie you’re keeping, don’t think about the fact that if you blow it you might end up doing a nickel in Ossining. You need to believe, as you’re strapped to that machine, that you are in fact on the verge of shitting yourself. And you need to remember that, like any reasonable individual, be they a murderer or a cashier at Homesense, nobody, nobody, wants to shit their pants in mixed company. You are only one thing while seated in that chair, wires hooked up to god knows where. You are a man with an intense, overwhelming need to eliminate his bowels in an environment where it would be extremely embarrassing to do so.”

I’d been writing this sort of ‘intellectual’ porn (which really, I can’t imagine working for anyone); stories about people like Gordon and Ben, massive insertions, strange insertions, illegal insertions, pay-to-play, hotel takeovers, huge wads on hairy backs (for which I received a small bit of payola from Semenax) for years. I can’t say I particularly enjoyed it. It started when I was in prison, because I was really unhappy with the way I was being sexually assaulted, and found that, similar to prison lawyers or elegantly literate men who could write love letters to women consigned to wait at home for their lovers to be released, I had a talent; a talent that would and did forestall a prolapsed rectum courtesy of Hank, Timmy, Big Timmy, Chinese Dwight, The Accountant, Liminal Phil, and Butch 3.

The series on Gordon and Ben, I actually had smuggled out by a friend and it ended up being published by Luridmax, an obscure French erotica publisher who focused mostly on golden shower and macrophilia narratives.

They are now out of business.

My brother Bernardo was right when he spoke of our father’s mercurial nature, the fact that he may have faked his own death—this was not out of the realm of possibility for Guillermo, but nonetheless, I am now the only living person who can both attest to the fixity of his death, as well as the manner of its deliverance.

Dad had easily convinced Bernardo that he was an ‘academic’ working on a thesis. There are two reasons this was done so easily. One is that my brother is a dipshit, an asshat and a moron. The other is that Bernardo could not and never was able to accept the the truth of what our father was: a criminal. He didn’t play violent video games as research for a thesis, he played them because he was a violent man who liked to play violent games.

I inherited this from my father, which is why I was the sole beneficiary of his will, the same will Bernardo and my sister are still battling over in a probate court somewhere, while I live off the full inheritance in Tenerife. My father taught me much more than my brother or sister about how to live in this world (I’m sure Bernardo has used the peanut butter and lie detector test advice dad gave us to amuse people at obnoxious academic parties for years). My dad taught me how to break the law and not get caught. Here are some things I was told, having become the favorite child early on when dad caught me stuffing a Snickers in my diaper at sixteen months:

1. Your best friends are leather gloves.

2. Three things to eliminate in a jam: teeth, hands and feet. DNA is popular, but it takes a while. Head in one bag, torso in another, arms and legs in a third, hands and teeth down a sewer grate. Dump the bag head in a residential garbage can thirty miles from where you dump the torso bag, and thirty miles from where you dump the arms and legs. Ideally, dump each bag in a different state. This causes the police to engage in typical jurisdictional squabbling and creates legitimate technical problems, which can give you an astonishing head start.

3. When choosing a new identity from the grave of a dead toddler in a cemetery, pick a common name. John Smith, Alan Phillips etc. Whatever you do, do NOT pick an antiquated sounding name — no Forbes Pennyworth DeQuincy, those sort of names draw attention no matter what.

4. Whenever possible, marry the new wife in international waters. She’ll think it’s romantic, what she won’t know is that it’s not legally binding. That way, should your bigamy ever come to light, you won’t be charged. You’ll just look like an asshole.

5. Always look like an asshole.

I loved my father Guillermo DeTorquido San Felipe (né George Lazard). One thing I loved more than George though, was and is money. I was taught about this love by my father, so I know that in the end, while he might not have been ready to die, he would have respected my move. This is what’s most important to me. That while I’m certain he would have preferred to keep living, I put an end to it in a way I know he’d genuinely respect.

Bernardo with his PhD in Ancient Music. Sophia with her moronic dentist husband Lyell who’d say sorry if you hit his car. Spineless, weak people. Not me. Never me.

“You may be a piece of shit, Carlo. You may be a shiftless predatory fuck, but you’re my son, and for fuck sake, you make me a helluva lot more proud than your brother and sister, living their lives inside the lines. Honestly if I didn’t have warrants out at the time, I would’ve stuck em’ both in a sleeping bag full of rocks and thrown them in the river.”

Words like these from a parent, they feel real good.

It happened like this.

My dad had just finished a three-year bit. Bernardo and Sophia thought he’d been living in Tucson, running a ‘workshop’ on some type of bullshit.

I was looking at eleven more months of a six-year sentence for felony battery. Dad had been the only one who visited me (or the only one I allowed to visit) during that time. It was on one of his last visits that he told me he’d cut my siblings out of the will, because, as he put it rather succinctly, “Fuck em.”

By the time I made it back to my cell, I had the entire thing planned perfectly. I almost wanted to call my dad and tell him, but….

My cellmate, John Allan Richards, had terminal lung cancer, was facing compassionate early release after serving almost twenty years for bank robbery. We’d developed a good, quasi-paternal relationship over our time together. Once I learned about the will, I told John that, since he’d be getting out, and since he wouldn’t have much time left out there, I had a story to tell him. I wasn’t asking per se, but I knew that since his doctors had told him he should already be dead, that old-fashioned prison ethics would steer him in the direction I needed.

Look John, I never wanted to bring it up — it’s too hard, this sort of language. I told him how my father Guillermo had molested my sister Sophia from when she was five to thirteen. John had three daughters. It would strike him where I needed him struck. “Jesus fucking Christ, Carl. This is no good. No, this is just no good. And he’s out there still?”

I told him he was.

“I sort of suspected John,” I told him. “Sophia was always sick, always sad, had no friends, acted too clingy when I brought male friends home. I knew my dad, I knew he was a sick fuck, there wasn’t anything I’d put past him. But it wasn’t until I was sixteen, going through his VHS collection looking for porn that I found the tape. It was the only one with a handwritten label.”

“What’d it say?” he asked, looking already like he wanted to reach through the prison, send his arm through the streets of Philadelphia and rip my dad’s throat out.

“It said ‘Little Blondes’...”

“For fuck sake!” he cut me off.

“I know, I know. I put the tape in. Well, there she was John, Sophia. I turned it off right away. I knew there’d be other blondes. I mean, fuck sake, she was mostly a redhead.”

“Alright, Carl. I want to help you with this. Cause this…I can’t abide this.”

It’s not just a myth of film and television that pedophiles are considered to be subhuman scum in prison. Just as in the real world, they’re seen as such. Everything came into motion so easily. He actually coaxed the information out of me, which was beautiful. I told him where my father lived and where my father drank, because I knew those things. He was still sending me letters, often just written on coasters from the bar. John’s date was coming up soon. The cancer had spread to his brain, he was starting to forget things and would wake up with subdural hematomas that looked like mandarin oranges. I think I’m making my point.

Carl was released on June 15th, 2009. We had a party for him, Vino brought an empty Tide container of his best pruno. At the end, when he was leaving the cell, Carl took my head in his hands and looked me in the eyes.

“I got this, John. Fuck this bullshit. I can’t abide it. I just cannot abide it. Plus, it’s likely bullshit, but maybe if I can do one good thing in this life, make some stab at redemption or whatever, God might not shit on me so heavily.”

I told Carl I loved him. I did love him. Then I slipped him the piece of paper with my father’s address on it.

July 3rd, it was in the news, which is how I heard about it first. It took Bernardo a few days to call and tell me, probably ‘cause he was playing the ocarina or some bullshit at a recital in Sonoma or Marfa.

Guillermo DeTorquido San Felipe, aged 69, was leaving the bar he drank at regularly to walk to his home three blocks away. In the neighborhood, most people avoided San Felipe. They heard he’d done some shit, and he never smiled. But, if you had a flat, he was gonna fix it for you. As he approached his home, John Allan Richards, notorious for a bank robbing spree that stretched from Abilene to Austin and released from prison weeks before on compassionate grounds, approached San Felipe in the middle of the street, brandishing a handgun and visibly limping. He was heard to shout, “Hey, short eyes!” immediately before pressing his revolver against San Felipe’s head and pulling the trigger. San Felipe died instantly. Richards did not run or hide his gun. Instead he sat on the curb next to the body. When the police came he was taken to central booking. There was no clear motive for the slaying, and police were perplexed as to why a man who’d just been released after serving two decades in the penitentiary would execute what appeared to be a stranger, resulting in his return to the penitentiary.

For three days, police questioned Richards. They pressed for his motives, enquired as to his relationship to the victim—these sort of police questions. Richards would only say one thing: “He had it coming.” Police were at a loss to understand. San Felipe had served his time in prison, mostly for wire fraud or the occasional aggravated assault. There was nothing that would explain a revenge-motivated execution in the middle of the street.

On his fourth day of interrogation, Richards asked Detective Leslie Morris to get him a Sprite. He said his mouth was dry from “talking to you fucking goofs for so long.”

When Detective Morris returned to interview room eight, Richards lay slumped on the floor, dead. An autopsy later revealed him to be stuffed with tumors, and his personal physician later stated his surprise that Richards was still living.

The will went through probate quickly. I received very little in terms of liquid assets or investment products. I did, however, inherit an antique briefcase. Inside this briefcase was a small card — “It’s a boy!” The envelope held the key to a storage space. The day before the funeral, I rented a car and drove for an hour. Behind a bunch of lamps and stolen dishwashers I found a suitcase containing one and a half million dollars in small bills.

Once my lawyer informed Bernardo and Sophia’s lawyers that the will was incontestable, Sophia apparently expressed surprise that I was alive. I hadn’t seen them for over fifteen years.

At the internment, I stood mixed in with a group of mourners at a nearby funeral while Guillermo’s was happening. I watched Bernardo deliver his ‘clever’ speech, and Sophia her saccharine one. Once everyone was gone, I left a bouquet of tulips and a bottle of Wild Turkey on dad’s grave. I didn’t want anyone to see me. I’m sure nobody wanted to see me either.

Before I left for Tenerife, I paid for John Allan Richards’ tombstone. He had no family, and no money, and would’ve been buried in a potter’s field. He’d done me a great service, and really, John had never done anything worse than rob a bank. A thing that, really, all of us are entitled to try.

For more from Brad Phillips, follow @brad___phillips on Instagram. Click here to read Chapter 3: Luridly Liminal / Liminally Lurid.

Chapter 1: G and B By Gideon Jacobs (and Brad Phillips)

January 15, 2020

Over the next year, Brad Phillips and Gideon Jacobs are writing a 12-chapter "serial novella" for Autre. It will be written Exquisite Corpse style — they will alternate who writes each month's chapter, and won’t have access to the previous chapter until it has been published. Brad and Gideon have not discussed plot, structure, format, themes, characters, etc, and promise not to do so even once the project is underway. The idea is to react to each other's work, and hope the final Frankensteinian product is something that deserves to exist. If the authors like what they've made when it's done, the editors might publish it as a "zine." Installments will go up on the 15th of every month.

text by Gideon Jacobs (and Brad Phillips)

At Guillermo’s funeral, his son Bernardo said something like, “Hello everyone, and thank you for coming. As you all know, my father liked to keep the world on its toes, so I’ll honor him by formally announcing that he isn’t dead.”

The mourners laughed.

Bernardo then said something like, “I mean it. There was no suicide. Has anyone seen a body? I didn’t think so. My father is currently shopping for groceries to stock the fridge of his new condo situated on the beach of a tropical island nation.”

The mourners shifted in their seats.

Bernardo then said something like, “This funeral is another one of his projects. It is part of the thesis he spent decades beating like a dead horse and yet never actually articulated because he wanted to remain mysterious—his big idea that there is nothing funnier than a mismatch of perceived stakes. This is why, as a child, I would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and find him playing my most violent video game, giggling to himself as he committed heinous acts against the game’s innocent characters, bystanders just running errands or commuting to work. And it’s why you’re all gathered here today laying flowers on an empty grave.”

The mourners exchanged looks.

Bernardo then said something like, “In short, my father is alive and well, and apparently a bigger prankster than ever. Thank you for participating in his funeral, thank you for your time, and my sincerest apologies for his unique sense of humor.”

Bernardo returned to his seat. Guillermo’s sister walked to the podium and delivered a really beautiful and moving eulogy.

Gordon didn’t want to fuck Ben in person because Ben wasn’t that cute, but he thought sexting with Ben could be fun, especially if he was able to convince him to send him videos of his winking asshole, so he messaged Ben on the dating app they matched on, saying, I know it’s only 9PM but I’m in bed already and it feels VERY good. What are you up to?

Gordon played chess on his phone for a bit and was starting to fall asleep when Ben messaged back saying, I’m also in bed early like a grandpa and proud of it. Am watching bad TV. Gordon thought about ignoring the message, silencing his phone, and rolling over, but the small chance that this interaction might lead to him ejaculating soon was enough to make him rub the fatigue from his eyes and respond with, I think getting to know each other a bit would be more fun than bad TV, don’t you? Ben said, I agree.

The question now was how quickly could Gordon drive the conversation to sex. Would Ben be turned off if he didn’t warm things up with flirtatious banter? Or would he be refreshed and relieved by honesty and transparency, as he also didn’t think Gordon was cute enough to fuck in person, but also wanted to see some dick and butt before bed?

Gordon decided to cut to the chase but to do so in a way that made it clear he was aware he was cutting to the chase. OK, so forgive me if this is too sudden and out of left field, but I have to be up super early in the morning and I think you’re super cute. So, I propose a game: You tell me something I can send you right now—words, photo, video whatever—that would make for your ideal stranger-made masturbation material, and I’ll tell you what you could send me right now that would be my ideal stranger-made masturbation material. Then we’ll both take a sec to make each other our perfect customized little sexy gift, and then when we’re done, we’ll press send at the exact same time. What do you think???

A few minutes went by with no response from Ben. Gordon started to suspect he’d just offended an innocent, possibly prudish man. The thought of it made him feel sad, so he messaged, Shit, I’m sorry if that was not at all what your looking for one these apps. Please feel free to ignore that dumb idea if I offended you! Either way, hope to run into you sometime somehow somewhere. Sleep well :) Ben immediately responded, Sorry got distracted by the bad TV and didn’t see your message. But YES lol that’s a brilliant idea. Les do it.

Gordon felt more awake now. He sat up in bed and composed his request. OK, so I think it would be really really sexy if you placed your phone on the floor and stood over it, naked, spreading your ass cheeks slightly and flexing your pelvic muscles so that your asshole winks. I know that’s a bit of a specific ask, but I think it sounds hot and if you do that for like 30 seconds I’ll probably explode very quickly over here. I’d love to cum long and hard while seeing you do that for me...He considered how he would feel receiving this message. He also considered how he would feel if it was screenshotted and ended up on social media and everyone he knew saw him ask a stranger for this video. Then he pressed send.

Ben responded, I love it. OK, I want you to send me video of you putting a wine bottle in your ass. Gordon laughed out loud. He wrote, lol I’m not sure thats possible. Ben didn’t say anything. Gordon touched his asshole with his fingertips. He messaged, OK. I’ll...try...

He went to his kitchen to get a wine bottle. He emptied out what was left of a cheap red into the sink—less than a glass. He grabbed lube from his bedside drawer, and thoroughly lubed up his asshole. He lubed up the skinny end of the bottle. He propped his phone up onto his pillow, pressed record and laid back, lifting his hips to make his asshole visible to the camera.

It quickly became clear that he had far too tight a sphincter for the job, but he managed to get the bottle almost a quarter of the way inside himself, and he hoped his effort, paired with some theatrical moans, would make up for the incomplete task. He stopped the recording. He edited out the beginning few seconds, the part that showed him pressing record, leaning back and putting his hips in the air, and he edited out the last few seconds, the part that showed him removing the bottle and stopping the recording. He messaged Ben, I’m ready when you are. Send on the count of three?

Ben messaged back, One. Gordon messaged back, 2. Ben messaged back, Three. Gordon selected the video and pressed send. He sat waiting for Ben’s video to arrive, his dick hard with anticipation. He waited a minute, assuming he hadn’t received Ben’s video yet because Ben’s video was a big file, that Ben had gone above and beyond the call of duty and winked his asshole for more than thirty seconds.

After a few more minutes, Gordon started to feel impatient. Resend? yours didn’t go through. An error sign popped up saying the message couldn’t be delivered. Gordon closed the dating app, reopened it, retyped the message. Resend! Your video didn’t g through or something?! The error sign popped up again. Gordon closed the dating app, reopened it, and this time, when he tried to message Ben, Ben’s profile was gone from his list of matches. Ben had unmatched with him.

Gordon jumped out of his bed and opened Instagram. He searched users who had the word Ben in their Instagram handles and scrolled through hundreds of profiles, squinting his eyes to see if any of them were Ben. After a while, he started to feel tired again, so he wiped the leftover lube off his slightly sore asshole and started a new game of chess that he eventually forfeited because he fell asleep before either player achieved checkmate.

Guy was the name Bo gave his French alter-ego that came out sometimes when he was in a good mood, usually after meditating for twenty minutes, practicing gratitude for ten minutes, doing one hour of aerobic exercise, and eating a home-cooked, high-protein, low-carb meal.

When Brett was ten years old, his best friend Gregory started hanging out with other kids in their neighborhood because, deep down, they both knew that hanging out with each other didn’t count as hanging out at all, and Gregory had reached the point of his young adulthood when he wanted stuff to start counting.

Brett wasn’t offended or hurt by Gregory’s disloyalty. His leaving the bubble of their best-friendship felt natural and unavoidable. In the moments when Brett felt like confronting Gregory, he’d put on his sneakers and start the five-block walk to go knock on Gregory’s front door, but always end up turning around when the house came into view. Then, on the walk home, the left side of Brett’s head would ache a little, an ache that was the result of some inchoate part of his brain trying to come to a realization about inefficacy, about how you can’t change what is already in motion, and since everything is always in motion, you can’t change anything.

If Brett was just a few years older, this might have led him down an existential rabbit hole about free will, which might have led him to his first proper dalliance with suicidal ideation, followed by an involuntary slap to his own face that was equal parts self-harm and self-preservation. But, at this moment, Brett still had the prefrontal cortex of a child, and so, he just hummed the tune of a song that didn’t exist and kicked a stone down the street like some 1950s sitcom kid.

In late August, not long before school was due to start, Brett and Gregory hadn’t seen each other in two weeks, the longest they’d gone without contact since they were toddlers. Brett’s mother noticed Gregory’s recent absence from her house, so she called Gregory’s mother, who she tolerated more than liked, and asked if the woman’s son wanted to come over and play. Gregory’s mother said yes, Gregory would like to play, and that he’d be there in ten minutes.

An hour later, Gregory knocked on Brett’s door. Brett answered and saw that Gregory was with another boy, a lanky kid from the grade above them. Brett told them to come in the house, but they said they were supposed to meet up with a group of kids near the old out-of-commission train bridge behind the public tennis courts, that they were playing Capture the Flag. Brett asked his mother if he could go, and she said OK, just be home by dinner.

They walked in the direction of the bridge. The older boy was leading the way, then Gregory, then Brett. No one said anything for a while. They just walked. Brett tried to think of something to ask them to break the silence. He remembered that the letters notifying students which class they would be in in the fall were about to be mailed out, and he considered asking if they’d received their class assignments even though he knew they had not. He was about to open his mouth when, out of nowhere, or maybe out of somewhere that’s just not somewhere people know about, it dawned on him that Gregory and the older boy were giving him the quiet and stillness he needed in order to hear the soft soundtrack of everything that was about to happen.

So, Brett focused. He tuned out his footsteps and heartbeat, and he listened carefully. He heard the following: the distant voices of more boys from the grade above, chatting and joking in a tone they would not chat and joke in once he arrived at the bridge; the whispers that the boys in the grade above whispered to each other once he did arrive at the bridge; the slobbery licks of a dog’s tongue lapping at a chocolate milkshake one of the boys had spilled into an empty pizza box; the loud rushing of the river below, deep this summer because of unusually heavy rains; the scrape of an old rusted car bumper being dragged by two boys across old rusted steel beams; the soft “here boy” and “good boy” and “thatta boy” that one of the boys used to coax the dog into standing still enough for him to tie a rope around its torso; the buckling crunch of the metal bumper as the other end of the rope was tightly secured around its torso; the heightened silence of having everyone’s eyes on you while your body is carefully positioned to create enough leverage in your heel to do the very thing those eyes don’t expect you to do.

Gregory’s sneeze broke the silence when they were still a few blocks from the tennis courts that abutted the trailhead that led to the bridge. Brett started to hear his own footsteps and heartbeat again. He said, “God bless you.” Gregory acknowledged the courtesy with a small nod and unleashed a hard kick on a soda can that was sitting on the edge of the sidewalk, sending it tumbling into traffic.

Baxter said, “Ha. Ha. Ha...” With pauses in between each “ha” to make it funny. Gerald said, “Ha. Ha. Ha...” with even longer pauses in between each “ha” to make it even funnier.

For more from Gideon Jacobs, follow @GideonsByeBull on Instagram. Click here to read Chapter 2: Guillermo’s Funeral.

Narcissus and the Broken Giver By Marc Frazier

October 31, 2017

text by Marc Frazier

Strains of Tchaikovsky fill Bruce’s second-story apartment. Curtains swish lightly in the breeze like a mournful dance—dancers illusive, then static; then, he thinks,

mocking. The clock ticks off minutes as only a Sunday afternoon clock can.

Bruce enters the bedroom, his favorite place to relax when alone. Although tastefully decorated, elements of its décor are dissonant like the strings of the symphony he listens to, or his own needs and wants. The bed is an old metal frame with box springs. On the wall to the left of the bed is a long wall mirror. Stretched out on the bed Bruce stares out a rather large open window.

The mustiness. It clings to me. Acts on my senses. The mustiness of summer cottages in resort towns open to their first boarders of the season. He tries not to think. A fly buzzes somewhere near. The time away has done nothing, he fears, as he traces the lines of his right palm with the forefinger of his left hand and vice versa.

Suddenly Bruce jumps up and yanks open the top right drawer of the large, antique wooden chest. He reads and rereads and stares without reading the piece of paper before him. It sounds poetic, he can and cannot understand it, he could appreciate it and then he could hate its author. He hears footsteps on the stairs. He cannot mistake their author. The same.

The music stops, the clock ticks, he hears the knock. He contemplates whether to answer it or not. Again the knock. He sits unmoved on the bed. Then he hears the door close and sees him standing in the bedroom doorway.

David stands not smiling, not not smiling. “Didn’t know if you were home or not.” Silence. Bruce realizes he is holding the note in his hand. This disturbs him thinking it gives David too much power, that he cares enough to have it there, in his unsteady hands, that David knows all this with one glance.

David nervously brushes his red bangs to either side of his forehead. Tom jumps from the bed, hands fisted, swinging wildly at the other man who remains motionless, “You son of a bitch, you fucking, mother-fucking son of a bitch.”

David, being physically the stronger, overpowers Bruce’s fists with his hands. Bruce sinks to the floor holding as if to a ridge on a mountainside to David’s belt. He sobs. “I trusted you.” He feels like he will fall off this precipice, unprotected, all the way to the bottom. David’s hands are overlaid upon Tom’s clenching tightly to his belt. “You son of a bitch.”

Bruce’s hands open David’s fly and take out his cock. This is the intimacy we had he thinks. David stands more smiling than not smiling, glancing sideways in the mirror reflecting his firm chest swelling, lapsing, his six-pack abs.

When David’s guttural breathing slows, Bruce says evenly, “I don’t ever, ever want to see you again, you son of a bitch.”

Happy Story By Joseph Grantham

July 12, 2017

text by Joseph Grantham

I work at a bookstore.
For a while, everyone at work thought I was going to kill myself.
I thought so too.
They started placing bets.
I felt left out.
“I bet a hundred bucks I’ll be dead by Thanksgiving,” I told them.
“That’s not fair,” they said. “You’re the one in control.”
They had a point.
We were in the break room.
We were listening to current events on the radio.
There was another terrorist attack.
A seven-year-old was exploded.
Others were, too, but hers was the explosion that made us sick.
“You really gonna kill yourself?” Bill asked.
“I wouldn’t put it past me,” I said.
“All right then,” Bill said, addressing the group. He rubbed his hands together. “Let’s place bets on how he goes about offing himself.”
There were so many ways I could do it.
It was like choosing a breakfast cereal.
How do you choose?
I could jump off of something.
It would have to be high.
I could tie a rope around my neck, attach that to something, and then jump off of something else.
It wouldn’t have to be too high.
“He’s thinking about all the ways he could do it,” Frank said. “You can always tell. His eyes glaze over.”
I was obsessed with something.
But I didn’t know what it was.
I didn’t want to die.
I wanted to be dead.
Or maybe I didn’t.
I wanted something that I didn’t, and couldn’t, understand, being that I was alive.

That night I got a phone call.
I was in bed, half-asleep.
My nonexistent wife was asleep somewhere else in the world.
So the phone call didn’t wake her up.
I picked up the phone from the bedside table.
I said, “Hello?”
“What kind of haircut do you have?”
It was a man’s voice or a maybe a boy’s.
It’s hard to tell sometimes.
“Gray,” I told him.
“Gray?”
“I thought you said color.”
“I said ‘kind’.”
“Bowl.”
“Bullshit.”
I sat up in bed.
“Who is this?”
Click.

And then you have to go to work the next morning.
After a phone call like that.
“I got the craziest phone call last night,” I told the guys at work.
“Was it about your haircut?” Frank asked.
“Yeah, how’d you know?” I said. “Was that you?”
“Nope, it was my son. He’s been doing that lately. He called Bill the other night.”
“Asked me the same thing, about the haircut,” Bill said. “Woke up my wife.”
Bill shook his head.
Frank shrugged.
“Doctor says it’s kind of like how some people sleepwalk. But instead of sleepwalking, Davy calls people up and asks ‘em about their haircut.”
“So he’s sleep calling?” I asked.
“No, he’s wide awake. It’s just sort of his thing.”
Sometimes there’s no such thing as mystery.

Thanksgiving came quicker than I expected.
People were buying turkeys and watching football.
People were lecturing other people about Native Americans and fuck Christopher Columbus.
And I hadn’t killed myself yet.
I hadn’t given it much thought.

Christmas came and I realized something.
I was happy.
Drinking only tea and enjoying my mornings.
I’d go out on the porch.
I was alone and I’d probably stay that way.
But I love books, I love reading them, they’re enough for me.
Sometimes things happen and I get scared.
I get scared because I don’t want anything to get in the way of my happiness.
Like, a few weeks ago, really it was only last week, I had a cancer scare.
And by that, I mean, I thought I had cancer.
There were lumps.
But I went to a doctor, got everything checked out.
He felt my nodes.
The lymph ones.
Turns out I’m okay.
I’m okay with a lot of things.
I’m okay with being ugly.
I’m okay with having what looks to be a strong jawline from the front, and a weak one from the sides.
I don’t have a choice.
I’m okay with meeting women online and then meeting up with them in person, disappointing them.
And every day I think I’m going to get fired from my job at the bookstore.
And every day, when I get home from my job at the bookstore, I stick an invisible gun in my mouth and blow out my invisible brains all over the walls of my kitchen.
But I’m okay.
Doing fine.

Space, A Preface (for The Doctor) by Benjamin McPherson Ficklin

January 16, 2017

“After death comes
nothing hoped for
nor imagined.”
Heraclitus, Fragment 122

Before anyone labels me insane, let them be born into my head, and we’ll see the situations they find themselves in. Like, at that moment, the edge of the Oregon desert, stooping in the shade of the last ponderosa pine, glancing back and forth from the dirt road to the setting sun. I mean, haven’t we all felt naked and limbless upon realizing that we’d invested hope in something untrustworthy? Personally speaking, it’s a familiar thought: Oh, all their promises were lies easing their experience of our interaction. Or worse – some people have malefic intentions.

I remember the tree groaning as I watched the sky spread orange on the horizon. The long shadow stretching across the desert – that wasn’t real, just another thing progressing toward disappearance. Can’t you almost see me dissolving as I slouched there in flip-flops, shredded blue jeans and a yellow bikini top? They had my backpack. They weren’t returning with beer and gasoline for the eastward drive. Considering it now, that story reminds me of the time I attended RagnaRöck. It was this festival near Weott, California, pretty deep in the redwoods. Four days of, maybe, two hundred metalheads and me listening to music beneath the giants. I awoke hungover on the second day, too much red wine. Nothing is beautiful when grappling with internal pain, right? So who wasn’t going to say yes to some cocaine with breakfast? I think I’d been planning to make pancakes. It doesn’t matter who brought the coconut. You just need to know there was a coconut in the camp I’d awoken in. One of the metalheads produced it when I verbally begrudged my headache. “Drink the milk inside this coconut.” They said something like and handed me the fruit. Isn’t it easy to imagine a gaggle of metalheads doing cocaine and growing increasingly more frantic in their application of various coconut-opening methods? Whacking it against a rock – whacking a rock against the coconut – whacking the coconut with a frying pan – punching the coconut. It wasn’t cracking, so, with a burst of excitement, I leapt up, cradling the fruit, and declared I would return with a knife! or a sword, or a dagger. Any blade. The mission: Open The Coconut. What I mean is that my hungover need for electrolytes was buried by the coke, but it felt good to have a purpose. I was proud to be a woman searching for a knife to open a coconut.

I scuttled through the trunks, cradling the coconut like a football, just sober enough to not shout my need into the early morning camp. Laughter. I heard laughter, or maybe it was merely voices. Outside a red tent sat two guys wearing black. One of them lifted a golden dagger to the nose of his friend. The friend snorted violently. Perfection, right? Synchronicity. One of those moments where you have faith in a cosmic current upon which you’re riding. New-age people love this idea and will tell you all about it, as long as you employ their vocabulary. Me? Who am I to believe anything? Yet, here was a dagger and what appeared to be more cocaine at seven something in the morning. What could I have said to them? Some high-pitched, rapid-fire rant about my desperate need to borrow their blade. And, maybe, could you help me keep my buzz going? Whatever came out of my mouth, I still recall the gaunt redhead with a long beard asking, “You want to take a hit of space?”

I immediately said. Like, “Do you want to take a hit of space?” “Yes!” He lifted the knife and smiled. I snorted. They both laughed. I tried to reiterate my purpose for needing for the blade, when I experienced a cessation of the corporeal form I’d inhabited for the preceding twenty-whatever years. A complete rupture in continuity. Darkness mostly. It wasn’t so much calm as it was devoid of feeling. Weightlessness is maybe a good descriptor word. Nothingness with succulent orbs scattered in the darkness. Floating freeform for some decades until coming upon themed planets that fractalized infinitely. It doesn’t matter what the planets were, as much as it matters what the planets evoked. I can say that I remember there was a labyrinthine orb that I flew into, and, upon noticing the cracks in the stone walls, I burrowed into more minute mazes. A liquid orb with water ever more blue the deeper I sunk. A flesh orb in continual orgy with itself. Heat orb burning me into nothing over and over again, no incineration any less visceral than the last. No pain though, remember? No emotion. Feelings evoked by the orbs were so distant that I could consider them objectively. Forever spent travelling the nihility of darkness; forever spent delving into orbs. Heat, fear, wetness, sensuousness, hunger – though there was nothing to feed, or I mean that I had no remembrance of body or personhood or Earth or any language taught to me as a child.

“What’re you?” At first it didn’t sound like English. It was just a fleshy smacking that reverberated through the darkness. Years later, it became recognizable. “What’re you doing? Why the fuck are you crawling? Where’s the coconut?” Millennia in the past, I was still me and there I was crawling along the dirt path between the tents amidst recognizable things like redwood trees, ferns, plastic coolers, tents, and one of the guys from my camp standing over me. We’re all a lost people, really. Abstainers, outcasts, misfits, the abused, the neglected, the left behind, our society doesn’t make space for most people. Yet there I was, this person on the planet Earth, in a time, beneath enormous trees. Isn’t it sort of cruel that we tell little kids they’re special. We’re implying, You’re greatness is due to your uniqueness. This platitude is pervasive across The United States of America, thus I can bet all those metalheads had quarterlife crises right around when I had mine. Even the angriest portions of this country’s counterculture want to believe their individuality predestines greatness. Oh, what the fuck story am I telling? A tension, a rupture, a breaking of my mind continued all that day. At one moment I was omnipotent and capable of exploring existence unknown, the next I became a dirty human surrounded by acoustic metal. Everyone was mad at me. I’d be mad at me too. When the last hallucination of a golden plane of unfeelable joy (somehow I knew that was the final insight) left me, I returned to corporeality on a wooden stage, without a coconut, next to a man with a guitar, before a crowd of people, yelling – I was yelling, “Why can’t I die! Why can’t I die! Why can’t I die!” I was so overwhelmed by the profundity of my experience that I thought it had to climax in an expiration. But I returned to flesh. Toes, elbows, stomach, butt, ears, boobs, nostrils, mouth, language. I spent the next few years afraid that at any given moment my human reality would dissolve again. But I’ve always come back here to you. Most of us are here. What am I saying? Don’t listen to me. Anyways, sorry. And there I was, somewhere on the edge of the desert, beneath a ponderosa pine, again in disbelief of my proceeding existence and stuck with the responsibility of a body. Those that had promised me care were nowhere on the road, but, since I was no longer bound to them, there was a desert to wander through. The sun set and it became cold real quick.

Benjamin McPherson Ficklin was born in Portland, Oregon. He funds his writing addiction by working as a commercial fisherman, abstract photographer, weed trimmer, event coordinator, and gongfu team-master. Follow Benjamin McPherson on Twitter.

Perdition by Dan Marovich

September 20, 2016

text by Dan Marovich

This mountain seems to keep growing, Sergeant Fox thought to himself. Down below him, his men tirelessly ascended on their hands and knees through the ankle deep mud, often times using the buttstocks of their rifles as anchors in the deluge. Each of them was soaked in sweat, and the effort of yesterday evidenced upon their uniforms in the form of salt stains ringing their collars and sleeves. Each of them was panting with exertion; the hundred pound packs on their backs made them look almost comical in the mid-day heat. Sergeant Fox sighed, laughed to himself, and then looked back towards the summit.

“We’re almost there, boys,” he whispered.

It was day twenty of their thirty day patrol. The mission was called ‘Operation Avalanche’ and was designed to cut off the routes of egress to the extremists, mercenaries, and never-do-well’s coming in from across the Pakistani border. The first week they had seen positive results, in the form of captured bomb-makers and their mad scientist cohorts; they were easy enough to identify. Every bomb-maker had the hallmarks of a failed experiment; sometimes it was burns down their wrists, sometimes it was shrapnel scars across their face, but usually, it was missing knuckles or missing fingers. But after that first week, the fruits of their labor began to dry up, and Operation Avalanche began to feel more and more like an exercise in futility. Each night, they somehow managed to sleep a little bit less than the night before. Currently, they were down to four hours of sleep a night, in hour long intervals, when they weren’t on overwatch guarding against what might be lurking in the darkness.

Tonight, however, they had an obtainable objective: one of the men they caught crossing the border provided intel on an Al Qaeda safe-house atop one of the tallest peaks in the Gardez Mountains. In the basement of this safe-house was a supposed cache of mortar rounds, rockets, artillery shells and millions of rounds of DshK ammunition. If they were able to capture this safe-house, it would be a huge victory for Alpha Company, and provide bragging rights instead of what had slowly become a shit sandwich of a mission that no one wanted to eat. Several hours later, Sergeant Fox and his ten soldiers arrived at the first false summit of the ridgeline, the rally point for their platoon.

No one said anything; words had become a lost art after the first week or so, in which the lack of sleep had given everyone a touch of ferality and almost instantaneous bursts of anger at the slightest provocations. Fox sat behind them in the middle of the formation atop his rucksack, each man facing outwards, creating a defensive perimeter.

About an hour later, the radio attached to Sergeant Fox’s armor crackled to life. *Three-Three, this is Three-Six, we are in position on the neighboring ridge. We got eyes on you and the objective. What’s your status, over?*

Sergeant Fox unclipped the radio, took his helmet off, and scrubbed his brow before answering. “Three-Six, this is Three-Three, we are good to Charlie-Mike on your go, over.”

*So you’re good to proceed, outcopy over.*

“Roger that, Three-Six.”

*Good. Fifteen mikes ‘til we move. We’re gonna move fast, so be ready – sun should be down, so mount your NODs. Over and out.*

“Alright boys, get your NODs on,” Sergeant Fox called out. “Left to right.”

The first soldier on the left side of the firing line dropped his weapon and reached to one of the pouches connected to his armored harness, and withdrew his night vision goggles. Moments later, they were secured to the front of his helmet, at which point he nodded to the man down the line, where the exercise repeated.

*Three-Three, this is Three-Six, we’re moving time now, over.*

“Yep, roger that Three-Six. Enroute: over and out,” Sergeant Fox remounted his radio. “Alright boys, it’s time to kick rocks. Leave the rucksacks here. Let’s go.”

An hour later, they reached the perimeter of the mountaintop safe-house. A sparse wood-line of something that looked like sage and dried up pines provided a degree of camouflage as they approached. Each soldier took a position behind boulders and tree-trunks facing the lone structure atop the peak and waited.

“Three-Six, this is Three-Three, we’re in position,” Sergeant Fox whispered into his handset.

*Three-Three, move into the yard,* the lieutenant replied. That was all Sergeant Fox needed.

Giving the hand signal, Sergeant Fox’s first team stood up, rifles at their shoulders, and approached the safe-house’s back gate, lining up along its right side; a wooden door consisting of logs cut in half with a roughly attached latch on the inside. Looking back towards Sergeant Fox, they gave the signal that the gate was breachable; Sergeant Fox grinned. Reaching over his shoulder, he withdrew the twelve gauge shotgun from its shoulder sheath, and racked the slide. The second hand signal was given, and the remaining team moved forward, stacking on the left side of the gate. Sergeant Fox took position at the front.

“Three, two, one,” Sergeant Fox whispered a moment before the shotgun belched fire and flame, punching a hole through the wood of the gate and blowing the latch apart into bits of twisted metal; in a single fluid movement, the shotgun slid back into its sheath. The first team pushed into the courtyard, weapons at the ready, bounding through the space like wolves inside a sheep’s pen. The second team moved in just as liquidly, adjacent to the first; their eyes were on the windows, Sergeant Fox moving in behind them.

The courtyard stank of goat shit and pickled urine. Rags of cloth fluttered uselessly in the untrimmed grass that grew in inconsistent patches along the unpaved earth. A doll made of straw and frayed yarn watched silently with buttoned eyes, propped up against the backdoor frame of the building.

Those motherfuckers brought kids here, Sergeant Fox thought.

The courtyard cleared of danger, Sergeant Fox pointed at the backdoor of the house; the first team moved back into a stack on its right side. Sergeant Fox then gave the hand signal for the second team to stay put and keep the courtyard contained. Every soldier acknowledged seamlessly, their former exhaustions extinguished and replaced with nervous excitement.

*Three-Three, take the house. Rules of engagement: Capture if possible, kill if necessary.*

Sergeant Fox gave the command; the leader of the first team stepped back and put a boot to the backdoor which exploded inwards, shattering something made of glass inside. The soldiers poured inwards into the unlit building, their night vision goggles giving their eyes and faces an eerie green tinted glow. A staircase downwards was located; Sergeant Fox gave the order to descend. A door barred their entrance to the basement; it was promptly kicked in. Ten feet from the door, a man dressed in a white robe sat behind a desk, dimly lit by a failing lantern, cried out in sudden alarm. He stood, and turned to face Sergeant Fox and his men as they stalked into the room.

Time seemed to dilate, slow down. Sergeant Fox didn’t recognize what he was doing as it happened; he saw the man and without thinking moved forward to engage, the training unconsciously taking over. Three steps away: Fox’s eyes darted to the man’s hands; he was holding something unidentifiable – gun? Knife? Weapon of some kind? – and then looked up to the man’s expression: surprised, afraid, and panicked. Two steps away: Fox began to scream. The words weren’t chosen, but the growl in his throat gave voice to the threat of his rifle. One step away: the man began to raise his hands upwards, towards Sergeant Fox; Sergeant Fox responded by igniting the infrared laser attached to his rifle which aimed his weapon in the darkness, visible only through the night vision goggles he wore. The man made to rear back, potentially to fight, when Sergeant Fox jabbed the barrel of his M-4 through the man’s ivories, which exploded like tempered glass. A fountain of red pumped out of his mouth, alongside jagged shards of broken teeth. The man collapsed onto the ground holding his face, writhing around in the slick of his blood. Suddenly, an overhead light turned on. Each soldier flipped their night vision goggles up.

“Status,” Sergeant Fox screamed. Each of the soldiers communicated that they were “up”. Fox nodded, leaned forward, and grabbed the man by his collar. “Get the fuck up, shit bag, it’s time to work.” The man was still screaming bloody murder, spitting up chunks of meat and teeth as Sergeant Fox wrenched him to his feet.

“Hey Sarge, you’d better look at this,” cried one of the soldiers. Sergeant Fox looked to where the soldier was pointing; it was the weapons cache they were looking for, all done up in neat piles of potential destruction.

“Well loddy-fucking daaah,” Sergeant Fox grinned, then leaned forward and into the face of the basement dweller. “Lucy, you got some ‘splaining to do!” Sergeant Fox produced a pair of flex-cuffs and the man moaned, still holding the jagged slice of his mouth together, and began to mutter pleas in Pashtu through his fingers – one of which ended at the middle knuckle.

“Behold: the Graveyard of Empires”, a sign read just above the concertina wire of the compound’s exterior wall.

Sergeant Fox sat atop the concrete sandbagged bunker, smoking a cigar. To his right sat the company doctor, Doc Flannigan, similarly smoking a cigar, while sipping from a cup of something that looked like apple juice but smelled like jet fuel. The ice clinked harmlessly inside his glass. Both Sergeant Fox and Doc Flannigan were absorbed in the relaxation provided by their vices, and stared into the dimmed horizon of Forward Operating Base Salerno, Khowst Province, Afghanistan. Each had yet to take a shower despite the mad rush to clean one’s self that everyone exhibited after the conclusion of Operation Avalanche; for them, the moment of calm afforded them the opportunity to enjoy the naked pleasure of their poisons, which the mission had precluded them from.

Neither of them said a word.

Overhead, an apache gunship circled, the beating of its rotors whipping sound across the nearby mountains like miniature thunderclaps. There was dust, but neither Sergeant Fox nor Doc Flannigan gave a damn; they were dirty, and more dirt didn’t matter – it was all the same to them. Beside Sergeant Fox sat his electronic leash: the radio he had to carry at all times, which chirped with static exuberance every so often like some kind of palsied bird. The sound of diesel engines began to fade into the distance as soldiers finished the process of refueling and refitting their vehicles, tirelessly preparing for the next patrol out. The air tasted like melting copper; somewhere, a burn-pit was destroying the never-ending accumulation of plastics and human feces.

Booted footsteps approached from behind at high speed; Sergeant Fox sighed and looked over his shoulder. A private wearing a clean and dry uniform stood at parade rest, a rifle slung behind his shoulders. A barrel plug adorned the flash eliminator of the private’s rifle, covering the muzzle; Sergeant Fox sneered.

“What the fuck do you want, kid?” Sergeant Fox turned back around to face his horizon, which had begun to purple with the sunset. It was beautiful through the wash of the heat radiation. He took a drag from his maduro.

“You’re needed at the TOC, Sergeant Fox,” the private responded.

“What the fuck for?”

“There’s an on-going attack on the Green House,” the private explained.

“Right now?”

“Right now, sergeant.”

Sergeant Fox groaned. He looked to his right. Doc Flannigan continued to stare at the horizon and smiled as he sipped his bourbon. There was a darkness in those eyes, Sergeant Fox noted, a hollow quality that he hadn’t seen before. He studied a moment longer before discarding the notion of saying something.

“Yeah, fuck you too, Doc,” Sergeant Fox said as he dismounted from the top of the bunker and flicked the remains of his cigar towards his feet. Doc Flannigan laughed as Sergeant Fox was led away.

The Green House was the code word associated with the border outpost the Special Forces had set up with the help of the local militia groups. It was staffed primarily of grizzled veterans from the Soviet Aggression who knew how to fight, men specifically chosen by the green berets stationed nearby at Chapman Airbase to hold the mountains. The Green House sat on top of the most optimal route into Afghanistan from Pakistan, which was directly in the shadows of the Gardez Mountain’s tallest peaks. Without the Green House looking down onto this route, an army of any size could easily slip into Afghani territory and wreak all sorts of havoc before returning across the border, protected by legalities and politics.

The TOC hummed with the throb of dedicated electronics and communication equipment. Thick power cables lay tangled like mismanaged cobwebs carelessly strewn about across the floor, braided with neon yellow duct-tape so that you noticed them right before you tripped. Men sat hunched behind desks crowded with computer monitors and projector screens with thick, bulbous headphones insulating them from the din of reality just behind them. The smell of unwashed bodies and calcified sweat filled the humid air. Endless radio communications flooded the remaining airspace with orders and reports. The private waved Sergeant Fox forward and into the room; in a smaller alcove, Afghani voices were screaming through a different radio network, automatic gunfire and detonations blasting in its background.

“Are you Sergeant Fox?” an anonymous voice called out.

Sergeant Fox looked around, seeking the voice’s origin. “Roger that,” he said to the crowd of seated bodies before him. A hand connected to the voice waved; three rows down, a short, fat man in Air Force fatigues stood up and nodded to Sergeant Fox. Sergeant Fox narrowed his eyes and approached.

“Why am I here?” Sergeant Fox demanded.

“You’re the only squad who’s air-assault qualified in your platoon, and I hear you are the most mission ready. Is that true?”

“Yeah, my boys and I are ready to go,” he said.

“Alright then. Wheels up in fifteen. Your commanding officer is already rounding up your men. Head to Red Tarmac when you’re ready, the Blackhawk will be waiting for you and your boys. Mission brief in the seats.”

Sergeant Fox nodded, turned around, and ran for the door.

When Sergeant Fox got to the tarmac his helicopter was on, his men were already there, looking about as pissed off as humanly possible. Thirty days of nigh-endless bullshit only to end up on the QRF – quick reaction force – was a slap in the face. Sergeant Fox had the sneaking suspicion that his lieutenant had volunteered them for this mission; he’d have to find out later. The Blackhawk they were about to board began to rev up its engines in preparation, deafening Sergeant Fox’s squad. Fox gave the hand signal; each man donned his hearing protection. He gave another hand signal and the weapons checks began. The third check ensured every soldier had each piece of their vital equipment: NODs, grenades, water and food. The last hand signal he gave was to board the Blackhawk; when all of the men were inside, the rotors began to turn. The pilot stood offset his helicopter, finishing a cigarette, before reaching out to shake Sergeant Fox’s hand.

“Hey buddy! You Sergeant Fox, right?”

“Roger that,” Sergeant Fox shook the pilot’s hand. “What should I call you?”

The pilot grinned; “Call sign is Archangel; I’m from the 7th aviation wing,” nodded, and climbed aboard. Stenciled on his helmet were a lion, a leopard and a wolf, all three of which were snapping at each other in a circular pattern. “But you can call me Vee.”

A minute later, each soldier was buckled into his harnesses, and each wore the headsets associated with his seat. Sergeant Fox adjusted his mouthpiece. “Radio check,” he whispered. A stream of, “Check,” and “You’re good”’s came through in reply. “Good copy,” Sergeant Fox said, right before yawning. What the fuck, he thought to himself. He hadn’t even felt it coming. His men had seen it; each had looked away. Quietly, Sergeant Fox reached into one of his harness pouches and withdrew a tiny bottle of Tobasco that came with almost every MRE the army offered, dripped some onto his fingers, and then wiped his face just below his eyes. The burn of the vinegar scratched at the lines of his softer skin, but he knew it would keep him awake.

“Alright, fellas, listen up: mission brief!” Vee crooned over the internal radio network of the helicopter. “The Green House is being hit by a company sized element and are pinned down. We are gonna drop you boys off alongside some of the S.F. fellers and get you some, how does that sound?” Everyone cheered. “I like the sound of that,” the pilot continued, “Okay! We are gonna hit Chapman Airbase first and then take you to the fight. Time on target is estimated at twenty minutes, roger?” Everyone roger’d back. “Alright boys, sit tight. Here we go!” The helicopter lurched to life, jumping off the pavement and into the barren sky above.

The landscape of the dustbowl that was Khowst might have been beautiful, once. Sergeant Fox looked out from the nest that was the coupled minigun, pillboxed on the port flank of the Blackhawk. Maybe it was the navy blue glow of the evening sky reflecting off the silica-infused, talcum-powdered quality of the dirt and dust on the ground, or the vibrant green of the weeds that grew like tiny hairs in random patches of depressed topography, Sergeant Fox couldn’t decide, but the land seemed to beg for a positive opinion that wasn’t forthcoming. Maybe once, but not now, Sergeant Fox thought. Here, along the curb of one of the few paved highways undulating beneath them was the fractured crater of a roadside bomb; there, was the blasted bowl of a fixed-wing air-to-surface ordinance explosion, which consumed half of a dilapidated building. He wanted to care but couldn’t; the destruction was too absolute. “Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me; the carriage held but just ourselves, and immortality,” Sergeant Fox whispered.

“What was that, Sarge?” One of his soldiers looked over at him, confused.

“Never mind, private,” Sergeant Fox answered.

He was still lost in thought when the helicopter suddenly dipped in elevation, turning a hard right on its axis. “We are gonna land and refuel! Time until takeoff: ten minutes! Deboard if you want, it’s on your sergeant,” Vee screamed; Sergeant Fox looked to his men and nodded his approval. A moment later, the Blackhawk landed roughly and began to power down. When the rotors finished turning, Sergeant Fox sighed, took off his headset, and nodded to everyone. Everyone unbuckled and climbed out of the helicopter. Vee was still fussing with his seatbelt harness when Sergeant Fox leaned into his cockpit.

“Hey, what channel you guys on for this? I wanna listen while we wait.”

Vee gave him the frequency, and Sergeant Fox adapted his radio to it. “Thanks,” he said as he worked. As soon as the frequency was keyed in, all hell broke loose; Sergeant Fox turned down the volume to his earpiece so that his men wouldn’t overhear.

*Ghost Four, this is Ghost One, get your fucking team on the perimeter wall now!*
*60mm mortars are black on ammo; I repeat, black on ammo! Switching to 120’s! 120’s are red on ammo! Danger close fire missions inbound!*
*Claymores are gone on the west wall! They are through the fucking wire! Where the fuck is our air support?!*
*Ghost Six, this is Reaper One, I’m working on fixed-wing support. We got one Charlie on station and possibly an Alpha!*

“Jesus Christ,” Sergeant Fox muttered to himself, sitting down hard on the rim of the Blackhawk’s deck. The shit was not only hitting the fan, but every surface of the misbegotten office. At least the Air Force JTAC was responding; successfully directing air support in the midst of a firefight without friendly fire would be miraculous – especially given the possibility of working with two planes instead of just one.

“Hey Sarge, check it out..!” Sergeant Fox looked up and saw all of his soldiers pointing at the sky above: an A-10 Warthog scrambled through the air, acrobatically twisting and turning as if through some invisible aerial obstacle course. It disappeared into the evening sky towards the Green House. “Turn your NODs on, you can see this shit from here!”

Sergeant Fox donned his helmet, and tipped his night vision goggles forward. Immediately, lances of light began to arc outwards from the top of a mountain maybe five miles away, tearing through the sky like unexploding fireworks; he was surprised he could see the tracer fire from here. About a dozen different streams of gunfire had become visible, and only now had his ears adjusted to the environment enough that he could hear the report of the heavier guns pounding away like arrhythmic drumbeats. Claymore and grenade detonations scored the mountaintop in brief flashes of light, followed closely by distant roars.

“Sarge, we need to get up there,” one of his soldiers said.

We need to get up there, Sergeant Fox repeated in his head. Suddenly, a yawn began to form in his lungs; just as quickly, he turned his face and hid it. When he turned back around and looked at the mountaintop, he froze. He could see the tumble of the tracer rounds slapping through their machineguns, slamming into rocks that sent them skyward; he witnessed the flash of mines and grenades exploding, killing or maiming the men on the ground; he listened to it all through the panicked transmissions of the Special Forces troops still electrically echoing through his radio’s headset. His breath caught in his lungs and his eyes began to burn, having forgotten to blink as he continued to stare. We need to get up there, his mind repeated again, but when his eyes finally failed and he turned away to clear them, he noticed his gloved hands were trembling. He balled each into fists, and the shakes in his fingers disappeared.

*Ghost Six, this is Reaper One! Get your men behind cover! Alpha inbound on strafe run, west to east!* Moments later, the sound of the A-10’s fury whipped down across the valley. The warthog’s main weapon, a 30mm autocannon, screamed.

It was such a powerful weapon that the recoil generated by its bursts of fire – which were shorter than three seconds, because any longer would melt the weapon’s seven barrels – was enough to point the plane skyward if the aircraft wasn’t angled correctly; the entire plane was built around the cannon. Each shot was indistinguishable from the last; through the night vision goggles, the soldiers saw a solid line of rippling light – hundreds of glowing incendiary rounds - generated from a point in the sky rain downwards, followed by the long throb of the weapon’s throaty growl. A long collection of explosions followed, covering the mountainside in light and debris. Through the NODs, several of the soldiers saw entire trees uprooted and flung cartwheeling through the air.

Each of Sergeant Fox’s soldiers cheered.

*Reaper One, this is Gungnir, on station, your orbit. I got guns on your position: copy danger close fire mission? Over.*

*Gungnir, this is Reaper One, what’s your payload?*

*Roger that, Reaper One, we are C-130 Spectre gunship. We got five mikes until bingo on fuel. Confirm danger close fire mission time now, over.*

“Holy shit,” Sergeant Fox breathed. His ears hurt; he hadn’t realized he’d been pressing the microphone so hard against his face.

*Gungnir, this is Reaper One: I confirm, danger close fire mission. We got tangos in the wood-line at grid Whiskey-Golf 3034-4521, over.*

*Fire mission confirmed. Uh, keep your heads down, Reaper One.*

*Yeah, roger that.*

*Gungnir , this is Ghost Six, don’t hit the big building in the center of the complex. Why do they call you Gungnir?*

*Ghost Six, because we never miss, over.*

The next five minutes represented the greatest amount of destruction that Sergeant Fox had ever witnessed. The Spectre gunship was outfitted with cannons that belonged on tanks; a 105mm howitzer cannon, a 40mm autocannon, and two 20mm vulcan guns; each gun on their own more than enough to annihilate the enemy forces on the ground. Sergeant Fox felt each shot from the howitzer deep inside his ears as their blasts altered the atmospheric pressure for miles; through the green-tinted lattice of the night vision goggles, the Spectre gunship was like an angry dragon hurling salvos of fireballs at the ground below, their passage through the air detonating the atmosphere in bursts of static discharge. As each round impacted, fiery eruptions bloomed from the mountaintop; the Green House looked like it was falling victim to some hidden volcanic god, suddenly breaching the surface of its peak, attempting to swallow the Green House whole. All four weapon systems vomited round after round, dumping everything they had into the land surrounding the compound. Plumes of smoke and ash blossomed, occluding the mountaintop until unceremoniously, Gungnir’s cannon fire stopped. Slowly, the sound rolling down from the mountains dropped in volume, lessening and lessening until it became as a breeze, vibrating across the surface of everything.

*Ghost Six and Reaper One, this is Gungnir: what’s your status?*

Ten seconds passed. Thirty. A minute idled by.

*Ghost Six and Reaper One, this is Gungnir: What’s your status, over?* Concern painted the voice.

*…Gungnir, this is Ghost Six, we are all green and accounted for. Looks like the enemy is beating feet back towards Pakistan; I can hear bells ringin’, over!*

*Haha, roger that Ghost Six. We are zero on fuel and currently Roger-Tango-Bravo, Ghost Six. Glad to be of service.*

“Where you stationed, Gungnir?”

*Ghost Six, we are stationed in Kandahar, over.*

*If I find myself down there, first round is on me.*

*Roger that, Ghost Six. Valhalla awaits; Gungnir, over and out.* With zero preamble, the Spectre gunship veered a hard left, away from the mountains.

*Archangel, this is Ghost Six. You are clear to in-fil; I’m still collecting reports, but we might still need help, over..*

Sergeant Fox blinked and looked over at his men, who were all wildly dancing and cheering. Vee walked up and tapped Fox on the shoulder. “The refueling is complete; let’s get your boys up in the air, roger?” The pilot busied himself with strapping back down into his cockpit. “Ghost Six, this is Archangel; we are enroute!”

*Archangel, this is Ghost Six, roger that. Listen, we hurried our boys out there to the sticks, so keep your guns tight and get good target recognition before engaging. From what I’m hearing, it’s lookin’ like we got things under control down here. How about you make a few passes around the mountain, see if we got any squirters dartin’ off. And if you could, Archangel, fly low – see if you can wash some of this smoke out for us, over.*

“Roger that, Ghost Six. Flyin’ low,” Vee said.

When the helicopter reached the mountaintop, the wash from the blades fanned the smoke out sideways in oily black tidal waves of soot and cinders, revealing the carnage below. The small collection of trees that once existed atop the mountain were now splintered fingers, reaching up towards the blistered sky, begging for relief. Brush fires were everywhere, consuming the vestiges of the remaining plant life and shattered wood. Boulders and stones were cracked and burning as well; the phosphorous detonations of the howitzer’s incendiary ammunition having melted the stone in gouts of cauterized mineral flows. The air stank of scorched earth and burning metals.

Bodies and their pieces littered the mountaintop.

As the helicopter made its first pass, Sergeant Fox peered through the window. The Blackhawk hovered slowly, rotating along the edges of the one-sided battlefield. Sergeant Fox began searching for survivors, eyes scanning the gigantic collection of corpses; a body lay tangled in the branches of an uprooted tree, one of its legs missing at the knee; another body, inside one of the deep craters left by the howitzer rounds, hastily thought of and used as a position of safety, cradling a broken weapon in its hands, its torso covered in fire; a third body in camouflage fatigues, cut in half, a hand reaching up into the air –

“Hey, Vee – there’s a live one down there,” Sergeant Fox spoke into his microphone. The Blackhawk spun around.

“Well, would you look at that,” Vee said, surprised. “He doesn’t look like he’s gonna stay that way for long, though. One sec,” Vee flipped a switch on his dash. “Ghost Six, this is Archangel, we’ve got a survivor directly beneath me.”

*Roger that, Archangel. Wait one.*

Below, Sergeant Fox saw a three man team move in, the leader of which stood before the truncated survivor. The survivor’s hands reached out towards the soldier, the other lay twisted in the tangle of his exposed intestines.

The man screamed. Two shots rang out, and then a third.

*Taken care of, Archangel. Hey, it’s lookin’ pretty clean down here. Feel free to take off, I think we got this. I’m gonna send in my local nationals to clean this shit up.*

“Roger that, Ghost Six. Archangel out.” Vee banked the Blackhawk a hard right, circling back towards Salerno. “Sergeant, looks like it’s time I take you boys home.”

White noise filled Sergeant Fox’s ears, who nodded, unable to speak.

The ride back was a siren’s song, whispering into Sergeant Fox’s ears. The hum of the Blackhawk’s machines and engine were lulling him away to sleep, but he knew that if he succumbed, something, everything would happen simultaneously. Sleep was a luxury he could not yet afford. He could feel it, slithering across his face, pulling down on his eyelids; he felt it in his bones, cementing his joints; he heard it in his chest as it slowed his heart rate, dragging him down into oblivion. Had he been there, on that mountaintop, what would he have seen? How many torn bodies, mutilated corpses? A hundred or so men, how many -

No, not yet.

He looked over his shoulder, his eyes subdued. He looked at his men, and -

“Sergeant Fox! I need you to switch to channel two on the headset!”

Sergeant Fox gave the cockpit a thumbs up, and looked down at his radio equipment. A thumb switch later: “What’s up Vee?”

“Yo! We aren’t gonna make it to Salerno tonight, unfortunately. We’ve got reports of a village that was hit by the Taliban – one of the places that has a school for women. Reports say they were burning people alive. You’re from 3rd Platoon, Alpha Company, right? Well, Alpha is headed there now. We’re gonna drop you off with your boys. Sound good?”

Sergeant Fox nodded. “Sounds good, brother.”

“Alright, letch’er boys know. We’ll be skids down in about five mikes!”

“Roger that.”

Sergeant Fox reached into his pouch and withdrew the tobasco bottle.

“Hey Sarge, I’ll do you one better! Take a hit of this!”

Sergeant Fox turned around, and saw one of his soldiers taking out an old-school military canteen from his back pouch. He gestured it to Fox, who took it, eyeing the soldier suspiciously. “If this is alcohol, I will shake your hand right before throwing you face-first off this bird,” Sergeant Fox said.

“Me? Never, Sarge! Don’t worry, I got you!”

Sergeant Fox unscrewed the canteen’s cap and sniffed the contents lightly. The pungent aroma of some nameless energy drink greeted him, alongside the sharp stink of freshly ground coffee beans.

“That shit will keep you awake for hours yet, Sergeant Fox. I made it just before we came back out. Take some!”

He drank long and deep before handing the canteen back to his soldier.

“Thanks,” Sergeant Fox said. The effects were almost instantaneous; he could feel his heart quicken, his pulse reinvigorate, and his lungs breathe more deeply. The stony sensation that he was beginning to feel at the corner of his eyes faded, replaced with an anxious, manic energy. The world shifted uncomfortably; a wave of nausea struck Sergeant Fox. He shook his head and slapped his face, and the confines of the Blackhawk stopped spinning.

The helicopter touched down. “Alright boys, the ride is over! Get your shit and get off my chopper! Stay safe down there!” Vee screamed.

Sergeant Fox and his men jumped off the Blackhawk onto solid, grassy land. They were in the middle of a village complex, surrounded by tiny, unfortified buildings made of mud. The men of Alpha Company were scattered around various alleyways and tree-lines, prepared for enemy contact; none was forthcoming. Several structure fires glowed in the early morning twilight, billowing smoke up into the sky in random belches with the breeze. The damage was already done here: three women and one man dangled from a high-tension cable strung between two of the buildings, hung by their necks by telephone wire. Their heads ballooned with the strangled bulge of their entrapped blood vessels, which were beginning to pour from each of their skull’s orifices in a slow, pulpy ooze. Even their scalps were bleeding; their necks hadn’t broke.

“That one there? He was the local sheriff,” the lieutenant said, appearing next to Sergeant Fox, who hadn’t noticed his approach. He was chewing beef jerky as he spoke.

“And this was retaliation for the school being built, right?”

“Yes and no, I think. Yeah, the Taliban hates women getting educated, but I think sometimes they just need to kill something because they have such a hard time killing us.” Absently, the lieutenant picked at his teeth.

Sergeant Fox nodded. He looked behind him; his men had already fanned out, taking up positions that offered the best defense without command.

“Help! Heeelp! PLEASE! YOU HELP! YOU HELP!” A voice cried.

Both the lieutenant and Sergeant Fox looked up, seeing a woman running towards them from down the street. A dozen different rifles were trained on her until they saw she had no weapon; her clothing was smoldering. Sergeant Fox and the lieutenant ran to her and beat the embers off of her shoulders. Doc Flannigan arrived a moment later and draped a recovery blanket around her.

“Help! Must help me! My son! My son!” She pointed to one of the burning buildings.

Sergeant Fox looked at the lieutenant and nodded. He stripped off the harness that carried his grenades and ammunition after unslinging his rifle and unsheathing his shotgun, and laid them at the lieutenant’s feet before running into the burning building. A moment later Sergeant Fox stumbled out of the house, dragging a limp body in a blanket that was burning along the edges of its wool. Several nearby soldiers jumped up and promptly stomped the flames out. The body Sergeant Fox had dragged out - a teenage boy - was severely burned from head to toe. Along his arms and legs, portions of his skin were sloughing off the meat and bones of his body. All of his hair was missing, and every time he breathed, the boy coughed up blood and ash. Parts of his body crackled, as if being cooked, and the air stank sweetly of grease. The boy was screaming, but produced no sound.

“Doc! Get over here! Bring the interpreter!”

Doc Flannigan ran over, the lieutenant in tow, who was anxiously screaming into his radio for his interpreter to get the fuck out of his truck and over to the situation at hand.

“Ah jesus christ,” Doc Flannigan said, looking at the boy. He kneeled down and removed his medical bag from his back, opened it up, and began unspooling a roll of gauze. The boy’s torso heaved with gargantuan effort; blood dyed black from smoke seeped from the corners of his mouth.

“Doc, is he –“

“Fuck no, sir. He’s dead, he just doesn’t know it yet,” Doc Flannigan said through clinched teeth. “If he doesn’t die from the burns, which he almost assuredly fucking will, he will die of gangrene, because he won’t survive me scraping all of this dead fucking tissue away from his wounds tomorrow.”

“Can you at least –“

“What the fuck do you think I’m doing sir?”

The lieutenant flinched; Sergeant Fox sighed, putting a hand to the few burns he had himself.

“Alright, Doc. Alright. I’ll tell the mother.”

Presently, the interpreter trotted up, wearing his NATO equipment. Bits of food were trapped in his beard, and a large coffee stain ran down the front of his body armor. His name-tape was written in Arabic. The lieutenant wiped the interpreter’s face free from crumbs. “Now that you’re presentable, please ask this woman why she and her son were inside that burning building so long after the Taliban left?” The interpreter obliged him. The woman was still sobbing, but she spoke desperately, as if her answers would somehow repair the damage done to her son’s body. The interpreter turned back to the lieutenant.

“She says that she no see the Taliban any more, but saw Russians, and it cause her to fear for her.”

“What fucking Russians is she talking about?” The lieutenant said, frustrated.

A moment later: “She say she thought you are Russian, lieutenant.”

“Oh.. I see now. Thanks.” The lieutenant began to shake with rage. He turned to the mother and pointed to the American flag on his shoulder emphatically. The rural nature of this village meant it was most likely devoid of any outside contact; they probably didn’t even know they had won that particular conflict decades ago. Despite the war having been over for almost thirty years, the Russians were still killing Afghanis. “Please inform her that we’re going to do our very best to save her son’s life,” the lieutenant said.

Doc Flannigan reacted as if he had been slapped.

“Fuck you, sir! FUCK YOU! I told you what is gonna happen here, who the fuck are you to lie to her like that, you fucking –“

“Calm down, Doc –“

“No, no, fuck you sir. You piece of shit. You monstrous piece of shit, you’re gonna make me have to do it, you’re gonna make me have to tell her, you cowardly motherfucker!”

“I said calm –“

“For ten months you’ve had me doing this shit. Three hundred god. Damn. Days. I can’t do it anymore. They are countless, these dead people, and I can’t do it anymore! You need to tell her.. you need to tell her!”

Doc Flannigan began to sob, pounding his bloodied hands down onto his thighs, tears spilling onto the burnt stomach of the boy who now lay unmoving upon the ground. When Doc Flannigan saw that the boy had died, he began to chuckle through his sobs, and then he laughed, and then he was howling with laughter, angry laughter; his voice became ragged and wet from the anger that existed somewhere between his misery and the morbid humors he hid behind.

Sergeant Fox walked over, and helped Doc Flannigan to his feet by his armpits, as one might a sulking child. He was sobbing still when Sergeant Fox took him by the hand, and led him over to a knee high wall made of mortared river stones to sit upon. Sergeant Fox handed him a bottle of water from his cargo pocket; when Doc Flannigan didn’t take it, Fox opened it himself, poured a small amount over the head of Flannigan, and then held it in front of his face. Slowly, hesitantly, Doc Flannigan took the bottle and sipped.

“I can’t do it anymore, Fox, I can’t.. I just can’t,” Doc Flannigan whispered.

Maybe it was the smell of the boy’s charred flesh, or maybe it was the lack of sleep clenching at the dried interior of his stomach, but Sergeant Fox suddenly vomited. A small amount of what looked like tar was trapped inside the pool of his spit. Doc Flannigan didn’t notice. Sergeant Fox shook his head, curing himself from a spell of dizziness.

The woman, seeing Doc Flannigan being led away, realized her son had died; she wailed, beat her chest, and pulled out chunks of her burnt hair by the fistful. Her screams were savage and terrifying. The interpreter did his best to comfort her but to no avail; the soldiers gave her space, scared or perhaps reminded by her grief of their own. A search of the area found that every other person in the village had been shot dead in their homes or soaked in some kind of fuel and burned. Each building was a charnel house, littered with corpses and stained with blood. The mother was the lone survivor. When her voice shattered and broke, she became calm, but was more dead than alive; alone she stalked along the street, moaning, her eyes unfocused and glazed.

As the search concluded, the lieutenant called out over the radio. *Alright, let’s head back to the trucks. There’s nothing more we can do here. Squad leaders, get your men back to their vehicles. Three-Three, meet me at the school house. Get your gear back on and bring Doc.*

When Sergeant Fox arrived, he had Doc Flannigan wait outside of earshot. “Sergeant Fox. We got a MEDEVAC bird coming in. First, cut down those bodies; bag the sheriff’s and bring it back with you; the TOC is gonna want a positive ID. Then I want you to take your boys, scoop up that woman with Doc, and take them back to Salerno. I want you to get Doc somewhere quiet and alone, and stay with him until I get there. You got it?”

Sergeant Fox nodded, and then his head sagged to the left.

The lieutenant cocked his head to the side. “Hey, you alright? You look like you dozed off there for a moment.”

Sergeant Fox straightened. “I’m fine, sir. I’ll see you back at the FOB.”

The men of Alpha Company lined up along the single road leading out of the village, and marched back to their trucks down the highway. Black smoke blew along the road, obscuring the soldiers as they left. Sergeant Fox gathered up his men and made for the same clearing they were dropped off in after finding the mother, who allowed herself to be dragged along with them in tow. She was still moaning to herself when the helicopter landed.

“Everyone onboard,” Sergeant Fox coughed.

His soldiers slowly filled the seats of the helicopter, taking their time to buckle themselves in. Doc Flannigan joined them afterwards; when Sergeant Fox went to guide the mother up the ramp, she pulled away from him and ran. Sergeant Fox cried out to her, but to no avail; a moment later, the woman flung herself through the doorway of her still-burning home as she screamed, “Insha Allah!”

She didn’t come back out.

“Hey, yo, Sergeant Fox! We gotsta go, man! Get on the bird!” The pilot screamed. It wasn’t Vee, but someone else; a different helicopter all together, Sergeant Fox noticed. Slowly, Sergeant Fox climbed aboard, his hands and heart aching with the effort. Doc Flannigan sat there watching the burning building, expressionless. Grime had accumulated along the tear-stains of his face.

The helicopter lifted up into the sky, and headed south to Salerno.

“Hey, Sarge! Sarge!” One of the seated soldiers said.

Sergeant Fox looked over at him. “What do you need?” His voice was mutilated.

“Haha, just wanted to say: you used too much tobasco, brother!” The soldier pointed at Sergeant Fox’s face. “I woulda thought my mix would’ve kept you awake, but guess not!”

Sergeant Fox furrowed his brow, confused. Removing one of his gloves, he reached up to touch his face and wiped away a single tear he hadn’t realized had fallen.

The Blackhawk touched down gently, just as the sun came up over the horizon. Sergeant Fox looked down; somehow, his seat harness was already off. Curious. He reached forward, missed the side wall of the Blackhawk, and fell face-first off the side of the helicopter. One of his soldiers helped him up, dusted him off, and then returned to the company of his fellows, all of which eyed their sergeant suspiciously. Doc Flannigan stood there next to him, motionless and empty.

Sergeant Fox blinked; he was down the walk way; he blinked again; he was along the aisle where his tent stood. He yawned, his rifle slid sideways down the sling strung across his back. When he looked down at the weapon, he left it dangling near his hip. When he looked back up, he was inside his tent, his gear, rifle, and shotgun in a clumsy pile around his feet. Somewhere inside, a speaker turned on and began playing music. He sat down on his makeshift bed, and dropped his face into his hands.

“Mail call, motherfuckers,” a voice droned from the tent flap. “Rise and shine; it’s just another beautiful day in Paradise! Oh, Sergeant Fox: congratulations on the re-enlistment going through last week!” Sergeant Fox looked up. A fist shoved three letters into his hands, the first of which was from his wife, her hand-writing was recognizable anywhere; the second was a letter in official print from the county municipal court back home; the third, a document envelope from his current bank.

Doc Flannigan sat across him; when he had appeared, Sergeant Fox had no idea. “You know what these three mean, right?” The mail orderly said.

“Get out,” Sergeant Fox said. The mail orderly was already gone. Time became lost.

Doc Flannigan stood up. “I’ll be at the bunker.”

“Get the fuck out,” Sergeant Fox said, weakly.

The music moaned and drawled, spilling across the inside of the tent like yellowed puss. Sergeant Fox didn’t recognize the tune, nor where it was coming from. The lyrics felt polluted and sickly, and the guitar riffs curled inside his gut like a clutch of talons.

The sun has fallen down.

                    And the billboards are all leering.

                                        And the flags are all dead, at the top of their poles -

When Doc Flannigan exited, Sergeant Fox looked down at his shotgun. He looked at the worn grooves of the stock, caked with Afghani dirt and sweat. His eyes traveled down the heat-shield of the slide all the way to the buttoned front of the sight post. His hands reached down and picked the firearm up, and set the buttstock down flush against the ground. He could still taste the tang of the gun-oil, muddied as it was, trapped in its mechanisms. He looked at his gloved hands; each bore splatters of dried blood from the man at the safe-house. He turned one over, and found skin from the murdered boy stuck to his palm –

                                                            You grabbed my hand and we fell into it,

                                        Like a daydream, or a fever.

                    We woke up one morning and fell a little further down.

For sure it’s the valley of death -

Carefully, he moved his face in front of the muzzle, staring down into the cyclopean abyss of the shotgun’s barrel.

I open up my wallet
And it’s full of blood.

When he reached down towards the trigger well, he slumped forward and onto his side, asleep.

Dan Marovich writes fiction, non-fiction, and the occasional work of fantasy. Born and raised in San Jose, California, Dan has travelled the world, been a soldier for the US Army, and later returned to his Bay Area home, where he continues to write while moonlighting as a student at San Jose State University.

The Father: An Exclusive Excerpt from "Patricide" A New Novel by D. Foy

September 13, 2016

He was our father, and he fucked us. — Rod Steiger

Suicidal, apt to crumple on a dime in fits, I was flown out to my father’s in his dustbowl town, where nothing was expected, said my father, the place would be all mine, take a job when you’re ready, said my father, or anything you like. I’m looking for my own work, said my father, but we’ll fix you up, and if you need it, said my father, we’ll go find it, that’s what really counts. You’ve only got to get here, said my father, that’s it. We’ll be together then, and together we’ll be good.

•

I stared into space at my father’s house of gloom for the days it took to find a piece of my old self, then turned into a freak, running miles at a pop and busting calisthenics. And then I was reading again, then I was rolling through the country to marvel at life in the fields of rye. I wrote foolish letters to my girl in California. I wrote awful poems and a story with no end.

Between my sadness and my guilt, taking from my father in his own bad luck—mortgage in arrears, sharks at his door—I couldn’t eat more than a taco a day and a bite or two of beans. One morning I spied a tub of cream in the fridge, and my mouth began to water. But just as I’d got the tub on the counter and cream on the spoon, ready to smear my taco up, my father, as usual, appeared.

“Put it back,” he said.

“What?”

“We’re saving that for a special occasion.”

The double take, that’s what I gave my father. He was serious, his face a stupid stone.

“You mean for the gala we’re having Friday night?” My father kept his stare. “It’s a dollop of sour cream, Dad.”

“I don’t care what it is,” my father said with The Voice he used so well at times like these. “When you’re in my house, you’ll live by my rules.”

“You have got to be kidding.”

“Next time, make sure you ask.”

Decades vanished, then, and I was a kid of seven. “But why?” I said.

“Because I said so, that’s why.”

After that, I’d have been stunned to see him roast a wiener, but a few days later my father announced our dinner that night with Suzie, the woman he’d somehow lately taken.

Compared to my mother, if just by looks, Suzie was a turd on a satin sheet. She had a mannish face and brittle hair, acid-washed jeans with blouses from Walmart and Sears. Add to these her arrogance, her coarse guffaws and filthy mouth—“You’re getting so skinny,” she said to me once, “you’re going to fall through your asshole and choke yourself!”—and you were face to face with the best of the worst, as in the best-lack-all-conviction worst.

My father was getting naked with this cretin.

My father was sticking his penis in this cretin as she grunted her imperatives.

And the more I saw my father curtsy like a dolt in two left shoes, and the more I caught my father jumping at her orders and laughing at her jokes, the harder it became to look him in the eye.

We were greeted by a waitress in suspenders plagued with buttons. There were bogus flamingos and bogus plants and tuck-and-roll banquettes. Roy Orbison-cum-Muzak sealed the mood, and stale air. Then, as the waitress told her “specials,” my father said, under his breath, “Nothing fancy, got it?” I looked at him, like before. “Chicken or pasta,” he said.

Suzie gobbled up her surf and turf, then sucked her teeth and told a joke with pitchforks and dead babies while my father used his card to pay the bill. On it, where the tip should’ve been, was a zero.

•

Thank God for California girl.

Three weeks later, in mid-June, she flew out for a visit. We got nice in the honkytonks on Route 66 and, for all the chumps to see, screwed at dusk in my father’s yard. And then she was gone, to our city by the bay, and I was left to stumble from my dream.

Two weeks on again, when I could take no more of my quarantine or my father, she bought my ticket home, where I let a flat with a couple psychotic Irishmen. One got me hired by a builder, then attacked me with a hammer when the boss put me in charge. The other was a creep who[JSR1] murdered cats and stabbed his friends with darts when they were drunk.

•

My father was the man who never let you sleep when he couldn’t sleep, the man who came to you before the sun had risen to drive to the mountain to see it rise, then, stoned as ever, head down to the donut shop where none but old men and reprobates gripped their cups and spun their yarns through clouds from hissing batter. My father hauled you down your paper route then drove you to the creek for pollywogs and snakes. My father saw your glories and defeats on baseball fields and soccer fields, and listened to the stories of your exploits in the hills, your blacktop brawls, your reasons for loss, your little white lies and confessions of guilt, your knock-knock jokes, ridiculous, the piss-pot woes of your teenaged heart, all the while withholding his own, hidden in his beard, his buzz, the days he didn’t show, his omnipresent haze of fear—of the truth of his life, the grief he’d not tracked for what could only have been a cavalcade of losses and defeats from the childhood he’d survived himself: here expelled from the contest for his drawing of a stag his teachers judged a fraud—there bereft of the father he’d never had save in lore, dearly beloved anyway, as you knew forthwith when my father spoke his father’s name—here yet again, a man, trapped in the marriage my mother’s father had forced my father into when my mother told the monster she was pregnant at sixteen—and there again yet, blasted, with three sons at twenty-seven, his dreams on the wind and little in the bag but the hump along his path of failure and defeat.

And that was my father, now, trapped in his house, more a tomb than a home, the tyranny of his ruin bearing down.

Before I’d got out to my father’s, he was so much more than that. My father was my confidante, my cohort, my comrade in crime, my father was my mentor, my dealer, my captain, my king. And then, by the time I’d left—how can I say?—he was gone, my father, a wretch. I didn’t merely dislike my father, then. I hated him. But more than all the rest, even as I hated the man, I loved the father, still.

•

Denial’s the grace that shelters us till shelter is ourselves.

The truth of my father had always lain before me. And though I knew it had, I didn’t know I knew, nor could I have said it.

I didn’t want to know. It was just too much to know.

I avoided and denied the reality of my father as surely as my father had denied and avoided the reality of his own.

And nothing I did could obliterate my mother.

You couldn’t deny the illness of a woman who beat her son often, molested him in measures, tortured him a thousand ways. You couldn’t deny the illness of a woman whose kleptomania risked her family over and again, whose generally awful ways wrought disgrace in the least affair, from family gatherings and vacations to common times at bars and pools, or on a field trip to see how men made salt.

The logic of a child’s urge to flee such a woman, always, of the terror of a child made to live with such a woman, of the hunger of such a child for a spoonful of comfort and trust—none of these, either, can be denied. A child in these conditions, a child with just a sliver of will to survive, would cling fast to the human best ready to meet these needs.

For all my father’s weakness, my father was my haven, beyond which I saw just waste.

My mother tore my hair and clawed and slapped my face and neck.

My mother touched me with her hands and fucked me with her eyes, and with her words she fucked my mind, and when at last she’d finished, if merely for a time, she thrashed me with her spoons.

By contrast, punishment at my father’s hands was mild. My father whipped me with a belt sometimes, for reasons he explained: “You know why I’m whipping you, Son?”

Had these times made the whole of my harm by my father, they might have been excused. But these times did not make the whole of my harm by my father, or even just a few. When my father pressed together his first and second fingers, like a wooden dowel, he had a dowel with which to jab a chest. Equal pain, of course, through different means—accepted then for standard castigation—was brought down, too: curling, then squeezing, your son’s pinky, or with a finger thumping your son’s head, or dragging your son by his ear into banishment, the room of his exile, the corner he’d be made to stand.

And no matter the sentence, it was doled out always with The Voice of Paternal Law, The Voice of The Father, giant. My father may have deigned at times to spare these trials, but never The Voice of The Father, which alone sufficed to warn that past the limits of good faith, pain did lurk.

Still, when all was said and done, I felt a little safe knowing the worst that could happen by my father was a whipping with a belt. Some pokes to the chest? A twist of the ear or thump to the head? What were these to a beating with my mother’s spoons?

But wicked as they were, the creatures I’d seen in my father’s zoo of horror were not by far the worst. Behind the curtain behind the desk, rougher beasts were slouching yet.

D. Foy is the author of the critically acclaimed novel, Made to Break, and the novel, Patricide, releasing October 2016 (preorder here). His work has appeared in Guernica, Salon, Hazlitt, Post Road, Electric Literature, BOMB, The Literary Review, Frequencies, Midnight Breakfast, The Scofield, and The Georgia Review, among others, and has been included in the books Laundromat and Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial. Visit his website at www.dfoyble.com.

Tender Meat By Jennifer Love

June 1, 2016

by Jennifer Love

Me and Baby Rae like to talk about how we’re gonna get out of here soon. We both have big plans. She’s gonna be a school bus driver, and I’ll probably find Jesus or something. I just need to experience a great miracle to make me believe. Then I’m gonna be saved.

The chili always burns black at the bottom of the pot. That’s why they’ve let Baby Rae stay here so long, because she’s the only one who’s got the sinew in her arms to scrape the iron clean again. “I’ll tell you a secret, Tiny,” she had said when I was first assigned to kitchen duty with her. “I got a deal with the cook. She always burns the food a little on purpose, gives me something to work with. Keeps me off the streets til I get going on my bus license.”

My secret is that I watch her work out of the corner of my eye, I love to watch the rumbling muscle and fat. Baby Rae has great big folds of flesh and great big grooves around her eyes, she is stout and strong and steeped in rare wisdoms, pluckable as grapes. Like what she said before my first job interview. A shower ain’t enough, honey. You gotta go down to the Walgreen’s and pick out a 99 cent tube of lipstick. You wear lipstick, people think you got money, you know? She’s smart like that. Took a lot for her to get this way, though, living in the shelter for a record amount of time and not hearing a peep from no one about moving on. I know she had a baby boy and that baby boy isn’t hers anymore, because I guess somehow his school found out she was shooting up at home. The story’s a little fuzzy. She always gets to blubbering before long.

I stay quiet when Baby Rae gets to talking about her son. A long time ago, I had tried to explain to her about my own experience as a mother. Tried to say, hey, I know what it’s like. To give birth. And then to lose your kid. But she didn’t understand, because my baby was born into the hands of a fortune teller named Grace who I had found in the Yellow Pages after a long night of contemplating the vast mystery of the future. And I guess to her, that isn’t quite the same.

I reach back to the furthest tentacles of my mind, take myself out of the salty haze of the kitchen and back to that most important day. I am fifteen years old. I am wearing a sweatshirt that hangs halfway to my knees. I am on her doorstep, and then I am inside her house, sinking into the folds of her couch, breathing through my mouth and holding my hand out expectantly as she rustles through the contents of a drawstring bag. “I’d like to see my future, please,” I say.

She makes me pay before she will touch me. Takes my ten dollar bill, then takes my hand and glides her crackled fingertips across its surface. Retrieves a stone to press into its center. Oils the fingers, a different oil for each one, from tiny bottles she produces from the depths of her bag. Stones. Oils. And a knife. This she lifts with great ceremony before running the blade along the creases of my palm, drawing bubbling red threads to the surface.

“I didn’t know those were under there,” I breathe. When I touch them, they smear.

She strokes my wrist with her thumb. “Are you ready, baby?”

Her voice is barely audible. If I speak out loud, I fear the moment may break. My head nods before I know what I’m agreeing to.

She sinks the knife deeper into my palm, angling it towards my wrist. She’s reaching for something, I know. She’s finding something important inside of me, and I feel no pain at all.

Something bloody and gelatinous is on the end of her knife, as she pulls four inches of blade out of my flesh. She scoops it out of the meat of my hand and lays it, with reverence, across my other open palm.

“A baby duck,” she sighs, eyes glittering. “An embryo.”

The glazed eye of my offspring gazes up at me. Grace takes my hand again, pulls a needle and thread through the incision she has left.

“Will it survive?” I ask. “Is it going to grow up?”

She just nods, breaking the thread with her teeth. Taking my hand, she leads me to her front porch. She kisses the embryo, staining her lips red before she retreats into her house and shuts the door.

“Grace, wait!” I try the door, but it’s locked. I shake the knob to make the hardware rattle. “What about my future? You never told me!”

I bang on the door with my stitched hand, keeping my baby cupped carefully in the other. She pulses warm and wet in my palm. “Grace! What does this mean?”

It seems as if my voice should echo, but it doesn’t. I desperately need Grace to let me back in, but she won’t. The night, unsympathetic to my situation, descends. So I just slush home.

I named her Meatball. The little duck. My daughter. I cracked eggs over her miraculous body each day, gently massaged the yolk into her skin. Meatball was my moon and sun. She grounded me during my time of navigating life as a disoriented Canada goose, two states behind and wondering when everyone else was going to catch up. She started the thaw within me, organs materializing from the soup of my cells and groaning slowly to life. The world was becoming real with her every imperceptible breath; life could be more than something I thought about from afar, formless and alone, wondering when everyone else was going to catch up.

Frozen, thawed, back in flight-- life could be more than something I thought about in my sleep.

But I am not fifteen anymore. I am not with Grace, I am with Baby Rae. And she has moved on. Now she is telling me that if she’d had a man, she would still have her kid, and she’d have a job and a house and all that. Playing the game, she calls it. That’s how you gotta do life, she advises.

She cracks her dishtowel, slings it across the wire rack. “You know, Tiny, you’re a cute little thing. I don’t know why you don’t just pick a man off the street, get him wrapped round your finger. You’d be all tucked up in a nice house in no time.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“Like hell it ain’t. Wait til you’re my age, see what you think ‘bout it then. You can give me a call.” Baby Rae pulls the stopper out of the drain and meanders out of the kitchen, squawking with laughter. “Cos you know if I ain’t dead yet, I’m still be here!”

Baby Rae doesn’t know about the last time I tried anything like that. I had been scooting down the strip mall at the edge of town, a shopkeeper after me for stealing a can of beans. The bowling alley had seemed like a safe haven from the outside, with a faded sign promising fun for the whole family. Inside was dim and interplanetary, every surface yellowed by fluorescent beams. I ran for the lanes and slid down the first alley I reached, dropping my body low, gliding under the ten-pin triangle suspended and into the dark. My feet slammed into a metal grate. What the hell, a voice said from the other side, a voice that I would later know as that of my angel, my angel took a socket wrench to the grate and pulled it down with a clang so I could hop out, and I hopped.

“Who are you?” I asked him. He had a greasy black mustache that I trusted with my life. His body was shaped like a beautiful egg.

“I feel like I should be the one asking the questions here,” he said with something like a grunt, or maybe a laugh. I waited. I checked on Meatball. She was a fluffed-up duckling by that time.

The man cleared his throat and puffed out his chest a little. “My name’s Dave. I’m the pinsetter mechanic.”

He showed me the supply closet to hide in when the owner came back a minute later to bang on the door, said I don’t know man, she ran out that way, I don’t know, she didn’t say nothing to me until he left, and I asked from inside the closet if he had a wife, and he didn’t hear me so I came out of the closet and asked again, and he didn’t say nothing to me, and my insides snapped for a second and my eyes darted to the door, until he asked me hey kid, you gonna be okay if I sneak you out, and I didn’t say nothing to him, and that’s how I ended up sleeping in the musty space behind the bowling lanes, eating the food he brought me, feeding Meatball the oats and peas he brought her, spending my days plotting how I was gonna get out of there and into his house, where I could have a real bed instead of an inflatable mattress on the ground, and real showers instead of baby wipes and weekly trips in the middle of the night to the campground showers just out of town. I spent a long time on my teeth in those concrete restrooms in the cold and the dark and the night. Convinced that if I brushed them long enough, they would get sharp like fangs.

His wife’s name was Barbara. I had to ask him four different times if she was fake until he showed me a picture in his wallet. He loves her very much, he said, but that’s why I gotta stay here. He gets it, he said, but she don’t. And he kinda likes it, he said, having a little secret to keep.

“You guys don’t have any kids, right? Can’t you adopt me?” I asked him one day, and again. He didn’t say nothing to me. “Do you think of me as a daughter? Or more like a captive, illicit love?”

He snorted. “Come on, kid. You’re only old enough to be my daughter.”

“So I am your daughter, then?”

He watches the pins through the grates, spinning, spinning, spinning into place. From where I sit on my mattress, I can see every single line in his skin.

“Sure, Tiny. You can be my kid.”

I could be his kid. Until the night I was woken by the sound of pins crashing against one of the grates, and his voice, and something less familiar. The voice of a girl. Younger than Barbara. I scrambled out of bed and pressed my eyeball to the grate and saw her, my age but prettier than me, pretending she didn’t know how to roll the ball so that he would put his arm next to hers and he put his arm next to hers and behind them on the plastic seats, a cherry slushie he must have gotten her from the snack shack, he would’ve had to turn the machine back on for that and then clean it again before the morning crew arrived and I knew this because he’d done it for me and until that night, for me alone, and I saw the way they were looking at each other, and I pulled on my sweatshirt and shoved Meatball in the pocket and wrenched out the bolts and pulled down the grate and ran down the line at the side of the lane, picked up a bowling ball, and they were yelling but I couldn’t hear what they were saying and they were yelling and I threw the bowling ball at her head, and I didn’t throw it hard enough, and it landed with a bone-cracking smack on the ground that I became certain was the sound of my heart breaking.

She’s my niece, he thundered after me as I ran to the front doors, clasping another bowling ball against my chest. And here’s what happened next: first, his hand clamped down on my arm. Second, every nerve ending in my body shrieked. Third, my entire being pulled itself away from his grasp, a great surge of revulsion pushing forward so hard that my sick-mouse feet couldn’t keep up and one kicked the other and I fell, hard, on the hardwood, on my left hip. The pocket with Meatball inside. I felt her little bird bones popping against mine, the warm blood seeping through my sweatshirt, and my baby girl was dead, a mess of flesh in my pocket. A sob rose from my stomach, but I couldn’t think about it then.

At the front doors, I threw the bowling ball against the glass and this time it worked, the glass shattered, sent the screech of an alarm across the building and into the night. It sounded like silver blood, just like me, and it almost drowned out Dave in the background, his footsteps, his voice, still yelling, Tiny, you fucking crazy bitch, she’s my niece.

Two lungs later I laid flat on the side of the highway, arms outstretched like an angel. My bones were aching like they wanted me to tear them out or something, bury them in someone’s backyard until a hush settled in. Made them docile. I thought of all those glittering fragments of glass, suspended for milliseconds before raining down on the pavement. And my body a tiny angel, fluttering amongst the iridescence, avoiding the sharp edges with the practiced bobs and weaves of someone who has felt them before. Laying far out in the dark, I considered whether I really cared that Dave had some other stupid girl with a ponytail, or if I just thought I should. Sometimes it’s hard to tell how much of what I’m doing is me, and how much is a hand slipping through the cracks in my skin and knotting against my spine.

The sobs had long subsided, faded to kitten hiccups in my throat. I felt convinced that no one in history has felt as hard, as much as I do, no one else has ever laid flat on the ground on the side of the road in the middle of everywhere with their baby’s mangled body turning crusty against their hip, fucking freezing and waiting for the earth to split open beneath their back, waiting to fall, praying for a home or a hand or something to catch them on the other side. No one else has ever been so close to the void.

I stayed like that, a bloodstained palm to the sky, until the cops came to take me away.

But it’s okay. You know? People are always talking about how everything is okay. I’m gonna be saved. And Baby Rae’s gonna get her certificate and become a school bus driver, probably in Kentucky, she says. Where they have white picket fences and green grass, the kinda shit you don’t see round here, she says. I dig my nails into the blackened grit at the bottom of the pot, and the grit bites back. I’ll be there, too. When I’m an angel, back in flight. Higher than the sun. I’m gonna be saved. I swear. I’m gonna be saved. I’m just waiting for the miracle.

Jennifer Love is a writer, artist, and Bay Area native. She currently resides in San Jose, teaching literacy skills to ESL learners and working on a collection of short stories.

CATEGORIES: ART / CULTURE / MUSIC / FILM PROSE / DESIGN / FASHION

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Françoise Hardy’s memoir
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