UPON ARRING HOME, PARTS 2 & 3

2. How to Build Chicago-Style Deep Dish (Annetti’s Pizza)

The crust is made with my 4^th birthday cake,
soccer in the alley behind my house, two golden
retrievers, and Beastwars. The secret is a pinch of
hiding homework in my desk during 1^st grade.

That’s covered with piles of melted divorce.
Mainly made up of wondering where my mother
went and her eventual return, though my father’s
depression or their constant anger are sometimes
used. Some say this is the most important part.

Then add whichever shame I’m feeling. My usual
is kicking Jeanine’s bike until she fell to the
ground bleeding. I never go without it.

Finally, in the twist that makes this pizza unique,
you add the meetings with Ms. Snyder. Whether
from a can or fresh, it’s always unconditional
acceptance that I still work to deserve. That’s
seasoned with late night coffee at IHOP on
Mannheim, D&D until the sun came up, Lend Me
a Tenor, marching band, and the first time I read a
book all the way through.

One slice is enough. I take two.

3. The Legend of Yanni (Phoenix Restaurant)

Yanni wakes up at three on Thursdays, leaves the warmth of his family for the city he’d rather forget just to make egg lemon soup. He’s always there before the day knows it’s started and spends the first hours of its yawn stirring large vats in the kitchen. No one is allowed to see Yanni work. It’s said that he won’t make it more than once a week because good things don’t happen more often than that. Once, a manager tried to count the eggs that went missing but due to arithmetic or conspiracy always found a different number. The guy quit after two months but comes in every week for a quart to take home. To experience the soup is enough.

After the workday he doesn’t note, Yanni comes in to eat what he’s created. He waits until someone takes the counter seat next to his then taps the bottom of his bowl with the spoon. When he has their attention, he confesses:

There are no secrets.
It’s a gift from my yia-yia.
I make it for her.

MICHAEL VANCALBERGH’s work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Golgonooza Collective, Last Leaves Magazine, Puerto del sol, and many others. He is an editor at SRPR and writes essays on books, reading, and writing on his website Widely Read.

THE WHOLE LOT OF US

by Claire Lee

Mary’s old house, the stucco one off Poplar, burned to the ground last Saturday from a heating malfunction, nothing left but the dead roach in her kitchen, belly-up, three legs bent sideways. She had moved away a week prior, fancied herself some kind of writer, a born again romantic. She hasn’t been talking about it too much, but I know Mary believes in signs. Mary speaks the kind of language that makes you good at spotting constellations. We talked on the phone the other day, her screenplay, my marriage, the way the sun across both of our coasts seems to trickle into the cracks of our sunscreen. I was looking at our old debate trophies on my cabinet, the ones from back in college (I was “Most Improved,” Mary had won Sainthood), when she started talking about how maybe the whole lot of us might be doomed.

THE GUY FROM THE FUNERAL HOME DOESN’T THINK I’M FUNNY ANYMORE

by Claire Lee

I dreamt once of a sound, like something in my bones, like my sisters in the car when we got hit, the blood from her nose and the man in the santa costume. We still went to church and I did the lights on a cheap floor lamp and baby jesus was my neighbor’s nephew. It was a silly walk, remembered only by the blister on my pinky toe, but I can still taste the December Memphis cement, the candy from the corner store left for dust in my stocking. Sour like August, old, mothy, like my dead uncle’s house and the records he gave me when I was twelve. At night, I dream like a movie, the kinds I would never want to watch, and when I wake up, I hit the ground, mouth salty as a sore throat. Christmas has been thinning out, but maybe we all died that one year, maybe the pageant was our entry into the kingdom of god and his multiracial family or whatever. I’ve never been to a wedding but I’m almost done with my funeral punch card. One more and I get a free ice cream. Once a year, my mom makes banana bread in the morning but no one eats it anymore, busy chugging bloody marys to make sure the alcoholics in the family stay dead, the holy line ends with us. I want life for breakfast, early, before it gets weird.

ON THE RISING TREND OF EVERYONE BEING A BIVALVE INVERTEBRATE OR: A DEFENSE OF MISANDRY

by Claire Lee

If I put a gun to your head, how many bowls of pasta could
you eat right now (sauce, garnish, gristmill included). Comrade,
you think too highly of yourself, even if you believe in some innate

spine of honesty, a mollusk emptied of meat, still filtering algae from
its oil-drenched dock. The oyster from last week didn’t have just
one Jack Kerouac tattoo, and you would think two a mistake, three
a joke, but he kept going, a motel-room prophet jotting down lines,
every arrival rehearsed, every exit Quixotic. Imagine how embarrassing,

to contract norovirus from someone like that, sickness claiming the
functions of your stomach while he explains jazz and
Elizabethan poetry. The enjambment helps you feel the shock (apparently).

My short friend won the pasta contest, considering I could
only eat two bowls before my pride started swallowing itself.
The IUD was settling in like a parasite,
and I knew it was unreasonable to ask for a ride back from the clinic.
Call me when you’re done swimming,
tell me how the bread molds quietly, before anyone can notice.
Sometimes talking feels like looking at you from outside the cave,
watching shadows pretend at jokes, a mime working a crowd,
an audience laughing up seawater.
I’m not sure I’ve ever met a man I liked better than myself.

But I know that’s another kind of narrative,
(another way of being consumed).

My friend and I have started hitting each other as a form of resolution,
trading hail marys for the precipitous hiss of a rattling skull.
I’m not sure I’ve ever met a man whose spine wasn’t borrowed for the night,
an oyster not shucked, cracked open, swallowed whole.
Five Jack Kerouac tattoos would be just absurd;
good thing he had six.

CLAIRE LEE is a writer and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. Their work appears or is forthcoming in Ninth Letter, The Pinch, Scapegoat Magazine, Pictura Journal, and others. For more, visit ClaireBLee.com.

WHIRLAWAY

by Sheldon Birnie

Circle left. Allamande right. Do-si-do.

Gerard, the caller Friday nights, is good. Real good. He keeps us moving. Keeps the mood light. The polished hardwood of the community centre hall flashes beneath waves of crinoline, denim, sensible footwear and colourful polyester western shirts as we follow where Gerard leads.

Been calling 32 years, Gerard tells me one night, over a cigarette out front of the community centre after the dancing’s wrapped. In the cold. Dad used to call, he says. Kept him outta trouble dang near every weekend.

Which, more or less, is how I found myself here every other Friday night. Every Friday night I don’t have the kids.

Swing, buddy, swing. Roll away to a half-sashay. Swing your partner, round and round.

Square dancing is about the only place you can dance with someone else’s spouse without causing a tussle.

Or so Sheila’s fond of saying, throwing her head back and laughing that old smoker’s laugh every time. Heard her say it plenty of times since. She first told me that in group, a year or so back now, when she was tryna get me to come giver a try one of these evenings, after she spotted me wearing a Dwight Yoakam tee at a meeting.

Myself, I don’t need to worry about a tussle. Part of the reason I ended up in group in the first place. Wasn’t only the drinking what led to the divorce, though. Things were bad enough anyhow. But it didn’t help, and it only made things worse once we finally split. There were some dark days, darker nights there for a while.

Getting on the straight and narrow, that’s what it took to keep the kids—Sammy and Janine, my adorable little scamps—coming around every second weekend. Worth it for that alone. But I’m finding plenty of other reasons, too, as the days keep coming. Now, the nights don’t seem so long as they did, back then. Nor so full of strange lights and darker shadows.

Chase your lady round the two. Lady round the two. Gent cut through. Join hands and circle half. Dive through.

This here’s an older crowd, for sure. I’m the youngest out there, by far. But it’s not so bad. Folks are friendly, thoughtful, caring. They don’t judge my missteps, nor care what brought me here. So long as I do my best to keep up with Gerard and bring a box of donuts every now and then, things are just ticketyboo.

It was the so-called conspiracy stuff—her words—that really set the old lady off. Back when we were together, that is. Lights in the sky at night and unmarked black vans parked down the block and that buzzing in the background on the phone. I can see that now. Can admit that, now. She thought I’d gone crazy. Unhinged. Off the deep end. Again, her words. Didn’t want the kids coming up in that environment, she said. Didn’t want them living in a quote-unquote alternate reality. Reality’s all the same, I’d try to tell her. Here, there, every fuckin where. It’s only the veils we see it through that differ.

But that didn’t hold much water with the ex. No way Jose. I guess I see her point. Too little too late. But I was only asking questions. Questions that had been bugging me for years. Trying to find answers. What’s wrong with seeking answers?

Duck for the oyster. Dig for the clam. Dive for the hole in that old tin can.

Now, the answers I found—or thought I’d found—took me on a journey she didn’t want no part of. I don’t blame her. Not anymore. I hadn’t bargained on undertaking it myself. Took more than a few turns I didn’t see coming. It got dark there for a while. Real dark. But they say the darkest hour comes right before the dawn. Buy the ticket, buckle the fuck up, bud. Keep giviner.

Had I never seen them things I seen—lights in the woods, hunting; patterns in what they were broadcasting on the TV—would have never started asking questions. Never asked questions, never would have gotten any answers. Never would have known that having the answer sometime don’t amount to nothing. Answers only lead to more questions. More questions that need answers.

Bird fly out. Hawk fly in. Hawk fly out. Give birdie a swing.

They say you dance with the one that brought ya. Square dancing, though, that’s not always the case. You can dance with anyone, long as you know where you stand. Like as not, though, you end up more or less where you started. I like that. The world outside these walls, it’s not like that. I’ve come to accept it. But it’s nice to be in a place that makes sense. And I gotta tell ya, I’m in the best shape I’ve been in since the kids were born. Just from following Gerard’s calls, and putting one foot in front of the other. One foot in front of the other, over and over and over again.

Lady go gee. Gent go haw. All the way round until you meet your ma.

When the dancing’s done for the evening, the ladies who run the club bring out dainties and coffee. I always stick around, even though the coffee’s no better than the swill they serve at group. But it’s not like I’m gonna be dropping off to sleep straight away once I get home anyways. I stick around, chat with the old timers. They’ll ask about my kids, I’ll ask about their grandkids. We’ll talk about the Bombers or the Jets. How bad the roads are getting at this end of town. Whatever. It’s enjoyable enough talk, even if it don’t mean much. Maybe just because.

Sometimes, I’ll even stick around for a second cup. But I don’t ever talk about the lights in the sky or the black vans or the buzzing on my phone. My ex, she’d like to think I don’t believe in that stuff any longer. I do, but not like when we were together. Just before I was at my lowest there. Now, it’s just something I know’s out there, but that I don’t pay much mind. Like gravity, death, daylight savings time. Just some more shit I got no control over.

Sometimes, though, I wonder what some of these old timers might say if I were to bring it up. They seen some things in their day, no question; Gerard and Sheila, Bill and Judy. Whoever. Might make some wild conversation. But I don’t say nothing about it. Not any of it. Instead, we just talk square dancing. Probably better that way.

Circle left. Allamande right. Centres load the boat. Now pass on through. Do-si-do, good buddy. Do-si-do.

Sheldon Birnie is a writer, dad, and beerleague hockey player living in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. He is the author of the short story collections Where the Pavement Turns to Sand as well as the forthcoming More Strange Visions, both with Malarkey Books.

TRAVIS DAHLKE is a writer from Connecticut with work appearing in Joyland, Pithead Chapel, Electric Lit, HAD, and Juked, among other journals and collections. He is the author of Mount Summer (Out to Lunch Records, 2021) and Milkshake (Long Day Press, 2022). His novel Green Bears is forthcoming from Malarkey in 2027. Find more at travis-dahlke.com.

BEST PRACTICES

by Lori Barrett

The Board stands next to me on the train. They followed me from the meeting, all five of them, sweating in their wrinkle-resistant jackets and trousers. I find a seat and put in earbuds. One of them peers over my shoulder to see what I queue up on Spotify. Is this the best use of your time, he asks. He mentions a podcast about finance and makes a note in his leather binder.

They’re panting by the third floor of my apartment building. Does your landlord own a vacuum, a guy in a mustard blazer asks. I put a frozen pizza in the oven without preheating. Did you read the directions, the only woman on the board asks. I roll my eyes. I think I can bake a frozen pizza, I say. Martha Stewart said you don’t need to preheat. Martha did time, the woman reminds me. She opens her laptop and enters notes in a spreadsheet.

I plate my pizza. While my cupboard is open mustard-blazer guy points out that my dishes don’t match. I take my pizza to the sofa, but the Board is sitting there, so I take the chair in the corner handed down from my brother because it’s covered in dog drool. The Board turns on the TV. It’s frozen on a detective show I’d been watching the night before, a scene where the hungover detective smokes next to a nail salon. I think it makes my apartment smell like cigarettes. They immediately put on a show called Fast Money. The woman admires my coffee table. It’s a beautiful slab of walnut designed by my ex, the sides flowing from each end of the surface to rest on my thrifted carpet. Waterfall, he called it.

I don’t see any coasters, the woman says. You have to be careful about return on investment with a piece of furniture like this.

The only thing I invested was my silence when my ex returned from a furniture expo and spoke in plural first person. Who is this we, I asked. Other furniture sellers, he said. Even when you left the convention to sightsee, I wondered. Even when you ate breakfast?

The guy on TV yells about short term liabilities and an asset light model. Mustard blazer opens his binder and pulls out a sheet of paper that says BEST PRACTICES at the top. Below is a bar chart tracing the number of drinks I had last week. A pie chart shows frozen pizza consumption over the last quarter, with a side tab displaying cold pizza eaten at breakfast. A line graph for performance nose dives to the bottom of the Y axis: physical activity. A biohazard symbol is stamped over each entry in a list of household chores.

More like worst practices, says the guy sweating in a white turtleneck.

We only want to foster accountability, the woman says. If you plan to have dividends one day, you’re going to need to take account of your successes and failures.

A different news program starts, called Mad Money. The host gesticulates in front of flashing screens. The board is transfixed.

I take my plate to the kitchen. I turn on the window fan. Loose pages fly from binders.

We can’t hear the business news, the one in khakis says.

I turn the fan off and go to my room to find a pair of shorts. My ex and I talked about children. He would have been a great parent: patient and creative. In the end he chose to spread his risk. Diversification, the Board would call it.

Since then there’s been a blemish growing in my chest, like one of the knots or bolt holes he admires in barn wood. Some mix of memories, resentment, and words I swallowed as we ate over this coffee table, watching smoking detectives on TV?

I return to my seat in the corner. I lean back and accidentally pull down a string of fairy lights I’d hung with mounting tape. The sticky strip falls to the floor, covered in dust. The lights land over my shoulders like a boa. I reach behind me and plug them in. I’m a superhero.

I stand up to walk them to the door, stopping before my glow loses power.

Lori Barrett still has the trophy she won for being quietest in her high school graduating class many decades ago. Her writing has appeared in Salon, Citron Review, Laurel Review, Maudlin House, New World Writing and Identity Theory. She’s an assistant fiction editor at Pithead Chapel. Find more of her work at LoriBarrettwrites.com.

DOUBLE POINTS

by Claire Hopple

Wait, this can’t be right. By the looks of it, I’m sitting out back of a pizza parlor with a horde of rabid opossums beside me. Big mistake.

It’s a Wednesday, which doesn’t mean anything. Especially not to me. Not anymore.

We appear to be eating what I can only assume is leftover pizza. I want to claim it all for myself and give these opossums the dumpster crusts, but they’ll know. They’ll test. Just look at them.

The pizza parlor was a nice place once.

As you can probably tell, morale is low. I’m regretting my major life decision to let myself make major life decisions.

Last thing I remember is picking up a few things at the grocery store. The usual stuff. Not much to speak of. A disembodied voice spoke overhead about getting double points of some kind. These points are highly valued for the obtaining of an acrid liquid that poisons us and our surroundings but makes us impressively mobile. Double the points gets you double the liquid gets you double the poison gets you double the mileage to a destination that ultimately makes you feel anxious. Even if you love it there, you’ll want to leave and return home as soon as possible. This liquid is called gas, which is not a gas at all, but a liquid, as we’ve already established. That’s what the grocery store spokeswoman should’ve said over the loudspeaker, but she wasn’t even willing to show herself in public. And I didn’t have any coupons. I haven’t had any coupons for quite some time. Maybe I can build up to it.

Now I’m throwing pepperonis at opossums. So this is what companionship looks like. Maybe they’ll show me some illicit trash they’ve stored in a special hiding spot, that is if they don’t bite me first. Depends on whether they have something to prove. But really they’re no longer paying attention to me.

I do remember the grocery store smelled like money, like there was some kind of shakedown right before I arrived. I always miss the action. Money used to smell like pennies, back when pennies were considered money. These days pennies are considered parking lot litter, or at best some glove compartment percussion for your commute. Pennies smell like copper because they’re made of copper. And copper smells like blood, which should be where the term “blood money” comes from, but it means something else entirely, which is a little disappointing.

What I was really doing at that grocery store was casually spying on someone. But I was also studying the rest of the shoppers at random intervals, noting how many layers they’d shellacked overtop their quiet desperations.

Earlier that day, I had tampered with company policy. I was reworking some stipulations and got a little carried away. The thing about tampering with policies is that you can turn companies into time bombs. I added a line or two about the boss being required to pop out of a giant cake in order to fire someone. And including mini bottles in the vending machines. That’s all.

Oh, and I might’ve punched a guy out.

“You call those exploits?” I think I hear the Grand Opossum say, but I don’t know how to break it to him that he can’t speak English.

When I punched the new guy for trying to teach me a life lesson, all my workmanship fluttered to the ground, those beautiful nonsense sentences falling on his feet.

“Too bad about your nose. That dent oughta help,” I said to him while he was still grounded, learning how to breathe through coagulated carpet fibers.

Turns out that altering company policy and attacking a coworker does nothing. They didn’t care. Somehow everyone was buying it. Low morale? Low morale.

There’s no law against spying on your boss, attempting to determine whether she’s going to pop out of a cake just to terminate you in the proper fashion. But there is a law against starting a physical altercation. You get what I mean.

“Does it make a difference? Nothing can be done about it,” I say to the empty space where the opossums are no longer convening.

The secret to a good marriage is never coming home, and that’s exactly what I’m doing. The missus and I got married at the Mall of America, back when they still had a Chapel of Love. Back when my wife was still getting married competitively. I was Groom Number Six. She taught me how to cheat death along with some other practical skills that shouldn’t be mentioned here because you’d get bored reading them.

Maybe my boss has lost all her power over me. Maybe she’s still struggling to scan a barcode in the self-checkout line, skirting around the periphery of her disdain for me. She has no pizzazz. She’s never had any pizzazz. When someone doesn’t have pizzazz, everybody else knows it. She’s probably the reason that morale is low.

She does this every day, the thing with the numbers. Crunching them. She can really crunch, and she will not let you forget it.

A pizza parlor employee in a stained apron busts through the back door for a cigarette break, takes one look at me, and runs into the woods. That’s more like it. Now I really have this place all to myself.

For my next trick, I’ll become a celebrity under an assumed name. Hold seances for all those people who never learned how to cheat death. Develop an exercise book. Whatever it takes. When the time is right, I’ll make a move. But you can never be sure with me.

CLAIRE HOPPLE is the author of six books. Her stories have appeared in Southwest Review, Forever Mag, Wigleaf, Cleveland Review of Books, and others. More at clairehopple.com.

MUNGER ROAD

by Mallory Smart

Dave’s been dead six months and still texts like we’re cool.

The first time, I was drunk in the Portillo’s parking lot and thought it was some kind of glitch.

Second time, it just said: you coming out here or what.

No name. Just a number I should’ve deleted.

I didn’t believe in ghosts, but I believed in Dave’s bad ideas. And of course I knew the story before he ever told it.

Munger Road was something everyone did. Your cousin. Your sister. Somebody’s older brother who swore it happened to a friend.

Every place has an urban legend. Jersey has the Devil. West Virginia’s got Mothman. Ours was Munger Road.

You park on the tracks. Dust the bumper with baby powder. Put the car in neutral. Wait.

If you get handprints, the dead kids saved you.

If not, you were already dead and didn’t know it.

It was the Kirkland Signature of hauntings. But we still did it.

Dave brought Axe instead of powder. Said nothing haunts like eighth-grade confidence.

He once made me blast “Suburban Homeboy” by Sparks while we waited. Said it was the kind of song that made things feel like they were building toward something.

We listened with the windows down, and even the trees looked like they were holding their breath.

He always thought he was the main character. Now he’s part of the story we tell. Maybe the message begged for closure. Or maybe I just went because the movie came out.

It had been years since we’d gone out there together.

I parked where we used to. Killed the engine. Checked my phone. Still nothing.

By then he was just a forwarded email. A chain message. Some urban legend in an inbox no one opened.

They said it was suicide.

But legends never die clean.

And the thing is, I wanted the handprints.

Even now, I wanted something to touch me.

A breeze came through the corn. Dry. Aimless.

I lit a cigarette I didn’t want and rolled the window down like maybe something would crawl in.

Waited. Nothing moved but the smoke.

Then my phone lit up: look behind you.

I didn’t. I just sat there.

MALLORY SMART is a Chicago-based writer who loves keeping it weird. She’s the author of I Keep My Visions to Myself and The Only Living Girl in Chicago, the host of the podcast Textual Healing, and Editor-in-Chief of Maudlin House, an indie press for restless, unapologetic voices. Her work shows up where you least expect it and lingers longer than it should. Fine more at mallorysmart.com.

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VERY IMPORTANT PEOPLE

by Mike Nagel

Not long ago, I was sitting on the tarmac at Sea-Tac waiting for the plane to take off when a thin, grey smoke started billowing out of the air vents. Later I’d learn that it was harmless condensation, common for planes sitting on hot runways. At the time, though, it seemed like the end.

I looked around the plane to see how my fellow passengers were handling their fates. I’m proud to report that they were handling it well. The nerve of the interstate American traveler remains steadfast. Nobody seemed to mind that our plane was on fire. They were too busy playing on their iPads. iPads have come a really long way in the past few years. I’ve heard you can play Call of Duty on them now.

I was sitting back in economy class with the rest of the nobodies. Back where your comfort is not a major priority for the flight crew or airline. Back where you only get one complimentary drink and the wi-fi costs $10. Back where the plane can be on fire and you know better than to complain. They don’t know your name back here. They know your seat number.

“22b needs something again,” I would hear one of the flight attendants whisper between drink services, rolling her eyes at the sheer nerve of someone asking for what turned out to be a cup of water.

This kind of abuse takes some getting used to. Most of us have been building up a tolerance to it our entire lives, but I’d made the mistake of adjusting to a certain level of VIP treatment over the weekend. Now I was finding the detached attitudes of our flight crew a little off putting.

A few weeks earlier, my buddy Adam had texted to see if I wanted to tag along on a trip to Seattle. He’s a booking agent for some big-deal bands, and one of his artists was headlining a festival on the grounds beneath the Space Needle. We’d have backstage passes, VIP access, the whole deal.

“The whole deal?” I’d said.

“The whole deal.”

Normally I would have declined since I hate tagging along to things, especially concerts, and especially concerts in other states. But I’d made an exception in this case based on the possibility that I might meet somebody famous.

Like most unfamous people, I feel compelled to meet as many famous people as I can. I don’t want to meet them. I have to meet them. It’s what us unfamous people do. One day when I was working in Downtown Dallas, we heard James Franco was shooting a movie in the West End.

“I’m gonna go find him,” my coworker said.

“Then what?” I said.

“What do you mean then what?” she said.

Yeah, what did I mean then what? The finding was the point. The seeing was the point. Anything else would just be greedy. For most of us, seeing a celebrity involves all kinds of staking out and tracking down and other complicated logistics, but some people run into them all the time without even trying. My dad’s like that. The list of celebrities he’s run into is long and full of b-list character actors. He’s met the guy from the Maytag commercials, the girl from The Wonder Years, some lady on M*A*S*H. For years, he got Christmas cards from Howard Keel, a regular on the 1970s soap opera Dallas. One time he ran into John Goodman outside a 7-Eleven.

“I just saw you in King Ralph!” my dad said.

“Hope they gave you your money back,” John said.

Unfortunately, this ability to run into famous people does not seem to be hereditary. I’ve seen almost zero famous people in my life. My wife, J, has seen none. A kind of celebrity blindness, maybe. It’s practically clinical at this point. One time she shook hands with some guy.

“That was Martin Sheen,” they told her later.

“Was he nice?!” I asked when she got home.

All I want to know about celebrities is if they’re nice. Sometimes I want to know if they’re tall.

“Was he tall?!” I said.

If you are lucky enough to run into a celebrity, there’s no telling how you’ll react. Some people scream. Some people pass out. I heard about a woman at a David Cassidy concert who dropped dead.

My first night in Seattle, I was eating dinner backstage with Adam when a famous rockstar sat down across from us. He’d gotten big a few years ago when one of his songs was in a Mazda commercial. I’d never been this close to a rockstar before, and I didn’t know how I was going to react. So I was surprised to see that I was reacting by fantasizing about throwing my baked potato at his head. This, I’ll admit, was not what I was expecting.

I could throw this baked potato at this guy’s head right now, I sat there thinking. It would hit him right in the face.

I seemed to be interested in the pure physics of it. That I—a non-famous person—could throw a baked potato at this famous person’s head. And that it—a baked potato—would hit him in the face. This was all purely theoretical of course. The type of thing that makes sense on paper but doesn’t quite translate into the real world, like quantum mechanics or string theory. I looked down at my baked potato, then back at the rockstar’s head.

“Hmmmmmm,” I thought.

Looking back, my reaction might not have been entirely off the map. Later I’d read about a growing trend among concert goers to throw unopened beer cans at lead singers’ heads. It seems we’ve reached the point in our relationship with celebrities where we just want to throw stuff at them. I don’t think we’re mad at them or anything. I think we just want to see what happens. See if, at the right angle and velocity, we can launch an object out of our world and into theirs. Like sending a satellite through a blackhole or petting a squirrel. It just seems worth a try.

“He seemed nice,” I said to Adam after the show, as we walked back to our hotel.

“Yeah,” he said. “He is nice.”

“And tall,” I said.

“Very tall,” Adam said.

I met Adam online a few years ago. He has a scraggly grey beard and wears the type of pastel-colored sweatshirts that make him seem approachable. While we bummed around Seattle, he was asked at least four times to take pictures of strangers. Everywhere we went, people were handing him their thousand-dollar iPhones and entrusting him with their family’s irreplaceable memories.

“It happens all the time,” he told me.

When he’s not booking world tours, Adam runs a literary magazine. A few years back, I’d sent him an essay about some dental work I’d had done, and he’d agreed to publish it provided I make a few edits.

“Try making it better,” was one of his edits.

“What if this part wasn’t lame?” was another.

Like most people who hurt my feelings, Adam and I became good friends. Mostly we text, but sometimes we hang out. Adam’s gift is not just that he can spot famous people, but that he can spot them before they’re famous. You can make a career out of that kind of thing. Most of the huge bands he works with now were nobodies when he first met them.

“That doorway is where I met Jason Molina,” he said outside a rundown club in Seattle where a naked homeless woman was now bathing herself with Gatorade.

“That’s where the guy from Death Cab records albums,” he said as we drove past what looked like an abandoned building.

“It doesn’t look like anything,” I said.

“Important places never do,” he said.

It was 73 degrees in Seattle that weekend. There were wildfires nearby, but the wind was blowing the smoke out to sea. The skies were clear, but the sunsets were bright pink, laced with ash.

Adam and I mostly hung around the festival, but one afternoon we walked to the beach. Adam remembered it being close by, but we ended up walking for a few miles before we found it. I didn’t mind. It was nice out. The air smelled like dead fish and gasoline. Two bad smells that combine to form an even worse smell that reminds me of growing up in California. My family left before I’d turned eight, but sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I’d stayed. Some of my friends there became rhythm guitarists in local rock bands.

“Go ahead, name a note,” one of them always said when I’d come back to visit. “I do them all.”

When we finally got to the beach, our shoes were filled with parking lot pebbles and our heels were covered in blisters. It was worth it though. The beach really was nice. Bigger than Adam remembered, and better than I’d expected. Full of people and kids and dogs running around off their leashes. The water was too cold to swim in, but people were flying kites and making out on picnic blankets.

This is nice, I thought.

And then, because I’m trying to be a person who spreads joy and light in the world, I said, “This is nice.”

We sat there on a bench covered in dried bird shit. It looked like someone had opened fire with a paintball gun. After a while, I noticed something out in the water. At first, I thought it was a buoy. Then I realized it was a person. They were waving their arms like maybe they needed help.

“Is that a person out there?” I said to Adam.

He squinted.

“I think it’s a buoy,” he said. “No wait. Maybe that’s a person.”

We were the furthest people away from them with a hundred beachgoers in between. Surely if this person was drowning, somebody would notice. Surely somebody would do something about it. Or maybe I’m just the type of guy who will watch another person drown as long as everybody else seems okay with it.

“Are they drowning?” I said.

“I don’t know,” Adam said. “I don’t think so. I think it’s a buoy.”

Just then Adam got a phone call. I saw his phone light up with the name of a famous musician. Adam put up his finger, whispered an apology, and wandered off. And then it was just me sitting there alone while the sky turned into cotton candy, and I watched this thing out in the water bob up and down—maybe a person, maybe a buoy—waiting for it to slip silently below the surface.

After I’d gotten over my urge to throw baked vegetables at the talent, I started getting the hang of all this celebrity stuff. The first trick was to ignore them. The second trick was to act like you belonged.

Backstage, I focused most of my attention at the craft services table. They had free Cheez-Its, Snyder’s of Hanover Pretzels, Welch’s Fruit Snacks. It looked like someone had robbed a vending machine. Not exactly a luxury spread, but on the other side of this chain-link fence, regular concert goers were gladly paying $20 for this crap. I thought about how easily we accept whatever is happening to us. Good or bad, we start to think we deserve it.

I was standing at the craft services table when I saw one of the big acts take the stage. The daughter of a huge movie star. She’d gotten big a few years ago for a song about whipping her hair back and forth. Before she started playing, she took a second to explain how love is in the air and in the trees and in the water.

“And we’re all, like, made out of water, you know!” she said. “And water is, like, you know, life!“

It was one of the stupider things I’d heard recently, but it sounded familiar. Then I remembered that I’d heard it before. A homeless guy had been saying this exact same thing down by the beach, although I had to admit the message benefited from the wireless microphone, the giant festival stage, and the thousands of screaming fans.

“There are a lot of gods and goddesses here today,” the young celebrity announced from the stage. “We’ve got to honor and worship each other, you know? Otherwise, life is just, like, kind of hell.”

She paused for a second and ten thousand fans waited silently.

“Or maybe I’m just weird!” she yelled, and the crowd went nuts.

The next morning, Adam and I split an Uber to the airport. We drove past The Space Needle, the marina, the Amazon campus shaped like a giant pair of testicles. Bezos Balls, the locals call it. At the airport, we got separated at security. Adam to TSA Pre-Check, me to general boarding.

“That you?” he said about the mile-long security line.

“Whichever line is the longest,” I said. “That’s the line I belong in.”

A few minutes later, he texted me that he’d run into a celebrity in one of the airport shops, a guy who’d been nominated for an MTV Music Video Award. By then I didn’t mind. I’d been launched like a baked potato into the world of famous people and rockstars, but it wasn’t a place I could stay. You can convince yourself you deserve anything, but you’ll know it when you’re back where you belong. In the security line, I met a woman who was rushing home for the birth of her granddaughter.

“If this line don’t hurry up, I’m gonna punch me a security guard in the face,” she said.

That’s the thing about being a nobody. You’re in good company, at least.

I ate at Pei Wei by my gate and listened to a musician playing quietly in the corner of the food court. Some local act hired to entertain weary world travelers.

She had a MacBook Pro set on a card table and was singing through a battery-powered amplifier. I wished Adam was here so he could tell me if she was going to become famous one day. I hoped so. She had a nice voice, I thought. Fragile and sincere.

And later, when my plane started filling up with smoke, I wondered if I was about to become famous too. An economy class passenger on the doomed domestic flight out of Sea-Tac. The one that never even made it off the tarmac. The one where investigators recovered the black box from the charred wreckage and heard nothing in the plane’s final moments except the calm ticking of passengers tapping on their iPads, sipping their complimentary waters, trying to figure out how to connect to the wi-fi.

MIKE NAGEL is an essayist and the author of CULDESAC and DUPLEX (now an audiobook starring Tim Heidecker).

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Dear readers, Avery and I give thanks to you today and every day. Our fourth piece for Little Blanksgiving is a midwestern brawl from David Preizler. Save room for dessert tomorrow when we return with an essay from Mike Nagel, the final publication in our series with Blank from Dirt.fyi.

FUCK OR FIGHT

by David Preizler

Cody and I began the night at The Galley: pickled gizzards in a jar behind the bar, pitchers of Pabst, a jukebox playing a song about a Great Lakes shipwreck. Signs of formerly illustrious Midwestern breweries glowed from the walls. Grain Belt, Schlitz, Old Style, Miller High Life, and my personal favorite, Old Milwaukee—“Old Mud.” Usually we drank at someone’s house first, played quarters, or did it the old-fashioned way, puncturing a can of Milwaukee’s Best with a pin so one had no choice but to inhale beer. The Galley was on the way to the main strip so that is where we stopped off first.

“To the parched world, this excellent...” Cody never was any good at toasts. Now sophomores, we’d met as freshmen. He gazed at the glass he held aloft as his words trailed off. It was filled with Beam and Coke, his drink of choice in those days. I couldn’t drink it thanks to downing a pint on an empty stomach when I was sixteen. Since then, even the smell of bourbon made me sick. Cody threw back the drink—and I mean really threw it. The liquid leapt out of the glass right down his throat like a magic trick.

“You ready?” He was 5’7” with sandy brown hair. His hands seemed too big for his arms. His fists were as big as flowerpots and his knuckles were gnarled and sometimes after a weekend, scraped raw. Etched around his face were faint scars in the shape of crescent moons and seashells. These had not been inflicted by boxing or street fighting, he told me, but by a vicious dog when he was a kid. He was also a Greco-Roman wrestler but you wouldn’t know that by looking at him, only if you had the misfortune of being on the ground getting choked out by him in a leg lock. The only poster in his bedroom was a painting of a boxing match: Jack Dempsey v. Firpo.

Cody was not a connoisseur of art but he described the print with sensitivity to its nuances and affect. There was Firpo just having thrown a roundhouse, his arm frozen in the follow through. Dempsey, his opponent in a major upset, is upside down, tumbling backwards through the ropes. Everyone loses eventually (including Firpo, after Dempsey recovered), the poster warned. People who had seen Cody fight were terrified of him. I was relieved that he was on my side.

Cody raised the tumbler to his mouth and bit. He cracked a small chunk off with his front teeth. Then, moving the piece of glass to his molars, he chewed, grinding it down. It hurt my stomach to watch. I was certain he’d eventually bleed to death. I gave him the rest of my beer to wash it down.

That summer we got into a lot of fights. Not against each other; against other people. There was nothing else to do. Surrounded by corn and young bodies, and fueled by the beer and drugs that flowed in off Interstate 80, it was inevitable. Either you achieved your primary objective—got laid—or you fought. And anything could set it off. One time, I sparked a brawl by playing ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” on the jukebox in one of the off-campus Iowa hayseed dive bars. The August humidity didn’t help either. I used to change t-shirts three times a day but what was the point? The fresh one would cling, soaked through five minutes after I put it on.

I was nineteen and before meeting Cody, didn’t know shit about fighting.

Cody swallowed the last bits of glass. “Now what? The Airliner?” The Airliner was a bar owned by one of the Chicago Bulls.

“We haven’t been to Vito’s in a while.” I still looked like I was sixteen, but armed with my brother’s old driver’s license I could drink all I wanted in the Iowa City college bars as long as I had cash.

“Vito’s. Yeah.”

There was a line outside but Cody knew the bouncer, a 6’5” white guy who should have been playing football or basketball but somehow ended up as the doorman at a bar. The bouncer sat on a stool in the foyer of the bar, checking IDs and stamping patron’s hands with an ink emblem that was visible only under UV light. We pushed through frat and sorority types toward the front. It looked like an Abercrombie catalog, a mix of Iowa farm kids and the Chicago suburbs. Drakkar Noir and Calvin Klein Escape wafted off them in waves. Nearly all my friends were from Iowa, and none from Illinois. Cody was from Iowa. Cody caught the bouncer’s eye. He waved us through.

“This is the Rhythm of the Night.” It was 1993 and Corona’s dance floor anthem collided with us as we shoved and squeezed through bodies. Nothing like dime drafts to pack a bar. Vito’s was the bar version of a shotgun shack. A bar in front and a bar in back, and a dance floor off to the right, halfway through. There was also a pool table near the front. Word was that Vito’s owners were a couple of Middle Eastern guys from Chicago. I had never seen them but it lent an otherwise ordinary college bar an air of mystery. With so many people you had to push to get anywhere you wanted to go. And with so many people pushed tightly together, anything could happen. Knocking someone’s drink, bumping into some guy’s girlfriend, some guy spilling your drink and you don’t handle it the right way. It would be like what they told us in history class about Archduke Ferdinand. Except instead of an assassin’s bullet it might be a spilled Zima that sparked the World War I of drunken brawls.

Cody laid his hand on the bar, flicking a twenty back and forth between his fingers. “This is how you get the bartender’s attention!” It worked. The bartender mixed a Beam and Coke for Cody, and brought two Coronas for me.

“You’re a great bartender!” I had learned that the way to a bartender’s heart was to pour on the compliments from the beginning. On spring break in Ixtapa I drank free tequila shots all night after telling a bartender with horrendous English that his English was amazing.

“Two for Tuesday,” the bartender said, placing the bottles on the bar.

“To Corona,” I said, proposing a toast.

“Who?”

“Nothing. Hey, there’s Donna.”

“Who?”

Donna was from Des Moines, pre-med, and I had a crush on her ever since I spilled her beaker containing a radioactive isotope in our physics class. None of it got on her so I thought I still had a chance. I took one of the bottles I was holding and smacked the bottom against the mouth of the other creating a volcanic reaction. The only solution was to drink quickly.

“What the hell, dude?” Cody said. This coming from a guy who chewed glass. I drank the rest of the beer and handed him the empty bottle, which he set down on the bar. My eyes watered and the inside of my skull tingled. I had not yet reached an age where it would occur to me that beer could be consumed without guzzling or in anything less than enormous quantities.

“Be right back!” I said. We had to shout to be heard. Shout and put your mouth right up to the other’s ear. I pushed into the crowd. I was swimming through bodies.

Something you need to know about Iowa is that it’s a serious wrestling state. It’s the major high school and college sport. In Minnesota, where I came from, putting on what is essentially a leotard and embracing another guy on the floor was decidedly not masculine. In Iowa I kept those thoughts to myself. If you didn’t know this about the state, it might be disconcerting at a party when, at some point in the night, you saw drunken young men grappling on the floor. It was also why seasoned Iowa bar fighters who could not wrestle avoided letting a fight go to ground. For wrestlers though, getting you to ground was their goal. If you ever saw someone try to box a wrestler, it looked something like someone trying to box an ape. The wrestler would lope around with a hunched back, occasionally swatting at their opponent’s legs, looking for an opening to charge and take them down.

Throughout the bar were pillars with mirrors and a small ledge where you could leave a bottle or glass. I found Donna at one of those, chatting with a couple of her girlfriends. They were all blondes and all were taller than me except for Donna. Her friends seemed to regard me with contempt until Donna smiled and said, “Hi Lewis!” After that they greeted me even if their smiles seemed forced. I took Donna by the elbow and moved her away from them.

“Nice pants!” she said, looking at my mint green hospital scrubs. I had paired them with an ordinary t-shirt. I must have looked doubtful because she reassured me.

“No, I really like them! You’re pre-med now?”

“No! I just do some work at the hospital!” I put my mouth right up to her ear because of the music. It was true that I did occasional work at the hospital. Every now and then I got paid to do medical experiments. To be the medical experiment. In the last one, I got one hundred dollars to drink five shots of vodka while hooked up to an EKG and electrodes. The scientists took readings while I did things like immerse my hand in a tub full of ice and hold it as long as I could.

“What are you drinking?” I asked her. We were still shouting like idiots.

“Sex on the Beach,” Her cheek brushed against mine as she spoke into my ear.

I took a shot. “So I rushed past the pretty girls, and the prettiest girls in the world live in Des Moines,” I said it into her ear at a normal volume so that relative to the ambient noise it was a whisper. Her eyes widened and I knew that she heard me. Then they narrowed.

“Kerouac?” she said.

“Whoever said it knew what they were talking about!” A strobe light pulsed to the rhythm of the music. It was like lightning going off in the bar. Donna was there and then not there. I leaned toward her and it felt like we were in a silent movie, flickering images staggering toward each other. My lips were against hers. I set my bottle of Corona down on the ledge of the pillar and rested my hands behind her there. Donna put her tongue in my mouth and I tasted the sweet flavors of her drink…Peach Schnapps, Cranberry Juice, Vodka. Sex on the Beach, naturally the most popular drink in Iowa City. We kissed like that for a while, with the strobe popping. Even in the packed bar, with bodies brushing past us, we were alone.

I felt a hand on my shoulder and I knew it wasn’t Donna’s. I didn’t want to look to see whose it was but I did. Cody’s face flashed on and off in the strobe. It was twisted and flushed. Cody drew me away from her toward the front of the bar. And then Donna was lost in the crowd.

“What Cody, what?” As soon as I saw his eyes I knew it wasn’t good. When he snapped something came over him. It was like David Banner on that old “Incredible Hulk” TV Show. Cody’s eyes would swirl, charged by some chemical coursing through his brain. At that point, it was too late. There was no stopping him. I followed Cody’s gaze to the dance floor. And there it was. The source of Cody’s anguish. His ex-girlfriend Suzanne, dancing with some other guy. Her blonde hair was slicked back and she wore a black cocktail dress. She looked like she’d just stepped out of a Robert Palmer music video. She was pretty from afar but up close seemed to have features characteristic of fetal alcohol syndrome, eyes spaced wider than usual and a dumbstruck look like she didn’t understand anything you were telling her or she just didn’t care. Her dance moves were catlike and strange but somehow captivating. The guy she was dancing with was definitely from a Chicago suburb. He wore a Ralph Lauren button-down and Girbaud jeans with Timberlands. The boots shined in the disco dance floor lights and I could tell he had recently sprayed them with waterproofing.

“Who the fuck is this guy? Do you know him?” Cody hadn’t taken his eyes off him.

“I don’t know, who cares, forget him, Cody! He’s probably just some asshole from Naperville!” I yelled, hoping to forestall what was coming. I wanted to see some guy from Naperville get his ass kicked as much as the next guy, but not like this, and not by Cody. They weren’t evenly matched and it seemed undeserved.

Cody took hold of my shoulder.

“It’ll just be me and you, Lewis. Back to back. A lot of guys and a lot of blood.” Cody moved toward the dance floor. His strut was so fluid it seemed like he was on wheels. There was nothing to do but follow. Dancing couples parted to make way for him as he coasted onto the dance floor. Cody danced a bit as he made his way toward Suzanne and the guy from Naperville. As we got closer I saw that the guy with Cody’s ex was good-looking even if it was in a bland Chicago frat guy way. He had light brown hair, blue eyes, and unblemished skin. I felt nauseous knowing that in a few seconds, his face would never be the same. Cody’s face was an inch away from it. Their chests were butting up against each other. Cody’s teeth were bared and if you didn’t know better, you’d think he was smiling.

“What’s the deal, Scarface?” The guy said. I let loose a huge sigh. Not a good choice of words.

Suzanne shrieked and grabbed at Cody as soon as she saw him but it was useless. She bounced off him like a spring. In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud wrote of the struggle between Eros and Thanatos, love and death. I learned this in Psych 101. The drive for both could be equally powerful and attractive. Cody delivered his punches with a snapping movement. He tilted back and then popped forward with a jerk. There were three punches for sure, all to the Naperville guy’s face. One punch lifted him into the air. Another sent him reeling backwards. One more cracked his head against the dance floor mirror, leaving a spider web indentation at the point of impact, along with a splotch of blood. One eyeball was covered in blood. The white part was all red, okay? And so were his teeth, and a few were missing. I knew that because Suzanne was crawling on the dance floor looking for one of them. His nose was mashed. The whole thing lasted no more than thirty seconds.

“We need to go.” I pushed Cody off of the dance floor. Bouncers were zeroing in on us from two directions. Cody was still in some kind of fugue state, like a crazed dog. I pushed him toward the back exit. The steel fire door banged against a brick wall as we flung it open.

The alley behind the bar was quiet. We ran until we got to the sidewalk and street. Then it was better to walk and not call attention to ourselves. Everything was calm and ordinary. People were strolling down the sidewalk paying us no mind.

“People pick on me because I’m Irish. And because of my size,” Cody said. I just nodded. I wasn’t sure what to say. Once I had seen Cody pummel some guy for dropping a crumpled napkin at a sub shop. Cody said it was thrown at him. No one I knew picked on him. Ever.

“Always get the first punch, Lewis.” His arm was draped over my shoulder. He was drunker than I thought. “Some guy asks you if you want to step outside, don’t go outside, hit him right then and there. The one who punches first wins the fight.” Cody explained that the disorientation inflicted by the first blow, the shock, the watering eyes, the pain, it was all so stunning that an opponent almost never recovered.

“I understand,” I said, but all I could think was that one day he’d end up in jail or jumped by a group or someone with a knife.

Cody was quiet and we walked like that for a while. The next time I spoke I changed the subject.

“Cody, I’m going back.”

“Back? Back where?”

“Vito’s. Maybe Donna’s still there.”

“And the bouncers? They’re still there too.”

“They won’t recognize me. Anyway, it’s worth the risk. Always get the first punch, right?” I called out before turning around and jogging back toward Vito’s.

Some years later, Cody had moved to California, and then I heard that he was beaten to death outside of a bar in Oceanside. Maybe he hit first, maybe not. It doesn’t matter. Cody must’ve known that day would come. Like Dempsey memorialized in his poster, he had finally met his match. His opponents were a group of off-duty Marines and he was alone. He was found face down in the parking lot, his skull fractured. There was nothing the paramedics could do for him.

Everything turned out differently than we’d planned. I never found Donna again that night at Vito’s and later I’d see her around campus with an older guy she was dating—in his late 20’s and not a student. We’d greet each other while he glared. I’ve heard she’s now a doctor in Minnesota. I went to law school in Chicago.

Would Cody have changed if he’d lived? A few years after he was killed I was traveling in Chile. At a nightclub in a coastal vacation town, La Serena, I nursed a Pisco Sour and watched a local college student dancing by herself. “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” blared on the sound system and the Chilean crowd was really into it. Any guy who tried to talk to her, she’d reject. In the best Spanish I could manage, I asked why she came out at all if she didn’t want to talk to anyone. She liked that and laughed. One of the guys she’d rejected, muscle-bound and wearing a fitted black t-shirt, thought we were making fun of him. Before I understood what was going on, he’d been seized by the bouncers and they were throwing him out. He was bucking to get free but they had him by the neck and biceps and pushed him out the door.

“¿Qué le pasó?” she wanted to know.

I attempted to respond in Spanish but gave up. What could I tell her anyway?

DAVID PREIZLER’s fiction has appeared in The Madison Review, Santa Monica Review, Faultline, and elsewhere. He lives in California.

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Danielle Altman’s batshit story is the third helping of Little Blanksgiving, our series with Blank from Dirt.fyi. I was delighted through my first read when Daisy Dirt sent this to me—it keeps surprising. Go with caution if you’re afraid of Kathy Acker and/or spiders.
- AV

THE WORST HOUSEGUEST IN THE WORLD

by Danielle Altman

The Dream

I dream I enter a large elevator at a university. Some students invite me to watch a Korean horror movie. I’m excited to make friends (not suspicious of them at all). The movie is called Angle of Repose. It’s played on a warped 1980s-style television in the student lounge. When the movie starts, I blink. When I open my eyes, I’m in the movie.

It’s a bright summer day on the outskirts of Seoul. I’m in a café with friends and a new boyfriend. I like my boyfriend very much, I’m attracted to him, I want to take him in the back and fuck him. His hips slant when other girls come near. Our relationship will end badly.

A girl takes my arm and whispers flatly in English, he’s going to kill you.

I become afraid. I don’t know how to get around Seoul without them. I hope for the movie to end without dying (if I die in the movie, I die in real life). We walk out to the street (long curving road with homes, traffic, tall buildings).

Are we still in the movie? I ask the girl who warned me.

A large tarantula has fallen from the sky, my boyfriend says.

We approach the spot where it’s fallen. It’s a man in a tarantula costume, peeling off furry legs and a parachute. He’s very attractive, more attractive than my boyfriend.

I’m getting bloated from too much beer, the tarantula man says in a resigned tone of voice. I’ve fallen very far. Can someone bring me a glass of red wine?

More parachutes in the sky, blooming red against white. I know then the world is ending.

When I wake up

You’ve gone from ending to ended.

The Nightmare

They ask me to do the eulogy at your funeral in two weeks because we were close. Truth is, no one was close to you. Instead of writing it, I become obsessed with interpreting my dream: Are you the tarantula man, was I attracted to my dad? No. I wanted to save you (stop cancer). I’m sorry I couldn’t.

Eric says the dream had nothing to do with you. The night I had it, I’d fallen asleep reading Kathy Acker’s novel, The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, which she’d written under the pen name The Black Tarantula. Kathy Acker died of cancer too. I cried about her death while reading her biography more than I’ve yet to cry over you. Not because you were a bad guy. I miss our phone calls about the Arizona monsoons and how much you hate your doctors and wife.

Grief works in mysterious ways, Eric says. I pad around rooms and wait for grief to arrive, the houseguest that will stay an indeterminate amount of time.

Kathy Acker made maps of her dreams, so I map my tarantula dream with a Sharpie on poster paper while Eric is at work and the kids are at school. Acker wrote: “Maps are dreams: Both describe desire, where you want to go, but never the reality of the destination.” I’m not sure if understanding death is my destination, or you. I suck at drawing. I roll up the dream poster and hide it from my family. I debate presenting it at your funeral instead of giving your eulogy.

The night before your funeral, I type “angle of repose” into Google on my phone. It’s the one “angle” I haven’t tried: The name of the horror movie in my dream.

Why are you Googling random things when you’re twelve hours away from delivering an unwritten eulogy, Eric asks from the other side of the bed.

It’s eulogy research, I say.

My Googling is a dead end. The Angle of Repose is a mathematical equation and a book by Wallace Stegner that you would have found boring and that I’ve never read.

When I should be sleeping, I replay the memory of a nightmare I had when I was six. I’m in my bedroom in my nightgown, tight and itchy around my neck. The only glow is from the nightlight, turning my shadow into a monster creeping around the room. I’m supposed to be sleeping. Instead, I’m lining my stuffed animals up against the foot of the bed. I sit cross-legged on my comforter, taking a rest to rub sore spots on my head where Mom had let my pigtails out a few minutes before. The walls darken. Start slipping and sliding. It’s spiders. Thousands of them, crawling up the walls in my bedroom. I want to run, but I’m stiff. I try to scream, but no sound comes out. Just honey. Black honey. Dripping out of my mouth and pooling into the lap of my nightgown, spread tight as a trampoline between my crisscross applesauce knees.

The spiders drop from the ceiling, plonk, plonk, plonk on my shoulders, getting tangled in my hair, tickling my face to get in my mouth. Caught in my black honey lap. There is wet stuff on my face, looser and wetter than honey, it’s making the spiders slip off my cheeks and lips, I want to throw up, I’m shaking, I want to make it stop—I’m crying

Stop! My mom yells. She’s shaking me.

The lights are on

It’s so bright

Vicki! You yell. Stop.

You send her away. I stop crying and throw my arms around you. You sweep me up and hold me tight.

They’re still here, I whisper in your ear. The spiders.

My legs hooked around your hips, we explore every nook and cranny so you can prove me wrong. You strip the sheets, shift my bed and dresser, do everything a good dad could to comfort me. You put me down, kneel, and hold my shoulders gently. You scare spiders more than they scare you, you say.

I don’t believe you.

How do you know that? Have you ever known a spider?

You say that like you’ve known a spider.

Your eyes frantically scan the room and land on my closet. Do you know what spiders love more than anything? You ask. Dark, safe places. Like rainboots. Get your rainboots.

No! I curl my lips down in my cutest frown, the one that always works on you.

Get your boots, you say firmly. You’re a tough kid.

You know I’m not tough. All the weight in my body gathers like a fist in my chest, pushing up into my throat like I might cry. But I have no choice. I rush toward my closet, grab the boots, hurl them at you.

You grab one out of the air like it’s nothing. Look inside of it, you say. I do, but it’s too dark in the boot.

Put your hand inside of it, you say. I can’t. I’m trembling.

Do you trust me? You ask.

I burst into tears. Your face changes, you no longer look like the hero in charge but a guy who might be worrying he’s a bad dad. I don’t want you to feel like a bad dad, so I thrust my hand in the boot and wait for it, the creep-crawlies, maybe even a sting. But there is nothing. Just rubber and air.

See, you say. You’re tough.

But you still cave and give me what you know I want. You lift me and make a bed for me on the dog bed on the floor next to your side of the bed in your and Mom’s room.

The morning of the funeral, exhausted, my Notes app full of random niceties but no coherent eulogy, Mom and I are drinking coffee in the backyard of our Airbnb. I tell her about the nightmare and my memory of it.

Do you think that story might work for the eulogy? I ask her.

Oh, yes, your dad always loved spiders. Didn’t he ever tell you about Chester?

Who’s Chester?

His pet tarantula, she says. Her eyes crinkle in confusion as she puts her coffee down. He never told you about Chester?

The Eulogy (In Part)

In 1971, my dad traveled up the coast of California to surf with friends. Outside of Lompoc, where the highway narrows to a wind tunnel between the Santa Ynez mountains and the cookie dough hills crumble into vineyards, their van approached a thick, shifting band of black snaking across the road. Wide and long enough to block their path.

My dad got out of the van. He neared the black band. Thousands of tarantulas, migrating. He got an empty ice chest from the van, plucked a tarantula up, and dropped it in the cooler.

“I’ll call him Chester,” he said to his friends. “He’ll make a good pet.”

In Jalama, they unloaded the van to camp. A park ranger, eager to fine hippies for illegal fishing, approached them. “Show me what’s in the cooler,” he said to my dad.

“You don’t want me to do that,” my dad said.

“Show me what’s in the cooler,” the ranger said.

My dad opened the cooler. Chester jumped at the ranger, hissing. My dad gently caught Chester and put him back in the cooler.

Back home, my dad set up a spacious aquarium with piles of dirt, rocks, and sticks for Chester. But Chester grew slumpy and sluggish and wouldn’t eat. My dad released him at a dumpster. A place to hide, lots of food. Other bugs to befriend.

You can tell a lot about a man based on the way he treats his tarantula.

The Worst Houseguest in the World

Back home after the funeral, grief finally arrives. She announces herself by banging on my front door. Through my peephole, I get glimpses of her, a leatherdyke in a shredded black dress, tough as shit, like she’s a weightlifter or something, kicking at my door with black leather motorcycle boots. Shaved blonde head and dark woeful eyes.

“Hey c’mon, let me in, I’m starving,” she says in a low lilting voice that doesn’t match her streetwise words and intimidating look.

Oh my God. It’s Kathy Acker. I hold the front door with all my force against her, only to find a thousand other mini-Ackers creeping up between the floorboards and from beneath the windowpanes like a military surge of post-punk spiders. I cave and let the human-sized Acker and the mini-Ackers sweep in. That’s when I notice that the main Acker has luggage piled on my front stoop. A houseguest who looks like she will be staying for an indeterminate time.

That evening when Eric gets home from work, I tug him into our bedroom and shut the door. Kathy is downstairs teaching my kids swear words in French, and I don’t want her to hear us. He sits on the edge of the bed and slips off his sneakers while I hover over him.

“Can’t you kick her out?” I ask.

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea.” He scans the closed blinds, then the floor.

I sit next to him, press the side of my thigh against his, and gaze up into his eyes. “How about I lure her out back with some red wine and Georges Bataille. You lock the doors, and I’ll sneak back in later with my housekey.”

He squeezes my hand like I’m a child. “Her books and clothes are everywhere. She’s already claimed the couch. Maybe it’s time to accept that you can’t stop her from crashing here. Eventually, she’ll tire of you. Find a long-term place. Besides, she’s more of a city person. She won’t shut up about how much she hates the suburbs.”

I relent. When Eric’s at work and the kids are at school, she directs me to live in t-shirts and underpants. To get myself off on the couch to photos of her when I should be in the school pick-up line. To serve Cup of Noodles and beer for dinner.

Late one night, after she has been with us for about a week, she sits in a torn Vivienne Westwood gown on the edge of the bathtub in my bathroom, smoking, watching me floss and listening to me lament how unproductive I’d been at work and around the house since my dad died.

“You sound like a brainwashed corporate robot. Who cares about dust on the blinds.” She ashes in the tub. I open my mouth to ask her to please be less destructive, but she’s already hopping up and putting her cigarette out in my sink. The sizzle of a Camel dropped in an empty. A dad sound. Lung cancer.

She catches my eye in the mirror, her face a grimace of white hot rage, her skin so translucent that I can make out the shape of her skull. It pulls me back from the floaty sadness of my childhood and the past.

“You’re allowed to be weird,” she says. “Your father died. Besides, if the only thing you want to do is read my books in bed, that’s great. I was way too under-appreciated when I was alive.”

I think of Chester. As long as she needs to stay, it’s important I respect her. Even though I worry she might be a little self-centered, it’s a relief to be told what to do. I make up the dog bed for her in my room and let her store her stinky boots in my closet. While she sleeps, I remember what you said about boots and check them for those mini-Acker spiders, who have mysteriously disappeared.

Kathy sure likes to talk. One Saturday, we’re on a walk, talking about Jean Genet and blowjobs, while my kids fly by on their bikes.

“Do you remember when your dad taught you how to ride a bike?” She asks.

I’m five, back in that alley behind our condo in Bakersfield, the dead heat of summer rising in wiggly waves off the asphalt, you push me, yelling go! go! go! until you force me to go by letting go. HowdareyouIhateyou, sickening drop of stomach, but I’ve done it! Streamers and pigtails flying, ground rattling, I’m free as wind, fast as air. I love reliving these memories, each retelling and re-remembering imprinting you further in my psyche. But Kathy’s pie-in-the-face-in-public reminders of you come on suddenly, make me cry, and are embarrassing.

After a few months, she becomes less pushy about going for walks and having late-night talks. She begins to disappear for hours at a time, which I’m grateful for. The biography was right. Kathy Acker is exhausting. With her hanging around less, I win a two-million-dollar account at work. I clean the blinds. I start wearing pants and stop leaving my vibrator, pussy-damp and gathering cat hair, on the coffee table. But sometimes I miss her.

One night, I’m drinking Pinot Grigio and making chicken piccata, with Kathy sitting on the kitchen counter swinging her heavy motorcycle boots toward the sides of my legs

“The Black Tarantula.” I slice lemon wedges while the chicken frizzles in the pan. “Why did you call yourself that?”

“Why do you think?”

“Because you wanted to kill yourself, Metaphorically. You wanted to stop being Kathy Acker the woman and become Kathy Acker the writer.”

“You’re wrong.” She swipes my wine glass from my hand. “All the Kathy’s I’ve been are immortal. That’s why we write in the historical present.”

Oil hisses, leaps, stings my arm. I turn down the gas just in time. The chicken is on the verge of going from browning to burned. I feel a cool wind, as though the back door has been opened, and it has, it’s hanging open, blue twilight seeping in. I open my mouth to ask Kathy to shut it, but when I glance toward the counter, she’s gone.

All the weight in my body gathers like a fist in my chest, pushing up into my throat like I might cry. She was a thread between worlds, connecting me to you. But I have no choice. When she leaves, she leaves, when she wants to talk, we talk, and when she pushes, I go, go, go. I shut the back door, but I know she’ll be back. In the middle of my kitchen, she left her most beloved possession. Her boots.

DANIELLE ALTMAN’s writing has appeared in Write or Die, Dream Boy Book Club, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, and elsewhere.

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It’s day two of Little Blanksgiving, our week of fiction, poetry, and essays co-published with Blank, a Dirtyverse newsletter about books and the culture around them. Today we’ve got a new poem from Karan Kapoor, no stranger to Little Engines.

THE PAIN

by Karan Kapoor

We were running after pleasure, we only got the pain;
our dogs were barking, we sighed: oh, no, not the pain.

Our dreams sieged us, shook us out of sleep —
can you imagine a wound from a gunshot, the pain?

Our stomachs growled, waiting for joy we rapped
our nails on the table, the waiter brought the pain.

Yes, there was hunger on our faces, but
what made you think we sought the pain?

The wait was over, we were told. We were full
of holes and it was cheap, we bought the pain.

It was, like all else, a matter of fortitude. Hurt us,
that’s alright, but not a lot, we taught the pain.

Father, free us of want, lead us to will —
our prayer unheard, we fought the pain.

There is distance between love and loss, but little.
It clung to us like a curse we’d caught — the pain.

You lied through your teeth: Karan, it’ll all be gone one day.
Though it left us eventually, we never forgot the pain.

KARAN KAPOOR is a poet & writer of absurdities and the Editor-in-Chief of ONLY POEMS.

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It’s day one of Little Blanksgiving, our week of fiction, poetry, and essays co-published with Blank, a Dirtyverse newsletter about books and the culture around them. We start with Kyle Seibel’s latest story below. You might recognize the setting, but it’s from a different angle.

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THE TREES OF KETRON ISLAND

by Kyle Seibel

Paul dries his hands on the front of his shirt and goes outside to see his son climbing out of a dusty sedan. The car has no license plate and a panel near the bumper is missing and there are patches of corrosion along the wheel well.

The neck of Junior’s t-shirt is stretched out and Paul can see the bony line of his son’s clavicle through the eaten and thin material. Paul asks where he got the car and Junior smiles. His teeth are practically green.

“Borrowed it.”

“They know you borrowed it?”

“Not yet,” Junior says, flashing his green teeth again.

“No phone huh?” Paul says.

“That’s right.”

“Ferry’s still out.” Paul squints into the distance. “Weeks now.”

“Took the Warren bridge, Dad. Up and over.”

Paul pulls off his ballcap and works the bill into a more aggressive arc. “You eat?” he says, but a plane roars overhead and swallows his words.

After the engine noise dissipates, Junior says, “What was that one?”

“Growler. From Whidbey, probably.”

“That the kind you flew?”

“Nope.”

Junior steps forward. “So Dad, you know how I’ve always been really intrigued by fine dining? Like the business side? Well, at TCC they’re doing these—”

Paul puts his hand up and looks at the sky. “Hang on, I think there’s another one coming. There’s usually a couple.”

They stand in silence, waiting. When nothing happens, Paul walks over to the blackberries that grow wild along the driveway. He wipes off some spider webs and inspects a cluster. The berries are rotted and half-gnawed. “The rabbits this year. Size of labradors.”

“Hey Dad—”

“Hang on a second, PJ. Help me get some netting from the shed. Been meaning to do this.”

“Well, I can’t really stick around too long, is the thing. I was just hoping to, you know.”

Paul scores his throat and spits in the gravel. “You are killing me, boy. Every time you come here.”

“Dad—”

“Damn these rabbits,” Paul whispers, whipping his hat off and wringing the bill again. “Goddamn them.”

Flying low overhead, a commercial propeller plane barely clears the treeline and zips above them.

“Holy shit,” Junior says, ducking. “That happen a lot?”

Paul blinks. “No…”

They go to the road and scan the skies. In the distance, they see a slim passenger plane climb high into the air and dive steeply toward the ground. Both father and son watch the plane do this over and over, the aircraft coming close enough once to send them scattering into the yard.

The plane changes heading and through the trees, they catch glimpses of it circling somewhere over the Narrows. Then the plane changes heading again and they lose sight of it completely.

Paul slaps Junior’s chest. “Bet we can see it on the roof.”

And they can. From the roof, they can see the whole sound. Paul straddling the spine. Junior sitting on the low pitch, hugging his knees. They watch the plane climb so high it inverts and then dives down, pulling up right before hitting the water.

“Fuckin a,” Junior breathes. “He did a backflip.”

“A barrel roll,” Paul says.

Later that night, Paul will watch a TV news story about the plane. He will learn about Richard Russell, a baggage handler who, on a whim, hijacked a passenger aircraft for over an hour, maintaining cordial and self-aware dialogue with the controllers in the tower and the pilots of the jets they scrambled to escort him. He admitted to having some mental problems, but never knew how severe until now. The other pilots tried to get him to find a place where he could land safely, but in the end, Richard Russell chose to die by crashing the plane into the trees of Ketron Island.

On the roof, Paul and Paul Junior watch it happen. That final dive. No attempt to pull up. Then the fireball.

It is almost full dark. Paul removes his hat and works the visor curve with his hands. He looks at his son, who is also crying. Balancing on the roof, they clutch at each other awkwardly, a hug of sorts, and Paul feels sharp shoulder bones and smells sour hair.

Even for Pierce County, Ketron Island is remote, and as a result, the crash site burns for hours. A long finger of ash points straight to heaven. It is still smoking when Paul Junior leaves, spraying gravel into the grass, the black daemon within him throbbing with hunger, nosing the pocket that holds what the father promised will be the last time.

Kyle Seibel lives in Santa Barbara. His debut collection Hey You Assholes is out now from Clash Books.

Cross off the readers on your holiday gift list with 25% OFF EVERYTHING IN THE LITTLE ENGINES SHOP WITH CODE BLANKSGIVING. Grab copies of ARCHIVE, recent issues of the print magazine, plus hats and t-shirts. Shipping is free in the US: littleengines.shop.

Avery, submissions editor

SO THESE VISIONS OF FRANCINE

by Lily Gareth Cunningham

In ninth grade I accurately predicted that Francine Druly would piss herself and be escorted from the cafeteria during the Spring Quarter Masquerade Ball. There would be two dry rough elbows in crisp beige shirts holding her limping pissy body. Royalty-free classical music would roar to a room of slow-swinging tweens. They’d stare like gobsmacked puppets. Her piss puddle would shimmer beneath a disco ball as they all tiptoed around.

In my premonition her reasons for peeing were unclear. But I felt, at first, that it was an exciting and positive vision because high school dances are dull and pissing yourself is funny.

Francine Druly was perceived as a lonely oddball by students and faculty alike. This characterization frustrated me because in my visions she was not odd at all, and if she was lonely I could not tell from watching.

I’d begun psychically studying Francine before and after school to substantiate these rumors of her weirdness; I’d learned from an instructional video posted by a now-retired clairvoyant content creator in a subreddit for mystically-inclined lesbians called r/SaphPsych.

I’d lie supine on my grandmother’s plastic-covered flannel couch, making eyes at the yellowing popcorn ceiling, summoning these visions. I’d been living with my grandmother for the past year and a half. It was unpleasant to think about why. It was better to draw clockwise circles with my feet, tap my fingers one by one, concurrently stream Radio Disney’s biggest hits of the year 2003 and binaural beats from SleepTube, and visualize the dilation of my third eye as it became open to receiving. The reddit psychics advised one could only receive what allowed itself to be transmitted. I only ever received Francine.

Every vision I’d received of Francine, up until the piss one, had been more tedious than the last: Francine at a clear plastic table in a large white room spooning worm gray rice from plate to mouth; Francine nodding blankly at her desperately cheerful mother; Francine grabbing beige clothes from her closet and wearing them with no hesitation, curation, or second-guessing.

Francine gnawed on stale bread yesterday. Francine will gnaw on stale bread tomorrow. Francine is gnawing on stale bread for the rest of her godforsaken life. Francine, whose complacent pink lids shutter boring black pupils inside sallow gray eyes. Francine, whose long gaze never deviates from the object or task directly in front of her. Francine, a sickly stick figure with boring brown hair, who never looks down at her feet, not with reticence or fear, and who never looks out the window of her house, not with longing or desire. Did Francine want, literally, anything at all? I imagined shouting at her like she was an insufferably dopey contestant on a high-stakes game show. But in those streaming visions of mine there was no prize worth rooting for, only the strange and simple act of being. I got nervous thinking about this, about Francine having to exist so blandly without winning anything for it, and wondered how she felt about being, quite possibly, the dullest person on Earth.

In the mystical subreddit I asked for feedback:

I’m receiving visions of someone who, I’m fairly certain, doesn’t want anything. Do you find this quality admirable or terrifying? Have you ever seen this?

My question received no upvotes and only one comment from a user with a questionable karmic score. Their username was u/imcheetahgurrl03 and their comment was an array of indecipherable characters sandwiched between a rat emoji, a cartoon jam jar, and a GIF of a dancing dog.

Several feverish nights later I received the piss vision of Francine. It was an exhilarating development, my first unprompted vision and it finally involved Francine doing something very odd. I was in the middle of switching resting positions on the couch when I saw the hot yellow streams gushing down Francine’s pale calves, frothy as they were pushed, the adult chaperones grimacing, and the mortified gulps from the students dancing nearby. I decided to sit with her at lunch the next day.

Francine never sat alone; instead she camouflaged herself among alternating groups of friends. The table she sat at that day, the Yarn Club table, would be folded up and tucked in a corner for next week’s dance. Then she would be dragged away in front of it by the two beige-shirted elbows and a little bit of table leg would protrude out just far enough to nearly trip her, but not enough to seem out of place. I imagined even the table would judge her when she passed by on piss day and suddenly I felt protective. As dull and bland as Francine was, I didn’t think she deserved that.

The president of the Yarn Club clacked his long silver needles together and fumbled through a puke yellow scarf. Francine sat at the far right of the table. She was gnawing stale bread again, with an open jar of oily peanut butter that remained mostly untouched. The small loaf expelled brown crumbs whenever she ripped a chunk. Some of the crumbs were soaring and landing in the Yarn Club president’s scarf-in-progress but he hadn’t noticed yet. I squeezed in at the table’s edge. I introduced myself to no one in particular. The Yarn Club continued clacking their needles. Francine gave a thumbs up and chewed on some bread. We sat silently for a bit and I noticed Francine hadn’t swallowed all of the bread bits she’d been chewing. Instead she’d spat them out and rolled them into small moist balls combined with peanut butter oil.

She noticed me noticing and said, “They’re not for me.”

At the sound of her voice, the Yarn Club stopped clacking, as if anticipating a great disturbance.

“They’re for the dogs,” Francine explained, and the lunchtime bell rang.

The ninth grade Spring Quarter Masquerade Ball was a week away and fliers were posted, memes had been circulated, outfits had been discussed, and couples had formed in preparation for the event. Our bi-weekly gym classes had become compulsory dance lessons led by our school’s Director of Fitness, Darlene Montana.

Darlene Montana no longer danced and rarely ever stood. That day she conducted us from her seat on the bleachers like a maestro under the influence of downer narcotics. Her pointer finger dragged left and right in midair slightly behind the tempo of the royalty-free classical music booming from the gymnasium’s speakers. She hummed and rocked her head side to side, eyes fluttering open only when a student screamed that another student had accidentally tangoed over their toes. That day I noticed, for the first time, the wobbliness of Darlene Montana’s upper arms compared to the sleek stiffness of her forearms; the two limb parts were conjoined by elbows so rough, wrinkly, and gray that it seemed the joint might disintegrate. It arrived to me, not as a vision but a feeling, that she would drag Francine from the floor next week.

A windy tango screeched on while our sneakers squeaked out its steps. We all clasped hands when needed but avoided eye contact. I had my arms on the shoulders of a quivering eighth grader who scuffled his fingers along my waist and fixed his terrified eyes to the floor. Francine boogied in the corner by herself. She had acquired the Yarn Club president’s half-made yellow scarf and bundled it over her head and around her chin like a Babushka, with tufts of her brown curls poking through the gaps in the yarn. Darlene Montana snapped her crinkled fingers lazily to signal a new music cue: the waltz. I didn’t mind it. When we waltzed, our toes tapped and glided us around the gymnasium as one delicate mass. I liked being a part of something so smooth. I yanked the quivering eighth grader over to Francine’s corner so she’d naturally become my partner after him.

Francine knew the steps very well. With her hand on my shoulder blade she guided us through nervous couples and wheeled around on her toes like she was skating. I tried looking at her eyes but she was looking upwards, staring at the metal beams in the ceiling and tapping her fingers in rhythm to the waltz.

As our waltz was ending, I complimented the way she’d styled the Yarn Club president’s half-made scarf.

“The yellow with your hair poking through,” I said, “is like funky dark spots.”

The music stopped, and Darlene Montana released us from class with a lackluster wave.

“Ooooooh,” Francine said, “like a cheetah.”

Francine’s house was one I’d passed before on my walks home from school. It was a long white one-story farmhouse at the intersection of a nature trail and a dead end road. There was a small fenced-off enclosure to the left of the house. I’d tried many times to see inside but found myself blocked. There were blackout curtains, an opaque white tarp over the outdoor fence, and an aggressive smell of spoiled salmon. I hadn’t realized the impenetrable house was hers until we approached it that afternoon.

I’d asked Francine if I could come over after school mostly to gauge her response. Her cheetah comment left me rattled. Francine rapped several times on the rough wooden door of the farmhouse. It creaked open about two inches and revealed a long bulbous nose belonging to her mother.

“Hurry,” hissed the face behind the nose, “the dogs are coming.” She ushered us inside while something warm and furry scurried across my ankle, making a rubbery chuckling sound as it darted across the room.

“The dogs steal the ferrets,” Francine explained, “and eat them, probably.”

Her mother winced. “They got sweet Meghan last night.”

I’d seen the house in my visions, my visions that had conveniently failed to transmit the hundreds of ferrets on its floors or the tented enclosure attached to the living room window housing even more. The ferrets clawed at the tent, scratched the window pane and flung themselves at the glass like rabid bats. I looked around, trying to comment on anything besides the ferrets in order to be polite. I felt a nibble at my toe and came up short.

“What’s that chuckling sound they make?” I asked.

“It’s called ‘dooking’,” Francine said.

“It means they’re all so happy,” her mother said.

“Or terrified,” Francine countered.

Her mother scooped up two of the nearest squirming ferrets and plopped them on her shoulders like sandbags.

“You girls need anything? I can make some rice?”

Worm gray rice.

“No, thanks,” Francine said, leading me towards her room.

White room. All beige clothes.

“I’m going around to check the doors now,” her mother said, “and make sure those damn dogs don’t get in.”

Francine’s floor was also covered in manic ferrets. She shut the door behind me and cleared a path towards her bed by nudging the ferrets aside with her feet. I followed her and we sat together.

“Don’t worry if you step on them,” she said, “they can handle it.”

“They’re kind of cute,” I said.

“They’re weasels,” she said.

The ferrets scurried in circles like Tasmanian devils and excreted tufts of fawn-colored hairs from their coats. Many hairs were sticking to my black pants but I felt it would be rude to brush them.

“You call in the dogs to eat the ferrets,” I said. The oily bread treats. The Reddit emojis.

“I have,” she said, “and it hasn’t been working.” She picked up a squirming ferret and stared down its cloying face.

“The population hasn’t thinned at all; they are multiplying rapidly.”

She cradled the ferret in her lap and stroked its back, releasing a bale of listless beige hair. I sneezed.

“Listen,” she said, “it’s been a nice day with you.”

I wanted to touch her, but I couldn’t, because one ferret was nibbling her hand, another was climbing up her torso, another was relieving itself in the corner near the closet.

“Yes,” I said, “it’s been a nice day with you, too.”

She got up to clean the corner ferret’s mess and the others tumbled to the floor, yelping.

“We won’t be here much longer, I’m afraid,” she said, bending down. The ferrets slithered between her feet and chuckled, begging to be pet.

“Why?” I asked.

“The longer we stay, the bigger the litter gets.”

“Francine,” I said, “I’m worried.”

“Don’t worry,” she said, wiping the floor with a towel, “it’s just pee.”

I wondered how to drag out our time together. I wanted to confess my psychic abilities. When she came back to the room and stood in the doorway, backlit by a yellow light, dusts and furs and dander bits danced behind her. A gaggle of ferrets circled her feet and wheezed out a chorus of squeaks. She was wearing beige. So much beige. Small black eyes surrounded her, glinting spectral green in the darkening room. I sneezed again.

“I’ve been having visions,” I said, sniffling.

“Shall we feed the dogs?” she asked.

I sneezed again.

She led me down a long dark hallway. I could hear deep humming in a minor key. We passed a door to the left, cracked open just an inch and I could see Francine’s mother haloed by a yellow lamp. She was painting the wall with a large foam brush. She was painting slowly, painting the white wall with strokes of beige. A docile ferret splayed along her right shoulder, its tender pink toe beans gripping her shirt, its head upright and undulating as if under a spell, and Francine’s mother swayed side-to-side in lullaby. I was seeing something I shouldn’t, like watching my dad cry when I used to live with him, or catching my grandmother being lowered onto the toilet by her nurse. We kept walking.

At the end of the hallway, we exited the house through a sliding door. I’d expected darkness outside but I could still see the ferrets through the purple night; tufts of coarse ochre fur with mauve flecks in their beady black eyes and blush pink noses leading the way. They swam around the grass with frenzied yowls and it haunted me. I pitied the ferrets, daft and clueless creatures that they were, but I could also see how they distressed Francine. She’d stuffed her long white skirt pockets with oily bread balls and whipped them across the yard, one by one. Each doughy missile landed heavy and scattered the yelping ferrets like a bomb.

I felt bad for the dogs, too. Francine whistled out a long steady siren. Did they know what they were called for? Did they wonder how it would end? Or were they oblivious to the future beyond the smell they followed, night after night?

“Don’t feel bad for the dogs,” Francine said, her pockets emptied.

I must have been frowning. I tried grinning, but felt I was snarling, so I stopped.

“They’re really hungry,” she said, “or they wouldn’t keep eating.”

The grass outside the fence trembled, as if chilly. I looked down Francine’s left shoulder and realized she was really short. She’d felt so tall in my head. In my visions she was lanky with cold gray eyes, towering over everything with perturbing and robotic sameness. I had been really wrong about that. I had been wrong about her house, her mother, the ferrets, her dullness. I started to wonder if I was right about anything, or if the images I’d conjured were transmissions of spiraled lunacy, not pings of practiced magic. Being right meant it was okay to know these things about her and to have seen them. Being wrong meant I was losing my mind, like my dad.

“So these visions of yours,” she said.

I looked down into Francine’s eyes, still bright blue in the fading light, and imagined telling her the visions.

I imagined her gently guiding me off her property and away into the night, politely waving, vowing to never see me again, and then correcting herself, she would have to see me just enough, so as not to rouse suspicion because who knows what I might be capable of. I imagined her, terrified, telling her mother to call my grandmother, or worse, the police, or worse, the high school psychologist Mr. Nardene, who was fifty-seven and still lived at home with all three of his parents.

I imagined explaining that it wasn’t just me, it was an entire subreddit of one thousand one hundred and thirty-seven of us supposedly clairvoyant, definitely lesbians, only to find that the subreddit had been scrubbed from the internet.

I wanted to check my phone for proof but Francine grabbed my shoulder and crouched.

“Get down,” she whispered.

The white tarp slapped the ferret fence, billowing in the cold night wind. I heard the scraping first: steps scuffing along the unpaved driveway, rocks colliding and upending themselves from the force of some stomping creature. Then I heard the wails. There was no softness to them. They were sharp sobs slicing the air around us until it was paper thin.

“Oh wow,” I whispered, “your mom cries too?”

The sobs waltzed in tandem with the wind as Francine’s mom paced back and forth on the opposite side of the fence. She was heaving. There were no ferrets at her feet, only a half empty gallon of beige paint that she poured on the driveway, shaking the can as if punishing it. The paint smelled like glue and sludged through the gravel cracks in buff streams. The can made painful clangs as Francine’s mom beat it empty, then she retreated, stumbling her way back into the house. The sliding door slammed.

I looked at Francine. She was looking down at the gravel, watching the slow trails of paint crawl towards us. I reached out and touched one, dipping my pointer finger into a line of goo. I was surprised by how cold and rough the paint was. It was the exact same color as the ferret’s fur.

“Our old house was entirely beige,” Francine said, leaning back against the fence, “from floor, to ceiling, to fixtures of fixtures.”

“So you couldn’t see the fur,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, “every house starts out white but then… she paints.”

I nodded.

“The fur is dreadful,” she said.

“It’s not so bad,” I said, thinking of my grandmother’s mildewing yellow tub or my father’s hanging shrine of used glue fly traps. “We all have our things.”

“It is so bad,” Francine said, “that I can’t see the floor half the time.”

“You can vacuum,” I said.

“No, Natalie,” she says, finally looking at me, “I can’t.”

She was right, and I knew it. The ferrets would never allow a vacuum. They would squeal, or convulse, or pee, or snake along the rubber hose like demonic slinkies.

“We have to move,” Francine said. “It’s the only thing that works.”

I thought of traps, or crates, or leaving all the doors open while Francine’s mom slept, or tranquilizing the ferrets and sweeping them into boxes and depositing them into the woods in droves.

“And convincing her to move,” Francine continued, “is getting harder and harder.”

Francine’s left eye reflected the moon in its pupil: a sincere yellow beacon of the forthcoming night. I envisioned school desks toppling, angry red marks on failed assignments, anguished sobs and tantrums on the hairy floor.

“I see,” I said, “she has to be concerned, guilty, but not angry.”

Francine nodded, and tucked her black hair behind her left ear.

“Have you seen the Disney Channel original movie The Cheetah Girls from 2003?” she asked.

“No,” I said, “but I’ve been listening to the soundtrack a lot.”

“I really like their outfits,” she said, “all the sequins and colors and velour.”

It was so dark. I couldn’t see anything. I wanted to ask her something. Or maybe hold her hand. But it didn’t feel right. I could hear the dogs: rustling, barking, hungry.

On the night of the ninth grade Spring Quarter Masquerade Ball I funneled half a liter of lemon lime Gatorade mixed with cedar oil (for the smell) into a rubber hydration pack Francine had strapped to her inner left thigh. The pack was ballooned by so much liquid that even the gentlest movement of Francine’s right thigh against her left would cause a very believable gush through the coiled rubber straw.

She would piss herself during the waltz, about halfway through the ball, in the center of the dancefloor. I would jump back, aghast, disgusted, and catapult into the row of slow-swaying tweens. I’d shuffle my ballet flats around in the mess of piss and Gatorade and cedar and cry. Francine would be silent. Everyone would see. It would be totally, brutally, weird.

We rehearsed this in her room in whispers and giggles with the ferrets as our audience. They greedily slurped up the Gatorade, chirped around in crackbrained circles from the sugar, and slumped in a snoozing pile from all the stress. I remember looking at the mound of ferrets snoring pleasantly while they slept. Then I looked away.

The last time I ever saw Francine was that night of the ball. We wore matching beige dresses with silk capped sleeves, dropped corset waists and finely pleated skirts, both from Francine’s closet. We wore black and gold sequined masks and pale pink lipstick and pale pink ballet slippers and huge silver stars in our ears. In the picture her mother took of us that night, in the background in deep shadowed taupe, and in the hazy buff doorway behind us, and on Francine’s sand linen headboard where a stray ferret perched, and at our pink silk feet wiggling with nerves, and under our beige pleated skirts ironed so crisp, and all along the half-painted hallway, you can see hundreds of tiny black eyes glimmering green in the dark.

But thanks to all the beige, you can barely see the fur.

LILY GARETH CUNNINGHAM is a writer, filmmaker, and visual effects artist based in Los Angeles. Her first feature film, Acute Failure, premiered at the Cinequest 2021 Film Festival. Her writing recently appeared in Bruiser Mag. Find more at lilygareth.xyz.

We reach beyond my personal Rolodex today and feature Amber Christman, violinist for The Callous Daoboys. The artist and photographer Amanda Killian (who helps with various projects at Little Engines) suggested Amber from the Daoboys when I mentioned the plan to revive Paperback Rider, our series about musicians reading on the road. Amanda knew Christman to be a thoughtful reader in a ripping band from Atlanta, the city Amanda also calls home. I consulted my metal friend and he, too, gave Daoboys the nod. Their new album I Don’t Want to See You in Heaven is out now. You can catch the band on tour in the US through December and in Europe in 2026.

Artists featured in Paperback Rider are given a list of many questions—half about books, half about tour—and select a handful to answer from each category. In that way, Amber had input on the routing of this Q&A.

Best,
Adam & Amanda (who also took the pics!)

PREVIOUSLY ON PAPERBACK RIDER:

BOOK QUESTIONS

WHAT ARE YOU READING AND WHAT’S ON DECK?
Currently struggling my way through Blood Meridian. It’s a lot to consume and think about, so I might bench it soon. I told my friend Ethan from Crush++ that it’s my third consecutive McCarthy on this tour and found out he’s reading it too. Someone asked how I stomach that kind of thing, especially while traveling the Southwest, but that’s the secret sauce, baby. That’s the fun of it all.

I’ve realized I have trouble being chill when I read. It’s never something laid-back for the beach, you know? I had Point Zero by Seichō Matsumoto in my hands earlier this tour, and I’m thinking that’s on deck.

WHAT WAS THE LAST BOOK YOU WERE GIFTED WHICH YOU LOVED, AND THE LAST BOOK YOU GAVE AS A GIFT?
The last book I was gifted was an archive of my late grandfather’s visual art (Pete Christman Artist Archive). He was a photography professor at SCAD for years and years and had one of the most relentless work ethics in an artist I’ve ever seen, alongside my dad. Both of them would wake up and just make art every single day, across disciplines, always integrating new tech. So not standard lit, but worth mentioning.

The last books I’ve given as gifts were the Werner Herzog autobiography and Devious Dreams: Reimagining David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive by John Thorne, both to my boyfriend. Herzog’s a big inspiration for both of us, and everyone loves David Lynch.

A BOOK CONNECTED TO A LYRIC?
Not one of mine, but clipping. referencing the first line of Neuromancer with their newest record Dead Channel Sky was so sick. That’s probably my favorite sci-fi novel and I could just gush about it for ages. It completely rewired me when I was 18.

YOUR FAVORITE BOOKSTORE IN A SMALL TOWN?
We stumbled into a bookstore in Berlin that was entirely devoted to sci-fi, which ruled. It was plastered with movie posters and had wall-to-wall classics, old serials, and series I’d never even heard of.

Another favorite is Personal Studies in Bushwick. They’ve got a wild mix of ‘80s and ‘90s editions. Variety in age really matters to me. And there’s a little co-op in Detroit called Book Suey where I met an author named Elijah and talked about Cormac McCarthy for half an hour. If anyone in Detroit sees this, you should definitely go say hi.

AN EMBARRASSING BOOK YOU LIKE?
No shame in it! I was a massive Sarah Dessen person in middle school, and I’ve actually been thinking about going back to see if those romances hold up. I loved Lock and Key. Also The Clique series by Lisi Harrison—I reread the first one back in 2021, and it’s such a funny little consumerist time capsule.

TOUR QUESTIONS

MOST EMBARRASSING RIDER ITEM?
Last year we put “a picture of a dog or to meet a dog” on our tour rider. Total joke; we figured no one would do it. I think we even wrote “pleaseee :)” after it? But like 80% of the venues taped photos of staff dogs to the green room wall, and one promoter actually brought us to meet their puppies in the production office. It was so sweet and insane, I almost felt bad.

WHO’S A NICE PERSON YOU MET ON THE ROAD WHO WAS NOT AT THE SHOW?
This was early in our career, back in 2019 when we were doing DIY tours. Our van broke down, and we were stuck at a Firestone all day just hanging out and waiting. This guy sitting near us must have overheard our conversation because later we found out he’d put something like $400 towards the repair. It was unreal.

That was one of my first experiences with how kind people can be when you’re out there, and how connection is maybe the crux of all of it. That feeling of gratitude permeates pretty much everything we do in this band, and it set the tone for how I see touring now. We even ended up naming an EP after that feeling (ed: Can’t be sure, but guessing that’s the God Smiles Upon the Callous Daoboys EP from 2023).

WHAT’S THE MOST CONNECTED PART OF THE DAY?
Any time we’re hanging with the other bands after the show. This headliner’s package was perfect - we were constantly seeking each other out. There were so many moments that I’d just wander over to Crush++’s bus, and ask what they were doing. It’s simple, but tour can be isolating, and joking around and shooting the shit keeps you sane.

WHAT’S THE WORST STRETCH OF ROAD?
I’m sure SLC to Denver has been mentioned a million times, and for good reason. On another tour we took I-80 through Wyoming in winter and it felt like being on the moon.

A SUPERSTITION OR PRE-SHOW RITUAL?
Before we play, we all put our hands together and say: “Best Band in the World.”

We met Warren C. Longmire in the Spring, when he threatened to steal the show at Morning, Fuckers for Mission Creek festival in Iowa City. Two new ones from Warren below; you’ll see. After the poems, some news on events and a submission call.

JOYRIDE

by Warren C. Longmire

Most things don’t require a god. An ottoman.

The Pacific Crest Trail. A handful of clay. My snoring cat’s tensing leg while trapped in a dream.

Most things don’t require language. The sun.

A cheap grocery store plant, its weakened stalk dry as drunk, arcing towards a patch of window without sadness ‘til shaped in by an adjective.

This youtube of condos getting shot in the face in Kyiv.

The day the trade centers puff into liquid again, an iguana will pluck a hovering insect off its own eye socket in a display of Olympic dexterity.

What is an iguana but an interesting dance on a Taino’s tongue right before Columbus decided they would make good Christians and then killed them fools like a G?

Iguanas don’t exist in the way a word is a shadow formed when some actual vibration of spacetime is occluded by a Columbus.

Most things don’t have an identity. The sky, Venus’ small quasi-satellite, or an eye tooth in English.

After the second tower’s load baring structs are impaled by a F150’s pinwheeling axel, a detached Skip-It^tm surfing on a cruise missile’s wake, a snot bubble will pop off the nose of a delighted infant a few kilometers north of Johannesburg. Ignorant of framing, all of the studders won’t blick.

A piece of styrofoam pressed into a distressed slab of wear is a rock if there are no scales left to weight it so I, like, thank my lucky stars for the way the morning slices through my loft’s bedroom window. I praise God.

Most things aren’t alive and most things are not human.

Columbus shot a trade tower into half the world’s temples and species die and iguanas became a cartoon fiction and the Gods choked on their own backstories as the words carved into the cloud servers demagnetized: the digits all zeroed and silent again, and the cattle prod of electron burst hummed in silence.

Most things don’t have a soul if there even is one:

A disturbance of warm air is the song of the summer and a gun shot. A well constructed birthday cake full of purple fondant and imperial pipes. A human heart, the flesh of it on a surgical tray and a floor tom crashing, most things. Almost nothing does, my love, but you do. Not you, not me, I said and smiled through blood warm tears from an adjacent seat in the hull of this spasming airplane.

Not us, my love. Not yet.

A GOOD BEATING

by Warren C. Longmire

My preferred fighting
style
is to lean in and tell them to hit me, cold and
unflinching.

Only one man (in front of his son and too
big for his body) had too. Ultimately
everyone feels the fire
of a righteous fight and also
everyone chokes on
smoke without years of
actually, burning alive.

We don’t like smoke.
What we like is the fear.

We are extremely
kinky for the real shit
like

trauma that rains on your
boring little meaninglessness like
a grape-sized
hail.

Running for a bridge, scared
to death and
laughing just before a rainbow
breaks in.

Anyone can be Jesus and
live.

When my eye socket splintered after I
took his punch, it felt like
a purple jellyfish in my head: I almost laughed.

Didn’t heal for months.
Today is an excellent day.

With the right word,
most people can’t help but show
their five-year-old, the demons parting.

You have a five-year-old too
small
dewy thing.

Pull down your pants.

Look a fear in the eye today and say, “I want you.”

Warren C. Longmire is a Negro poet, performer, and technologist from North Philadelphia. A co-founder of the Excelano Project Spoken Word Collective, his work has appeared in publications including Action, Spectacle, The Offing, and The American Poetry Review. Warren was featured in The Best American Poetry 2021. His latest book, Bird/Diz [an erased history of bebop], was published by Bunny Presse in 2022. He is currently completing his MFA in Poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. You can find Warren at: alongmirewriter.com.

Send your pitch and two sample columns to: av@littleengines.pub.

Morning, Fuckers, our early-riser reading series, is going international. Join us for Winterruption festival in Winnipeg. TICKETS HERE.

THE OFFICE OF
FUTURE PLANS

by Kyle Seibel

The Office of Future Plans is on the second floor. To access the second floor, you need a badge. To get a badge, you need to see the Special Security Officer. Unfortunately, there is no Special Security Officer. Or rather, there is not one currently. Use the courtesy phone to call the yeoman on duty and have them send an escort. The escort will be a small Filipino boy. You will call him Ted. This is a false name.

The Head of The Office of Future Plans is Captain Markwardt. Report directly to his desk in the center of the room. You will know him, of course, by his captain’s uniform (embossed epaulettes and golden shoulder boards) but also by his extremely tan skin and extremely white teeth. Prepare yourself for the contrast. The first few times? It is alarming.

After introductions with the captain, report to the executive officer, Commander Skip. He’s the only one who has figured out how to levitate so far. The moron has barely touched the ground since cracking it. Before reporting to The Office of Future Plans, Commander Skip was a helicopter pilot. The thinking goes this made for relevant experience.

Your desk partner is Lieutenant Dragon. This is his real name, but no one believes him. His Future Plan, the one he’s working on, is for facial hair to be reintroduced to the fleet, for the men to be bearded again. He’s writing point paper after point paper and his point is this: Beards, baby. They’re back. He is sometimes referred to as Lieutenant Dragon Ass for his tendency to fall behind during mandated PT. The irony is not lost on him that he could not grow a beard at gunpoint. He is chubby and smooth, like a baby.

If you do not have a Future Plan in mind, one will be appointed to you. We have an approved list to choose from if you want something specific. Most of the good ones have been taken, but there are a few chewy ones left. Dogs That Never Die is popular, but remains elusive. By all means, go ahead and try. Everyone does their first few weeks.

Some Plans come with details and materials and documented previous attempts, while some have nothing but a name. One file just says The Disneyfication of Iraq. Another says Night Vision for Sound. In truth, it doesn’t matter much what you pick. With our schedule, you’ll barely have any time to work on it.

This is your day, this is how it goes. Mandated physical training, mandated departmental training, safety brief, intel brief, department head meeting, enlisted liaison meeting, daily mahjong game with Ted, computer time, chow.

It’s not all business. We get hazelnut creamer on Monday, as much as you want. Then on Thursdays, Lieutenant Marina squirts some cheese from a can on a bunch of these little pepperonis and then microwaves it for like, eight seconds. The pepperonis curl up around the cheese like a tiny meat taco. She walks around the office holding the platter and puts them on people’s tongues like a priest with communion wafers. Don’t listen to Lieutenant Dragon. They’re quite good.

Even though technically you outrank him, for administrative purposes, you report to the work center supervisor, Capulong. Capulong is a bastard. One cunt hair shorter and he’d be a dwarf. Capulong is not his real name, of course. His name is something ancient, unpronounceable. Capulong has rickets, Capulong has gout. Capulong has multiple sleep apneas. Do not let yourself be enchanted by this twisted creature. Do not be tempted to pity him. When you’re not looking, he will eat your balls.

Sometime in the late afternoon, Capulong plays a song. “It’s Later Than You Think,” by Kermit Ruffins. If you don’t know, it’s a real kick-back and good times tune. Big sassy brass section with a trombone solo. A quitting song, you might think. But no, Capulong, the bastard, is playing it ironically. You don’t want to be the first one to go, no one does. So when can you leave? Sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you just stay there.

Though you could just go. Sneak away and never come back. But you don’t. Because you can’t. Not really. And anyway, what would you be if you didn’t work here? Now that they’ve warped you for anything else?

Best to seek comfort in simple truths. Like, one day it will all be worth it. You don’t understand how this could be possible, and yet you believe. Yes, really you do. You curl your body around its warmth, shut your eyes, and try to get some rest.

THE OFFICE OF FUTURE PLANS: Live at Morning, Fuckers in Urbana for Pygmalion festival. You’ll need to envision dancing on stage at the end.

Kyle Seibel lives in Santa Barbara. His debut collection Hey You Assholes is out now from Clash Books.

Karan Kapoor returns to the magazine today with his newest poem, “a knock at the door.” His first go with us, a poem in Issue Eight, remains a favorite around here. You can find that and more in the newly renovated Little Engines Shop. After Karan’s poem, a brief recap of the morning shows this past weekend in Illinois, which were sick.

a knock at the door

by Karan Kapoor

maybe it’s the weeping
willow you meditate below
or the Book of Mercy you lost
or a mother who never
abandoned you
go open
perhaps it’s the woman
who scarred your thighs
or a wolf that needs a rose
go open the damn door
what if it’s Leonard Cohen!
don’t you want to ask him how?
it could be the burning giraffe
hurry you could water it
may be a mirror — see
for yourself or smoke
go gamble
it could be God
begging for an apology
even if there’s nobody
go
at least there will be nothing

Karan Kapoor’s poems have appeared in Best New Poets, AGNI, Shenandoah, North American Review, and elsewhere. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Strange Pilgrims and ONLY POEMS, and serves on the editorial board of Alice James Books.

I’m home after the weekend in Illinois, but haven’t unloaded the car. Depleted, but charged up after the morning shows in Chicago and Urbana. I promise what’s actually happening at the events is that we are reading literature, but we’re also providing entertainment. I’m harassing Mike and Kyle, saying the northeast needs donuts and stories.

- Adam

A new story below from Elizabeth Horner Turner, who we met earlier this year at our morning reading in Los Angeles. I think we all would have loved Uncle Brad.

If you’re an early-riser in Chicago or Champaign-Urbana, we’ve got Morning, Fuckers shows next weekend. We’d love to see you there.

Uncle Brad Would Have Loved This

by ELIZABETH HORNER TURNER

The instructor this morning at KidzGymTime wore her name tag in the center of her chest. The name—Cherrie!!—was written in red with two exclamation points and bobbed up and down with her breasts while she bounced in place, calling for everyone to start the goodbye circle.

As Cherrie!!’s breasts jiggled, Diane hauled her daughter Gretta off the balance beam to make their way toward the center of the room. Like most of the rituals at this place, Diane hated the goodbye circle, and today she was particularly concerned about the level of enthusiasm that Cherrie!! might bring to it. The goodbye circle began when the instructor brought out the giant teddy bear mascot, Mr. Teddy, and sat him next to some starry-eyed kid.

Mr. Teddy was enormous, and Cherrie!! was tiny, so she couldn’t see over him as she hauled him out of the supply closet. Lugging him toward the goodbye circle, she managed to continue chirping, “Let’s come together, friends, and sing with Mr. Teddy!” until she gave up her quest and thudded him down right behind Diane and Gretta.

Mr. Teddy was pretty grim. His fur was matted and stained, and there were tufts missing on his belly. The red, felt tongue listed out of his mouth at an angle, and purple paint splatters decorated one of his legs like bruises. Mr. Teddy would benefit from some time at rehab, but Diane had yet to muster up the courage and write it down on a KidzGymTime comment card.

His stained head fell over onto Diane’s while his giant, raggedy paws slumped against her back. The unwashed smell was overwhelming, and she felt like she was being mauled by a drunk at a bar. She got a few good whacks into his belly with her elbows as Cherrie!!’s voice quavered upward to sing-song “so sorry about that, friend!” Between Diane’s self-defense moves and Cherrie!!’s full body grabs, together they managed to shove the bear off Diane’s back and into an empty spot on their left. As Mr. Teddy drooped in, one plastic eye popped out of its socket, graying fuzz tufting out behind it. Giving a half-hearted laugh and thumbs-up to show Cherrie!! there were no hard feelings, Diane tried to tuck the eyeball back in. Cherrie!! pulled an exaggerated hand across her forehead and mimed phew! Once everyone was crisscross applesauce on the floor, together they launched into a rather tuneless version of “Teddy Bear’s Picnic”.

Gretta and the other children sang with gusto, the little voices cracking as the notes got higher. The mother on her right gave an eye roll. Diane felt a flutter of excitement, as eye-rolling was one of her own moves at kid events. Maybe this mom also thought that “Teddy Bear’s Picnic” was a disturbing song, and they could be friends. Maybe she also thought Mr. Teddy was a germ-riddled, stuffed perv.

“You know?” Diane started quietly. “That’s the first time I’ve been felt up by a giant bear and the most action I’ve gotten in months.”

The woman turned to look at her, eyes opening wide. Diane couldn’t tell whether this was positive or negative eye contact but figured she should keep going. “And this song, right? Is ‘picnic’ code for a teddy bear orgy? Like, what the hell are we singing with our kids?” Diane tipped her head to the side and raised her eyebrows conspiratorially.

The woman next to her also began to raise her eyebrows and they didn’t stop until they got close to her hairline. This was decidedly not a positive response. Then the woman did something Diane hadn’t seen from someone who wasn’t a teacher or librarian; she lifted her index finger up to her mouth and shushed.

“The children are trying to SING!” Bringing her finger back down to rest on her leg, the woman nodded curtly and snapped her head away from Diane.

“Well, all right,” Diane breathed, leaning forward to hide her reddening cheeks behind her daughter’s head. “Cool. That was really cool.”

This lady was definitely not going to be her next playground friend. Why was it so hard to find someone who might appreciate the absurdity of raising kids? Singing songs about teddy bear group sex while sitting in a circle with toddlers was weird. As the song ended, the mother threw Diane another pointed look and moved with her child to the other side of the circle.

“Let’s all remember to be kind and cheerful!” Cherrie!! chirped, looking at Diane with a frozen smile.

Giving Cherrie!! another thumbs-up to keep the happy teddy vibe going, Diane joined her daughter in a rousing rendition of “Wheels on the Bus”. Delighted with her mother’s sudden enthusiasm, Gretta began to bounce and clap in her lap​. As they started into the next verse, a beat-up Honda Civic pulled into the parking spot right in front of KidzGymTime, windows down and blasting a song. Diane yelped: “Runnin’ With the Devil!” The people in the circle faltered in their singing and looked at her. More quietly, Diane added, “It’s Van Halen, you guys.”

She peered through the plate-glass windows and even through the greasy hand smears, she could make out the driver: he wore those bright, rectangular sunglasses that baseball players like. She was surprised he was young and not the typical old dude who usually blasted David Lee Roth; the type of guy who looked like her Uncle Brad did before he died. This kid had duct tape keeping his front bumper from falling off, but had clearly dropped serious cash to update his car’s stereo system.

She hadn’t listened to Van Halen since the gathering after Uncle Brad’s funeral at her parent’s house, way back before Gretta was born. She’d invited everyone from the funeral to come by, to her mother’s chagrin, as she wanted to “Keep it simple, Diane, just small and intimate.”

The guys from the construction company where Uncle Brad worked asked Diane to play “Top Jimmy”—apparently, they’d reworked the lyrics. They said they had outfits. When Diane’s brothers hooked a phone up to the speaker system, Uncle Brad’s friends burst into the living room in spandex pants, threw their arms around each other and yell-sang “Top Bradley! He’s the king!” Diane and her brothers cheered them on and took plenty of pictures because Uncle Brad would have been fucking thrilled, but their father walked out of the house.

Uncle Brad was twelve years younger than his brother, their dad, and the two didn’t have a lot in common. Uncle Brad didn’t go to college like their father did, and he loved muscle cars and was big time into arena rock. He used to bring records to play for them every time he came over to babysit. They’d put on an album and jump on the couch and Uncle Brad would slide into the living room on his knees playing air guitar. A two-liter bottle of Sprite would materialize and Uncle Brad would judge a belching contest. Diane accidentally split her younger brother’s chin open when Brad organized a David Lee Roth kick contest. Brad stayed at the emergency room even after their parents arrived and as he slid a pack of M&M’s over to her brother while he waited for his stitches, he whispered to Diane that she’d won, fair and square.

That fall, Diane dressed up as Diamond David for Halloween, and Uncle Brad came to cheer her on at the school parade. As soon as her class was announced and they began to circle the playground, he whipped his boombox out and blasted “Panama,” obliterating the tinny version of “Monster Mash” the school had going. He was asked to leave, but he refused to turn the music off as he walked out. All the kids wanted to meet Uncle Brad after that.

The song from the Honda ended and Cherrie!! took the opportunity to get the group excited for their final circle activity. “Let’s keep singing friends, and I’ll get the magic sparkles!” she sang, her voice extra chirpy. Whenever magic sparkles came out, each KidzGymTime instructor said the same thing: “Don’t worry, grownups! Our magic sparkles are 100% safe! They’re non-toxic and non-scary.” They didn’t even call it bubble solution, “Because,” Diane was told, “calling them sparkles is much more magical.”

As the unmistakable drum intro to “Hot for Teacher” blasted from the Honda outside, red blotches bloomed all over Cherrie!!’s cheeks. Diane whooped with glee, but quickly covered her mouth. Smiling down at her daughter’s head, she bounced her knees faster, jostling Gretta up and down on her lap to the rapid-fire beat.

The cords in Cherrie!!’s neck visibly strained as she tried to speak over the drums without yelling. Lip-reading her mouth, Diane made out the phrase, non-toxic and non-scary. She had to give it to her; Cherrie!! was determined to get through her lines, no matter what. A parent pointed out the front window and Cherrie!! shook her head back in violent bursts, putting a hand up like a horse blinder to the side of her face closest to the window. She began to blow her magic sparkles at the kids. A couple of them had covered their ears. One boy stood up next to his mom, banging his head and bending his knees to the music. Gretta was slapping Diane’s knees to the beat. One kid threw himself onto Mr. Teddy. Outside, the Honda guy reclined his seat back and put his hands up, ready to air guitar the shit out of Eddie’s licks.

Diane turned Gretta around in her lap so they could face each other. “Isn’t this awesome, baby?” she shouted. Gretta slapped her pudgy hands on each of her mother’s cheeks. The boy on Mr. Teddy rolled off and started running around the room. This was much better than magic sparkle time, Diane thought. Several parents stood up and pulled their children toward the front desk. “Don’t leave, folks,” Diane yelled toward their backs. “You can’t leave Van Halen!” But even Cherrie!! abandoned sparkle time, retreating in defeat toward the supply closet.

“All right, baby. Let’s go clap for that guy outside and get a chocolate croissant,” Diane shouted to Gretta. A new coffee shop had opened in the shopping center, and they made strong coffee and good pastries; a reward for singing in a circle with adults. Diane stood up and hoisted the diaper bag onto her shoulder before taking Gretta’s hand. Close to the door, the music was louder and Gretta let go and clapped her hands over her ears, then a whistle blasted from the back of the room, startling all the kids and parents into silence. Outside, David Lee Roth crooned for the teacher to stop the screamin’, while a woman with a lanyard and clipboard emerged from the supply closet and strode purposefully toward the front.

“Please let me through!” the woman ordered. “I’ll deal with this fella outside.”

Diane snorted as she picked Gretta up. They definitely needed to witness this. Diane stood at the front bumper while Honda guy kept on playing, his hands a frenzy in the air, but Gretta whimpered about the noise, so Diane reluctantly peeled away and toward the coffee place. She raised a fist into the air and pumped it in solidarity. Gretta removed a hand from her ear and raised her arm up, too. Diane’s eyes began to fill. Uncle Brad would have loved this.

Diane carried Gretta into the coffeeshop and once inside, saw her daughter pop something into her mouth. What the hell was that? Gretta then reared back and spit whatever it was at her mother’s face. It bounced off Diane’s own mouth and slide down her chest into her bra, leaving a wet trail behind. She wiped her lips and stared hard at Gretta who started to gently pat her mother’s cheeks. “Sorry, Mama. Sorry, Mama,” she said over and over, but when Diane pulled the slimy thing from between her bra, Gretta giggled. Diane held Mr. Teddy’s plastic eye in her hand, covered in her daughter’s saliva and years of KidzGymTime bacteria.

Outside the coffee shop, a pack of parents circled the Honda and Cherrie!! was standing next to the driver’s side door pointing toward the parking lot exit.

“Have I ever told you about Uncle Brad, sweetie?”

Gretta shook her head no.

“Uncle Brad would have loved you, baby. He would have loved you so, so much.”

ELIZABETH HORNER TURNER’s work has been widely published and selected for inclusion in Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf's Top 50. Her fiction chapbook, Horsemouth and Aquariumhead, was published with Black Lawrence Press in 2024. Her previous poetry chapbook, The Tales of Flaxie Char, was published with dancing girl press. She lives in San Francisco.

Brittany Menjivar is watching adaptations. Previously: Nightmare on Elm Street, Nosferatu, The Polar Express, Secretary, Rave Macbeth, The Great Gatsby and Grand Theft Hamlet.

My fellow filmmakers sometimes say a screenplay isn’t itself a literary document. The people who argue this stance are often writer-directors we might consider auteurs; they don’t intend to disparage the art of screenwriting, but to call attention to the cross-curricular, collaborative work that goes into making a movie. I always push back when this opinion comes up. How come? The answer is simple: I came of age, creatively speaking, reading Paul Schrader.

It’s fitting that Schrader’s work often contends with Calvinist thought, as my first encounter with his work felt predestined. As a film student, I had to present my thesis screenplay to my entire writing workshop; I was shocked when my classmates told me that I had echoed several plot points from Taxi Driver, considering that I had never seen the film. I looked up the script—which Schrader penned for Scorsese—and was shocked by everything I read before the first slugline.

“The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.” —Thomas Wolfe, “God’s Lonely Man”

“He has the smell of sex about him: Sick sex, repressed sex, lonely sex, but sex nonetheless.”

“As the earth moves toward the sun, Travis Bickle moves toward violence.”

These words don’t directly translate to any singular shot in the film, but seeing Robert De Niro onscreen, shrouded in smoke and staring silently into space, the viewer knows them to be true.

Schrader’s thorough descriptions wouldn’t feel out of place in a novel, and while he hasn’t yet turned to literary fiction, the Oscar-nominated screenplay for his 2017 film First Reformed is available in book format via Archway Editions. First Reformed is separated from Taxi Driver by a gulf of 40 years, but the parallels are clear: while Taxi Driver centers an isolated, traumatized cabbie who spirals into violence, First Reformed features an isolated, traumatized preacher who spirals into self-destruction. Much like its forebear, the script is a master class for writers of all disciplines—and it’s just as much of a page-turner as any paperback.

The heart of a screenplay is the heart of its protagonist, and Schrader immediately lays Toller’s psyche bare. Before we follow him on his journey, we learn that “his face is like a rubbed away engraving on [a] tombstone… He is Agony.” As we get deeper into the plot—which involves Toller’s entanglement with the widow of an environmental activist and subsequent descent into eco-nihilism—Schrader cuts back on the exposition. Yet we continue to learn more about Toller, primarily through screen directions: we don’t just learn that Toller’s a reader but see the books on his shelf; we don’t just discover that Toller’s taking meds but find out which bottles are in his cabinet. Several years ago, dissecting authors’ scene-setting choices became the butt of an online joke due to one particularly pesky meme—“sometimes the curtains are just blue,” went the popular refrain, to the dismay of English teachers everywhere. Guess what, Internet—in a screenplay, constrained by industry-wide length requirements, if any color was mentioned at all there’s probably a good reason. Diving into a screenplay, the reader is reminded that every word and every image count.

Even as “show, don’t tell” remains wise advice, there are occasions when the invisible must be conveyed—a protagonist’s confusion during an emotional breakdown; ambiguous relationship dynamics that neither party can quite make sense of. How does the author explain that which characters can’t even explain themselves? First Reformed offers an answer: sometimes, it’s best not to. One of the film’s most distinctive sequences involves a ritual called “the Magical Mystery Tour,” which Mary used to perform with her late husband Michael as a means of stress relief. The two would lie on top of each other, fully clothed; then, staring into each other’s eyes, they would breathe in rhythm, eventually reaching a state of zen. When Mary comes to Toller late at night, distraught over Michael’s suicide, she invites him to recreate the ritual with her. The interaction that ensues is, at first, awkward—partly due to Mary’s grief, and partly due to Toller’s own existential turmoil, but also, it’s implied, because of the intimacy of the act. Is sexual tension brewing between the two, or is the viewer projecting?

Paging through First Reformed, I hoped for some additional insight, but Schrader’s calculated restraint was even more satisfying. Certain directions regarding line delivery provide an emotional framework for the interaction—there’s a “beat” after Mary elaborates on the tradition; she appears “shamefaced” after making her request. Yet the description of the actual moment is stark, focusing on choreography rather than emotional content. “Forehead to forehead, finger to finger, thigh and leg to thigh and leg” drives home the strangeness and potential subtext, but Schrader allows his audience to fill in the blanks. When romance does blossom between the two, it feels surprising and natural at once.

Reading the script for a film you’ve watched, the temptation to seek out secret information runs parallel to the desire to note deviations from the finished product. One such deviation that stood out to me was the song that the children’s choir performs at Michael’s funeral. In Archway’s version, Tracy Chapman’s “Rape of the World” soundtracks the scene; in the film, we hear Neil Young’s “Who’s Gonna Stand Up?”. Whereas Chapman’s song is more straightforwardly somber, Young’s is on the nose in its sloganeering. As Mary sobs wordlessly into a tissue, impassioned lyrics like “Protect the plants” and “End fossil fuels” multiply the discomfort everyone at the ceremony is feeling—and serve as a contrast to Toller’s hopelessness. This was the scene that cemented the film as one of my personal top ten of the century. I couldn't believe that it could have never existed—but who’s to say how the other song might have moved me? The joy of spotting differences isn’t determining which iteration is better, but reveling in the number of directions a project can veer in. During the revision process, it’s easy to get struck by decision paralysis—but First Reformed shows that possibility as exciting rather than terrifying.

Publishing a screenplay as a book might seem quietly transgressive and maybe even counterintuitive. A script in your hands can feel like a secret, the floor plan for a Disneyland dark ride—it’s not something you’re supposed to have access to. But there is something inherently prosocial about engaging with a project in a rudimentary or partial state. Trial and error is part of what makes us human, and amidst the AI boom, bearing witness to an artist’s creative process, the very thing that separates it from a computer, is not only historically significant but spiritually fulfilling. With all that said: I can’t wait for Schrader to publish Hardcore.

BRITTANY MENJIVAR studied creative writing and film at Yale University. Now, she works and plays in the City of Angels. Britt’s a columnist for the Los Angeles Review of Books, the author of poetry and prose collection Parasocialite, the screenwriter behind award-winning thriller short “Fragile.com,” and the co-founder of literary reading series Car Crash Collective.

Bob Hicok returns to Little Engines, and we’re stoked to have him back. Previously, we published an all-timer from Hicok along with a poem only available in the print edition of Issue Nine. You should be aware that , Steward of Hicok, maintains a Bobstack if you’d like more poems.

QUICK UPDATE ON SHOWS:

The early-riser reading series heads to Pygmalion festival in Urbana, Illinois, on Saturday Sept 20 at 10:00am, along with a soon-to-be-announced show in Chicago at Exile in Bookville on Sunday morning, Sept 21.

EULOGY I DIDN'T GIVE (III)
Bob Hicok

I was washing a spoon when I felt myself
never knocking on my parents' door again
the rest of my life, and held the spoon
to my ear to see if it had anything to say.
Like what — people are mostly water,
and love mixes our waters and they can't
be taken apart? A spoon would say that
but not a knife. A knife would say, Cut it out,
get on with your life. Advice.
I don't have any except death
is the beginning of thinking I saw my mom
folding clothes at the laundromat
as I drove past, though when I came
back around, it was a cactus with her smile,
which isn't advice but a story, a moment
trying to be part of an elegy that begins,
To be haunted is to be followed
from the inside out. Everywhere I go,
she is the smell of the sun, he the feeling
of air holding my head in its hands.
And everywhere I stay. That leaves nowhere
to do what it's best at.

THE EULOGY I DIDN'T GIVE (XXIX)
Bob Hicok

He kept a towel beside the bed to spit into.

He was a very mucusy person.

A quality I've not inherited.

I do share his ability to start a lawn mower
on the first pull, but carrying a chair
wherever I go is my own thing.

Three legged. A tripod of repose.

When I travel to the ocean, I want to see dolphins.

When I visit his grave, I expect to see his ghost.

Good thing the chair is very patient.

A long time from now, when everyone I know
has no one left to dream their face,
sitting will still be popular, though not always
to play the cello.

Very few people will ever sit in a chair to do that.

Or stand.

Or float.

Which is too bad.

I'm having an out of body experience.

I'm in my body, and want out.

BOB HICOK’s forthcoming collection is Breathe (Copper Canyon Press 2026)