This is the first time we’ve made eye contact, but I’ve been looking at his face my entire life. I know those narrow, close-set eyes almost as well as my own. Eyes so blue they almost glow in direct light. Eyes I always had to turn away from because of the way they constantly laughed at me.
All these years, they’ve never stopped laughing at me.
Continue reading “Pissing Bullies by Rasmenia Massoud”
“You scary pretty,” she said, settling onto the lattice bench. She wasn’t her, but she looked at me the same way, as if she knew the part. Ever since Celeste’s funeral, I kept finding her inside strangers. I checked the time out of habit. The second hand trembled near the six. The woman was small inside a brown trench coat made of possum fur, seams hand-stitched with thick black wax taxidermy thread. The woman kept her eye on me, then threw a coin into the fountain beside us.
Continue reading “Inside the Possum Coat by Patrick G. Roland”
The dreadful ghoul has been beaten to death after death with cudgels, sticks, baseball bats and dirty old men, but the hardest thing in writing to do, I think, is setting out to be funny and actually succeeding. I do not know if Todd Mercer had that in mind when he set out to write The Assistant Town Drunk: From Zero to Hero in Seconds, but funny is what he delivered. There’s subtle wit and slapstick all the way through this one and we highly recommend it for those who might be feeling low.
Continue reading “Literally Reruns: The Assistant Town Drunk: From Zero to Hero in Seconds by Todd Mercer”
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The dumbest question to ask a kid must be “What do you want to be when you grow up?” (Often preceded by “So”). For me the best answers for that are “How the fuck should I know, I’m seven”; “Lizzie Borden” and “Anything that takes me away from you.” But I never used any because even at that young age I knew it was an insincere “points winning” question usually asked by some dweeb whose aim was to screw my mother.
Continue reading “593: Limping Mind Games”
I still read about wanderlust though my nomadic days have dwindled. Reading about the swish current Melbourne-Sydney train, the XPT, kindles a memory of The Spirit of Progress, the titan of the tracks from my boyhood. When I first rode it at thirteen, paddocks of silvery grass shivered, wan morning light breaking over imagined desperadoes’ campfires, rural Victoria flying past like life, silent stations a blur. Ticketless, wearing sad belligerence’s long overcoat, I rehearsed my tale. This account was not for my furious parents’, but my schoolmates’ ears. My burgeoning description of speeding back in custody for daring crime when skipping school, and the resulting vivid arse-whipping, having hitchhiked from big trouble, would consolidate my schoolyard status.
Continue reading “Clickety-click by Ian C Smith”
In my mind, I walked in bare feet on a narrow, yellowed, dry-grass path, not stilettos or Merrell’s, Asic’s or glass slippers. Posturing and protection seemed incompatible with the advancing disclosures.
Left and right there were walls of water like the falls in certain hotel lobbies and shopping malls, but seemingly static, not flowing, like glacial ice, the same layered turquoise and white, and mirrored, warped, the way shame distorts what isn’t love into something recognizable and consequently accepted. There was enough width for my shoulders plus an inch or two on either side.
Continue reading “Almost Cinderella by Claudine Mussuto”
She’s never home when I want her to be, and when she is, sometimes I wish she’d just go. Tonight there’s a cat on our couch. It’s purring under the pressure of her palm. She’s left the window open, and the very edge of a drizzle is falling through. Tiny little droplets are falling through the awnings and onto the windowsill. Portents of water damage and mold.
Continue reading “Little Bites by Jake K. Istuk”
September 8th
The idea came to Louis Lovelace after a phone call informing him of the end of the world.
He groped for an excuse to end the call, but his mind was foggy from the smoldering joint in the ashtray. He’d been burning through the severance from his last job for almost five months now, and the truth was he had nothing better to do than listen.
“Louis, it’s Sheldon. We went to college together, remember?” the hopeful voice on the other end of the line said.
“I know this seems strange, but it’s urgent.”
Louis remembered Sheldon as a devoutly religious student who shared his notes whenever Louis was too hungover to take his own. They had hardly been friends, and in the fifteen years since graduation, Louis hadn’t thought about him once.
The Damascus steel, fresh off eight sets of eight strokes at fifteen degrees against the diamond rod, meets no resistance when you turn it on yourself by accident. Across the web of skin that spans forefinger and thumb, a line of blood appears and lengthens until the bright sting of pain arrives. You place the boning knife to the side of your butcher block with a gasp that you hope the other cooks don’t hear. You hold the cut to your mouth and when you remove it from between your lips, you pretend what you see is a gash in someone else’s flesh.
Continue reading “The Butcher by Brandon Sharp”
“The dead don’t die.” – Jeff Tweedy
Whoever believes that a 58-year-old man can’t rock out any more hasn’t heard (or has heard and hasn’t understood) Jeff Tweedy’s new song “Lou Reed Was My Babysitter” from his 2025 triple album Twilight Override.
The symbolic title of this song alone is worth volumes as it encapsulates an American way of life, for good and ill, in five words.
Anything with Lou in it has to be great, or near-great, to justify the use of his name and this song is.
Continue reading “Sunday Whatever: Tweedy on Reed an essay from Dale Williams Barrigar.”
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