Author: Back Patio Press

I’m at the mall and can’t hear shit. My dollar store earbuds are blaring tinny death metal. It’s all just a perpetual eeee without them. I swear I blew out my eardrums years ago. Dozens of concerts right up against the PAs will do that for you. I just pop a couple of B9 pills every day. I have a special-order LP to pick up at the record store. Fuck it, I’m here for a short time, both literally and metaphorically.

An overweight dude in a Pantera shirt is coming my way. Cargo pants, stained crew socks, and dirty black Vans complemented with a denim vest adorned with numerous patches. I think he sees me. Well, probably my Death shirt. It’s always giving me undue attention. The red, jagged logo and the old pastor “blessing” the invalid in the wheelchair. It’s hilarious, but the riffs go hard as fuck. But the shirt is more than an emblem of my passions.

It’s a hand-me-down from my dead brother, Roy. He got me into this music early in life, like 8 years old. I’m only 16 so it’s been half my life. It’s been worn so much, that the white is browning in spots. Mainly the bear claw-looking shred on the right shoulder. My first circle pit. A badge of honor. Maybe I could get a sick skull tattoo there when I’m of age.

Oh, man, I miss my brother. He was always a magnet for pain and adrenaline. I can smell his sweat near the armpits still. You’d think someone as buff and energetic as he was wouldn’t have died shooting up drugs. His band broke up right after the funeral. He was Chuck Schuldiner in my eyes. I hope one day I can shred like him. I know he spends his days drinking beer, watching motorcycle stunts, and pit tickets for Dio shows up there in Metal Valhalla.

Oh, shit. Forgot about this dude in the Pantera shirt. Wouldn’t be surprised if he comes up to me and…

Yo, cool shirt. Name 3 songs.

Oh, no…there it is.

He smells like Taco Bell and car oil. The guy in a mosh pit that’s slow, waiting for smaller dudes like me to get close, just to shove you like a human bowling ball with corn-fed strength. I try to sidestep, but he bounds over with surprising agility. He’s huffing out of his mouth with the simplest of movements. Jeez, maybe lay off the Cheesy Gordita Crunches, my guy?

Ew, we make eye contact. He’s got a few missing teeth in his yellowed sneer, a ratty mullet, and asymmetrical brown eyes. I can’t stop staring at his forearm with a “hot” pinup model tattoo that looks more like a blow-up doll. We’re by the fountain, which has a skylight overhead. A golden sunbeam splays onto the floor. It is an omen, a battlefield issued by the Metal Gods.

I say I’m listening to Mayhem if that counts. The dude snorts and crosses his hairy arms. Oh, now you gotta tell me 3 songs by BOTH!

Oh, sweet baby Jesus, here we go. Two metalheads dusting up in a suburban mall. I am suddenly shoved by the dude and my earbuds pop out from the push. The world returns to eeee. This pisses me off and I start seething. People are noticing. Grimaced parents in their pastel khakis and polos shoo their kids away. It feels like a galactic vacuum is pulling me inside myself. I think of Roy, what he would do.

I plug my ears again from the scary world. Turning up the volume, the song I love by Lamb of God plays next. Perfect timing. The world becomes mine to manipulate. I lift my arms and conjure fire around me. I flex my arms and watch my muscles pump and bulge to inhuman proportions. My forehead cracks as volcanic horns sprout forth. It’s the power of Thor and Satan. And I’d like to think Roy is part of it, too.

Now this motherfucker has something to die for!

I flick an ethereal butterfly knife and scratch him up a bit. He staggers back after hearing 3 songs by Death. The knife morphs into an obsidian broadsword so I hack away. 3 songs again by Mayhem. I lop off his arm and the artery spits blood in plumes. I am in a blind rage, deaf to his pleas for mercy. The ground quakes before me and I lift a diamond war hammer. It looks like one from a GWAR show. Each swing is a beat with the chorus. In seconds, the dude is a bloody pulp. His teeth fly out and clatter on the ground. An eyeball, too! Fuck yeah!

A bulge in my crotch forms, but it’s a devilish revolver. Rare studio recordings are in the chamber. I produce it and aim for the cavity that is his blubbering stomach. The impacts would make any human puke. Finally, a giant bazooka descends from the heavens, crafted by CDs and cassettes. The missile is a purple, flying-V guitar, Roy’s guitar. As the breakdown shudders my crippled eardrums, I launch it. The dude explodes into ground beef. Pieces of him plop into the fountain, staining the water red.

The fire quells and my body returns to stasis. I watch my earbuds and iPod fall and dissolve into the ether. There is no longer an eeee, just the calming silence of my breath. A shadow now covers the fray. I look up to the skylight and there’s Roy! Wearing a black beater and torn jeans, he has white, angel wings protruding from his back. He smiles and nods before flying into the clouds. I reach out to him on the verge of tears, but he’s a speck in no time.

I plop onto my ass and survey the slaughter. There is no way any janitor on earth would clean this shit up. But then there is a gurgling from beneath the surprisingly intact vest. It takes my breath away, despite it all. A pair of conjoined eyes rise from the marinara sauce that is his remains. A hand, too, locked in postmortem devil horns. As the gore bubbles, a sentence is formed with pops. 3 distinct, comprehensible words.

Hell yeah, brother!

Josh Dale is a native Pennsylvanian and the author of the novella, The Light to Never Be Snuffed, and the poetry collection, Duality Lies Beneath. He hopes you read this outside, far away from society, and maybe with a cat. Say hi at joshdale.co

Katya chewed me out for bleeding into her sheets. They were some sort of special soft. A high thread count, whatever that means. She’d bought them online, forty percent off for Father’s Day. I hadn’t stained them intentionally. She said it was because I had bad skin because I didn’t exfoliate so I developed pimples which inevitably popped somewhere which made me culpable.

Culpable I had to look up. Deserving blame the dictionary told me. I said it was genetic and therefore not my fault. I come from a long line of badly-skinned peoples. My cousin gets cysts on his head the size of golf balls.

She didn’t want to hear it. Started leaving scrubs and tonics and loofahs at my place, even bought a special suction hook to hang one from in my shower. I said I was happy with my Irish Spring and Walmart washcloths but she said that showed my ignorance. First the soaps and scrubs, then the sheets, like my place was a weak state begging to be colonized by her enlightened empire. She said my sheets were too rough, cheap, barely cotton. I said a sheet’s a sheet. Again, ignorance. So she thought I bled into them on purpose. As if I lay there in the dark listening to her and my Yorkie Pickles’ snoring and quietly popping my pimples, gleefully pressing them into her Father’s Day discount sheets. They were nice, soft and cool. Why the hell would I stain them? For what reason? Talk about ignorance.

This went on for months. Blood, soaps, thread counts, arguments. Finally, one morning she lost it. Said if I wanted to end things, I should just end things, like a man, instead of taking it out on the sheets. She was tired of me being enigmatic, she said. I said I didn’t know what she meant, what that word meant. She said exactly.

She was naked when she was yelling this all, dressing me down while trying to get dressed—is that an expression? Dressing down? Just screaming and ripping the sheets off the bed with me and Pickles still in it. And it kind of made me horny, all this naked rage, the veins in her neck, the angry jiggle of her thighs. So I kissed her and apologized and squeezed her ass and we had one last enigmatic fuck on that unmade bed with Pickles sighing in the corner and afterwards Katya left with a garbage bag full of stained sheets.

Pickles was glad to see her go. I only have a twin so space is at a premium. Me, I’m not sure how I feel. Was Katya right about ignorance and culpability? She had a big vocabulary. I’ll admit I like the loofahs. My skin has never looked better.

Enigmatic. It means difficult to interpret or understand. Mysterious.

Sometimes I miss those sheets but thread count? No, thread count I never looked up.

Kent Kosack is a writer based in Pittsburgh. His work has been published in Bruiser, minor literature[s], L’Esprit, 3:AM Magazine, and elsewhere. See more at: www.kentkosack.com

How vital 
the imagining 
of infants – 

our childhood play
that sometimes ends 
with the accidental
pulling off
of beetle wings,
the folding
of butterflies,
boiling
of ants.

A dismantling
of dreams
in aid 
of dreams. 

Rob Yates is a young writer hailing from Essex but currently very much abroad. Most of his stuff can be found via www.rob-yates.co.uk.

Banking 

The teller wasn’t particularly likable in general, but he was much less likable while working. He was good at making people feel like he was content to never have met them at all. They had to patronize the bank, though, because that’s where everything was, all the cash. No one could get it out from inside of there. 

The teller was also a banker – the bank manager, and the owner of the bank. The teller had no other employees besides himself. 

At night he would sit inside the vault amid the valuables people had entrusted with him and he thought about them for a long, long time. Their being there made him truly happy. Then a pile of money began to glow and opened up so that he could have sex with it, and he did have sex with the pulsating, now vaguely anthropomorphic money pile. He had sex with it late into the night, every night. 

He often awoke exhausted and still inside the safe and still inside the money pile, which was essentially restored to its normal appearance. He cleaned himself off in the bank’s comfortable bathroom and prepared to begin the day’s already slated workload. 

That was the secret of banking. It wasn’t savvy investment. It wasn’t knowing how to take advantage of worthwhile risks. It wasn’t being subsidized by the government. It wasn’t being wealthy to start with. It was being ready to have sex with the valuables whenever they beckoned. 

When you did that, had sex with literal money, everything else just fell into place. But the teller would never tell this secret to anyone. It would be his own, along with all the other valuables that technically didn’t belong to him but basically did. 

And the child he bore with the money, naturally. The child would also be his own. 

The child, a boy, appeared next to the pile one day. He was tiny, and looked like the teller but also had a green face filled with rectangles and the images of presidents. The teller kept the child out of sight, but he continued to grow larger and  hungrier, and there was little that would sate the boy’s appetite after a while. 

Hands 

Hands are across America. I can’t see anything but hands. They’re just fists in spots, so I’m sucker punched a lot. But there are always hands to catch me before I fall too far. What I’m saying is this is a situation with pros and cons. 

The pros outweigh the cons. 

A scarier thought is no hands. 

Consider a world with no hands. Yes, you could walk freely wherever and not feel like you were on the verge of literally being strangled. That’s true. 

But, tell me, how would you live without these, your hands? Who’d be there to catch you after they pushed you, eh? Who’d be there to grip you to sleep? There’d be no one to massage you without asking? Or inadvertently (well one would hope inadvertently) grope you? 

Of course there was a question about whether the hands did anything with purpose. Given their ubiquity and their seeming lack of bodies and, especially, brains attached, it was reasonable to doubt it. Hands did what hands did. Nevertheless, there is an essential truth they seem to have been connected to, something embedded in the universe – a higher truth, one only detached hands can know. It’s the higher truth those of us with entire bodies are always metaphorically trying to grasp. 

So you see you need those hands, those hands that squeeze and grab and pinch and pluck and gouge and cup and wave and more. 

You couldn’t possibly expect to understand higher truths without helping hands to guide you along the way, could you?

Matt Rowan lives in Los Angeles. He edits Untoward and is author of the collections, Big Venerable, Why God Why, and How the Moon Works (Cobalt Press, 2021). His work has appeared in Barrelhouse, HAD, Beaver Magazine, Moon City Review, Maudlin House, TRNSFR, and Necessary Fiction, among others.

People say you shouldn’t lie to your kids, that it breeds mistrust. But there’s no general wisdom for when your kid asks to see a corpse.

“Ask Siri, Papa,” your darling, innocent child asks you.

“Ask her what?”

“Ask her what a dead body looks like.”

Don’t play with me. You would lie.

“There are no pictures of dead bodies on the internet.”

“Hmph,” she says. She really says that, in two syllables. Hum-ff and folds her arms, lowers her brow, like she learned on a cartoon.

“Honey, it’s not good to look at pictures of dead bodies,” my wife says, instinctually understanding the importance of being honest with your kids.

A child’s mind seeking truth is rivaled in tenacity only by a rat seeking food. Both would chew through concrete to get to the reward on the other side, no matter how putrid and rotting. Nutrients are nutrients. Information is information.

“Why is it not good?”

Then, an eruption of why’s, little probes intended to detangle the 10,000 year knot of unnecessary human suffering in an afternoon, the answer to each the same: You’re not ready to understand that a day will come when dead bodies stack up all around you, in such numbers that you will orient your life in relation to them. Young people will chuckle at you behind your back for how much you talk about which friend died this week, who is on life support from tripping down the stairs to the den, who was put into hospice. And that’s if you’re lucky.

People say you shouldn’t lie to your kids. But what if you’re scared they’ll wish cancer upon you for raising them in a supersonic abattoir?

“Looking at dead bodies could give you bad dreams,” I tell her.

We’re both satisfied with that answer. For now. We move on to Legos.

People should say, “If you lie to your children, walk them toward the truth eventually.”

Establish first the glories of this life, so they may undergird the weight of death. She must first see a baby chick peck its way out of an egg. She must jump from a tree into a pond. She must throw a glass bottle against a wall.

We follow the instructions to build an animal hospital. I find the pieces, she makes them look like the pictures.

Chris Heavener was born and raised in Central Florida. Published in PANK, elimae, Vol 1 Brooklyn and Apocalypse Confidential. He lives in Durham, NC with his wife and kids. 

Two Chefs Fight.  

Both of them were 
built like juggernauts 
and when one of them 
mentioned a burnt dish –
boiling point was reached 
and they started 
swinging for each other –
knocking pots, pans 
and plates everywhere. 

I wasn’t sure what to do – 
so I just watched them.

And when one of them
hit the hard kitchen floor –
they stopped, 

As I swept up their mess, 
ready to smooth more 
sharp shards of the world’s broken dreams into poetry.

This is Punk.

It wasn’t, 
the raised fist, 
or finger – 
it was the way 
it allowed people 
to healthily raise
questions of this failing 
capitalist wet dream 
in a way that could 
beautifully 
glimmer back,
like the barrel of a gun 
in authority’s ugly 
little face.  

Come on Now.

There is enough, 
without the blood 
soaked revenge, 
without the downfall,
without love, 
without sex,
without  
the comeback tour, 
without praise, 
without success, 
without selfie sticks. 

There is enough 
amazement 
and beauty 
for a life lived, 
simply in fields 
of sunflowers 
swaying in a breeze, 
in a stranger’s smile, 
or a dog pissing 
against a lamppost,
in the early 
morning sun. 

Gwil James Thomas is a poet, novelist and inept musician. He lives in his home town of Bristol, England but has also lived in London, Brighton and Spain. His twelfth chapbook of poetry Wild River Carry me to Sea is forthcoming from Back Room Poetry. He has recently been published in Viper’s Tongue, DFL Lit, The Songs From The Underground anthology, Paper & Ink and Late Britain Zine. He plans to one day build a house, amongst other things. Instagram: @gwiljamesthomas 

It’s mostly the car I’m worried about. Its list of transgressions has grown increasingly massive as this Heatwave Of The Century summer has gone on. I know it’s hot, blistering, but there’s nothing I can do about it, and I am too.

A ghost lifts my hand. The phones glass feels like the smooth top of a searing oven.

I’m outside

My fingers are numb, senseless. The consensus of black is broken, filled up by white and green.

Come to the door

Yes. It’s the car I’m worried about. Not that I’m not where I’m supposed to be. I’ve been cracking up lately, unable to control myself, unable to care or stop. I think: this time it will break down for good. Two hours from home, they believe I’m with a licit companion much closer. My mind cycles through possibilities. The last time I’d done this, barely two weeks before, I’d forgotten to turn off my location before rushing out of my grandmother’s and into the wet of the world’s mouth. Within an hour, I was getting messages from all corners of the city:

Hi, where are you?

Why are you in Middleton?

Pick up your phone, please.

Do not turn off your location.

This time I’ll be better. Yet, I linger, car idle. Through the windshield, a house. Flat green expanse in either direction, its miles before I can see another. I think: I can still drive off. If the car broke down, what explanation could I have for dragging the ancient thing two hours away? To the middle of nowhere. Not a house in sight but one.

Are u coming?

The headlights die.

His cat greets me, stood up on back legs and pawing at the clear storm door. I can see through the house, into the backyard, where dead grass is king. I reach for the door handle and materializes, lopsided grin meeting my hesitancy.

He nudges the cat away with his foot.

“You’re–?”

“Yeah,” I respond. He holds open the door, waves me past. His hair is damp, flat. The living room: large, all white, vaulted ceilings. Sunken sofas line the three walls that don’t bleed into the kitchen. An acrid smell, cleaning solution, but also rankness, sitting water covered in a layer of scum.

I don’t notice her till I sit down. He’s asking about drinks. The slashed leather surface of the sofa impales my skin. I say no, turn. Immediately across, she watches, hands collapsed over her legs, sagging face, face fossilized in an expression of self-satisfaction. A circle of mud surrounds her, dirt and rot embedded into material. Before I can stand, he sits, drinks in hand.

I take it.

“Who is that.” Barely a question.

“Ma.” Presses his hand against my open shirt. He shares the woman’s bleached, straw hair, thicker than the wisps of nothing falling across her hollowed-out eyes. “She likes to watch.”

It’s dark now. I think: If I don’t come back, will they be able to find me? Worse, I think: Do I want to be found? I feel his heartbeat through his lips. In his lap, my forehead against his sweat, I feel the pressure of her knees against my back, rancid breath touching my neck.

When he is on top of me, my back to the white couch, she is back where she was, looking, even as he whimpers into my shirt, back arched. Soon he slows, stops, and says “I can’t stop thinking about my ex.” Locks himself in the bathroom.

I cross the room, sit next to his mother. Breathe in her sourness. The corpse doesn’t move when I curl up next to her. Down the hall, in the bathroom, he wails.

She says, “Your family is searching for you.”

I sigh. Out on the porch, the car’s hood is lit like sapphire. If I run, keep running, if I drop my phone, leave the car, it would all be over with. Over my shoulder, a voice.

“It’s too late.”

I know that. In my pocket, my phone agonizes. 18 Missed Calls. Sit back down, think.

As I’m trying to catch my breath, I notice the wailing has stopped. A pressure, on my shoulder, not heavy enough to be a hand. “You can stay here.”

I expect the car not to start, fatal irony. But of course it does, smooth as silk. Outside, the house is overcome by gloom, with only a rectangle of light burst forth from within it.

djp: Black midwesterner, bookseller, artist, horror freak who can be found @especiallymidd