Category: Fiction

Two Shorties by Z. H. Gill

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Dogs Fucking

At my girlfriend’s dad’s house, I am watching two identical dogs—Labrador Retrievers—fucking in the front yard across the street. My girlfriend’s dad calls that yard the “weeds start-up.” He calls the dogs, these interchangeable yellow Labs, “Jim and Pam.” He calls me “buddy.” He calls my girlfriend “sweetie” or sometimes “daughter.” He calls the limpid bay window through which I am watching “Jim and Pam” fuck “my portal.” He calls his house “Housey.” He calls his wife “Kath” or “Kathy.” Sometimes he calls her “Cathedral,” which she hates. He calls me “youngster.” He calls me “Dinner,” like, “Where’s Dinner?” or even “Hey, Dinner!” because the first time I met him I bought him dinner—at a nice-enough restaurant—and none of my girlfriend’s former boyfriends had ever done that, and he never lets me live it down. Out of love, my girlfriend claims. The two dogs are finished fucking. They kiss each other tenderly, knowingly. They disappear down the side of that house, presumably into its backyard. My girlfriend’s dad calls that backyard “Weeds Corp.” He’s been back there before, helping his neighbors catch a dying bat scrambling for “one last go at it.” He calls their house “The Academy.” No one knows why he calls it this. He won’t say. (Now we all call it “The Academy,” too.)

You Have to Spend Money Every Day

Your best friend posits the existence of a person with shot glasses for pinky fingers, both of them replaced, fleshy opaque cups attached in their stead. They point straight up, drinking from them is awkward, doable but awkward; you twist your wrist in unnaturally to do so, to sip Don Julio that’s cold as a river.

You used to steal shot glasses from gift shops wherever you went. Souvenirs, you told yourself, and so easy to steal.

You quit drinking and grow addicted to the following: spending, saving, watching, weather forecasts, quiet, cockcrows, unsweetened iced tea with a jet of lemon. It’s better this way, you tell yourself every day [you have to or you’ll fold into yourself].

Z.H. Gill lives in LA.

It is Not Advised to Do Cocaine When You’ve Had Open Heart Surgery by Xairan Ray

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The two. They slouch into the rigid metal poles of a mid-rate hotel couch. It is red. Their skin is red. They had a day at the pool.

Earlier in the day they were sitting at an angle from each other.

“I think I’m gonna use the bathroom.” The larger, near-sixty father suggestively wiped his nose. He just had open heart surgery. The skinny son of the man in his 20’s. It’s not advised to do cocaine when you’ve had open heart surgery.

The father is startled by his son as he pushes the door of the restroom open. “Jesus, I just about had another heart attack!”

It’s not advised to do cocaine when you’ve had open heart surgery. Crudely. The father lets an excess amount of cocaine fall from his finger onto the floor. He pouts like a Playboy model and says, “oops.” It’s not advised to do cocaine when you’ve had open heart surgery.

The two. They are slouched on the crude red couch. Their skin red. They now wait in their hotel room.

“Almost ready!” A man calls from the bathroom.

“No worries! Just gonna do another line!”

The father innocently grabs the powdered-over zip of cocaine. Pours it carelessly on the table. It’s not advised to do cocaine when you’ve had open heart surgery.

Two people come out of the bathroom. The man who called from the bathroom and a woman.

“Excited to finally lose your v-card with your old man, hey Josie?” The father smiles at his son. It’s not advised to do cocaine when you’ve had open heart surgery.

The man who called from the bathroom stands before the father. As if in front of a urinal. The man who called from the bathroom has a large penis. The father lays the penis in his hand as if holding a taco. His hand the tortilla. The penis a sort of worm filet.

“Only seen these in the pornos!” The father smiles. Opens his eyes wide. Gobbles.

The woman mounts the son on the couch. It’s not advised to do cocaine when you’ve had open heart surgery.

The son suffers from erectile dysfunction. For the first time that whole trip, the son speaks.

“I can’t do this.”

The son pushes the woman off and gets up. His penis hanging awkwardly in front of his father. He gets his underwear and shorts on. He runs out of the room. The father squabbles the penis out of his mouth. He runs for his son. His dropped-trousers catch on the glass coffee table. He falls. The shock of the fall combined with the pain in his chest. His rising heart rate. His raised libido. His recent drug use. It’s not advised to do cocaine when you’ve had open heart surgery.

Xairan Ray is a writer and filmmaker based in San Diego. He is interested in the uncomfortable nuances and dark secrets of relationships and desires, inspired by such artists as Todd Solondz.

Beastmaster, Esq. by John Pinto

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I.

I’ve been learning lots from going through old people’s homes, destroying their things, and cleaning out their fridges. Their fridges especially. Open any old person’s fridge and get honest with yourself. See the food growing hair in the dark. Smell the sour milk. Know someone too old and tired to care is drinking it anyway and then, a little later, puking it back up.

The next-of-kin who contract this work out to me are horrified by fridges. But I can throw out anything. I throw out baby pictures, wedding albums, books someone meant to read when they had the time, and it’s all whatever.

But then the sobbing sneaks up on me while I’m shredding totally superfluous documents from law firms with names like “Sweeney, Knopfler, Nitro, & Beastmaster” and I realize the pink thing failing to navigate bread and butter at the breakfast nook used to be Beastmaster.

Beastmaster: he’s got a Joe Pesci build, rugged Pesci charm, Pesci handsomeness, and I bet prosecutors shit themselves whenever Beastmaster went full Pesci on their fascist, sculpted-by-Jazzercise asses.

This job, man. Some days you’re the janitor for a grand building from a gilded past, and some days you find yourself hoping Joe Pesci’s inevitable death will be sudden and violent. You imagine Joe Pesci stumbling off a subway platform or wrecking a small aircraft. You see him get shot in back of the head while admiring a mounted swordfish in a faux-wood paneled man cave.

However he goes, I hope there’s no warning or waiting. I hope his loved ones don’t even get to say goodbye. I hope they don’t have to hire me.

II.

I find “My Cousin Vinny” while throwing out Beastmaster’s VHS collection!

III.

Purpose re-enters Beastmaster’s life. He marshalls me like I’m a janitor-turned-paralegal with raw natural ability and a disdain for protocol that reminds him of his younger self: “Buy a VCR at Sharper Image! I’ve got coupons!”

So I take the coupons for my wall of tacked-up bric-a-brac back home, and I trawl a few thrift stores.

The winner is from Singapore and weighs 35 lbs. We need to unplug the living room lamp to free up an outlet, and then we need an adaptor or else the VCR won’t talk with Beastmaster’s TV, and then Beastmaster needs his evening bread and butter, and then suddenly the sun has gone down and Beastmaster’s cooled on the whole enterprise. He’s re-forgotten being a lawyer. He’s utterly incurious about Marisa Tomei’s Academy Award-winning performance. With no joy in my heart, I turn on the VCR so he can be babysat while I throw out his Naval papers.

But then it’s just one of those moments.

And we are both surprised by a tape someone forgot to eject from the VCR, an old home movie of little kids at soccer practice.

These kids! Offscreen coaches implore them to pass, but they’re the kind of little where a 4-4-2 is unimplementable and confusion reigns supreme. You can’t even see the ball most of the time. Strikers, sweepers, and middies all bunch and clump into schools of red and yellow pinnies, goldfish yet to be bagged for the fair.

“What is this,” Beastmaster asks. His generation was not raised alongside this sport. “What are they doing. Who are they.”

And I’m like, “I don’t know.”

Beastmaster points at the pinnies onscreen. “Ketchup and mustard.”

And I’m like, “Yes, I suppose.”

“There was still some ketchup and mustard in my fridge yesterday. Not today, though. Only butter today. Can you believe that? A fridge of only butter. I bet tomorrow the butter will disappear, too.”

And I’m like, “Hmm,” and I keep my eyes on the screen and wait for a jump ahead in time on the VHS to a birthday party or Christmas, or even to halftime and kids eating oranges on the sideline. But the jump never comes. The moment never ends. The soccer is unremarkable. We never get a goal. So I start watching Beastmaster watch the kids. He’s looking pretty Pesci in this moment. Then he leans forward and squints and vaults Pesci entirely.

He goes post-Pesci.

He looks like Pesci’s immortal soul as it will appear forever after the bodies we clumsily labeled “Beastmaster” and “Joe Pesci” are dead and gone.

When a ketchup pinny kid loses a cleat but keeps on running after the scrum, I watch Beastmaster smile.

“Sure looks like fun,” he says.

And we watch together, but only once—rewind button’s broken.

John Pinto is a film lab tech living in Philadelphia. His work has appeared in HAD, Rejection Letters, and The Second Bullshit Anthology.

A Couple of Quickies by Corey Lof

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Wilts

Wilts saw the ocean for the first time when he was twenty-six. Thank you, he said. We were on the Oregon coast where a waterfall was coming off the cliffs, landing on the beach and running through a spiderweb of trenches to the shoreline. The sun had set and what was left of the light had turned the waterfall, and everything really, the rocks, the sand, us, the ocean, translucent and purple. Thank you, thank you, he said, breathing like he wasn’t sure he would ever get to do it again. I half expected to turn around and find him facedown making angel shapes in the sand, like he was talking to God, or the earth or something. I hoped he wasn’t talking to me. I wanted to be with Teo, riding around on Aprhi’s shoulders in the shallow, taking selfies. I didn’t want to be credited with whatever Wilts was experiencing. I ignored him, but he kept saying it. Thank you. Thank you for bringing me here. He was never going to last. It was always like this with Wilts, we’d be doing something normal, like getting gas or watching an ambulance tend to a car wreck, and Wilts would experience some profound depressive episode. It was nothing to be jealous of, but there I was. I wanted to push him over into the sand, fill his mouth with it. 

Man, thank yourself, I said. You pitched on gas too. 

Side of the Road Somewhere 

Two AM, shady back corner, some Seattle parking lot, this couple walks by, guy with lines shaved in the side of his head, parachute sleeves of a bomber jacket shining like paranoid tinfoil in the streetlight, screaming, You fucking slut, you fucking bitch, keep walking I kill you! His sleazy, weasel-y voice stacking up between the red brick, making like a peacock, house of cards, while the chick stays a couple strides ahead taking prissy, poodle steps in heels and a dress, into a darkness, a darker darkness, shade, a shadow, off the main road onto a side road, into an alley, while the guy keeps slogging after her, You bitch, you slut! Until she stops dead in front of some shoehorn sports car, a red Lamborghini or something gross like that, Waya think you’re gunna do? she says, hands fiddling in a disco ball purse and face like she might just pull something. I’ll leave ya a smear on the concrete, guy says, palms out glistening, like he’s expecting something, like they’ve done this a million times. I show ya how ta be nothing, he says, but the chick just pulls a set of keys, glittering the same as the purse, and drops ‘em in the guy’s hand, like of course this is how its gunna go, then tippy-toes around to the passenger side and they both somehow manage the car’s guillotine doors, and the thing starts up like a space craft and whips out the alleyway and I’m there begging, pleading, needing, just flip the thing, man. Hit a pole. Show me what a dead arm looks like hanging from a smashed-out window. Give me something.

Corey dreams of financial security and total ownership over his time, but instead of realizing those dreams he writes fiction, lives with animals, and is about to have a child. You can find some of his stories through his twitter @coreylofsatwit. But those publications are few. 

Miss Amtrak by Audrey Lee

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I’m reading Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker.

When the train comes to a stop in Elkhart, Indiana I’m on page 18. The child prostitute narrator is describing her vagina as beef. I’m tough, rotted, putrid beef. Kathy Acker’s writing is really gross and I check Twitter in between pages to read some more normal material, like about this rapper who is trending because he called his baby mama “Miss Amtrak.” Things could be worse, I think as I watch an Amish family with their toddler son board the packed train. I could be taking Amtrak to get fucked. That would be desperate and slutty.

I watch the Amish family putter up and down the aisle with their toddler son. When the train jostles as it picks up speed they lose their balance and fall into each other. They look like lost kittens, pathetic and helpless in their dour clothes. They look as dumb as their drooling toddler son.

Fuck, I think. The seat next to me is empty. The aisle seats in front of me are open. They’re gonna sit the kid next to me.

I turn my attention back to Blood and Guts in High School while the Amish toddler crawls clumsily into the seat next to me. I feel his blank, baby eyes staring at me while his parents stumble over themselves to put their bags away. Thank God this kid can’t read, I think, and turn to page 19.

Kathy Acker included illustrations in Blood and Guts in High School. The back cover describes the book as a “controversial, transgressive, work of philosophical, political, and sexual insight,” and that “the text is illustrated with intricate sketches.” Page 19 is a full-page drawing of a hairy vagina. The words MY CUNT RED UGH are printed where the asshole would be. I’m slow to register what I’m looking at until I realize that the Amish toddler is looking at it too.

Audrey Lee wrote the chapbooks Disjecta Membra (Bottlecap Press, 2022) and Probably, Angels (Maverick Duck Press, 2020). She lives in South Philadelphia and is so normal on Twitter @postpunkpoet and at www.audreymorganlee.com. 

“Treblinka, 1942” by Stuart Buck

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I was made in Pakistan in 1927. I came to Germany before Hitler had his hands around the throat of the country. But fascism is never far from the surface and even back then the seeds were spouting thick black stems, choking the air. I arrived in a leather satchel, brown, used and dirty. A man had bought me from a sports shop in Pakistan while visiting a friend and had traveled back to Germany by steamer. 

Like many Germans, the family eventually succumbed to the Nazi party and in time my owner became the Gauleiter for Dusseldorf. I saw little action, being taken out on windless days then replaced and forgotten. When the Fuhrer himself visited Dusseldorf, he was so impressed with my owners running of the local branch of the Nazi party that he asked his aide to invite him to help run Treblinka concentration camp in Poland. Not wanting to leave his family behind, he broke the news to them over spaetzle. 

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“it’s the christmas of killing yourself” by Eli Sahm

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& i’m the michael jordan of shooting 
james bond in the stomach a dozen times
you can’t even handle a pork hammer sandwich
we didn’t come to america for the christmas 
brisket that drips off the bone like spoiled ice cream
because i’m the winnie-the-pooh of eating pussy
you’re the annie oakley of watching me eat pussy
you’re the harriet tubman of doing heroin 

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A Smallie by Richie Johnson

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I said, “lets give Cowboy a saucer of milk.”

She said, “no one says saucer anymore.”

She was right. No one says saucer anymore. I began wandering what exactly a saucer was.

She said, “You’re not supposed to give cats milk anymore.”

That made less sense to me. “So you once could give cats milk, but now you can’t?”

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“Taxidermy for Dummies” by Charlie Chitty

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Zack pulled on the balaclava and climbed over the porch. The balaclava he’d bought secondhand from a guy on Craigslist who said he used to use it as a make-shift gimp mask. 

Every few minutes, he’d catch a whiff of something raw and potent and retch for a solid ten seconds.

“You could have just fucking washed it first.” said Paul. His pumpkin mask from three Halloweens ago bobbed on his face.

Zack flipped him off and grabbed the window frame as Paul clambered gracelessly over the porch and fell on his ass. Zack ducked under the window as Paul scrambled to his feet. 

There was a scraping as the old woman inside pulled open the window and Zack saw the barrel of a shotgun poking just above his head.

Paul stumbled, climbed back over the porch and fled. Zack, feeling his pulse begin to race, grabbed the barrel and yanked the gun.

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“Another Monday in March” by Jacob Hendricks

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When I get to work I leave my guts on the curb. I won’t need them inside. So I scoop them out like ice cream and pile them up next to the others. They’re all pretty similar. Some are darker. Some emptier. I notice mine are heavy and fragrant. I can’t place the stench. But it reminds me of ground beef and sour cream. 

When I leave work I find my guts where I left them. A few crows were just about to start chowing down. I caught one in the belly with the heel of my boot. Then I stuff my guts back in the best I can. I feel better already. There’s sunlight for the first time this year. The vitamin D from the light turns my blood into wine. It’s been too long. I start sweating. Quickly soak through. I fumble taking my coat off and almost trip crossing the street. Catch myself against a bench. An old woman walking a cat laughs at my reaction. I nod knowing it’s deserved. I thank her. I thank her cat. Both of them still cackling as I slip down the street. 

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