Two Excerpts From A crate that once contained oranges by John Johns

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Making piña coladas for your close friends

Halfway through cutting into the pineapple the resistance became too much. Yeah. The knife was stuck. And when I tried to pull back the whole fruit came up with the knife. I waved this knife-pineapple before my eyes in wonder. 

Then I slammed it down to the surface and the blade cut deeper – there was a wet ripping sound. I slammed it down a second time, and the two halves of the pineapple lolled apart unequally and golden. There was the smell. The wetness of the knife. The reveal of good stuff well-earned. And the dissatisfaction of a good struggle concluded.

I offer Baby Hughie an Easy Peeler tangerine

He stares at it with intrigue, then astonishment, then dismay. He chews the knuckle of his index finger and shakes his head. He picks it up with both hands and feels its cold skin against his tiny upper lip. He looks at me. Yep. There it is. Cold and orange, straight from the fridge. 

Noticing that I’m peeling mine, he begins to peel his. It’s not easy though, and his breathing becomes very heavy. Globules of juice form where his little fingernails have penetrated the pith. He sniffs. He opens and closes his mouth as if rehearsing the act of eating. He’s building a pile of dimpled orange skin scraps while I, as an expert in easy peelers, have removed the skin in an unbroken spiral. 

I split the naked fruit in two, easily, and he cannot believe it. It’s so easy. Life is so easy. I peel one segment away and shake it around like a little trophy. Now Hughie is tapping his forehead quite hard, and blinking. He’s scared. I place the segment of orange onto my tongue. Hughie is vibrating with fear. I rescind the segment into my mouth. Then I close my mouth. Then I chew.

John writes from England, and he just finished this novel. Extracts have appeared in Lighthouse and Perverse. In 2019 zimZalla published a book of his. He also runs a journal called Tar Press, publishing new fiction onto Twitter. Their archive features, among others, Amit Chaudhuri and Julianne Pachico.

His personal Twitter may be currently suspended. Usually it’s @henry_johns. Tar Press is @tar_press

Exactly Where I Don’t Want to Be by Daniel Jaeger

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A writer in Paris? Try Bumfuck Eastern Oregon, living in an RV parked in gravel. An afternoon at Café de Flore? I’m boofing Robitussin in a desert full of invasive plant species, I’ll meet you there.

Synthetic leather bookmarks? I’m cool with my empty suboxone packets, thank you.

I’m bored of that structure. We get it, Dan, you’re edgy and depressed. Pretentious at best. Polyps under sutures wrapped in gauze, Sunday dress. No one rhymes anymore. I’m rapping. Culture vulture. I’m one of those goth sadboys. Oh, that’s okay then. Thai curry–one of the best foods on the planet–is the result of mixing cultures. Yeah, but you have to give credit where credit is due. Okay. Thank you Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye. Oh, and Tupac.

Daniel Jaeger lives and works in Portland, Oregon. A poet and artist at heart, he doesn’t want to live fighting for literary appreciation, but he wants literary appreciation. He doesn’t care if everyone likes his work, but he wants you to like his work. He has work published in Rejection Letters. He’s on Twitter at @BlackLiquidStar.

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.

Never!!!! by Elizabeth Yellin

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drunk at the open house

trying to convince someone’s mom to hold me down and “ride it gruesome”

battle rapping a dog (and winning)

vibing out like a total natural

getting crushed to death while eating a salad

flipping the bird at some birds

getting coffee while having to shit way bad

holding in the shit

going out for another coffee

instead of shitting 

and chugging the coffee through the pain

going out for drinks later

and still holding in the shit

never letting go

never letting go of the shit

trying to explain what you mean by “riding it gruesome”

nailing it just totally mysteriously convincing

and getting everything you ever wanted

taking the shit

giving up coffee

kissing a wild bird

holding the dumpster above your head and smearing the lettuce against the pavement

never vibing (never!!)

letting the dog win the rematch

getting choked out in the amazon position and dying briefly

and buying the house with cash

and never writing another poem again

absolutely never, ever again

finally

(;

Elizabeth Yellin is Forever Magazine top voted poet 2023.

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.

I Have a Gun (Excerpt) by Graham Irvin

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men like guns
for the same reason 
they like cars bikes 
skateboards legos 
buildings computers 
indie music or internet memes 
guns can be broken apart 
infinitely retooled 
constantly made bigger 
better more expensive 
a gun is a task project hobby
studied vanquished conquered 
all men need a project 
manhood is the product 
of obsession
there is no collective 
accepted obvious voyage
men must pick
a hobby and learn 
everything there is to know 

it’s the reason men
defend Woody Allen 
it’s why there’s a dude
at the noise show who scoffs 
when someone says
they listen to Merzbow
it’s why people are afraid 
to enjoy Infinite Jest or Lolita 
or Blood Meridian or whatever
because they’re afraid 
they might look like that guy 
a gun is the same as reading 
Deleuze & Guattari in public
except it’s sometimes used by cops
and soldiers and dictators
and right wing dads
and far left revolutionaries
and sometimes children against children
to extract blood from the bodies
of people who instead got obsessed 
with table top roleplaying games for instance 
a gun is a tonka truck for adults 
a gun is a great second obsession 
for the man who didn’t become 
a hero of his first obsession
sure he’s gone to comic-con 
every year since 2005 
but that doesn’t make money 
and the attendees are getting younger 
their costumes are unrelatable
why would anyone want to pretend 
to be an intergalactic vigilante 
when they could be the real thing or
at least own the thing that makes it real 
a bullet is basically an earth laser
he could imagine anyone’s face 
on those paper targets 
a child actor turned director
the host of a mid tier podcast
any scumbag 22 year old 
by the concessions
all the anime e girls flock to 
no he doesn’t understand what or why 
or how their whole thing works 
it’s just the obviousness with which 
they see him as a non prospect
he just wants to be desired 
a gun is a distraction a fantasy 
a way to hold the potential for death 
and still fiddle with cosmetic modifications
magwells night sights trigger connectors
handle grip inlays plastic wood grain pearl 
a gun is a sport about death 
men never have to play 
it’s protection from an opponent 
they never have to face because
they’ve always got their gun 
and no one fucks with an armed man

Graham Irvin lives in Philadelphia. His writing can be found at Hobart, HAD, Apocalypse Confidential, Joyland, The Nervous Breakdown, and/or Misery Tourism. His book Liver Mush is available at http://flatdogdistro.bigcartel.com.

Like A Smoke Detector by Shy Watson

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Carmel woke up as she always did—trembling and in search of water. She never remembered pouring the glass or placing it on the nightstand, but the habit had automated itself years ago, as with breathing at birth or any other cast that had kept her alive. She was grateful to have not soaked the sheets. It had been days, four of them, since she had awoken to a scent not unlike protein powder, having clumped with milk on a counter freshly wiped with bleach.

Her unemployment checks enabled what had already lain nascent inside her, from genetic predisposition and what she had witnessed. As a child, she pretended the sounds from the living room were that of a movie, the volume of the television unreliable as everything else. But eventually she unwillingly outsmarted the trick. Everything could only function for so long. And while she tried more advanced forms of denial (it was the neighbors, it was psychosis, she was dreaming), none of them ever stuck. Now she had the Klonopin, the Ambien, and the Bota Box wine.

Her job at the call center had lasted just long enough to qualify for the unemployment, and she hadn’t been bad at it. She was especially adept at scaring elderly women into buying things they didn’t need. She harbored a sweetness that seemed to outlive her, grow beyond her, and touch others with its vapored tips. But she had started drama. Everywhere she went, as her mother put it, she brought drama. It was why she was kicked off the volleyball team, her mother liked to remind her, why every boyfriend had dumped her, why her father never called, and, most importantly, why she couldn’t keep a job to “save her life.” What she wanted to say, but didn’t, was that she wouldn’t do anything to save her life.

Carmel’s cat, which she had found next to a shattered television only one month earlier, jumped onto her yellowed, faux-down comforter and screamed for food. The meowing was urgent and deranged, like a smoke detector, and Carmel sprung out of bed to shut it off. Of course, there was no food, only empty, concave cardboard boxes of off-brand Meow Mix. The fugue state responsible for Carmel’s glass of water had not yet become accustomed to caring for a cat. She slid on rain damaged Minnetonkas and thought beeeeeeend, and snap! as she plucked her EBT card from the mottled living room carpet. The jerking motion caused her frontal lobe to throb. She turned the bottom lock and slammed the door behind her as she left the apartment for the stinging autumn air.

In the summer, she had given the deli guy a blowjob, of which she only remembered the end, as his cum had tasted so acrid, it jolted her out of a blackout and forced her to register the fluorescent lit litter bag against her ear, on a dusty shelf by which she knelt. Abdul lifted his pants back to his hips and pointed toward the beer case as he said, “This time it’s on me.”

The EBT card had been accepted like legal tender ever since: for cat food, tampons, Parliaments, Twizzlers, and, more often than anything else, beer. There was no doubt the rest of the staff knew, considering the men—probably cousins—always snickered while ringing her up. Maybe they hope it will happen to them, she thought. And she was so unsure of herself that she couldn’t be certain whether or not it would.

Shy Watson’s fiction appears in Fence, Southwest Review, Joyland, and elsewhere. She wrote “Jeff! Bess!” for SAD HAPPENS edited by Brandon Stosuy (Simon & Schuster 2023). She earned her MFA from University of Montana.

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.