Tag: Fiction

Conversation by Tyler Peterson

Featured Back Patio PressLeave a comment

By the time we’d known each other half an hour, we were talking about which song we’d want playing in the background while we committed suicide. 

It wasn’t as out of the blue as I just made it sound. What got us on the subject was this scene in a German movie I’d seen recently about a couple who make snuff films out of the suicides of consenting subjects.  Two of said subjects were young women – teenage-looking, early twenties at the absolute limit – who, for reasons we are not privy to, kill themselves together with pills and vodka.  Of all the things I was meant to be upset about in this movie, I found myself particularly upset by the music they’d picked to play them out of the world of the living: some listless late-90s jangly sub-Mazzy Star dryjack, played on a tinny boom box that turned those trendy jangles all crunchy and abrasive.  The viewer isn’t informed which of the girls was in charge of the music, but if I were the other one I would have put a pin in the whole thing and found something decent.  I mean Christ, you only get one shot at this. Take a bit of care with it.  

Fine, she said, so what would you pick instead.    

This is a more involved question than would strike you at first glance. It presupposes a couple of things, above all that you’re killing yourself in some way that leaves you enough time to listen to something; “bleeding out in the bathtub” was the example she used.  And I never really saw myself punching my ticket in that way.  Didn’t fit my personality.  Part of that was, no doubt, related to the cultural gender dynamics of suicide.  Slitting your wrists in the tub is sort of your classic female suicide, a lengthy, languid affair that you need to set the mood for, in contrast to a quick and decisive manly suicide like a gun or hanging.  (There was a sex and/or masturbation analogy lurking in there, which I decided not to bring up because I was fucking amazed the drift of this conversation wasn’t weirding her out yet and I didn’t want to push my luck. She may have noticed that I restrained myself from saying something but she didn’t press the issue.) 

She said she would dispute that.  We both knew that suicide was underreported in light of the its taboo nature –  underreported by quite a bit, in her opinion. Specifically, she believed that tons of overdoses among men that get ruled accidental actually aren’t.  There was kid in her high school, she said, a senior who had already been to detox once, found dead of a benzo overdose, and it came out a couple years later that his dad had found a suicide note with him but hidden it.  Imagine how often that probably happens, she said.  

I made her go first and it didn’t surprise me at all that she an answer on hand.  “Tomorrow Never Knows”.  I was already pretty attracted to her at this point so I kept to myself how basic I found that answer.  Her reasoning surprised me, though; she didn’t mention the lyrics at all.  “It’s the drums, mainly.  I’ve always loved the drums on that song.  I don’t know enough about audio production to put my finger on it, but it’s sort of like, echoey and strange, there’s almost kind of like a phase effect on it, it wooshes and sloshes around, and I dunno.  The beat is just super hypnotic and it’s always been able to like, calm me down, and I think I’d need that, in that situation. Just calm down and push myself through it.”    

It was my turn now.  I paused a moment. I paused too long for her, and she chided me for it.  She said I had something in mind already, it was my honest answer, and I should just spit it out instead of trying to think of something cooler to try to impress her.  I didn’t know that I accepted that premise. I also thought she was being a bit of a hypocrite – I doubted she’d just come up with her answer off the cuff, that was thought over for sure. But was she was right, I did have something in mind. So I said fuck it and told it to her.  It was “Heaven” by Robyn Hitchcock.  But not the album version.  The one I had in mind was a live version from some reissue.  I ran across it by pure accident when my friend burned me a CD ages ago. It was an acoustic reworking of the version everybody knows, and it had a slower tempo, an interestingly lopsided arpeggio behind it, some harmonies that weren’t there before. Most importantly, there was a spoken-word intro where Robyn went off on this whole fantastical tangent, making “Heaven” out to be a folk song that miners used to sing while they prayed at a floating cathedral out in the wilderness. 

She asked why I picked it and I didn’t really have an articulate reason. It was just a beautiful song, but not without a sense of the sardonic, and the intro added a surreal touch, perfect for tipping me off into what dreams may come.    

I didn’t go home with her that night, but I did get her number.  I got home with a maggot on my brain. I queued up “Tomorrow Never Knows” on a Bose speaker and filled up the bathtub. Steaming hot. I grabbed a filet knife from the kitchen and I gave myself a quick stab in the thigh with it – on the outer edge so as to miss the femoral, I wasn’t doing it for real.  I climbed into the tub and winced as the bloody part of my leg seared like a section of hot wire.  I’d made the wound probably deeper than it needed to be, and definitely made the water hotter than it needed to be. Moreover I was dumb and left the shampoo bottle open in the bottom of the tub while it was filling, and boy did that shit sting.  No matter.  All the better.  

 I lay there, lazily bleeding into the water until there was enough in the tub that I could pretend I was dying, dried off my hand on the hanging towel, reached over to the counter and hit play, and I sat there, following the billows of steam off the bathwater with my eyes, envisioning the life slowly oozing out of me drop by drop. And I’ll be damned if I didn’t see what she meant.  That drum part was fucking meant to be played in a bathroom you were dying in. That odd double tom hit like a faltering heartbeat.  Ringo was obviously plugged deeper into the mysteries of the beyond than he was ever given credit for. The acoustics were perfect.  The drums bounced off the tile and mingled with the sound of the bloody water sloshing around when I shifted in the tub.  It was like that whooshing beat reached into my head and turned the volume down on everything else. The heat on my face and the throb in my leg all sank down to the bottom of the bathtub.  I surrendered fully to the fantasy with ease, and blackness gathered at the edge of my vision as I imagined it would.  

The next thing I knew I was sitting in a silent bathroom, with my neck stiff and my limbs goosebumped from the completely cold water.  I hauled my heavy body out of the tub and started drying, rubbing hard to warm my body back up, pausing to blot my leg wound gingerly. I debated whether to tell her what I found out.  I decided that was third date material.  

Tyler Peterson is a writer from the cold, mean streets of Iowa.  His short fiction has appeared in Misery Tourism, SCAB, Expat Press, and Body Fluids. He Xes as @type___e

Some Other Place by Katja Vido

Featured Back Patio PressLeave a comment

Under the bridge where cars move quickly–BMW’s, Fiats, Yugos, etc, I watch Milan sell drugs to some rich kid. He’s ugly–marked viciously by acne scars and baby fat, and Milan is smiling because now he can afford his groceries and more importantly he can pay his boss back. I look around me but there’s no one I can sell my body to. I am saving up for some other place.

A bomb falls, we can hear it. We all scream with delight and horror. The ugly kid who bought the drugs shakes. Milan kisses my lips. I take a little bit of speed only because my brain hurts and I’m thinking about dying kids and my mother, who is also dying, of mental derangement. We move towards the other groups of people and there’s a DJ playing loud techno music.

The bomb won’t get us, so people keep dancing. Another bomb falls. When I look at the sky it’s bright orange. One kid taps me and I look at him with a fake, faraway smile. He asks me what I’m thinking about.

“Some other place,” I shout. He swallows a pill and laughs, makes a peace sign and says, “That’s a good idea. Which place?”

I tell him I don’t know. He says we spend all of our lives dreaming of something better but nothing ever happens. I shrug and leave the crowd, facing the Danube river, still hearing the loud music, the yelling and laughter. I could dip my foot into the river or just jump but I don’t–that is not the other place I want to go to. So I walk back and dance underneath the bombs.

Katja Vido is a writer from Toronto, Canada. Her work has appeared in the print issue of Style Circle’s  “The Book,” as well as the Little Black Book. She was shortlisted for the Letter Review Prize in fiction. She is an editor for St. John’s Compassionate Mission’s upcoming book of Sunday reflections. She has lived between Belgrade and Toronto, and graduated from Toronto Metropolitan University in 2020. 

Deer Meat by Josh Olsen

Featured Back Patio PressLeave a comment

I broke my ankle on Super Bowl Sunday because I slipped on the ice in my driveway while bringing in the groceries and bidding on wrestling cards on my phone at the same time. It was an embarrassing accident, to say the least, one that kept me at home on the couch, unable to drive myself to work, make dinner, or go up and down the stairs by myself. 

I hadn’t left the house in over a week, until my partner took pity on me and drove me around our neighborhood like an old, wounded dog about to get put to sleep. Our mailman saw me as I struggled to get out of the car, comically large orthopedic boot on my right leg, crutches wedged in my armpits. 

“Are you ok?” he asked. I told him I broke my ankle and the mailman told me that Joe Rogan recommends I eat deer meat. “Lots of deer meat,” he said, “because deer are fast and have more protein,” unlike slovenly pigs and cows, he added, and eating deer meat would heal my broken bone faster. He claimed he once had a broken hand that his doctor told him would take six months to heal, but he ate lots of deer meat and was better in three, then he told me which of my neighbors had ring cameras, and which would be easier to have packages stolen off their porch. 

“Thanks, I’ll try the venison,” I said, tucking away his suggestion to rip-off my neighbors, and was reminded of my mother, who treated her bulimia-induced anemia by eating liverwurst and braunschweiger sandwiches (for the iron, of course). I hadn’t gone deer hunting since I was sixteen and I wasn’t sure I could even find deer meat where I lived, aside from fetid piles of roadkill or the occasional bag of venison jerky, but I suddenly had a craving for succulent, milk-fed veal. 

When I was a kid, my favorite food was veal parmesan, so rich and morally dubious, but I never had it homemade, despite my mother’s Italian roots. Every once in a while, my mom would splurge and buy a tray of frozen Stouffer’s Veal Parmigiana, and it made any meal feel like a bacchanal. 

One time, my step-grandparents took me and my little brother out for lunch at Country Kitchen and told us we could order anything we wanted on the menu. My step-grandparents ordered ribeye steak and onions, well done, with pools of Hunt’s ketchup, my brother chicken tenders, and I, the adopted bastard, didn’t hesitate to order the veal parmesan. Upon hearing my order, my Scandinavian step-grandmother scanned the laminated menu and recoiled, “The most expensive thing on the menu,” and my fat face burned with shame. 

“I’m not cooking venison,” my partner said as she helped me hobble up the front stairs, and I asked, “Well, do you think Stouffer’s still makes a veal parmesan?” 

Josh Olsen is a librarian, a columnist for SlamWrestling.net, and the co-creator of Gimmick Press. 

The Wait by Troy James Weaver

Featured Back Patio PressLeave a comment

It was a Friday in April, Richard Nixon’s heart gave out, and Uncle Chip gave me a tackle box. 

“You can have it,” he said. “Got a new one in the truck.”

His mullet dripped down his back, dark curls glittery in the light. The late spring sun smelled like nickels and lemon grass; the oriole songs plaintive against the swaying limbs throwing shade at our feet.

We went in opposite directions and paced the banks, casting our lines. The river rolled along, coppery and gentle. Every now and again I’d get a bite, but nothing stayed with me. Chip wasn’t having any luck either. 

After a while, cloud-shifts over the sun told us to pack it up and herd it in, the moon already high and pale as bone in the pink sky.

“Guess canned spaghetti is on the menu tonight,” he said.

We got a fire crackling. A few wet logs hissed and spat back at the flames. He cut the lid off the can and nestled it into a little bed of coals. Ten minutes later we were eating with our fingers from overturned Frisbees, wiping our hands on our pantlegs and drinking warm tap water from old two-liter pop bottles.

“Too bad about the fish,” he said. “But this ain’t bad.”

I nodded.

“You sure are quiet,” he said. “You look like you’re lost in it.”

“I’m just happy to be here.”

“Me too, kid. Me too.”

Before calling it a night, he told me stuff out of a children’s book. Something about a guy looking for his toe. And another one about a murderer, which he claimed was true. 

There were lightning flashes in the faraway distances as we climbed into the tent, wind picking up and scratching whispers across the canvass. I fell into a deep sleep to the cadence of his breathing.

I woke a few hours later. Thunder echoed off the white-caps, lightning so intense and frequent it bleached the sky. I reached for Chip, but not far enough. I couldn’t get to him. Or he couldn’t get to me.

What’s the difference?

More distance, strengthened by force.

When the clouds finally parted, the streetlights popped on, and the gentle sound of my mother’s voice, through the war of my blood, called me back up to the house to try to smooth away the hurt.

please be patient, god isn’t finished with me yet by dizzy turek

Featured Back Patio PressLeave a comment

my crusty eyes erupt. my fuzzy body is entombed in dust. dandruff populates my pillow. i smile big. today will be like the other days. i peel each day like a banana. i lift weights in my bedroom until i sweat. i drink water, tea, coffee, & liquor from a tiny glass. much the same, i whisper, halitosis loitering in my teeth. however, today will differ from the other days. i’ll get ready in 10 minutes. i’ll go to the bus stop for work. i’ll listen to all the conversations around me. people from all over the neighborhood who i’ve never met. i’ll hear details that i wasn’t meant to hear, but that’s ok. i won’t tell a soul. i won’t have breakfast. i’ll spend 20 dollars for lunch from a venezuelan restaurant. i’ll sit alone in the conference room so i’m away from my computer while i nourish myself. my dad will text me but i won’t have time to answer. there’s too much to do. i’ll do some emails then i’ll go online shopping. what a nice set of hats! i’ll buy them for all my friends. that’s 180 dollars for hats. the sun will bless me through the window. i’ll want to take a walk but i will not have finished my excel spreadsheets. there will be more cells to fill, 1000s upon 1000s. i’ll get an earache. work will be done at 3:45. i’ll leave 4:30, say goodbye to Marie, exit through the front door, get on the bus, and watch the lights slide past. the slow traffic will make me impatient. i’ll eat sardines and bread because i will have not gone grocery shopping. there will be many a road to go down, many a sidestreet. i might pray if i can remember. the light will leave faster than usual and the dark will be plumper. the ufos will flit over the lake and the moon will cast its light in a giant wavering circle. that night air will give me a chill and i’ll go back inside for 7 chocolate chip cookies and 2 hours on the internet, opening tabs and closing tabs. i won’t call my mom, my sister, or my friend saide. i might pray if i can remember. my neck will crunch, my posture will weaken me, i’ll have some time for anything. then at 12:30am, i’ll feel the sigh of my weary head and go to bed without having brushed my teeth or taken off any clothes. then dreams will play like words in the wrong contexts like reminders coming late like my noggin like a salad. but mostly, i’ll be a rock or a clicker with no batteries, lying like a great big dead piano, only the sound of breathing making anyone think i’m a human being worth my weight in salt. i might pray if i can remember. then nothing, void, the day will die a happy death. but that’s then. this is now. my stomach is an ocean in a plastic bag. split ends tip their morning caps at each other. boogers yawn in the dawn. sleep creeps on my eyelids. time is subtracting today but that’s ok. i smile big. today will be unlike any other day.

dizzzy turek writes in chicago but is originally from ohio. find writing on substack and on twitter @dddddizzzzyzzz

Little Maniac by Joshua Vigil

Featured Back Patio PressLeave a comment

At night I turn into a rat. I scamper beneath clothes that no longer fit, out from under choking sheets,
and I leave my sleeping husband behind. If it were up to me, I wouldn’t turn into a rat: I dig through
trash, the piles that run down the alley beside our apartment’s sole window. Gnaw on old cheese. My
fingers, so tiny. The only marvel. In the morning, my hair matted, my skin stinking of sewage, I tell my
husband the truth. I say, I turned into a rat again. He playfully rolls his eyes then pats my head. My
little maniac, he says. Though he gives me space, never kisses me in the mornings—he smells what I
smell. A rat.


I have rat friends. Squeak squeak, I say to them. Midnights, we prowl the streets, pavement slick with
moonshine. Not all of us make it when we cross. Cars, they come out of nowhere. We mourn our
friends and scurry to the abandoned pizza box, crusts galore. In the mornings, my husband still says
nothing. Was it always like this? Perhaps it was. I insist I am a rat, and he digs his fingers through my
hair, calls me his little maniac. When he pulls his hand back, the tips are oily from the pepperoni I
rolled around in the night before. He smiles. Retreats into the bathroom.


I have a rat lover. I don’t know how this happened. We fuck like bunny rabbits, which is saying
something.

This story ends as one might expect. The city rat czar and her dirty tricks. We bound into the alley,
digging deep into the mystery box. There are many of us, over a dozen. We scavenge to the bottom.
Meet something slick and sticky. Our tails get caught, tangled further in panic. We dart away, each in
opposite directions, each pulled back by our tails. We’re stuck, the material’s knotted us into a clump,
we’re together. The moon dips before the sun rises. It’s a new dawn and we’re dying. At least we’ve
seen it with our own eyes, we say. The legend of the Rat King.


Then the sun lands on my face and I’m no longer a rat. Naked in the alleyway, I look down. The rats
are still a knot. They look up at me, they squeak. I have the instinct to kick them. I lock eyes with my
rat lover and my stomach turns. Squeak squeak. I ready my foot and his pleading eyes glitter.

Joshua Vigil lives in the Pioneer Valley. His work has appeared in Hobart, HAD, Maudlin House, and elsewhere.

Back Door Boys by Lee Pearson

Featured Back Patio PressLeave a comment

Once or twice every month, Elias would ask me to be his third wheel whenever he’d find some new hole on Tinder—I’d be there in case something went awry and he needed a drinking buddy to finish the night with. I never minded being an accessory to his casual hookups if I got some free drinks out of it, and it’s not like I ever had anything better to do.

From the moment he came into our apartment, I could tell Luis was something special. He seemed unimpressed with our modest digs and our less-than-stellar score of low-grade sativa mixed with high-grade poa pretensis. He still smoked it, the haughty asshole. He was generally a sour lemon, but I was interested to notice how he’d start sweetening up at our jabs and provocations—the crueler the slander, the cuter he’d get. Elias caught on to the act and just started insulting him for anything and everything, which apparently aroused something deep and masochistically whorish in Luis—I’m not qualified to psychoanalyze further, but he was basically begging to be fucked right there on the couch while me and my roommate took turns just absolutely hollowing him out on Street Fighter.

We crawled out the apartment and made our way toward a bar down the street. Luis made some snarky remark when speakers outside the place started hoarsing out Back Door Man. I nudged his side, offered a cigarette. “Hey, you know this song’s about butt sex?” He didn’t laugh—Elias did. My memory fuzzes into static somewhere in the bar, snapshots of a billiards bouts. Luis clawed at Elias’s crotch every time he’d lose a game—I think he was losing on purpose.

Elias, our reluctant DD with a blood-alcohol level somewhere around .20 if I had to guess, stopped by a Taco Bell on the way home. Luis was one of those joyless healthy types that never ate fast food. I stumbled inside, almost falling headfirst into the plate glass door. Staggering back into the car with my food, interrupting a game of grabass, the inside reeked of Luis’s candy-flavored vape nectar. I was gulping down the burrito in hopes that it would soak up all those shots of tequila, curb their nauseating effects. It didn’t work, but Taco Bell’s still delicious when you’re browning right at the cusp of a full-on blackout. I wiped liquid cheese off my lip.

“You know how much micro-plastic has got to be in that burrito?” The candy cancer mist poured from out his mouth, wisped through the gap of my open window. I could taste the shit in my food when I took a bite.

As Elias’s wingman, it was partly my duty to help him seal the deal. I said, “I don’t give a fuck. You’re literally inhaling shards of metal into your lungs right now, dumbass. You’ve been a dour little bitch all goddamn night, so why don’t you just shut the fuck up, get over yourself and stop ruining my dinner? You self-important sonofabitch, fuck you.” I didn’t really mean it, angry outbursts not being in my nature—but I did it for Elias, knowing he would’ve done the same for me.

Elias said, diplomatically, “Hey, man. How about you head inside and cool off? We’ll be up in a bit.” Luis chuffed, but I could see him patting around at Elias’s groin in the dark, giddy to fuck.

I slammed the door on my way out to really sell the show. Whipping out the dick n balls to piss out some venom in the grass, I shared an enthusiastic thumbs-up with Elias—he knew what I was getting at, and he was stoked. The last I ever saw of Luis was his silhouette shifting to straddle my roommate in the driver’s seat, under the sparse light of the night filtered through a massive oak overhead. I was already passed out when they came back in to screw some more on the couch and smoke off the rest of my grass—which Luis was a huge fan of now, apparently.

Lee Pearson is a writer that lives and works in Northwest Arkansas. He has no credentials or accolades.

The Bee by John Johns

Featured Back Patio PressLeave a comment

Mid-piss I realised there was a bee there in the toilet bowl, trying to crawl up the side. The stream that’d already left my penis caused the bee to slip back down into the water. But it was not my fault – the trajectory of that initial burst of piss had been determined before I even saw the bee. How could I have known? As the water yellowed, the bee struggled about with its tiny black limbs that were not designed for swimming, and with its cheerful fur sodden. My piss continued unabated. I was really drunk and really needed a piss and could not stop. Then I tried to stop and felt an actual pain in the base of my penis. Generally speaking the bees are in real trouble – I knew this, but the piss did continue. Unabated. In fact my attempt to dam the flow had created a build-up, and the velocity and volume of piss was now even greater than before. I could taste sweat on my lip and, watching this bee tumble and spin underwater somersaults, I knew that it was still a choice. I could be pissing on the floor right now but I wasn’t. I was drowning the bee. That was my choice. Bobbing in and out of sight amid the settling froth, the bee buzzed on, completely lost in the wake of humanity, and then I flushed the toilet and the piss and the tortured bee were rushed off like they were never there at all. So terrible.

John writes from Glasgow. He just finished a novel called ‘A crate that once contained oranges’, excerpts of which have appeared in Back Patio, Lighthouse, and Perverse. In 2019 zimZalla released 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. Tar Press is @tar_press

Bennton by Steve Gergley

Featured Back Patio PressLeave a comment

When I get home from work on Friday afternoon, I discover a black envelope slipped under the front door of my house. Inside the envelope is a letter from a person who claims to be my long lost brother named Bennton. Though I am an only child, I read the letter out of curiosity.

In the letter, Bennton writes that he has been searching for me for the past twenty-eight years, and that this grueling search has plunged him into an inescapable black hole of depression and sorrow. He writes that because of this depression, he has developed a crippling addiction to Hershey’s Special Dark Chocolate Bars with Almonds. He writes that he is eating one such chocolate bar right now, as he is scribbling this very sentence, but it is the last bar in his possession, and he greatly fears the withdrawal symptoms that will soon follow, because they are horrific and tortuous and entirely not fatal. He writes that he possesses a, “very impressive and very valuable,” (his words, not mine) antique knife collection, and that he is willing to sell/trade any and all of these knives for money that can be used to buy more chocolate bars. He writes that he is very excited to finally meet me after so many years of searching, but then he veers into a tangent explaining that his earlier reference to his knife collection was in no way intended to be athreat, and if he accidentally conveyed that impression to me, he greatly apologizes. He writes that he can’t wait to meet me, his long lost brother, his only surviving blood in this world. He writes that he is waiting for me in my bedroom at the end of the hallway, and he strongly recommends I bring a very large amount of the aforementioned chocolate bars when I return to my bedroom to greet him, because he has laid out his knife collection on top of the soft cotton comforter of my bed, and there are many shameful and horrendous things he has done in the past when starving for a fix.

Steve Gergley is the author of The Great Atlantic Highway & Other Stories (Malarkey Books ’24), Skyscraper (West Vine Press ’23), and A Quick Primer on Wallowing in Despair (Leftover Books ’22). His short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Maudlin House, Passages North, Always Crashing, Rejection Letters, and others. In addition to writing fiction, he has composed and recorded five albums of original music. He tweets @GergleySteve. His fiction can be found at: https://stevegergleyauthor.wordpress.com/

Secret by Blake Levario

Featured Back Patio PressLeave a comment

It’s a big secret. But if i told you it wouldn’t be. The secret would be broken in half. You
take one, I take the other. The secret is cherry flavored. It’s huge. But I can’t tell you.
Sorry. You show me your polaroids but not all of them. I think you have a secret too. Is it
bigger than mine? That makes me want to tell you my secret so you tell me your secret
and we can compare them. This wouldn’t do anything but displace us. The world is big
but my secret is bigger—think: universe sized. Think: bigger than that. Remember that I
carry my secret, and I’m six foot nothing in boots. I’ve been keeping this secret my
whole life. It just built itself a barn. In space. The barn is everywhere. Inside of you, yes.
This secret is so big that it makes up who you are, who I am. So if I love you and you
love me, the secret is shared between us. If you don’t love me and I love you, same
thing. It’s a really big secret. I wish I could tell you.

Blake Levario lives in Brooklyn and collects Snoopy tattoos.