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With each straining breath, a part of him is lost, carried from his dying body, infusing in the molecules of the air around us. His face changes as his soul departs. A pallid hue drapes his cold dried skin, droplets of a final tear teeter at the corner of his closing eyes. He said he was scared; In his voice I heard him as a small boy. Long slow breaths, peaceful now, outside the rain thunders against the ground. Holding his hand, hoping for a final gentle squeeze, now silence, soon broken by the sobs of my siblings. Gareth Greer, Magherafelt, N.I. Husband & Dad first, poet & author second. Somedays good at both, other days not!! Waiting for a bestseller to bubble to the surface, and then retiring to somewhere warm and remote.

If you’re ever going to amount to anything, said Dad, you’d better The phone rang and interrupted him, but Emma knew what he was going to say. Better learn to Flaming Finish Something. Anything. Start with the beans on your plate, young lady. Get to the end of one blasted fish finger. Emma looked at the end of the fish finger. Which was indeed blackened. She wondered what it would be like with flames coming out of it. Maybe the big finger of God coming down at her out of the clouds. It would be the end of the day and the sun would be huge and fiery and this giant finger would come out of a fish-shaped cloud and go, finish something can’t you. For God’s sake. Emma wasn’t sure how God had got mixed up with this. But now that He had, there wasn’t much arguing with Him. Not that Emma was the argumentative type. She wasn’t the finishing type though either. She had a stammer when she talked on the outside so even finishing a word could be a chall-ll-l-l Mostly she didn’t bother but left it for her sister who was good at finishing things. So that was teamwork. And if Natasha guessed the end of her sentences wrong, well it didn’t really It was OK. She was Em so even her name usually ended halfway and it always sounded affectionate, or nearly always, so it was Emma is a kind and caring girl, said her school report, and good with the guinea pigs. Also, she had brought the class goldfish back for the holidays and was very reliable with his feeding. A small pinch of flakes in the morning. Unless he wasn’t very hungry that day; if he didn’t finish the flakes straight away, don’t worry just The fish was in fine shape at the beginning of term and everyone said she’d done an excellent job. She mightn’t set the world on fire, Miss told her parents, but she’s a lovely There must be something wrong, her father interrupted. Is she scared of something? Her mother asked. Things have a way of working out, said Miss. With a bit of encouragement. Try not to expect too much. Her parents must have been listening. Years later, just before her GCSEs, she went down with a virus. She was too unwell to sit the exams and missed them all. Her mum sat on her bed and tried to console her. We’re not expecting you to set the world on fire, she said. We love you just We want you well and healthy, said her father, smiling down at her. Concentrate on getting better. But Emma could not get better; her nausea and tiredness seemed to go on and on. While her friends did their A levels and went off to uni or travelling, Emma’s world shrank around her, until some days there was barely room enough in her own body even to breathe. Sometimes her friends came home. They bounced into her room (hair bleached by foreign sun), flung themselves onto her bed and talked (overnight bus to Built a shelter on I met this really) Until, inevitably, they got to the well enough about me, what about you? And then, suddenly, the air seemed to run out and everything felt Laters, Em, they said. Getwellsoon. A year or so passed and she did start getting better. Enough to get up and sit in the garden or walk to the park and watch the squirrels chasing each other up and down the tree trunks. Better enough to start living a bit but not quite These days even her dad seemed scared to make suggestions. Like he’d run out of Then, when she was twenty-one, two magical things happened. The first was that a distant great-aunt passed away and left her a thousand pounds. The second was that Maz, her pen-friend in Australia, invited her to visit. Half-way round the world, Em, said her sister. It’s just your sort of trip. From the plane, the clouds over Australia were little far-apart puffs stretching on and on and underneath them the reddish land sped and sped for a day In Australia it was summer and they were having a heat-wave. 40 degrees in the shade. Some of the shops were still draped in tinsel which sparked and crackled in the blinding windows. Standing in the street while Maz pulled the shade across the windscreen and locked the car, Emma narrowed her eyes against the headache clawing her temples. Her blood felt oddly hotter than her skin. They went to the cinema just for the air-con but then it broke down and everybody fled, slowly, like dreamers. The night was full of them getting up for showers. They lay down wet and minutes later were dry and overheating again. Let’s go fishing, Maz said. It’ll be cooler on the coast. She called up her friend Liss and got it all fixed. Liss came the next morning in a white Cortina with flames painted down the sides. The boot was piled to the roof with surf boards and fishing rods and sporty sun-scorched clothing. Sticky-backed letters on the dashboard said, ‘Sick Bogan’. Whatever that was. All day they juddered along ridgy dirt roads, pausing sometimes for knobbly blue-tongued lizards and once a long black snake lording it on the road. Far from the city, there were emus with silvery, bush-shaped bodies stalking through the scrub and kangaroos with enormous legs and rudder-like tails lurking among the trees. Liss stopped at a shop and bought a lemon, some chilli oil and a bottle of white wine. Supper, she said, grinning. A giant grey spider jumped onto the door-frame. Repel boarders, she shrieked, knocking it off with a brush she kept for the purpose, and then slammed the door. While Liss and Maz chatted about fish lures and where the big waves might be, Emma slid about on the sweating back-seat and thought of the regulated comforts of her little vacuum-packed bedroom. She couldn’t see what use she’d be on a fishing trip; she’d no idea how to surf. Perhaps she could just sit in Sick Bogan and We’re here, Maz said. Here was a little tin-roofed hut with a small black range, a tiny table and a couple of bunks inside. A sign said, No Campfires November to May. All around it was bush bush bush as far as Here you go, Em, Maz said and chucked over a baggy lycra top and a pair of rubbery shoes. They smeared white cream thickly over their noses and ears and crammed tattered cotton hats onto their heads. Then, dividing the fishing gear between them, they headed for the beach. Small simple word; even Emma could say ‘beach’ without a glitch. Bucket and plastic spade, stripy windbreak, sand in your witches ‘beach’. Only this ‘beach’ was several hundred miles of burning white gold, a wavering border of pale foam and the deep blue blue blue glittering into forever. Not a single house, not a single other person interrupted the vastness of it - Emma’s brain seemed to stretch and warp. She was minuscule in the face of infinity as she slipped and stumbled after her friends across the squeaking sand and up onto a vast slab of black rock that shouldered its way out into the sea. I’m not really the fishing – she started to say, but a huge wave flew up and atomised in their faces. You’re all right, they said, laughing with delight at being wet and cool. A fishing rod was thrust into her hand. On the end of the line hung a huge, jointed lure, shiny and many-coloured as a Chinese dragon, with a fan of ferocious spikes for a tongue. What kind of creature would fall for that? Squid, Liss said, love prawns. Can you think like a prawn, Em? Emma’s prawns were pink and curled in mayo on a bed of wilting lettuce. Think? Kind of jerkily, Maz said. They scuttle and then look back. Scuttle some more. They kind of stutter actually. She smiled with friendly mischief. The squid are going to love you. They demonstrated, flinging the line right out in a huge swishing arc and then jerking it in, quite fast. Prawn fleeing for its life, Liss said. Sends the squid loopy. And before long, she and Maz each had a loopy squid, safe in a rock-pool at their feet. Despite their encouragement, Emma didn’t have the touch. She couldn’t get the line out far enough; nor in fast enough nor jerk it prawnily enough. No squid went loopy for her. It was evening now, the sky a sore-looking red; time to go and cook up the catch. But Maz and Liss were adamant. Everyone must catch one. We won’t stop until you do. Just Flaming Finish Something for once in your They took turns to hold her hands around the rod, all three of them madly thinking like prawns. Once she had one and lost it. Again and again and still again until she thought her heart would break with it or she wished the line would anyway, swishing and jerking and stammering like a terrified prawn like herself really actually sorry–I, so-er trying to explain herself caught between infinity and Suddenly Magically, terribly With its big live body and giant green eye Squirting black and splattering her clothes with it A creature from another world hung heavy on the end of the line The consequence Oh of her prawny stutter. Maz helped her land him and disengage him from the terrible barbs of his ecstasy. All right, squiddy, she said and all of them breathed out with relief Except maybe the squid for whom breath was no longer an option. Such outlandish beauty. Brown and white stripes chasing themselves across his skin like sunlight rippling on the seabed; the tourmaline brilliance of his eye Ever seen a squid die? Liss asked. What could she do but shake her head (death being a stuffed bison with a sad glassy look and a great-aunt passing distantly)? Liss raised her hand, edge on - watch - and brought it down Chop. The squid’s body turned instantly white. Instantly dead. Not half a second’s transition from one state to another. The most shocking and beautiful death on earth. They gutted and cleaned him and put him with the others in the eski. Then they climbed down from the great black rock and headed back in the pinky dusk. In the little tin-roofed hut three women sat down to a dinner of fresh squid. Hot-seared in chilli oil with a drizzle of lemon. A large glass of white. Cheers, said Maz. Here’s to Emma and her first squid. As they crammed their mouths with the sweet-salt flesh, the chilli ignited against the roofs of their mouths and the lemon sang on their tongues. Outside, without the slightest effort and requiring no assistance from any quarter, the vast dome of the sky caught fire. It blazed, as it always did, in scarlet rose orange crimson and the clouds streamed out like brilliant vapour from a giant rocket. In the lilac glow that followed, the moon rose over the salt pans and the emu in the darkening scrub and the little tin-roofed hut in which three women slept content. Juliette Adair is a hypnotherapist & life coach living in Dorset, England. Having spent more than a decade writing a novel, it is a joyful liberation to be writing short fiction. She has had pieces accepted recently in Corvid Queen and Soft Star magazines.

Worms I’m sure lose patience With rocks with moles with each other And weeds too must get antsy sometimes Because of trowels or other spouting seeds or frost Even clouds Even with all of their comings or goings Probably get annoyed in their own way With the far off horizon So why should I be surprised at all that Who wins or who loves who Or even how the world spins to and fro Causes such unending uproars among the living and the dead Or among the good or bad or squirmy You can listen to an audio recording of this piece here Larew's most recent collection, Patchy Ways, was published in 2023 by CyberWit Press. www.HiramLarewPoetry.com

to wherever crows fly October ended. November rushed in with warm embrace. The autumn world smelled like spring. Deciduous trees stood rank against property lines. What leaves hadn’t yet fallen were falling. A blanket of colorful decay covered the ground in orange, amber, red, and brown. Only the crows remained, begging for death to fall into their laps. And when nothing fell, they flew away, to wherever crows fly. And you, standing alone, watched white clouds like smooth river stones skip across the expansive blue sky. nothing worse The 7:30am parking lot of the state psychiatric hospital is filled with the out of sync screamed choruses of the committed. Their clenched fingers clutch fenced-in porches that separate them from the outside world. You’ve been employed here for six years, only thirty-two more to go. Unless of course, things take an ugly turn and you end up on the other side of the nurses station becoming a patient yourself. And sure, every clinician jokes about it, but you’ve seen it happen so many times before. From this parking lot you watch the autumn fog lift, revealing a bright burning circular orange sun that rises over treetops, highlighting dying colors: red, and amber, and purple, and brown. And you think of all the things you think you’d rather be doing, but even then you can’t think of anything. And there’s nothing worse than that. halfway through autumn, halfway to winter after six days, the two feeders out front remained untouched, it’s never a good sign when the birds disappear. the thermometer on the back porch reads 73 degrees, it has for two days. halfway through autumn, halfway to winter, spring returned. does this happen every year? is november always like this? these questions don’t scare you. not remembering doesn’t scare you. the thought of snow, that cold wet white death quietly raining from the sky upon barren land, scares you. but for now, there is no snow. there is only the full feeders, motionless like retired gallows. and there is your sorrow, and your life. all continuing on. another day, another season, another year. repeating, again. and it’s beginning to rain driving 80mph through the setting autumn sun, there’s something about the way sinking sunlight hits power lines on a deserted county road that slightly softens your beating heart, like a sort of magic, like seeing the eyes of the woman you love after a few days of being alone. yet, right now, this feeling can’t be enjoyed. you’re lost in your head again, seeking answers to questions that can never be answered, questions that persist amongst fading memories of cold years gone by. and at home, gazing into black twilight, there are no shooting stars to wish upon, no clouds and no moon, just pitch-black, and it’s beginning to rain. trading rocks for pinecones Menacing clouds mixed with sundowning smiles, things are not going so well. I try trading rocks for pinecones, but kicking them just doesn’t feel the same. Where do you go when the graveyard is filled and no one picks up your call? simple song beer foam rising in the bottleneck— another missed chance to drown some ants, but in the winter there are no ants, there is only you. springbirds return early to thaw their wings in the sun, they sing their songs from wet branches, they sing their songs for you. confusion is universal when the worm dies on salted concrete, when you lose your purpose to reality. don’t let this happen. find love and let it in. Tohm Bakelas is a social worker in a psychiatric hospital. He was born in New Jersey, resides there, and will die there. His poems have been printed widely in journals, zines, and online publications all over the world. He is the author of twenty-four chapbooks and several collections of poetry, including Cleaning The Gutters of Hell (Zeitgeist PressPress, 2023). He is the editor of Between Shadows Press.

I Still Give Myself Grace I pour out another non-alcoholic beverage for the suburbia where I used to force my head to lay. The tear stains on my pillows may be a distant prostitute to whom I still owe money but I still give myself grace. Even the bullies who placed my third eye in toilets will be forgiven in time. For now, I let old winter days pile up. They’re only terminal, after all. Buttered Toast Memories Buttered toast memories march into my sinuses. They are led by the caws of nameless birds. Do I greet it all with a friendly wave or a corrosive snarl? I glance at my watch for advice; the years shuffle away like my mother’s throat. May I choose to be grateful regardless, for this life is nestled on a fault line of all the pills I take. Your Wing This loathing of mine lays solely on your tombstone. A stray memory or three may lay eggs in now barren garbage dumps but it’s always the broken light-tubes to which I return. The shard don’t even hurt anymore; they’re a minor annoyance I shrug off along with the millionth lie you told. It’s frustrating that I still miss you but your wing is still warm after all these years. Robert J. W. is a poet and writer from Morgantown, WV that is known for his work about mental health and memory. He has been writing poetry for 20 years now. He has frequently published collections with Alien Buddha Press (including Dusty Video Game Cartridges and Bed of Bones) as well as being featured in several of their zines and anthologies. He enjoys listening to music, meditating, reading, and hanging with friends. You can find him on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/Robertjw4688\

When Anne and Gareth first got together, they’d squeezed into Gareth’s single student bed, clinging onto each other tightly, a mass of entangled limbs, neither able to imagine letting the other go. Out of love, yes, from the sheer intoxication of simply being together, that too, but also to ensure neither of them toppled off the mattress and onto the bare floorboards. When Anne and Gareth got their own rented house together, they luxuriated in the extra space their new double bed offered them. Indeed, they barely left it for weeks after moving in. But they still spent their nights clinging onto each other in the middle of the mattress, even though neither had to worry about falling out any longer. When Anne and Gareth finally bought a place of their own, the removal van didn’t turn up with the bed for three days, forcing them to resort to sleeping bags on the floor. Anne, always on the superstitious side, considered this an ill omen. Gareth told her she was being silly. When Anne and Gareth had their first baby, a little boy called Jonah, Anne spent hours out of bed in the middle of every night, breastfeeding. Then, when Jonah was older, he slept between them. Gareth said this was a bad idea, but Anne said Jonah simply wouldn’t go down in his own room and Gareth was welcome to try and prove her wrong. He did. She wasn’t. But a distance far greater than the mere width of a sleeping toddler had formed between them. When Anne and Gareth had their second baby, a little girl called Lily, Anne again spent hours out of bed in the middle of every night, breastfeeding. Soon, Lily would join Jonah in the bed with them, to the unhidden frustration of their father. As Anne and Gareth peered across the bed at each other, the distance could have been measured in miles. The nights when they clung to each other seemed a long time ago. When Gareth eventually decided, despite Anne’s protestations, that sharing a bed with two infants was too much – “I’ve got work in the morning!” – and moved into the spare room “just for a few days”, the distance between he and Anne not only followed him, it stayed with them wherever they went, silently, but unmistakably, growing each day. When Jonah and Lily were finally both old enough to sleep peacefully in their own beds, Gareth moved back into his and Anne’s bedroom. But so did the distance. Neither Anne nor Gareth found themselves able to close it. They slept perched on the edge of each side of the mattress, as if there were still two children in the bedspace between them. When Anne and Gareth found themselves sleeping in separate beds in separate houses, they both wept. Anne moved Jonah and Lily back into her room for a time, clinging to them instead of Gareth in a way that brought all three some comfort. Gareth tossed and turned on his single mattress, before giving up hopes of rest. He got out of bed, padded across different, but sombrely familiar, bare floorboards and left the room. He stared at the television until the sun came up, remembering when it had been unimaginable to let Anne go. David Cook's stories have been published in Ellipsis Zine, Janus Literary, the National Flash Fiction Anthology and more. He's a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. He lives in Bridgend, Wales, with his wife and daughter.

Weary from my travels, I turned the corner into their lane Coming home, back to them Everything a little different, but still just the same. The selfsame faces beaming round the table A meal and some deliberation The warmth washed around me in waves Even in that dry summer, offering salvation. My eyes were as bright as the yellow lights And I heard your laugh through the lull I can tell you now, as surely as I felt it then It’s simple. And when we walked back, stumbling and giggling I told you about my heartbreak and you told me about yours You’re aimless tonight and I’m throwing myself off the cliff Jubilant, gorgeous, screaming out the words to David Bowie’s “Heroes.” I don’t know what the year will bring If love will ever be within our reach But I can tell you now, as surely as I felt it then For those few brief moments, we were unquestionably alive. Amruta Gaiki (She/Her) is an Indian graduate student majoring in English. She likes reading, writing, and going on walks with earphones plugged in. Her work has been published by Rejection Letters, Livina Press, Bubble, and Alien Buddha Zine. She is an editor at The Milk House. Follow her on Twitter & Instagram @flames_n_ice and read her blog at: https://goingliterary.wordpress.com/

I took my mum’s hand, malformed, pitiless, In her age that guarantees no renewal. She looks at me, as I bury my face in the Crux of her arm. Briefly wanting to scour this fleeting moment upon infinity. She turns and looks out the window, The heart can only break so many times (at least that’s what I thought). I’m sorry mum. I love you. The silence that follows is complete. David Hay's debut publication is the narrative poem Doctor Lazarus. His first poetry collection is forthcoming from Rare Swan Press. He has a collaborative work Amor Novus/A Spontaneous Prayer with Soyos Books, a pamphlet due in November from Back Room Poetry and has a novel How High the Moon coming out from Anxiety Press later this year.

My Nemesis is a magnificent dancer. She performs pirouettes to the bar and passes after her first attempt so she can later explain the legalities of torture. This ornery oracle scans rooms and documents from left to right and right to left. She speaks every language but my native language. And practicing my second language will not save me from the horrors accompanying her swift gait and savvy social behaviors. My nemesis wears combat boots and moonlights as a flight attendant with a 500-year-old samurai sword hidden in the cockpit, headed for my destination. She is the reason dead sparrows appear on my doorstep, my car won’t start, and I swallow five pills every night to help me fall asleep. Sara Cosgrove is an award-winning journalist and emerging poet. Her poems have appeared or are scheduled to appear in The Seventh Quarry, Meniscus, and Notre Dame Review. She has worked as a writer and editor for more than a decade and has studied in the United States, Cuba, and France.

Dervis told me he wanted to “sleep on it” but after lunch, he’d already had an answer for me, so I guess he napped on his lunch break. He was not going to let me come back. His feeling was, “Yeah, sorry, you can’t go on vacation for two months and expect to keep your job.” I tried explaining that a tour is not a vacation. For bands like mine, it’s a bad dream. It’s dying of boredom in a van with no A/C surrounded by people with no communication skills, and the van dies daily, and you finally get to your gig and you’re going on way later than you thought, and even though you might have a few fans scattered about, no one’s dying to watch your set, so there’s a nagging feeling of futility and despair that you drink heavily to escape, knowing that tomorrow will be the exact same except now you’ll be hungover. So why do I bother? Because the alternative is I stay in this warehouse and keep working for Hal Dervis. What can I say, I still think our band’s gonna be huge. Friday was my last day and I left without a goodbye to anyone. Every one of my co-workers is either a divorced mom or the delinquent son of one of those moms. I don’t know how the trend started of the moms bringing their scary sons on board, but the sons sure do make their presence felt. They took over the radio so that there is always nu metal or countrified rap-rock playing, and if you don’t have anything to say about paintball or Fortnite, you get left out of most conversations. There are also some retired guys supplementing their social security, and a couple dudes in their twenties who are screwing a couple of the moms, unbeknownst to the sons. I don’t have anything against any of these people, I just never had anything to say to them and that includes “goodbye.” I did catch Dervis’s eye on my way out and gave him a vaguely threatening look, one I hope communicated, “You are a punk and a lowlife and no one on earth will remember you when you are gone. Working for you has sucked.” As I was getting into my car, I saw Kurt across the lot—he was smoking a cig by the loading dock—and I felt a rush of guilt. I’d needed work desperately a few months back, and even though we were barely speaking, Kurt hadn’t hesitated to get me this job. Sure, all he’d had to do was ask his dad (yep, the Rod Korver of Rod Korver Hospitality Supplies), but still, he asked. And in all the three months or so that I worked in the warehouse, I’d never once gone to the offices next door to check in on Kurt and see how the social media management was coming along (poorly, I figured, since Kurt has no social media skills and his dad only gave him the job so he could put something on his resume that’s not Dairy Queen or Pizza Hut). I felt I owed it to Kurt now to go tell him I was leaving, though I couldn’t imagine him caring and really didn’t want to talk to him. “Hey man!” I said as I approached, big fake smile on my face. He answered, “Yo,” in a low voice, almost a moan, smoke leaking out of his head. He looked philosophical, brooding, but sort of consciously brooding, as if playing the part of “guy with stuff on his mind.” It didn’t suit him. “Wanted you to know it’s my last day,” I said. “Shit, really?” I told him about Dervis calling my tour a vacation. Then I told him about the tour. Then I asked if I’d told him about it already. Then I thought, Why the fuck did I ask that? I knew I hadn’t told him and that he wouldn’t want to hear about it. But it used to be all we talked about, music stuff. Going on tour was a dream we’d once shared. Now I was living it and he was not, would never. Kurt put out his cigarette and said, “You’ll get your job back. Don’t worry about Dervis, fuck him.” It seemed pointed that he made no mention of the tour I had just mentioned. I could tell something was wrong but couldn’t bring myself to ask. We’d spent lots of time together but never discussed feelings, or anything very personal, unless drunk. I don’t know who’s to blame for that. I think I’m a sensitive guy, in touch with my emotions and whatnot. Girls I’ve dated have told me I am, anyway. But I was never in touch with Kurt’s emotions. Not knowing what else to say to him, I asked, “Do you wanna hang before I leave?” He hesitated, then mumbled, “Sure.” Pissed me off that he didn’t seem to care either way, when I thought me asking him to hang was a huge deal since we hadn’t in so long and I didn’t even want to. Maybe it sounded to him that I was inviting him to celebrate the start of another My Favourite Bastard tour, to toast my success. So I added, “Been a while.” “I know,” he said. “Are you asking to hang out because of what’s happening with my folks?” “Huh? What about your folks?” “They’ve separated. My dad’s fucking one of the sales ladies.” “Jesus, are you serious? What the fuck?” He told me Mr. K.’s been seeing this lady—I don’t know which lady—for like six months. His mom found out a few weeks ago and he doesn’t know where his dad’s staying. “I gotta quit this fucking job,” he said. “I have to see him every day and act like…but what can I do? Go back to Pizza Hut?” “How’s your mom?” “Not good.” “Fucking dads,” I said. Not sure why I said that. My dad’s probably the most supportive person in my life, and because he toiled so long in shit jobs before finally opening his own restaurant at 46, I still believe I can have a music career and he believes it too. Kurt knows all this and probably resented me saying “fucking dads” as if we were in the same Sons of Shitty Dads support group. “Look,” I said, “you have social media experience, you can tweet for whoever.” “There’s more to it than tweeting. You have to know SEO and all that.” “What’s SEO?” “I don’t know. Fuck! I’m so stupid.” “You’re not,” I said, putting my hand on his shoulder. How odd it felt to do that. When had I last touched the guy’s shoulder, or shaken his hand even? Had we ever hugged? We must have, at some point. Probably while wasted. Kurt said, “Well, I’m around tonight if you want to come over. My dad left all his booze in the basement, the real top-shelf bottles.” This excited me. I had sorry thoughts about Kurt’s family situation, but those thoughts were outshined by excited thoughts of drinking Macallan 12 Single Malt in his basement. I also had a guitar I’d left there years ago and it’d be nice to have it back. It’s an Ibanez, this sparkly blue junker I got for a couple hundred. “Dude, I’m there,” I said. Kurt and I met in high school, started a band, played together almost weekly in his parents’ basement, planning to tour the world as a guitar-and-drums duo like the White Stripes or the Black Keys, only we wouldn’t suck. We were called the Gray Slits. I loved that name. It meant nothing, but I liked that it was ambiguously offensive. My dad asked me if it was a reference to old ladies’ vaginas (it wasn’t, but I liked the idea of people thinking it was). I played guitar and Kurt played drums. He wasn’t amazing but I knew my playing was good enough that he didn’t need to be. And I was fairly sure I had charisma, which sounds weird to say, but now that I’m in My Favourite Bastard I’ve had people confirm that I have onstage charisma. Not enough to take the focus off Melanie, our singer, but people look at me. The Gray Slits never played a show. Coming up with the name was the first and final order of official Gray Slits business. Everything beyond that was talk. Kurt seemed content to jam and fantasize forever; I was desperate to be in a real band, so I found one. But after joining My Favourite Bastard I still had occasional practices with Kurt, which were awful. I’d conjure some workaday riff (my best ideas went to Bastard) and Kurt, knowing my allegiances lay elsewhere, would half-heartedly play along until we were both drunk enough on Bass Ale to quit for the night and go play NBA Jam. Then one night he got up from his drums and, without a word, left his own basement through the sliding glass door, got in his car, and drove away. When he came back 45 minutes later I was upstairs in the living room, eating Cheetos and watching Everybody Loves Raymond with Kurt’s mom (many of our practices ended with us watching CBS programming with Mrs. K. so it wasn’t weird that I was doing this). I said, “Where’d you go?” Trying to be nonchalant. He said, “Just drove around.” He took a seat on the couch and we watched the episode in silence. During commercials, he said, “I don’t know what we’re doing down there anymore. I think I’m having a bad time. Aren’t you?” It was our final practice. We stopped hanging out, too. Things got busy with my band and Kurt went to work for his father. Sometimes I’d lay awake wondering why Kurt seemed to take for granted that he could keep my Ibanez. Then I’d think about Kurt and his lack of ambition and I’d become inexplicably furious. Eventually, I stopped thinking about him. Then one day after a tour in which I lost pretty much all my savings I called him and asked if his dad might be hiring warehouse guys, and here we are. I pulled up to his house at about 7:30. I sat in my car a few minutes, suddenly having second thoughts about going in, about seeing Mrs. Korver looking all spurned and betrayed. What’s the appropriate way to act around your ex-best-friend’s mom who’s just been spurned by her husband who is your boss? It would have been a good idea to have a couple beers before coming here, and I wished I had a bottle of something tucked under the seat or in the glove box. But when she opened the door, I just wanted to hug her. She looked the same as always: cheerful, put-together, delighted to see me. She wasn’t on a six-day bender, shuffling around in pajamas with her hair in a huge ratty mess. Maybe she’d been doing those things but had put herself together knowing I was coming. “Sammy!” she cried, bringing her hands together. “Where have you been?” We caught up. She’s still at the same veterinary clinic. She asked about my band, I said it was going fine, though I made sure to portray tour life as bleak. We got to the kitchen and Kurt came up from the basement. I felt disappointed to see him then. I’d been enjoying Mrs. K, who, if she was depressed, at least put on a happy face, whereas Kurt looked almost petulantly glum. Mrs. K. offered us wine and I really wanted to stay with her, but Kurt said, “We’re going downstairs.” “Come with us,” I said. “No,” she said, laughing. “I hate it down there.” Kurt went downstairs without another word and when he was gone Mrs. K. poured me some wine and said, “Take a glass anyhow.” Everything was pretty much the same in the basement. Boxes piled up, pieces of old furniture, and Kurt’s champagne-colored DW drums, the most beautiful kit I’ve ever seen. I hate to think of them not being played, just wasting away in Kurt’s basement. I ran my finger along one of the cymbals and showed Kurt the dust. “Not practicing much?” I asked. “What for?” “Fun? Or just to stay on top of it?” “Nah, one day, maybe.” “It’s a beautiful kit, you know, if you ever wanted to—” “Yeah, yeah, I’ll get back into it,” Kurt said. “Hey wanna see the bar? You’ve never seen it.” I’d been scanning the room for my Ibanez. I’d left it in its stand right by the drums. Where was it? I followed Kurt to the bar, figuring I’d ask about it after a couple Macallans. The new bar was not new anymore. There was a big mirror that had a huge decal of the mascot from the college Mr. K. went to, and there was this long crack along the mascot’s chest. The floor tiling looked dirty. And there was a clear plastic bowl, half-filled with an obviously stale salad of Cheetos, ridged potato chips, and pretzel sticks, in the corner. I said, “I take it that’s not a snack you just whipped up.” “Oh fuck!” Kurt said. He was looking at the shelves next to the mascot. “Where’s all the…dude, where the fuck is the good shit? Mom!” He bolted upstairs. I looked at the shelves and I saw what he meant. There really was no good shit. No Macallan 12, no Lagavulin, no Johnnie Walker Blue, or even Johnnie Walker Black. What remained was Seagram’s, Dewar’s, Jim Beam, Evan Williams, Wild Turkey—how had all this rotgut accumulated? Why would Mr. K. have this crap to begin with? I drank the rest of the wine Mrs. K. had given me and looked at my phone. There were new messages in the My Favourite Bastard group chat. Melanie: Hey Bastard bros! So psyched for the tour kickoff! Looks like we can leave a couple hours late tomorrow since we’re not scheduled to play in Cincinnati until like midnight. Also I’ve been listening to this Cyndi Lauper song and we NEED to cover it! Chip: I love Cyndi! And great news about Cinci! Richard: [surf’s up emoji] I put my phone away. I didn’t want to leave late and play a show at midnight. I felt exhausted just thinking about that. And I didn’t want to learn a fucking Cyndi Lauper song. I was growing tired of Melanie’s whims and relentless chipper attitude. Kurt came back looking defeated. “It’s gone,” he said, “he took it all. Came one day to get his golf clubs and other shit and apparently took the good booze as well.” He went behind the bar to take a frowning inventory. He got the Wild Turkey bottle and showed it to me, displaying it like a sommelier presenting a rare Bordeaux. “I got him this. He said I was drinking too much of his scotch and needed to contribute something.” “And you contributed Wild Turkey?” “The price was right.” “It isn’t scotch.” “I don’t know much about whiskey.” “Wild Turkey’s not a great one.” Kurt then sort of slammed the bottle down. I was surprised it didn’t break. “He left it as a fuck-you to me,” he said. “There’s no other way to see it.” “He probably just doesn’t like bourbon,” I said, but Kurt’s theory was just as likely. Anyway, not leaving the Macallan 12 or even one nice bottle was the real fuck you. “Not much of a bar now. See that mirror? My dad had his friends over to watch the Rose Bowl and they got shit-faced and one of them, probably my dad, fell into it. There was blood. My mom had to clean it.” When he mentioned the Rose Bowl, I was reminded of something, and I probably shouldn’t have brought it up but I was feeling bad. “Remember like five Rose Bowls ago? We had the chance to play that college party at Pete’s, but you chickened out once you saw all the people there?” I was trying to laugh about it, but it wasn’t funny to me. He got quiet. “Yeah,” he finally said. “They were just drunk Abercrombie & Fitch types, they would have hated us.” “That’s what would have made it fun.” “Not for me.” We started drinking heavily. He opened the Wild Turkey and got down two glasses and poured us each a big shot. I quickly downed mine and poured another as he drank his. He made a disgusted face and said, “Okay, I get why Dad left this.” I agreed it was awful and said, “Let’s try a different one.” I got down the Jim Beam. We had some of that, then the Seagram’s, then Evan Williams. It was all so terrible. “Why are you still living here, man?” I asked when I was starting to really feel the booze. “When are you gonna get your own place?” “You sound like my dad.” “Why couldn’t you try harder in our band? Why were you so chickenshit?” “Wasn’t chickenshit. Just didn’t have the desire like you did.” I was drunk now. The whiskey pours were getting longer. My thoughts returned to the Ibanez, and I thought of a clever way of asking Kurt to find it. “We should jam,” I said. “Jam?” he repeated like he’d never heard such an idea. I didn’t care for his judgmental tone. “Yeah. Grab that Ibanez I left here. We’ll fuck around.” He looked troubled and weird. “I’ve never heard you say jam,” he said. Which is bullshit, I’ve always said jam. He was trying to hurt me. “So that’s what you do in your band, jam?” “Yes, we jam, Kurt. It’s how bands write songs.” “That’s cool, don’t get offended.” “Well don’t get sour.” He laughed. “Yo, listen—” “And what’s with the yo? You never used to say yo. What’s with that?” (And actually he used to say yo quite a bit but it always seemed unnatural and I never called him on that, so this was my way of finally calling him on it and getting him back for saying I never say jam.) He said, “I’m not sour about your band or anything to do with you at all.” “So you’re not at all sour about me being in a touring band and you doing SEO for your father while not knowing what SEO is?” I felt cruel saying that so I laughed to ease the blow. But the laugh sounded cruel, too. “It’s a job, so what. I’m sorry being in a band wasn’t my calling.” “Social media is your calling, then.” “I don’t have a calling.” Then he called me a dickhead under his breath. After a tense period of quiet, I asked, “Where is that Ibanez, anyway?” He took a deep breath and sighed, not looking at me. “The Ibanez isn’t here. I gave it to my mom.” “Your mom plays guitar now?” “I gave it to her for her church drive.” “Church drive. As in, a sale?” “To raise money for the church, yes.” “Why did you give my Ibanez to your mom to sell at her church?” “She asked if I had any stuff to donate and—you were never gonna come get that thing, come on. You always said it’s a piece of shit.” “But it was my piece of shit. I was keeping it here, but—” “You left it here.” “Maybe I liked knowing it was here.” He didn’t get that and neither did I because hadn’t I hated knowing it was here in his basement? I kept talking: “Maybe that kept us connected in my mind. As long as your drums and my guitar were here, it meant…” We heard glass break above us—Mrs. K.’s wine glass. We looked at each other then ran upstairs, which was unnecessary, as Mrs. K. probably knew how to handle broken glass, but I think we wanted to escape the awkward moment we’d found ourselves in. She already had the dustpan out and was saying, “Relax, relax, I’m just a klutz, it’s fine.” But it was clear from her concentrated, ineffective sweeping style that she was in bad shape, maybe as drunk as us. “You okay, Mrs. K?” I asked. “Fine,” she said, standing with the dustpan despite several glass shards still shining on the tile. “Careful,” I said. “She’s fine,” Kurt said. “Let’s go.” But I didn’t want to go back downstairs. I thought I’d call a cab or go sober up in my car, even take a long walk by myself. Mrs. K. dumped the dustpan out into the wastebasket while I stood guard over the remaining bits on the floor. In the joining living room, I could see the TV was showing a trailer for a new Sonic the Hedgehog movie. It looked cozy in there. I said, “What’s on?” “Becker,” she answered automatically, pouring more wine. “You like Becker?” She took a big swig of Cabernet. “I love Becker.” Kurt went downstairs and I suggested he come back with some shitty whiskey and then we could all watch Becker, but he didn’t acknowledge me at all. I swept the remaining glass and then joined Mrs. K. on the couch as the Becker theme song started. “Damn, this guitar part really rips,” I said. Mrs. K. laughed. I tried to focus on the show but I worried Kurt wouldn’t come back. Then I was scared he would come back because, unless I was imagining it, Mrs. K. was very close to me on the couch. I turned to her and she was looking at me. “It’s so nice to have you back here, Sammy,” she said. “Oh, yes,” I said. “Good. Happy to be here.” “So, are you seeing anyone now?” “Uh, no, not at the moment.” It seemed our faces were nearly touching. I’d never had fantasies about Mrs. K. and never in my right mind would try to kiss a friend’s, or even an ex-friend’s, mom, but when drunk I assume anyone this close to me wants me to kiss them, and I’ll kiss anyone. Thank God I had enough presence of mind to snap out of it and look away. “I should check on Kurt, probably,” I said. She nodded, maybe in disappointment, I couldn’t say. I went downstairs. He was not at the bar, or in the backroom they used for storage. I called his name, checked the bathroom. I went to the sliding glass door and found it unlocked. I opened it and stepped out into the cold. The Korvers have a lot of property, with woods behind their backyard, and I wondered if Kurt was out there. “Kurt,” I yelled. Nothing answered. I went around to the front. His car was gone. I called his phone, which went to voicemail. I texted him, Where are you? Don’t be stupid. Trust me, you don’t want a DUI. Seriously. Don’t fuck around like this. I went back in through the front door and went into the living room and sat beside Mrs. K, putting distance between us this time, but not much, if I’m honest. “Everything okay?” she asked. “Kurt’s gone.” “Oh,” she said. “He’s been doing that a lot. Leaving without a word. I’m sorry. He’ll come back.” After a few minutes, I put my hand on my leg, but because we were so close it was basically on her leg. My pinky was definitely touching her leg. I felt her looking at me and I was sure that as soon as I turned my head toward her we’d be kissing. Then I turned my head toward her—I was right about her looking at me and, while we did not immediately start kissing, we definitely would if we continued staring at each other like this. I was drunk enough so I leaned in for it. But then she turned away and cleared her throat. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Sorry, I…I’m going through—you know, and…” “Don’t be sorry,” I said. “It’s okay.” She laughed at herself, or maybe at both of us. “Mrs. K.,” I said. “You might as well call me Cheryl.” “Cheryl…” “What?” “That guitar Kurt gave you, the blue Ibanez? You sold it at your church drive? mine. I really want it back. Do you have the details of who bought it? I’ll buy it back if the guy wants. Is there a record of who bought it?” “What’re you talking about, Sammy?” “The guitar. You sold it at your church.” “I didn’t sell a guitar,” she said. “No.” “Yeah, you did. The blue Ibanez? Kurt said—” “He has a guitar in his room,” she said. “I know that. He’s been learning to play it.” I looked at the ceiling as if I’d be able to see into Kurt’s room. “Is it blue?” She shrugged. I excused myself and went across the room to the stairs. I hadn’t seen Kurt’s bedroom in years; it felt like a violation of his privacy to go in there without him. But him keeping my Ibanez and lying about selling it at a church drive was a way bigger violation, I think. But then also, I’d tried to kiss his mom, so we were probably square. The room was oppressively messy. I had to wait for my vision to adjust as there was so much crap on the floor vying for my attention. But quickly enough my eyes found the Ibanez. It was on the rug by his bed tangled up in some shirts. I picked it up, feeling victorious for a moment, then suddenly despondent. I put the strap over my shoulder and checked the tuning. It really was a piece of shit, this guitar. But it’s what I’d come here for and I wasn’t leaving without it—which seemed so pathetic, that I couldn’t just leave it. But I couldn’t. I started walking back downstairs with the guitar still strapped over my shoulder. Mrs. K. saw me like that and immediately laughed, which was appropriate as I looked like I was about to burst into an emotional staircase guitar solo. She stood and came toward me. We met at the bottom of the stairs. She put her hands on my chest, her right hand moving under the guitar strap. I hadn’t realized before how much taller than her I was. “Found it,” I said. She launched her head at mine, kissed me. An ungentle, hard kiss, her tongue lashing inside my mouth. It was weirdly unsettling and arousing at the same time. I felt disgusted with myself and with her a bit as well—what a betrayal of Kurt—and yet I really wanted to see where this would go. I started putting my hands anywhere I wanted—her body, her face, her hair. This was insane. The front door opened. “I’m back,” I heard Kurt say. “Now we can party.” Mrs. K. darted back to the sofa and was almost sitting down when he got to the room. Kurt was holding up a bottle of Macallan 12, which he let drop to his side when he saw us. He looked back and forth between us, his mom breathing heavily and her hair a mess, me probably with lipstick on my face and holding the guitar he’d lied about giving away and all I could think was I wonder if this means he’s not going to share that whiskey. Brad Austin is a writer and comedian from Michigan currently living in Melbourne, Australia. His work has appeared in the New York Times and Vulture.

Hannah’s dad holds the local paper close to his cataract-clouded eyes and cries when he reads about Ken Todd. Dabbing his face with a grubby handkerchief, he eulogizes his old friend. Good mate. Genuine bloke. Hannah remembers Ken Todd’s hand gripping her thigh, inches above her grazed, plastered knee, on the back seat of her dad’s car. She remembers his sorry not sorry look, blaming her dad for taking a corner too fast. Life and soul of any party. Always up for a laugh. Hannah remembers Ken Todd’s fingers, pincering the flesh between her jeans and her crop top. She remembers how she cried when he asked who’d eaten the pies, and her dad, embarrassed, saying she needed to learn to take a joke. Student at the university of life. Hannah remembers Ken Todd’s thumbs kneading her shoulders. She remembers how he told her to relax as he leaned over, pretending to help with her homework, his cigarette breath on her neck and his hands wandering down to where her bra fastened, lingering there too long, his laughter at her panic. Pillar of the community. Salt of the earth. Hannah remembers Ken Todd’s hands, clasped beneath his chin in a parody of prayer at her mum’s funeral. She remembers them later, at the wake, circling her waist as he whispered whisky-sodden words of consolation into her ear, all the time looking down her blouse. Heart of gold. Would give you his last pound. Hannah must have blocked out, until now, Ken Todd’s hand in her knickers, the time he took her to see his backyard aviary and the five-pound note he produced afterwards, from his wallet in exchange for her silence. Always something about him though, says Hannah’s dad, meeting her eye at last, that you couldn’t quite put your finger on. Alison Wassell is a short story, flash and micro fiction writer from North West England. She has no plans to write a novel.

I. Amsterdam has many open-air public urinals, but I can recall only one. It consisted of a semicircle of vertical 2x4s enclosing a slanted piece of piss-rotten plywood over a sidewalk drain. It stood right on the pedestrian thoroughfare just a few feet from a shop window on one side and a straight drop into a canal on the other, and I’m assuming the drain sends all of this untreated urine—mine and everyone’s before and since—gushing right into the canal, where open tour boats cruise all summer and skaters glide during winter cold snaps. I saw plenty of men on passing boats pissing right over the side. Consider the amount–the sheer, concentrated volume of human urine discharged into a municipal waterway. That shoddy little outdoor urinal always had a long line. A very priapic place, De Wallen. Amsterdam’s largest red light district. A lot of penises come out for various reasons, not all of which are immediately clear. II. The naked man was half a block away when I first saw him. He must have been in his early twenties, as I was, at the time. It was a little like looking in the mirror while dressing in the morning and seeing a reflection that was a few seconds behind putting on the bottom garments. Was there any doubt he was American? No, none. The nakedness was not the tipoff. The non-vocal cues made him: the rigid hips and shoulders, the Midwesterner’s plod, and most strikingly, the way he carried his pants, the grip for a four-seam fastball, so ubiquitous and so often-practiced as to be ingrained and reflexive. A national tell. His hair was dark, cut close to his head, shorter on the sides than on top, George Clooney-style, and severely rumpled. Sweat would have made it look that way—sweat and rolling around, spending a few moments with the damp hair mashed down on one side, then another side, then mashed and slid laterally, and finally dried in the breeze off the canal. Heavy black eyebrows laid at the bottom of his forehead like great dogs with broken legs. His eyes, distant nebulas, saw ... what? What dreams from childhood arrived at long last on the back of some faint and flickering neural pulse, after endless light-years of synaptic ricochet? Theirs was the ambivalent dual-vision of absolute focus and clarity against a field of fog and daydream: the somnambulist’s eyes, fixed on the torch behind the movie screen. Those eyes floated in a delicate gravity, pulled inward by something heavy and dull, pulled outward by a pinprick, white-hot but remote. III. There’s something about the De Wallen penis fountain I envy. Not necessarily the size; one could probably carry it onto a bus, although not under one’s clothes. Not necessarily the water-powered spinning testicles at the base of the fountain, either—scrotumaqua rotātus. The fountain is impressive if for nothing other than the determination of its creators to summon it into existence, to invest in its planning and execution, to acquire and complete the necessary permits, to hire a sculptor to fashion it and a team of workers and technicians to transport and install it—from the formulation phase of chewed pencils and wastebaskets full of wadded paper to the moment a faucet was screwed out and the thing first spasmed and sputtered to life, a collective human hand stroked it along, despite aesthetics, civic propriety, or, of course, a sense of empathy for that chance pedestrian who may, at some point, have had a negative experience involving the subject of this particular graven image, the signifier behind this sign. What must they have said to their project’s detractors? Surely local opponents of the penis fountain voiced their displeasure. Surely they asked, “Does our city, already somewhat notorious for depravity and vice, need this kind of thing?” “Yes,” the fountain people must have answered. “It will punctuate a pre-existing statement—an exclamation point for the sentence, ‘Only in Amsterdam!’” But then wouldn’t someone surely have said, “What about the victims of sexual abuse who will have to walk past it, or worse, to dine or work in the restaurant on the corner beside it? Must we remind them of personal agony with such a landmark when a reasonable substitute—a bird or a fish—might be obtained instead?” The answer: “We must and we shall. How many die needlessly each year from equestrian mishaps? Yet, the horse statues remain.” Finally, an exasperated, “But it will be an eyesore!” answered by, “It is the function of good art to stoke passions, challenge preconceptions, and penetrate boundaries. The penis fountain will do these. Afscheid.” Indeed. I found my preconceptions challenged. I had not expected to encounter so literal an expression of symbolism I had long assumed was starkly obvious anyway. As for the fountain penetrating boundaries, another mark in the success column. I could not imagine such a permanent transgressive object existing in public view anywhere else. More shocking still is how it becomes even more surreal and horrifying at twilight. The waning summer sun is groggy and weird at the 52nd parallel around 10 p.m., when it lies full down and pulls to its chin a purple blanket atop a thin, pale sheet. The penis fountain supports this tent of sky, and the first twinkles of starlight are caught in the prism of its relentless ejaculation as a delayed sunset splashes the slick, wet metal shaft with swollen violets and shimmering whites. IV. A tremor went through the crowd, so slight as to almost go undetected, and from farther away it would have, but not on the street, with so many people close together. One picks up on the sharp little jolts that jump the gaps between bodies in a group like reflex signals racing over the chasms between cells in one huge, writhing beast. A little tug somewhere up ahead, a slither to the side, then all at once the great snake of the crowd disgorged a male nude who did not appear to have noticed. In truth he was only half-naked, but the naked half was serious. He’d kept his t-shirt on, a dark gray cotton one, and it was sagging but not soiled, the battered shirt of a man on a tear, not that of the long street-dweller, the hard-begrimed and waxen garment of the institutionally homeless. As he walked, the man’s torso trailed a step or so behind his legs, which bowed his posture like the bowl in the capital letter D, his arms extending down like the stem. His dick swept slowly before him like a divining rod, and the shirt draped limply off the bow of his chest and belly, stopping just above his groin, and settling itself against the grooves of his ribcage. The ribs beneath the shirt looked rounded like stones in a creek, as opposed to the severe, corrugated metal rib angles of the starving. In his left hand, behold—the pants, secured with the fastball grip. He—or someone else—had wadded them up tight, almost packed them, like a parachute. Something the naked man was merely waiting for the right moment to deploy. No belt was visible—was it wound around the pants? No shoes, either. Were they in the pants bundle, too? Impossible. The bundle was too small. It could only have been the pants, nothing else. But inside the pants ... was his wallet there, snug inside the back pocket? His passport—was it still in his control? Was it secure? V. It was summer, 2001, when this happened. I forgot about the naked man after he passed through the crowd and continued down the road, obliviously parting small crowds in his path, his nakedness encircling him in an orb of personal space like the bubble of light that surrounds a lantern bearer. I boarded a flight and returned home, and I did not think of the naked man for the rest of that slow, sleepy summer. Only weeks later, in mid-autumn, did my confused, milling crowd of thoughts part and reveal the naked walking man. Suddenly I remembered him, his every detail, and the whole scene, too, full and plain. I remembered, and I will always remember, standing near that penis-shaped fountain, watching the naked American lumber past. There were bar-hoppers, coffee shop stoners and sex-gawkers jamming the sidewalks, tourists of all sorts bunched together like the gabled canal houses whose reflections rippled darkly in the water. Scattered sniggering followed the naked man as he strolled along carrying his trousers, but there was no cry of alarm. He was less an individual than a kind of host, either a medium possessed by the powerful spirit which hovered over the place or the latest avatar of the communal id. A temporary mantle, though. Soon drugged up and naked would be someone else’s gig, and everyone seemed to understand this—that trouble was close, maybe imminent, for the pantsless walker, who did not adjust his shambling, steady gate, did not seem to feel the hot breath of danger on his bare ass cheeks. We who watched him go saw the collision course he was on with some indeterminate disaster. We all sensed his doom. Many of us were his compatriots. No one helped. We could only guess the form they would take but bad times were almost certainly coming. The man moved forward unswervingly, at the even pace of a rail-mounted machine. Nothing in his expression indicated he knew something was amiss. Nothing in his posture betrayed the vulnerability we all recognized in this bulletproof automaton on a piss-splattered track, this friendless, drugged, sexed, single-minded, irreducible American. How he aroused my pity, and my envy. No one could touch him. He had nothing to take away. He had no fear. So vulnerable, his bare feet trudging the old cement, the still-smoldering butts and roaches scorching his soles. So invincible, advancing for lack of a path of retreat, forging ahead through the night because he could not return whence he had come. I will never know what became of the naked American. In my mind, he is walking still, forever oblivious, doomed, relentless, spectacular, sad, eternal.