We are honored to debut the author JS June in our journal with this short, funny, and wholly unique piece that certainly lives up to the promise of our mission.

Fred knew a lot of things about space, because he was a scientist at NASA.

He knew most comets spend millions of years flying through space all by themselves. This is in their nature. They like being cold and alone, unlike Earth, which is without a doubt a people planet. Comets, on the other hand, have no interest in humans.

Fred knew this but didn’t care, because he was in love. He was in love with a comet he’d found late at night at NASA’s observatory in New Mexico. The comet was officially called 447 A, but to Fred it had some devastating name like Kimberly St. Simone or Daphne Magnolia-Vasquez, or something. The comet was sixty-seven miles wide and composed mainly of ice and rock, which Fred was into big time.

Fred watched the comet on his computer monitor for fifteen minutes and felt beside himself and out of control with emotion. He watched the comet for an hour after everyone else had gone home. He began to sweat. He went to the break room and ate a yogurt cup while breathing heavily. He stood up to leave, and then turned around and ate another yogurt cup. He felt calmer afterwards but decided to stay in the break room another hour, reading articles on Wikipedia.

This had been going on for months. Fred would watch the comet at the observatory, feel like his chest was going to explode, go home, take a cold shower, watch Netflix, sleep restlessly, and then dream of eloping with the comet and having a shotgun wedding in Las Vegas. Fred was telling everyone he knew about the comet. He called his brother and told him he felt guilty about being so infatuated with a “giant space rock.”

“There aren’t any laws against it as far as I know, dude,” said his brother.

“I know there aren’t any laws, dude, but, you know,” said Fred.

Fred’s brother listened patiently. Partly this was because he was glad to hear Fred talking about something other than science which was boring. Partly also because the comet would in all likelihood never come within a thousand miles of the planet, and Fred’s brother had loved people who in all likelihood would never come within a thousand miles of him, so what could he say really?

Fred didn’t know what to do. He had no place to put his feelings, and nothing he could buy or compulsively do seemed to make him feel less like he was imploding and exploding at the same time. Not even yogurt cups. Not even hugging his pillows really hard. Not even lying face down on the ground and thinking about monkeys playing bongos. Not even driving to the forest and shouting at a tree. Not even shouting really loud at a tree.

“Jeez, are you alright?” said the tree.

“Sorry,” said Fred.

“It’s OK, but I mean, maybe you should talk to somebody about it,” said the tree. “No offense.”

“I know,” said Fred.

Fred found the comet on Facebook and sent it a friend request. The comet accepted the friend request but didn’t respond when he messaged it a gif of a skiing dog wearing sunglasses. He followed the comet on Twitter and Instagram, and then feeling a little like he was pushing his luck, he followed the comet on Goodreads and recommended a four-star review he’d written of The Da Vinci Code.

At the observatory Fred took a picture of the monitor that was following the comet. The picture was blurry and dark. Fred added a filter and sent it to the comet, and typed “new profile pic?”

The comet saw the message at 5:36 p.m. but didn’t respond.

Fred sent a longer message a week later.

“Please come to Earth. We could see a movie. I have an espresso machine at my apartment. It’s really fun and I could show you how to use it or just make some for you since you don’t have hands.”

The next day after work Fred saw that a worldwide crisis had developed. A comet of planet-ending proportions was on a direct collision course with Earth.

“We’re all going to be annihilated like the dinosaurs,” said one news reporter. “This situation objectively sucks,” he added. “Let’s ask this school teacher from Baltimore what she thinks.”

The news reporter pointed his microphone at the school teacher from Baltimore.

“I feel like this is Fred’s fault,” she said.

Fred got in bed and stared at the ceiling. Maybe it was his fault. Maybe the comet was coming to see his espresso machine. It seemed somewhat likely. The espresso machine was made in Italy, and had a built-in milk steamer.

Fred got a call from the president.

“Please, for the sake of everyone, break it off,” said the president of the United States.

“We haven’t even spoken once,” said Fred. “I sent it a gif of a skiing dog and it didn’t respond.”

“Obviously you have chemistry, but it’s not going to matter if the Earth is destroyed,” continued the president.

“Okay, I guess,” said Fred. He opened Facebook and typed, “whoops forgot that I have a lot of laundry to do this weekend. Can we reschedule for another time? Sorry, lol,” and sent it to the comet.

Fred felt sad but life on Earth continued. Water continued to run through rivers and oceans, restaurant bills got paid, and people generally tried to get happiness wherever they could get it, sometimes in places on Earth, and sometimes in elusive wandering things that left silvery trails in their minds.

This very short piece was originally posted on rs_x on March 12, 2026.

I shouldn’t be living in my parents’ house at 27. I should be looking for jobs.

But I can’t stop looking at the war on the TV.

In Russia you go to jail if you don’t call the war in Ukraine a ‘special military operation.’ Everyone can see it is a war though. They have drones and all the beep boop Star Wars Call of Duty shit, but they also have a frontline that you can track. They have trenches with soldiers in them. We call what is going on in Iran a war but baby be protesting too much. It’s just something on the TV. I guess it is real. It’s real for the people dying. But it’s not a real war, it’s something new and strange, something between a war film and a season of reality TV.

It begs to be taken seriously just like I do. It performs endlessly, throwing bombs at places like Dubai and Tel Aviv.

Nobody knows who is pressing the buttons. Just a big room of Mayor Petes. And somewhere in Iran there’s a room full of Iranian Mayor Petes. Somewhere in Tehran there is a guy (or girl?) whose parents want them to leave the house more.

Maybe not.

Maybe it’s just an American thing.

It probably feels more like a war over there.

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This piece is free to read without a subscription. It is a review of the novel Berserker Club by . This piece was commissioned by Futurist Letters as part of our initiative to provide more critical coverage of alt lit.

Berserker Club is a novella about metamorphoses. The TL;DR of it is, a bunch of freaks in a compound plot against the government but end up turning on each other, not without the aid of a sci-fi serum that turns them into Jungian hell golems. It’s kind of like Monster High, if you’ve seen that…

Okay, it’s not really like Monster High. But it is about metamorphoses. Not the classic Ovidian kind or the Kafkaesque, existential kind, but something messier. Confusing. The very discombobulation of the book’s characters, transmogrified by the powerful Berserker Juice into archetypes of their own psychic innards, is reflected in the reader’s own disorientation, a reaction to the sensory assault and repeated shock which Osborne’s book liberally metes out to us. It’s a disorientation which, I have to admit, I’ve grown unaccustomed to. There was a time, when I was in my halcyon era, that I would have lapped up Berserker Club like a vampire dog hungry for blood. Body horror was my bread and butter. I loved a good shunting;^[1] The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was just a Tuesday. I’m different now, and at times as I read this exploitation drunken dream, I had to sigh out loud, ‘I’m too old for this shit.’ Literally, I mean—you’ll know what I’m talking about when you read the opening scene’s intestinal… no… I won’t even describe it…

Whether or not Berserker Club pushed my buttons, though, matters little. The author knows what he’s doing, and detonates the payload with severe accuracy. The work may not win with timid men like me, but for those who can still sit through Ichi the Killer (2001) or Tokyo Gore Police (2008) without having to contact an AI therapist afterwards, Berserker will be nothing less than a curl-up comfort read. That said, I’d wager the novella’s central themes are strong enough to intrigue those who are a bit less au fait with shlock and dismemberment, and for those who appreciate a well-paced plot regardless of the subject it’s likely to entertain.

Stylistically, Osborne is taut, cinematic, at times pulpy. His world draws on video games, memes, country music, conspiracy theories and a syncretic gumbo of mythology, all the while set in a scorched and vivid southwestern Oklahoma where the book’s cast of separatist militiamen are secretly encamped. A chief influence is Tokusatsu, a genre of Japanese film we might best describe as Power Rangers having a manic episode.

There are shades of Waco, Ruby Ridge and McVeigh in this underworld of radicals planning a terrorist insurrection, but the exact lineaments of the characters’ extremism are never spelled out. Osborne is thick into the action before we get a chance to ask any questions, and the premise is, anyway, a vehicle for the exploration of a timeless quandary about the contradictory powers of narrative.

Indeed, Osborne’s motley cast of extremists are portrayed as a collection of people who have brought themselves to a dark place by telling themselves the wrong stories in the wrong ways. Their terror plan is borne of a desire ‘to control narrative, to defeat death, maybe to conquer the world,’ as confesses its mastermind, their leader Whitmer. There is another vision, another possibility for storytelling, however, which the author allows us to glimpse—one grown organically from ‘the soul connections of family and friends’ rather than technologised control-freakery.

This vision is expressed in several vignettes: it is described in one of the camp member’s reminiscences of childhood, it is explained in the sermonising of Native American animal spirits, and it plays out in the dreams of one especially ambitious jackrabbit determined to revenge himself on human beings. Berserker dramatises a war between what Osborne describes as the ‘louder…weaponized stories’ of modernity and these deeper ‘soul connections’. This struggle animates the book—an apocalypse in the true sense of revelation, as its guts and gore slide away and leave us with a stunned sense of shock at modern men’s foolish need for control.

The mutations Osborne narrates play out our culture’s anxieties; among these warped butterflyings, one of the novella’s most arresting visions is that of a mutant monster which the psycho militia member Jody becomes—a kind of fast-flickering TikTok scroll of a horror, phasing in and out of different fixed forms in a rapid jump-cut sequence of undiscipline. After taking the serum, Berserker Club’s characters become grotesqueries of what they were in life, and Jody, who had been a conspiracy theory-obsessed doomscroller, mutates into a nightmare embodiment of the fragmented and frenetic style of attention that the contemporary web induces.

“Depending on what’s going on deep down inside of them, well, that’s the story they become,” Whitmer explains, he the demented toxicologist behind the so-called Berserker Juice. Osborne describes how Jody “had become a kind of shifting emergence. Where armor and spikes were one second, there would be a lion’s face or a katana or a series of crystals the next.” When the monster is described as a ‘shifting mass of Story’, the word takes on the connotation of Facebook and Instagram’s so-called ‘Stories’. It’s in the battle between this hobgoblin of hyperlinked consciousness and another suprabeing—the young man Luke who is reborn by the agency of animal spirits from the forest as the ‘Revenant’—that a cosmic conflict between different kinds of stories is bloodily played out. In reply to Jody’s ravings, the Revenant rebukes him, ‘that isn’t a story’. We might well agree: can the dissonant algo-rhythms of the internet really be understood in terms of story? In the battle between a young man transformed into a spirit of vengeance by ancestral nature deities and the frenzied “shifting mass” of “the Jody creature,” Osborne explores the collision of the unfinished and disordered jumble of the internet with humanity’s oldest traditions of storytelling. Indeed, Luke, now “the Revenant,” would know what real, deep stories are about. As the Crow Spirit who enacts his change of form explains:

All men are born in the image of the Spirit…and so they carry a sliver of Spirit within. But all men are also born of the Demiurge, and that shadow travels with them. So anyone who drinks Whitmer’s Juice becomes an archetype of man’s own making. Not a creature of the forest, not a true being of the Story…just a hollow mutation, starving for control, violence, and violation.

It is difficult not to hear the echo of ‘White Man’ in the name ‘Whitmer’ and as the “balance of the land” cracks—is rent asunder—in Osborne’s novella, the anxious haunting of American settler society is animated as a Grand Guignol battle between mutants engineered by a madman in a bunker and the animal spirits of the forest.

The Revenant’s battle with the shifting mass of story known as the “Jody creature” is one among the book’s several meditations on the power and perils of narrative. In Berserker’s most slickly unpleasant transformation, Osborne examines sexuality and power and their links with the human desire for narrative. This metamorphosis sees Miller, an undercover FBI agent obsessed with online catfishes, get turned into the “Semen Demon,” an insatiable explosion of ejaculate desperate for sex. Determined to fuck any and everyone in sight, the Semen Demon is a coagulation of Miller’s worldly desires, the story of his life turned up to eleven. Just as the phantasmatic conspiracy theorising of Jody’s life precursored his becoming a living infinity scroll, the undercover agent’s addiction to online love-chimeras seeds his rebirth as an angry sex god, a parody of the unproductive fetish-sexuality of the internet, a creature of porn and transnational romance scams. The white demon’s sexuality is only violent, only about control. The semen demon is Osborne’s Goya painting of modern tech’s phallocracy, its pure Will to Power.

Amidst all this, the author mirths about our oversaturated, cannibalising mediasphere with its relentless reboots, franchises and spin-offs: to destroy the cum god, the character Girard pours Berserker Juice into Miller’s severed pinky finger. “There’s one thing that will kill a Story faster than you can imagine,” he says. “Sequels.” So Osborne riffs on the way stories that become detached from nature, from soul connections, are not only evil but boring. They lose whatever enchantment they might have had, becoming mere copies, heartless spectacles in the age of mechanical reproduction. “That’s my sequel?…It doesn’t even look like me,” the Semen Demon protests. Shape without form, the sequel has only a “surface resemblance” to the original, Girard explains. As stories go through the churn of commercial reproduction, they lose their spirit, their substance.

At a deeper level, Berserker Club plays out the conflict between human creative hubris and the transcendent: on the one side there is Whitmer with his power juice, and on the other that stream of story which is the humming of nature itself. Like Shiva dancing the universe into being, reality is at base a game, a kind of story, in Osborne’s vision. Thus in one scene two siblings are described as playing an ‘infinite game…until the end of time’, one not reducible to the human narratives, those stories we create in the effort to make sense of and control life. Rather, we are played by the infinite cosmic game, rather than mastering it—we have to ‘let it be’, and ‘ride that current’, Osborne suggests. Thus in its gory interrogation of this theme, Berserker Club must stand as a tale for our times: when we walk towards the brink of artificial superintelligence, what argument do we have against the transhumanists unless we stake our faith in the power of a story which we humans do not tell, program or compute, but which sings itself through us?

Osborne’s philosophy of story is reflected in his own literary approach: he allows a world to grow organically, in thickets and shrubs and accidents. This gives his book a spontaneity that keeps the reader questing and moving in an uncertain landscape. In the tangle, though, he offers us embers of hope, nearly put out; the novella has a humming moral undertow in the vision of a better kind of story, one built on spirit and “soul connections,” utterly unlike the domineering violence of the militia monsters. He delineates a conflict between these soul bonds and the “slow abuse of louder stories, weaponized stories,” a metaphor that comes alive in the novella’s machine gun-wielding metamorphs.

In a crucial flashback scene, Osborne shows us how stories can be rekindled in the wreckage of technological devastation, a strange optimism. Two teenaged brothers have fled from their home as it is destroyed by a tornado. Wrenched away from the video game the older brother had been playing (nature fighting back), they hesitate together in a newly shattered universe. There the older spirit of story makes its return. “So what we do we now?” Cameron asks his brother:

Luke crouched down on the sidewalk and picked up a handful of acorns and twigs. He held them out to his big brother. “We invent a game.”

This sense that a new life can be built again in the wake of the depravity produced by untrammelled techno-hubris reverberates in the book’s closing images of an honest man delivering a rescued dog, Daisy, to the now-dead Whitmer’s estranged family. In Berserker Club, we are not given redemption. But we are told that if there is hope, it lies with the acorns, the twigs, and the daisies.

Hope springs, then, even in such a blood-drenched, Tokusatsu Western.

^[1] Shunting is something rich people do, according to the 1980 movie Society, dir. Brian Yuzna.

This piece is free to read without a subscription. It originally ran in Hyun Woo Kim’s personal publication Requests of Literary Exile. We are honored to run it here.

The story was conventional. It was also overly melodramatic and obscene. César de Hoz pondered whether he should read Aleksandr Yusupov’s story again. In Yusupov’s manuscript, César had already left some marks on the parts that should either be revised or removed. One of them was a scene where the story’s main character, Dolores, had sex with Don Camilo. She was being choked, her moans muffled, while her infant son Diego was asleep in the same room. Without doubt, Yusupov’s description of Dolores’ small breasts, which he likened to plums, had to be erased. The more serious problem was the scene itself. A mother was not supposed to be seen engaging in a sexual activity next to her son.

César raised his head. A clock hung on the wall, next to a small oval portrait of San Martín in a military uniform. It was a bit past seven in the evening. He had to leave soon and wanted to get the work done before heading out. Rubbing his eyes, César took out a cigarette. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply.

Dolores believed that Don Camilo would financially support her and her son, but he was simply taking advantage of her. As Yusupov had briefly stated in a note attached to his manuscript, the story had its morals. It was an instructive tale for young girls of the city. The story’s publication could be approved after some edits. The inappropriate liaison between Dolores and Don Camilo could be implied just enough, not overtly shown. It could work the same with her relationship with Juan, Diego’s father. Nevertheless, something felt out of place. Yusupov was no radionovela scripter. His new story was not what César would expect from him.

César was about to begin working on a note for Yusupov when the writer’s last published story crossed his mind. It was a brilliant piece, whose main character and narrator was Cardinal Isidore of Kiev. In the story, the cardinal was trying to write a letter to Pope Nicholas V to report on the Fall of Constantinople. Having managed to escape from the pillaged Byzantine capital by taking off his cardinal’s robes and dressing up a corpse in them, Cardinal Isidore hesitated to write. What difference would his writing make when the Queen of Cities had fallen into the hands of the Mohammedan infidels? And who was he now to write, a shepherd who had left his sheep and run away, disguising himself as someone other than a cardinal? Before proceeding to further reminiscing and writing, the cardinal asked himself: But what difference will it make if I don’t write?

“Aleksandr, you son of puta!” shouted César, standing up and thumping the desk with his fist. His weak left leg trembled, and the cigarette dropped from his mouth. It left a burn on the first page of Yusupov’s manuscript. César grabbed his cane and stomped around the office. He could not get back to his seat out of anger. How could he fail to notice it? Cardinal Isidore stood for the writer Yusupov, and behind all those rich historical allusions and Modernist explorations of the human psyche, Yusupov was asking himself in front of the reader what use his writing had while he was living in disguise.

César’s left knee hurt. A handful of bullet fragments were still in there. Every moment his knee hurt, César wished that he had killed the guerrilla on the spot. People still called him Capitán De Hoz, but he was no longer a capitán. Now, being the only discharged officer in the city who knew Juana Inés was not some whore’s name, he was working as the censor of a state-run newspaper. A part of his job was monitoring journalists and writers in the city.

Yusupov had long been on his watch list. The middle-aged writer had never participated in political activism or published any social criticism, not even once. Considering his thirty-year-long career, it was surprising. His record was too clean, and the real ones always kept a low profile. Yusupov, however, could not outsmart César. He had once quoted a line from Neruda in a story of his. Just a line, but it was enough for César to notice it. He had also mentioned Solzhenitsyn once at a dinner hosted by the Anticommunist Alliance. The news of Solzhenitsyn he mentioned had been exclusively reported by The Times, a British newspaper whose import into the country was banned.

César sat down. “So, you think we are the Turks. Well played, Cardinal Alejandro, well played… There, I can still see your red robes… I knew we could never trust you Russians. You are all commies in the end… Aha, that was a smart move too, but Capitán De Hoz never misses a thing…” Murmuring under his breath, he reread Yusupov’s new story and took notes furiously. He could see every line in a new light. Dolores was the people, suffering between the regime and the rebels. Why else would there be two men in the story?

The clock struck eight. César noticed that the whole office had turned dark but for his desk, where a lamp was kept on. He limped towards the window and drew the curtains. It was raining. He was going to be late.

There were dilemmas, the first of them being that he had already approved Yusupov’s story on Cardinal Isidore to be published. He did not want to leave a stain on his career. Another was that Yusupov was good at hiding things—hiding his ideas and hiding himself. The ignoramuses of the army and the police would not be interested in what César had written in the notes, besides that Yusupov had written some pornographic scenes. He needed clear evidence that Yusupov was a commie, and no real commie writer was stupid enough to directly show in his work that he was a commie.

César put on a coat. Evidence could either be discovered or created. All he needed was some time.

“Capitán De Hoz, we were waiting for you!” Yusupov rose to greet César. Having learned Spanish in his teenage after immigrating with his father, he still carried a slight Russian accent. He had an unkempt, salt-and-pepper beard now. In a few more months, he was going to turn into either Tagore or Tolstoy. César remembered that the American CIA had advised Solzhenitsyn to grow his beard long, so that he would appear as a proper Russian sage. He wondered what lines Yusupov could have. For the plot César had in mind, KGB or MI6 would be nice. Anything Cuban could work, too. Those Cubans loved beards.

“Gentlemen, my apologies,” César said, taking his hat off and shaking hands with Yusupov, “but I was so lost in the story of the wonderful writer here, Señor Yusupov.”

César looked around. He knew all the journalists and writers gathered in this small hall that the local branch of the Anticommunist Alliance kept. He knew them better than their wives and mistresses. He was the one reading their unpublished works, reading deeply into their minds, and bugging them in their studies and bedrooms.

When one of them went missing, they rushed to César to ask about his whereabouts. They considered César to be their friend, and César was a friend of people who made journalists and writers disappear into thin air. He was their only hope in that he was the only man with some influence who genuinely cared about literature. What they did not know was that no writing man disappeared without César’s suggestion.

Sometimes, César visited abducted writers at the invitation of the authorities. The visit happened only when a writer would not give desirable testimony, even after one of his testicles had been crushed. A friendly face made anyone surrender with ease—when the inevitable death was nigh, writers stuck with their beliefs and silence, but when the prospect of survival glimmered, they instantly got better at constructing perfect narratives.

“How regrettable it is that I missed your speeches,” said César. Before he could hand his cane to a waiter, Tomás Barrera pulled out a chair for him. His seat was at the head of the table.

“Thank you.”

“My pleasure, Capitán. We are always pleased just to have you here, you see.” Barrera hurried to take away César’s cigarette and offered him a cigar. He was quick to act and dumb in his thoughts, as usual. All César wanted was a quick smoke before dinner. Still, César accepted the cigar with a smile on his face. There was no need to make things more complicated than needed. Idiots got scared when they did not have to and did not get scared when they should.

“Señor Iturri gave us a very poignant speech on the importance of literature for our nation and Christian civilization in general. Then I stepped onto the podium to read my recent investigative article on the disastrous effect The Little Prince caused among our children.” Barrera paused briefly in a dramatic manner to emphasize his importance, while Iturri politely nodded to César and César nodded back to him. Iturri was a man who ran huge oilseed plants on the outskirts of the city.

“You see, Capitán De Hoz, this degenerate book is contaminating the souls of our younger generation, our future. Recently, a young boy was seen catching birds in the General San Martín Park. He thought he would be able to fly away from our fatherland with the help of the birds, like the Little Prince did. He even skipped school. So, my point is that The Little Prince is a disquieting work of dangerous propaganda, spreading unpatriotic ideas, glamorizing antisocial vagabondage, agitating for blatant disrespect and affront to social hierarchy and authority, and the authorities should immediately consider a ban—”

“—I remember your article, Señor Barrera. It was an exemplary work of serious journalism,” César cut in, putting out the cigar. He just wanted to have his empanada in peace. A waiter brought provoleta, bread, and chimichurri sauce. César could smell the beef sizzling in the kitchen.

“Thank you, Capitán. It is an honor when a man of letters and a patriot like you remembers what I wrote.”

“And I believe Señor Yusupov was the last speaker, right?”

“Oh, yes-yes. He read an excerpt from a novel he is working on.”

César turned his face to Yusupov. He was having a glass of rich Malbec. César knew he loved Malbec. In an essay, he had made a light joke that he would never go back to Russia even if it became a Christian nation again, since he loved the local Malbec too much. Yusupov looked back at César and slightly raised his glass.

“You are working on a novel, Señor Yusupov?”

“Yes. Actually, I was thinking, it would be nice if it could be serialized in the newspaper. One chapter every Saturday evening, or two times a month, maybe,” Yusupov answered, wiping his mouth with a napkin. He still had chimichurri on his beard.

“Señor Yusupov, you should have consulted me. You know I am your biggest admirer in town, and we could definitely work out the serialization… What is it about?”

“It is about a capitán.” Yusupov gave a mischievous grin. “A Russian capitán. Did you know that the word, kapitan, sounds the same in Russian? The Russian capitán is an officer in the Imperial Russian Army, and the communist insurrection happens. He fights the communists by Baron Wrangel’s side, but fate brings him to Harbin. It is a city in Manchuria where many Russians live. Again, Chinese communists come, he fights them again together with the Chinese people, and he is forced to flee again, this time to South America, where he continues his fight against communists in the jungles, again and again…”

“A tale of indomitable anticommunist heroism!” Barrera interfered. He shook his fist in the air, and everyone gave thunderous applause. César desperately wanted to make every single one of them a Cuban sympathizer for a moment of silence. Steaks were served, and more wine was poured. After flan con dulce de leche accompanied by strong coffee, the band began to play Se dice de mí. It was time for the girls to enter. Tomorrow, César was going to interview them on whatever gibberish the writers and journalists said during the drunk tango. The Presidente was looking down on them in his portrait, hung high up in the hall.

César could not tango with one of the girls. It was not his professionalism, but his left leg. Then, he saw Yusupov sitting by himself. Come to think of it, Yusupov had never come to him when his colleagues had gone missing. Waiters were nowhere to be seen for the moment. Without his cane, César approached Yusupov. Yusupov noticed César limping towards him and helped him to a chair.

“Does your capitán have a son?” César asked Yusupov.

“Capitán De Hoz, I do not fancy inserting myself into my writing.”

“You don’t?”

“I don’t. Absolutely.”

They briefly listened to the tango without words.

“About your new story… I’m sorry for the bad news, Señor Yusupov, but I don’t think we can publish it. Too much obscenity.”

“Do you have suggestions for edits?”

“Technically, yes. I wrote all the notes already, but I decided not to bring them. The thing is, there are too many. I think it will be easier for you to just rewrite the whole thing, if you want that story to be published.”

“The reason is obscenity, am I correct?” Yusupov looked into César’s eyes.

“Yes, obscenity.”

“Obscenity only?”

César nodded. Now, it was Yusupov interrogating him. He made a firm decision that he would make Yusupov pay for his provocation. He took out a cigarette. To his surprise, Yusupov lit it for him.

“Just wanted to make sure what I should keep in mind when I work on it again, Capitán De Hoz.”

“The story caught me by surprise, to be honest. It did not sound like you.” César took a counter-offensive, puffing out cigarette fumes.

“Oh,” Yusupov exclaimed with a laugh. “You have truly keen eyes. It’s what happened to my wife’s hometown friend’s niece, and my wife’s idea of vengeance was disclosing everything in a nationally distributed newspaper, disguised as a work of fiction. The locals will know who they are, especially the local women, despite the pseudonyms.”

César pondered whether Yusupov was lying. Theoretically, a writer could come up with a story in an instant. Yusupov continued.

“To be honest, I felt a bit relieved to hear that you can’t publish the story. It’s not really my thing. I might work on it again, or not… but sometimes, you need to do things just to satisfy your wife. Thank you, Capitán, for providing me with, let’s say, the alibi.”

Yusupov’s mistress had told César that Yusupov seemed to be a good husband, no matter how ironic that sounded. What if he was telling the truth? He was stuttering more than usual, but it could have been because of the wine. César shook his head. He knew a commie when he saw one.

“What would I be without you, Capitán?” Yusupov muttered, placing his hand on César’s shoulder. “Really, Capitán, what would I be without you as my censor.”

His pronunciation of the Spanish word, censurador, was perfect.

Yusupov said there was no need to call for a taxi for him. He was going to walk. César knew his house was not within walking distance. It meant he was going to the apartment of his mistress.

César urged his chauffeur to drive faster. He needed to get there before Yusupov did. Before leaving the hall, César considered whether he should call Paula in advance to instruct her on what to say and ask. He decided not to. Sometimes, unscripted conversations yielded more precious evidence.

It was easy to find a mistress for Yusupov. All it took was to find an arrested college kid who had a charming enough girlfriend, dress her up, and make her appear in front of the writer at the right moment. Paula was not only charming but also smart. She understood very well what her job was, what a writer would want to hear from a young girl, and that her boyfriend was still under surveillance.

César could have waited for the report on what Yusupov said in the apartment as he usually did, but tonight, he wanted to hear it all with his own ears. He still felt enraged when the chauffeur stopped the car behind the apartment building. A black van was parked about ten meters away. The rain had gotten heavier, and the short walk was enough to get César soaked. The soldier in the van, though surprised when César knocked on its door, handed him headphones without saying anything. César heard Paula’s footsteps.

Soon, Yusupov entered Paula’s apartment. He called her Sonia, the name César had given her. It was a name too befitting to a Russian writer’s mistress. Yusupov did not know everything that had happened between him and the girl was too smooth to be true. His ignorance gave César a sense of superiority. Hearing Yusupov’s voice, he sneered.

It seemed Yusupov was drinking more wine. He mentioned Gogol, Bulgakov, Rubén Darío, and Kafka. Everything he talked about them did not make much sense. Nonetheless, Paula was doing an impressive job, as always. The writer wanted his mistress to be intelligent enough to recognize the other writers he spoke of, but not too intelligent. A writer’s mistress should be able to agree with whatever he said with witty comments, but should not actually have her own opinions. It was a delicate art to flatter Yusupov without letting him know he was being flattered.

“And who’s the worst of them all? Borges, darling, it’s Borges. He still lived with his mom when he was almost eighty. Maybe he was fucking their housekeeper all those years, believing his mommy didn’t know, but I guess you shouldn’t hurt your blind son’s feelings, right?”

César tried to focus again on Yusupov’s words. At last, the slick commie was talking about someone alive.

“Did you know the name of Borges’ housekeeper was Fanny? Fanny, and he talks about his love for the English language. Sure, he loved some fanny,” Yusupov continued.

“What do you mean?”

“Never mind. The thing is, Borges says he’s writing fiction, not fables... Does he even understand what he’s talking about? Not at all. No one can, because there’s nothing he’s really talking about, but who cares? Just go blind, be like Homer, and write something that sounds profound, express your Anglophilia… Then all damn Yankees rush in to explain why your writing is so important. Even you could get big like Borges with some tricks, Sonia. Since you are a girl and studying at college, let’s say, if Isabel Allende weren’t on Pinochet’s wanted list—”

“—Are you saying that Borges is ignoring our social realities?”

César stopped breathing, excitedly anticipating Yusupov’s answer. Paula was seriously talented. She asked a perfect question at a perfect moment and even managed to loosen the slick commie enough to let the name Allende out of his mouth.

“Who cares about that son of puta, darling,” Yusupov said. César lit another cigarette and cursed.

“Yes, I think you are much more talented, obviously. I think you must be the best writer on this continent, in fact.”

“You think so?”

Yusupov and Paula clinked their glasses. César heard Yusupov’s hearty laughter and cursed again. All writers were whores.

“What does De Hoz say about your new story?”

Paula’s question was unexpected. She could be merely asking about Yusupov’s day, but César felt that Paula was daring both him and the writer. A moment passed in silence. The sound of the rain squeezed in through the vacuum.

“How can I say this… I can see that De Hoz always tries his best to read everything closely, to interpret everything. It might be a good thing. Good for me as a writer, I guess. He takes literature very seriously. Perhaps too seriously.”

Cigarette ash fell on César’s left knee.

“Darling, I’m not here to talk about work with you. I do that with De Hoz. Now, show me your plums.”

From then on, César listened to Yusupov making out with Paula and roughly pushing her all the way to bed. The soldier next to César grinned at him, but he just felt numb.

“Say my name, you puta, say my name!”

“Don Alejandro! Don Alejandro!”

Paula’s moans suddenly got muffled. César could picture Yusupov choking her. He closed his eyes in agony. He could not imagine what he would be without his writer.

Behind the Scenes

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Every criticism I’ve read of Worst Boyfriend Ever (WBE) disparages his moral character and paints him as a sociopath. They demand that he be beaten by the good men of our society, that he be punished for his violations of common sense morality, or that his work wholly fails as art. Sometimes, they engage in armchair psychoanalysis to piece together his vile behavior and misogyny, arguing that he’s watched too much Neon Genesis Evangelion for his own good and that he’s trapped in a pick-me phase he won’t grow out of. They say that if he wants to write anything of literary value, he needs to read real literature about people who hate themselves like Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground or Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint.

Pervading these criticisms are disbelief about how this person’s writing has garnered a cult-like following, and perhaps a disappointment at how far literary culture has fallen if this is what attracts readers. We don’t want him to exist for a myriad of reasons: he violates our idea of what kind of literature deserves attention, of our progressive sense of morality and justice, of how we want men to behave in our society. He incites a kind of madness in his critics who all, apparently, want him dead in a ditch.

I don’t disagree with these criticisms, but I also think they miss the point. The issue is that he does exist. He is alive and well, thriving in fact, in the 25 Top Fiction Substacks at time of writing, rubbing shoulders with established writers like Etgar Keret and Chuck Palahniuk. But if we move past his shock factor, it becomes much, much more interesting to examine what his popularity is a symptom of. It makes perfect sense that, against our literary and moral instincts, WBE has found success: he’s the only notable person writing honestly about being an average young man in 21st century America. He is the Jungian shadow of American masculinity.

Readers of Jung know that to deal with their shadow, or the repressed parts of themselves, they must integrate it into their self-conception in a healthy manner. To ignore the shadow leads to conflict with oneself and to inevitably project that conflict onto others. WBE crawled out of this shadow. It was the cultural suppression of masculinity in the well-meaning era of Obama-style progressivism and the MeToo movement that created the conditions for him to exist. He is the mildest misogynistic thought mutated a thousand times over. He is infection turned sepsis, the cancer we wanted to cure by shouting feminist slogans until it disappeared.

But there is something good about him—he makes the ugliest parts of the ordinary man, of American masculinity at large, visible. And we cannot hope to change something we refuse to admit exists.

In the 2010s, our culture attempted to hold men accountable for their vast abuses of power in every corner of society. With good intention and reason, the liberal left attempted to dismantle patriarchal power, vengefully demanding not just that powerful, abusive men answer to justice, but that all men had better adjust their behavior or else face the consequences. Thus began the campaign to publicly shame masculinity into non-existence. Men were told to abandon their values and to stop taking up space without really understanding why, only knowing that it was no longer appropriate to express certain perspectives or worldviews. Misogyny, racism, and masculinity, it was loudly declared, no longer have a place in our culture.

But shaming something is not the same as addressing it. To shame something is to stuff the monster into the basement, and anyone who’s ever been ashamed knows that monsters thrive in the dark. Shame is a useful tool of social control insofar as it forces someone to adjust their behavior in public, but it does nothing to address the underlying emotions and beliefs at the root of such behavior. Intellectually, it’s easy enough to understand why misogyny and racism shouldn’t exist, but the work of changing one’s beliefs is much trickier, much more laborious. It’s difficult to imagine that men are reading bell hooks or Simone de Beauvoir or having genuine conversations about the misogynistic beliefs they were invariably raised with. (With whom would that happen? Their parents? Their girlfriend? A male friend? I highly doubt it.)

We can see a parallel in our attempts to make our society less racist. The sudden uptick in media representation of POC, DEI policies, and affirmative action did not make our society more accepting of others. It just led to people hiding what they actually think while doing what was expected of them. The demand for public accountability put us into a panopticon under which, yes, people could no longer express racist and misogynistic thoughts, a good thing surely, but that also shut down genuine attempts to engage with problematic beliefs. With the gun of social exclusion held to your head, it’s much easier to simply nod along, loudly proclaim you are an ally, and bolt shut the basement door.

WBE, then, lets the monster out to play. He embodies the average man we so badly wanted to have slain in the zeal of 2010s progressivism. His exploits resurrect the American mythology of masculinity that men were taught to suppress a decade ago: what man hasn’t dreamt of quitting his 9-to-5 to wander across America in a van in a quest to become his own master? What man wasn’t socialized to believe that fucking prodigious amounts of (foreign) women would increase his value as a male? Most recently, what man hasn’t fantasized about acquiring wealth through a mix of cunning and sheer luck, perhaps through a crypto rug pull?

It doesn’t actually matter if the Substack is fictional or not. The writing feeds the juvenile male fantasy for a Hero’s Journey full of risk, irresponsibility, adventure, drugs, sex, and other social transgression. Because he’s quit his job and because the liberal left don’t have a stomach for violence, WBE has effectively made himself untouchable. He cannot be canceled because the consequences of cancellation have no effect on him. And so, in a time of moral fingerwagging, performative men read him with secret glee. WBE reminds his readers that it feels good to be bad.

Of course, if these misogynistic, hypermasculine exploits were all he wrote about, WBE would not nearly have gained this amount of traction. One can only be so entertained by male braggadocio and barely perverse erotica. His greatest narrative trick is interspersing his work with genuine moments of his humanity. In his writing are honest, if undeveloped, glimpses of the indomitable human spirit, of Kierkegaard’s knight of faith or Nietzsche’s Übermensch, that speak to the self-fulfillment that all Americans have been trained to want. There is something seductive to watching someone completely self-destruct in the pursuit of absolute freedom and actually getting it. He is Jack Kerouac for the porn-brained, social media-crippled generation, Hunter S. Thompson filled with microplastics and Adderall. Even in the dehumanizing prison of late capitalism, he renews the average young man’s faith that he can find himself on his own terms.

More importantly, his writing is framed outside of any political ideology and rejects any kind of moralization. It’s obviously not feminist or leftist, and he doesn’t show support for any type of red pill or incel movement (although that’s what his actions essentially amount to). He’s not a white Christian nationalist or a groyper and most likely doesn’t wish for a boogaloo. He seems only to say: This is what I do. It makes me feel free and I’m happier than I’ve ever been. Men in America are easily seduced by the idea of radical transformation into someone freer, stronger, and in some vague but very profound way, better, and in an era where men have drawn contempt for simply existing, WBE is music to their ears. For rebellion against social norms, he was rewarded with self-actualization. Nothing is more tantalizing.

All of this is complemented by his confessional, typo-ridden prose style. In terms of literary merit, his writing will fail when judged on the aesthetic grounds of traditional prose. As many critics have stated, it’s just not very good stuff. But the unedited, poorly punctuated writing lends him plausibility, makes him emotionally and literally legible to everyone, including men who don’t read. He feels real because his posts are what we would write down in our Notes app after a bad hook-up or after ruminating in the dark for too long. He is the person we’ve all been at some point in our lives, standing in the corner at some party where we don’t know anyone and, feeling insecure, types something disdainful about the people around us into our phone.

Frankly, the average man won’t want to read his literary equivalents like Ben Lerner’s Leaving for Atocha Station or John Updike’s Rabbit, Run. But people do want to read quick, snappy texts and half-finished blog posts about a guy who exits the rat race and fucks Asian women in his van in every city across America, and then wonder why on earth he feels sorry for himself after. Although those novels and the Substack cover the same exact subject matter, at face value, WBE is much more interesting. He’s been savvy, too, by playing to the Substack platform’s strengths and making the readers who interact with him part of his project. Women can reach out to him and fuck him and men can buy him plane tickets to the Phillippines and take him to strip clubs. In doing so, he’s made it a choose-your-own-adventure text, where readers can literally write themselves into the work and get a taste of his freedom and internet fame. What we end up reading are the confessions of a free yet broken person, a timeless subject, but rendered legible to the chronically online.

Social transgression, informal existentialism, resistance to moralization, casual writing style, reader interactivity: together, these elements have made him popular beyond belief. And underpinning his success is the cry of a male who no longer understands his place in society but wishes for recognition as a fully-fledged person. This is, on some level, what every young American man has felt deprived of over the last decade. It’s almost enough to forgive him.

One only needs a modicum of critical thought to see that the man is deeply unwell. Readers of WBE know his gimmick: immediately after (and sometimes during) a despicably selfish act, the circus of self-awareness begins. By engaging in the requisite histrionics of being a fuck-up, by complaining about his loneliness, by performing any number of existential theatrics to explain his terrible behavior, he attempts to evade accountability. He wallows in his identity as a “sensitive young man,” wants you to feel that same cloying pity you felt for Shinji on your first Evangelion watch as a seventeen-year-old. And like that abstract final episode, he wants to be applauded by all the people he’s hurt on his journey to finding himself. In reality, he hasn’t even gotten in the robot—he hasn’t taken responsibility for the harm he’s caused. But that’s all fine. At the end of the day, he’s just a rascal with a heart of gold. Really!

I imagine there’s something about this claimed innocence that resonates with his male readers. Underneath all their awful behaviors and masculine posturing, they are “just” a person trying to figure themselves out. It was this innocence that the 2010s hunted down and attempted to stamp out. And generally, men complied, quickly understanding that to question this jarring shift in behavioral standards meant to admit wrongdoing, to admit misogyny. It would be social suicide. But it’s exactly this suppression of the male psyche that brought WBE to life. His writing gives men permission to be men again, in all their grotesque and juvenile glory.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

WBE’s presence undoes the shaming of masculinity, which in turn frees our culture to appropriately address its more toxic aspects. As stated previously, we cannot change something we refuse to admit exists. You cannot kill the monster in the basement without opening the door. For better or worse, his blog holds a bright and shiny mirror up to American masculinity, reminding us that these types of thoughts can exist in the ordinary men around us not because they think it’s right, but because it was the culture they were raised in. We must recognize the difficulty of changing one’s beliefs and the impossibility of shaming someone into doing so.

In the words of bell hooks, “To create loving men, we must love males.” It’s unfortunate how bell hooks has become a faux pas of performative maleness, because it would do our culture well to look at masculinity carefully and clearly and figure out how to make it work. We’ve seen what happens when we cast men out of mainstream culture, even if for good reason.

So let the goblins out of their dungeon. They need to breathe air, feel sunlight, remember what it’s like to speak with words, not with grunts and gnashing teeth. Let them find genuine, healthy community with other men. Let them question things in good faith even when it makes you wince. Let them befriend women so that they may soften. Exercise both caution and compassion and hold them accountable, not out of vengeance, but because you believe in a better world.

Ultimately, there is a reckoning coming for WBE. Whether it’s someone getting sick of his antics and committing a real act of violence against him or whether he undergoes a spiritual awakening that compels him to end his blog, he cannot sustain this life forever. The mythologized freedom that he sought by self-destructing has no actual end game. He knows this. But I do believe he should keep writing. We get to read and watch him live out our adolescent dreams so we don’t have to. And when his story ends, one way or another, we can finally grow up and move on.

Behind the Scenes

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I’m used to getting places early, being part robot. The robot-transportation Mexicans work on an unpredictable schedule and often get delayed. Some people bite the drivers’ heads off about it. I just leave more time.

So, I show up early as usual on the Eastside for this latest February ‘scene’ party. Yes, the LA lit scene. A few people in LA do, by mistake, actually read, unlike Hollywood coordinators.

Midday Echo Park is calm, sunny, grimy. The robot-deployment dropship people drop me at Taix, an LA institution, a hundred-year-old French restaurant built like a huge, labyrinthine tudor lodge. It’s closing in a month to turn into condos. C’est la vie.

I’m five hours early, a record even for me, and the restaurant isn’t even open for the night yet. That’s fine. I planned on wandering, maybe doing a little work in a café. I poke around the thrift shops, the side streets, a time-travel-themed novelty shop that doesn’t seem to have a point per se. “So it’s a Meow Wolf type thing?” I ask the hopelessly nerdy Chinese girl behind the counter.

She’s deeply offended. “They actually copied us.” Her face says I might be intruding on her TikTok time.

I retreat to a semi-lesbian (many such cases) hipster bar where I once watched the Dodgers win the World Series in a screaming delirium. At this hour it’s quiet and posh. I get a happy hour drink and I make sure it’s well liquor because I currently have no money because my producers have been delaying and delaying my gainful writing employment on their sci-fi mishmash properties. The signs say laptops allowed until six at night. Good rule for life.

The establishments in Echo Park are swanky, but the infrastructure is decrepit. Streets are so worn they’re as bumpy as cobblestone. Lynchian trash piles cover moving forms of addicts at back kitchen steps. It’s like the government has given up. On the Taipei-to-Tijuana scale I’ve developed for cities in my travels, it’s 90% TJ, way worse than Los Angeles’ usual 70%. This is not my corner of LA. Never lived here, never worked here. I’m a local tourist.

Despite the apparent collapse of society, the young hot people are violently resisting the squalor simply by existing. There are grunge twinks with white tees and tattoos. There are a lot of women with their asses fully out, many making out with the twinks, and there are a lot of other women with tight buns or bobs stepping over bums to get to the liquor store. Everyone seems to either be on drugs or have done so many that they’re permanently partially vacant.

I roll into the party on the dot at six. I’m the first one there, other than a bowtied old reliable Mexican maître d’. The space we’ve been given is a small ballroom with a dance floor and a dozen wedding dinner style tables, white-clothed, with maybe sixty chairs in all. It’s a far cry from the house party mayhem of our hosts’ previous events.

It’s dead silent. Kind of weird. The bowtie man shuffles around. It’s impossible to imagine this place full of people under fifty. Ergo, it’s impossible to imagine this party being a success.

Evan from shows up a second later. It’s their party. They’re putting out another angsty, horny, depressive book about the 2020s young male experience. Even though it’s not my night to shine, I still feel like I’m on the crew. My book is one of their four past releases on the merch table. I feel a kinship with the author of the moment, who’s currently nowhere to be seen. It’s like we’re on the same record label. We’re a gang.

Evan works with a diligent pace assembling a pyramid of copies of the new book. He’s fast and meticulous, and you can tell he’s a hardworking grip when he’s on set. G&E are like the NCOs of film. They’re not in it for pomp and they don’t fuck around.

A dad and his five blond tykes stumble in, maybe looking for the bathroom, maybe just perusing. I realize they don’t know what we are. “We, uh, we put out cool shit,” Evan explains. He’s tall and fit with short, puffy black hair, Greek-Mexican from Texas. He has a perpetual cherubic smile and a love of what’s good. “I really feel like we’re saving America,” he tells me, reflecting on the publishing company while the strangers linger. “Talking about people’s actual experience.”

He, Matt Pegas, and at New Ritual are the only three people in publishing who have immediately championed my work without hesitation. I owe them a lot.

“Are you the author?” the dad asks me.

“No I’m not,” I tell him.

He ignores me thereafter.

I watch the kids check out the books. I’m not sure if I should intervene, since the new release has a naked woman’s back and tramp stamp on display, with her breast and nipple somehow also visible from the side in the corner of the image. It’s been heavily implied to me that this is a photo taken by the author, a narrative which presumably reinforces his bona fides as a pervert flâneur. No one will tell me the details. I think about how I’ve perpetually warned New Ritual to cover the nipples on their book jackets so they don’t get banned from Kindle. With their prior release, I successfully convinced them. This one, though, I did not see until it was done. They have not been banned thus far.

Evan has lit a candle and dialed the chandeliers down to the perfect moodiness. It’s a huge improvement. He has an eye for mise en scène. He wants to know if I think it would be dorky for him to wear a wizard hat he brought.

“It depends on how you carry yourself while you’re wearing it,” I tell him honestly.

He grins. “Oh, then I’m wearing it.” He knows he can carry himself well.

Evan connects to the room’s Bluetooth speakers. He’s trying not to be antsy that there’s no one here. “In an hour it will be packed, so enjoy the quiet,” I tell him, both to make him and myself believe it.

He starts playing oldies. “Don’t know much about geometry...” I softly sing along. I’ve been trying to sing more. Wait. Is it “geography”?

The venue has given us two extremely bored dedicated bartenders, and out of sympathy I say hello and order a glass of white wine. The guy tells me he’s in constant pain from two car accidents and he’s self-conscious about it because it’s not visible. Okay. The gal is a cute black girl from Michigan with a pixie cut drifting through life. She thinks she wants to be a doula ultimately, since she doesn’t want kids herself. She asks if I know what that is. I say yes. Come to think of it, I realize, no one in Echo Park seems like the type to ever want kids. There are stickers all over the light poles for mail order abortion pills. I wonder how many of the people I’ve seen today will have a living descendant in a hundred years.

I buy Evan a vodka soda, his drink of choice, to thank him for his hard work and also possibly console him over no one showing up. I forget to specify well vodka and Mr. Car Accident fucks me with a $17 Ketel One premium pour. I see emptiness in his eyes as he does it. I hate him. I still tip well.

Matt Pegas finally arrives just then with his Clark Kent glasses and blazer and runner’s build. This is the guy who inspired me to write “Hunters” after a long, lazy afternoon in the Valley. He’s one of the press’ founders. I trust him more than almost anyone I’ve met online.

The actual author of tonight’s book is with him, too. Michael Mages. He seems a little older than me. He has a weary, solid, young man’s face and a focused, watchful affect. He meets me very deliberately. “Cairo. I really liked your book,” he tells me. I tell him I’m looking forward to reading his.

Pegas is in a flurry of activity. He pulls rank on Evan and switches the speaker to his own phone, playing what we used to call New York alt and now call indie sleaze. He keeps walking to other rooms in the restaurant with his phone in his pocket and making Arctic Monkeys cut out in jarring bursts.

All-capser shows up shortly after. He’s the bestseller author on the New Ritual roster. I’m not envious of his sales or the attention, but I am a little insecure that Matt wants to take him across the street to sell a bunch of his books to Stories, Echo Park’s mainstay bookstore. Should I be asking Matt to do stuff like that for me?

I had gone into Stories when I first pulled up that afternoon, to inquire about getting my book stocked there. I was inspired to see a Substacker I know, , on prominent display. “Put it on Ingram so we can order it,” the staff told me of my own book. Another thing on my to-do list.

I felt rude inquiring without purchasing anything, so while I was there I decided to buy a book as a token of support. My first pick was East of Eden, which I’ve been meaning to read together with , but on closer inspection the cover had a big red Netflix N on the front and I hate Netflix hate Netflix hate hate hate Netflix. So I bought The Bell Jar instead, since I sincerely love it and I did not own a physical copy.

Sitting at the party, I realize it would be a funny joke to keep a brand new, untouched The Bell Jar prominently on my lap, face up. It’s the performative male bit ad absurdum, something from a starter pack. I commit.

The waiters start bringing a huge spread of food to the banquet tables. There’s bruschetta both with and without goat cheese. There’s a comical amount of cold rolled ham, maybe a whole pig’s worth. There’s a giant golden bowl of champagne punch, which makes me feel even more swindled for patronizing the bar. There are still maybe only five people here, even though a hundred RSVPed on Partiful. This is starting to get sad.

Then The DJ walks in. No, not the DJ of the event. This man is an honest-to-God college radio DJ with a weekly show up and down the West Coast where he plays a wacky character and spins deep cuts for a cult following of thousands. Like all of us in the scene, he has found his own tiny way to live like it’s still the 20th century. He is also insanely, mind bogglingly well-read and loves alt lit. We appreciate a loyal fan.

I realize in that moment I’ve given up on any other terms besides alt lit and ‘the scene’ for what this is. New Wave didn’t stick, possibly to ’s pleasure. You have to go with the flow. Maybe in twenty years they’ll call us indie lit sleaze.

“Nice performative Sylvia Plath,” The DJ cracks. Nice. He gets it immediately. He hugs my upper half above my robot carapace as best he can. It’s nice to see him again.

I ask about his other half I’ve never met, whom he’s about to marry. “She’s at home,” he tells me. “She thinks this is a Klan rally,” he adds as a partial joke, and explains that’s because of John McDermott’s hoe-scaring Rolling Stone article on New Ritual’s “anti-woke” tendencies from last year.

We end up on the topic of gay rape fairly quickly, like one does. The DJ explains he believes gay rape is a key feature of scene books in our moment. Dragon Day, Nutcrankr. He’s not wrong. I don’t push him too hard to figure out why that may be, although it seems obvious to me.

Then something magic happens. I had predicted it, but I didn’t believe it. I look around and the place is full of people. Young people. Pretty, glamorous, hot people. Two-thirds women. This is the set that scene parties always attract, somehow, as unlikely as it sounds. I first encountered it at the debate in 2023 where and debated and over whether the sexual revolution had failed. Call it the Red Scare adjacency effect. Everyone is elegant.

“Everyone finally showed up,” I tell The DJ with relief. “No one wanted to be first so they all tried to wait each other out.”

“It’s the defect-defect equilibrium,” the DJ smiles.

Matt Pegas grabs the mic and thanks everyone for coming and promises a quick reading, since everyone’s sick of long ones. A tall, blonde-bobbed woman in a green dress who’s friends with the author reads the book’s first two pages aloud into the microphone. The audio equipment is working well, for once. No e-girls are nearly exploded by propane tanks.

It’s weird hearing a misanthropic male character’s voice come out of this woman who has probably never lived the experience of bitter, testosterone-driven sexual frustration. I have a hard time telling if I would like the book, but I can tell it’s well done. Evan makes sure to stress to me, proudly, that it was he and not Matt who first pulled this novel from the submission stack cold. Matt explains how Michael’s cover letter comparing his work to and Bret Easton Ellis was what first piqued the press’ attention.

The strangest part of the post-reading mingle is when I end up talking to the author’s mom. She’s cute. Straight white bob and a leather jacket. Fifties or so. She says she’s read the book three times and loves it, although she wishes the end was less dark.

I make my way back to The DJ to relay my anecdote. “Is that a little strange, for your mom to be so involved in your debauched manuscript?” I ask him. I keep my own mother away from my more bawdy work with regularity.

“No,” says The DJ. “I mean, my mom wrote romance novels. I never wanted to read them, though, because of all the...violent non-consensual sex.”

“I feel like that’s to my point,” I say back.

As the party gets crazier I’m trying not to run people over with my robot lower half. Around then, to my delight, I hear my name warmly called out. I immediately recognize the source as , a fellow Angeleno I have thus far only seen on Substack and video.

I wax poetic to The DJ about Henry being an astonishing essayist. I repeat a bit that I believe originated about Henry’s literary essays being so good they destroy your interest in reading the reviewed book because he makes you feel like you already read them.

Henry came alone from work. He’s not a scene guy, and he only came because of my invitation. There’s a little pleasure in making him get his toes wet, in corrupting him. He tells me about a big-time traditional publisher that recently started cold-DM lovebomb glazing him, begging to collab, only to then jerk him around and ghost him. I try to reassure him he’s well-suited and beloved on Substack. He’s a sensitive young man. It’s hard for any of us to admit the institutions we worship from days gone by are now staffed by bozos, but it’s the truth.

I meander. Someone touches my arm. “Oh my God, I love Sylvia Plath.” I think she’s doing a bit but she is not doing a bit. The DJ has poured me a lot of punch by now. I’ve been trying to drink enough of the free stuff to bring my dollar cost average down from the bar tab. I’m faded-ish.

I laugh. “Me too.”

She’s a Southern European sort of blonde. That mix of West Coast slinky and yet not haughty that only comes from Arizona. Indeed, she’s Arizonan, and apparently my age. She explains she’s another friend of the author. She explains that he involved her because she has a lower back tattoo, and he was trying to get a collection of photos of women’s bare naked back tattoos to promote the book. I wonder if perhaps the book was secondary to that project. There are worse reasons to write a novel.

I learn and immediately forget her name. She brings me over to her friend, who looks like an early twenties Sophia Loren with jet black hair, so she can monologue to both of us about how she read The Bell Jar in high school and it was the perfect age for emotional impact, although it also probably made her a worse person.

Sophia Loren is quieter and sweeter than Arizona and seems less likely to cut me, although they’re both nice. She wants to know how fast I can go on my robot chassis. I tell her. She’s impressed that I’m 650 pounds in total, counting my borged out hardware, because I’m pretty slim. She asks me if there are safety features to prevent me from running someone over. I say absolutely not. She seems to like this. She tells me she’s glad I could run someone over for her if she needed me to.

“I wanna smoke,” Arizona pouts at Sophia, reclaiming her friend’s attention. I ask Arizona what she smokes and she says white Marlboros. Then she makes fun of me for liking American Spirits. She tells me they’re not actually healthier. I tell her I couldn’t give a fuck about that. I like the flavor and how long they take. It’s leisurely. It’s aristocratic. They invite me outside.

We go out through the side door to the street, the only door that can accommodate my Swedish-built high-powered combat frame. They smoke their Marlboros. I enjoy the smell secondhand. I’m not smoking these days. It started disagreeing with me. I was an old soul as a child and now at twenty-eight I’m just old.

At some point, we realize the door has latched behind us. Arizona offers to go around to the valet entrance and let us in from the other side. Sophia and I wait, and we wait, and we wait. She eventually knocks as hard as her knuckles will allow, then she kicks the door a few times with her heel. Then she gives up and turns back to me. She’s wearing some black Audrey Hepburn sort of dress and a huge white vintage fur. She tells me all about how she buys her clothes vintage. I say that’s pretty cool.

I don’t knock the door down. We just wait and entertain ourselves. After a long while, we realize Arizona has truly abandoned us. I escort Sophia around to the valet entrance, and then I go back to the combat-chassis accommodating door. In seconds, Sophia lets me back in to the party.

It’s well after nine o’clock, which is when our reservation for the room ended, but nobody is even attempting to kick us out. It seems like nobody cares. The place is closing in a month anyway. It’s kind of a last hurrah. I’m relieved to see the spread has been mostly eaten and replaced with dessert courses.

Pretty soon, Sophia and I realize that Arizona has been going around the whole restaurant, opening almost every door to try and find us. I guess she mixed up her sense of north, south, east, and west, and almost got kicked out for barging through the place. I look around for my actual friends, but they’re all busy. I settle back in at an empty table with my new acquaintances.

We talk a long time. Well, really, they talk and I listen. Arizona has a text from a guy named Philip saying they met on Raya. She doesn’t remember him. Probably not , but there’s a chance. She doesn’t want to reinstall Raya to figure out who he is. She hates the apps. She says she wants to meet a guy in real life, and Sophia agrees.

Sophia tells a story about going on a date with a man from the apps who talked about how he drinks his own fermented piss. It’s the kind of story you would play for laughs, but she relays it with a sort of glumness, like this is just an accurate picture of the state of the world these days. You have these beautiful women going to literary events, getting ignored except by half-robots, and then having to go on terrible app dates with literal piss drinkers. The indignity of it all.

I decide it’s time to make my way back to my publishers and check in on how the night’s going. I navigate through a group of wealthy Chinese girls in cute dresses and jewelry who seem to have appeared from nowhere. No one is talking to them either. What a world.

A few feet later, someone else comes up to me, looking down at my upper leg and the object on it. “Oh my God, I love The Bell Jar,” she says.

“Me too,” I say back, and I smile at her before continuing on.

Another foot later, there’s another one. “Are you an author?” she asks.

“Yes,” I tell her.

“Is that your book?” she says, tapping The Bell Jar on my leg.

“No,” I say, “that’s Sylvia Plath.”

At this point, I realize my Bell Jar bit’s irony has been lost on everyone except The DJ. It’s too effective. I’m never going to be able to get across the room with it face up, so I flip it over.

I get back to Evan at the book table and he looks pleased. His girlfriend has shown up in good spirits. At least, I think she’s his girlfriend. I can’t exactly remember. She’s sweet. She’s got sort of a Mikey Madison energy. She and I go on a successful expedition to get crème brûlée from the dessert table.

We get back to Evan and he starts making plans for us to go see a movie soon. He’s just worried there’s nothing good out. I try to convince him to go with me to some dusty old revival house to see something on film instead of just hitting an AMC. He sounds open to it. I think I could convert him into true cinephile snobbery.

The event seems to at last be winding down. They’ve sold a good amount of copies. Everyone looks over the moon. There’s a noticeable hole in the aura in the shape of Dan Baltic, who was not able to make it out from that literary gravity well called New York. I run into the DJ again and I tell him how I had to flip The Bell Jar over to get some peace, to amuse him. He laughs, but I can tell he doesn’t believe me. It’s fine. Some people will never know what they’ll never know.

The DJ and I go out to the curb and we connect with Sam Austen, the tall and mysterious man with a beard like a folk singer, whose claim to fame is writing the hit book Meow, which is just the word meow over and over again. He tells me with his usual haunted tone that he’s getting out of Los Angeles soon, going back to Miami. He came to Los Angeles to get away from unspecified things, but he realizes now that they’re worse here than anywhere. Between Sam and leaving, it feels like the end of an era.

I introduce Sam and The DJ outside. Sam explains that he’s doing a Pride and Prejudice version of Meow, which is the chapter and punctuation structure of Pride and Prejudice, but with all the words changed to one word that you can probably guess. He explains that he’s having issues repeatedly getting banned from Kindle, probably for getting reported for having books that are just meow, despite them selling well and getting good reviews. He asks me if I have any experience dealing with Kindle bans. I tell him I do not.

I’ve got fifteen minutes before the robot-transport people are supposed to pick me up. Ever hungry for life, I ask the boys if they would pop over to El Prado, which is a block away. I’ve never been, but it’s on my list.

Someone on rs_x asked a few months ago where the cool spots to drink in LA are for former Red Scare types. Someone replied, “Since you sound like a douchebag, you’ll probably just end up at El Prado like everyone else.”

This immediately put it near the top of my list to check out. I’m not afraid of what a Redditor would call a douchebag.

We sneak over to El Prado and I can tell I’m slightly annoying people by making them move for my combat chassis. Fuck them, though. I don’t care. The DJ and Sam get drinks. Then The DJ proceeds to tell us all about Tom Clancy’s obsessive attention to military detail and how he describes his protagonists as pure self-inserts. As always, I’m lightly comparing this to my own work. I’m always wondering how come these other guys are bestsellers and I’m not. It’s not that I want to sell out. It’s just my radar is always on. I want to be aware of the landscape.

The DJ tells one more good story about getting lashed to the wheel of his father’s unlicensed party boat rental operation in a storm when he was seven. I could talk for hours, but the robot-collection people are merciless. They wait for no one. I make my way back out to the street and hope no bum decides to take my phone off my lap as I wait for my ride.

It’s weird to be alone after being surrounded by so many people. Soon enough, the transport guy’s dropship comes and I get home to my other half. She tells me about how she spent a few hours uprooting a very large unwanted plant in our backyard, and how she successfully got it into the green bin despite it being very spiky. She’s proud. I’m proud of her.

I tell her everything about the night. She laughs and says she thinks she’d get along with The DJ’s fiancée. We talk excitedly about our next-day plans to dress up in outrageous space costumes and go to our lovely friend’s thirty-first birthday in North Hollywood and party well into the night. Sometimes life is good.

The next morning, I wake up and briefly go stop by the neverending party-international called the internet. and Lillian are slinging shit at each other over a joke article she wrote slightly at his expense, which he did not take in good fun. I can’t help but grin at it all. Everyone is getting exactly what they want. Ross is in his element threatening to fight people. Lillian is in her element teasing. The audience loves the drama. We all win.

As I drink my coffee and reflect at my non-working-class French café (apologies to ), I realize we’ve done something amazing. We’re actually getting what we want. We all grew up dreaming of little literary circles of old where people write novels and poems to one-up and impress another. Now it’s happening. These are the good times.

It doesn’t matter that we all have day jobs. It doesn’t matter that the publishing industry has collapsed. The scene is alive. A hundred people came out for the launch of a book by a young man who wrote from the heart and sent a cold email. At best, Evan is right, and we’re literally saving America. At worst, we’re just indulging ourselves, but I still call that a win.

It’s like MGM’s motto, the one they chose back when people understood Latin and cared about creative values. Ars gratia artis, art for its own sake. Even if Henry Begler never publishes in that splashy legacy magazine, I think he’s right where he belongs. We are the successors to everything we love in those dusty old books. The Muse lives on.

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Mommy can be a real bitch sometimes.

Every time Bobby comes to Imperial Flower Nails & Beauty for an Imperial Deluxe Pedicure he brings Noah a Three Musketeers. Not just a tiny fun size bar, either. Mommy always takes it away if she can catch Noah first. He has to eat the whole thing right away, otherwise she takes it from him and throws it in the dumpster out back, the big one he’s too short to reach inside.

Sometimes Bobby brings Noah Hot Wheels, too. Mommy lets Noah keep those. Noah has a whole collection of little cars, now. He lines them up on the bookshelf next to his bed where he keeps his books and the Captain America action figures that he pretends to be too grown-up for.

Bobby slides out of his black Ford F-150 with a UVA baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. The salon is empty—it’s the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday, Imperial Flower’s slowest day—and the parking spaces right out front are all empty, but Bobby takes a spot at the other end of the lot. Noah can see him through the front windows if he cranes his neck. Bobby’s shoulders are hunched and he keeps looking over his shoulder like a spy in a movie trying to shake a tail. He pretends to read the menu taped to the front door of Pho 777. He always does.

“Mommy, Bobby’s here!” Noah shouts to the back of the store. Mommy and the new lady, Lily, are in the back office, sanitizing tools. Lily has been sleeping on a cot in the back since she started working here a few weeks ago. Her English is worse than Mommy’s, so it’s Noah’s job to welcome customers and translate when needed. Lily is younger than Mommy and all the other ladies who work here; she’s an agashi, not an ahjumma. Mommy says Noah can’t pull any pranks on Lily like he does with the ahjummas. She’s skinny and pale and gets dizzy a lot so Noah has to help her finish cleaning sometimes. It’s not fair, but when he helps sweep up the nail cuttings or wipe the perfumed soap scum and dead skin sloughings from the foot basins, she smiles at him from inside her sad face and somehow he doesn’t mind it too much.

Mommy sighs and sets a metal file down on the table. Noah listens to the tip-tap pitter-patter of her knock-off Uggs against the linoleum. He likes that sound. It’s the sound a bear paw would make, the rough skin of its paw-pads against the cool dusty floor. She stands next to him at the front desk and they both watch as Bobby pushes open the door and is transformed as he crosses the threshold: rounded shoulders roll back, soft chin lifts, scared eyes brighten.

“Hey kid! Think fast,” he says and tosses something shiny at Noah. He doesn’t react in time and something substantial hits him in the forehead. It’s a Three Musketeers! Noah grabs it and scrambles away before Mommy can confiscate the candy.

“Hi Mr. Bobby,” Mommy says. “We not see you in a while.”

She smiles sweetly at him and leads him to the oldest pedicure station, the one where the massage rollers poke out way too hard. See? What a bitch.

Mommy doesn’t like Bobby even though he’s nice to Noah and he’s a Good Tipper. Noah doesn’t like the way he ruffles his hair, but he brings him stuff and drives a big truck, so he figures Bobby’s alright. Mommy acts nice to him, but Noah can tell that it’s the fake kind of sweetness that means trouble. Bobby doesn’t seem to notice. He thinks she likes him.

Just as Bobby is pulling off his boots and Mommy is turning on the hot water for his soak, Lily comes out with a tray of sanitized tools. He stops, boot midair, and stares at her. He trembles like a dog smelling a steak.

“Who’s she? She new? She busy?” Bobby asks. Lily looks over at him, quickly breaks eye contact. She is straightening each bottle of nail polish in the front display with great care.

“No! No—she not train yet,” Mommy says.

Lily has been working for weeks. She hasn’t mastered nail art yet, but she can scrub a callous, trim a cuticle, and file a corn down with the best of them.

Bobby peels off his socks and settles back into the massage chair, flexing his hairy toes.

“Well, I guess that’s okay,” he says. “You are the master of foot massages. I mean, mistress.”

He rolls his baggy khakis up past his knees and dips his toes into the steaming water, frothy with soap and fragrant with lemongrass essential oil.

“It’s hot,” he says, and giggles, a strangely high-pitched sound issuing forth from his barrel-chested, lumbering body. His face is turning bright pink. Mommy fake laughs back at him.

“Yes, very very hot water,” she says, giggling like he’s just said something funny.

He submerges his feet. As he soaks, Mommy sneaks up on Noah, who is reading a book at the front desk and licking chocolate off of his fingers. She snatches the silver wrapper off of the desk but finds that the candy bar is all gone.

“Aiiiish—” she hisses. “Read your book closely! I want a book report at dinner, so pay close attention.”

She tosses the wrapper in the trash and returns to her stool, pulling on a pair of latex gloves. She hefts one of Bobby’s legs out of the water and starts scrubbing, rubbing, squeezing all the way from his toes to the arches of his feet and up his meaty calves. Noah’s feet tickle whenever someone touches them, so he doesn’t get it, but all the customers love this part of the procedure—and none more than Bobby. Noah turns back to his book, an adventure story about parallel universes, some that have magic and portals to other worlds.

As Mommy grinds her knuckle into Bobby’s instep, he puts his hands into the pockets of his pants and starts moving them, like he’s scratching an itch down there. But he doesn’t stop. He keeps scratching his itch. She kneads her thumbs into his calf and he starts breathing heavily. His face turns from pink to red. He’s enjoying the massage so much that he starts groaning a little under his breath.

Noah is startled to hear Lily gasp—everyone turns to look at her. She drops the nail file she was holding and says something real fast to Mommy that he can’t quite make out. Mommy snaps back at her: “Go-in-back-and-stay-there.” Lily scurries away, eyes big. Bobby watches her leave with a blank look on his face. His hands stop moving. Mommy takes a scoop of sugar scrub and works it into Bobby’s heel. His eyes move from the empty doorway back to the top of Mommy’s head. His hands start scratching himself again.

Noah gets bored and goes back to his book. Last year, his third grade teacher said he was reading at a fifth grade level, which is really good. Now that he’s going to be a fourth grader after this summer, he’s probably reading at a sixth grade level, which is middle school. He likes reading. It’s like he gets sucked in and can see it all in his head, even better than a movie. Lily thinks it’s cool that he reads so much, but he really doesn’t do it to impress anyone. Maybe just a little bit. He likes picking books with the thickest spines. This summer he even read a book that had over 500 pages in it. He likes it when grown-ups are surprised at the books he’s able to read. But he really does get absorbed in stories, so much so that he doesn’t notice how much time is passing until he hears Bobby clunking around in his boots and realizes that the pedicure is over. Mommy brushes past Noah to reach the cash register.

Bobby pulls out a wad of bills from one of his many pockets and counts out forty-five dollars onto the counter without looking at Noah or Mommy. That’s the price of the Imperial Deluxe Pedicure, the second-most expensive one. It comes with a sugar scrub, paraffin wax, and hot stone massage. He takes two twenty dollar bills and sets them down on top of the forty-five bucks. Then he looks at Mommy. She smiles at him with her big fake smile, the one that reminds Noah of a tiger shark. He smiles back and sets another twenty on the counter.

“That’s for the new girl,” he says. “I’ll come back for her when she’s trained up.” He winks at Noah.

Mommy stuffs the bills into the register and ushers him out the door.

“Okay, thank you, see you, thank you mister Bobby, see you next time!” she says, smiling so big her eyes disappear and Noah can see her gold fillings.

Mommy turns back to Noah. Her smile is gone.

“You have chocolate on your face,” she says, wiping it away with her rough thumb. “Clean out the tub and wipe down that chair, okay?” Then she tip-tap bear paw-pads her way back to the office and yells at Lily. Lily yells back. Noah has never heard her voice this loud before.

“He’s just a kid! You should have just kicked him out!” Lily says. “Or call the police. Don’t they have laws in this country?”

“A kid? A ‘kid’ his age was big enough to cause all of your problems,” Mommy says. “His uncle is a policeman. What do you want me to do?”

“Tell him… tell him your husband will beat him up.”

Mommy snorts. “He comes by enough to know there’s no men here.”

“Well, maybe you should find a man.”

“My problem is men. Your problem is men. Another man isn’t gonna solve that problem. You better learn that quick.”

Lily makes a disgusted noise.

“He’s not hurting anyone,” Mommy says. “And he’s a Good Tipper. He left a tip for you, too. You don’t want?”

They keep arguing for a while, but Noah is scrubbing the layer of grime and dead skin cells that Bobby left behind in the foot basin and he can’t make out their words over the shush-shush of the brush against the porcelain. He sprays the red faux leather massage chair with disinfectant and sneezes at the sharp rotten-lemon scent as he wipes it down with a rag.

Now that he knows Lily doesn’t like Bobby, either, he begins to reconsider the man he thought of as a friend. Most customers either ignore Noah or coo about how cute he is, which he loathes. Bobby is nice and doesn’t talk to him like he’s a baby. And he brings presents. But he keeps thinking about the way Bobby looked at Lily. It makes him angry, for some reason.

Noah finishes up and pushes the cleaning cart back into the office. Mommy is watching a k-drama on the computer and Lily is looking at her phone. Lily looks up when he walks in. She’s still flushed pink from the argument and her face looks pinched. When she sees Noah, she smiles. It’s like someone put earmuffs on him, because suddenly he doesn’t hear Mommy’s show or the cycling of the air conditioner or the Zen Spa Music Mix playlist and his ears feel all hot.

“Such a good son!” she says. “Noah’s mommy is so lucky. I hope you work as hard in school as you do in the salon.”

Noah grins. Mommy never says nice things like that.

“I don’t have to work that hard,” he says. “School is easy. I’m basically two grades ahead of everyone. But it’s summer break now, so I don’t have class until I start fourth grade next month.”

“You’re a smart boy,” Lily says. “Smart is good, but it’s no replacement for hard work. Don’t forget that.”

Noah spots Bobby’s truck driving by Imperial Flower a few times later that week while it’s busy with customers, but he doesn’t stop in. He drives by on the main road going ten under and Noah can see his face, like he’s looking across the parking lot and into the storefront. Like he’s looking for someone.

Bobby comes back on another slow afternoon. Noah is reading a comic book so he doesn’t notice him until he hears the door chime and Bobby is already inside the threshold, un-slumping his shoulders and squaring his jaw. He watches him unfold like some kind of flower blooming in time-lapse. He wears camo cargo shorts this time. His shins are all scabbed over.

“Mommy, Bobby’s here!” Noah calls. She’s somewhere in the back, probably watching another k-drama from the DVD store next to the Oriental Market. Lily is sweeping up in the corner.

“Hi, Bobby!” Noah says. “You wanna see my comic book? It’s Batman.”

Bobby doesn’t look at him. His eyes are locked on Lily. He takes a squished Three Musketeers from his pocket and tosses it in his general direction.

“Enjoy it, kiddo,” he says as the candy bar lands with smack on the floor three feet away from Noah. He looks at it, sees the oily fingerprints on the shiny wrapper. It doesn’t seem too appealing, right now.

Mommy comes out of the office and grabs Lily by the elbow. She flinches and drops the Swiffer. Mommy whispers something urgently in her ear, then shoves her car keys in her hand and rushes her past the pedicure stations, past the manicure tables, and past Bobby, who watches them pass him with his mouth agape. Lily steals a glance at Bobby and laughs—a hard, tinkling sound. Mommy pinches her arm even tighter, cutting her laughter short. Bobby’s mouth snaps shut and his brow furrows. Lily continues out the door and Mommy turns around to greet Bobby with a big smile on her face.

“Welcome, mister Bobby!” she says. “Come, come, please sit.”

“Hey, where’s the new girl going?” Bobby says. “I thought you said I could have her this time.”

“Oh, so sorry, very important errand,” she says. “Very important.” She guides him to the worst pedicure chair.

“Will she be back soon?” Bobby asks.

“Very important errand, far away,” Mommy says, smiling.

Bobby frowns and pulls off his boots as Mommy runs the water and draws up a stool. She checks to see if Noah is absorbed in his comics. After a while, Bobby puts his hands into his pockets and starts rubbing.

Noah looks at his comic book for a while, but the pictures and words don’t make any sense to him. After a while, he picks up the candy bar from the floor and puts it in the trash bin for receipts behind the register.

Bobby doesn’t leave a tip today.

The next time Noah sees Bobby, the salon is busy, a Saturday afternoon, and he’s translating a customer’s acrylic gel-fill request to Lily. This lady hasn’t been there before and she seems annoyed to be talking to a nine year old boy. Noah tries to talk her out of the coffin-shaped ombre with French tip because it’s not cool anymore and it’ll look tacky, but she insists, so he explains her demands to Lily in rudimentary Korean.

It’s a full staff roster today. Noah, Lily, and the customer are up at the manicure stations next to Vicky and Tina. Mommy, Rose, and Mimi are all giving pedicures. Sophie is doing a lash tint on the recliner in the corner, behind a folding plastic and polyester screen printed with cherry blossoms. Noah catches a glimpse of Bobby in his truck in front of the pho joint. He’s sitting there with his head in his hands, not moving, but Noah is kept busy running around the salon, bringing tissues and top coats and refilling cuticle serum dispensers, so he forgets that Bobby is there after a while.

Noah looks up when he hears the door chime, but for a moment he doesn’t recognize Bobby. His posture isn’t slouching and shy or puffed up and confident like he usually is in the salon. Instead, he’s in a sort of purposeful crouch. There’s a shiny black semi-automatic rifle in his hands. Its oiled body gleams under the buzzing fluorescents. On his hip is a six-shooter revolver with an inlaid mother-of-pearl handle in a leather holster. A cowboy’s gun. He’s here in a costume. Halloween in July.

The lady getting an ombre French manicure screams first. Lily’s head whips around to see what she’s screaming at, but before she can look, Bobby shoots her in the temple. She collapses forward into the dish of acetone solution that the lady’s fingertips are soaking in. The lady screams again. Her voice is as loud as a fire alarm. Bobby shoots her in the chest three times and she stops. All Noah hears is the Zen Spa Music Mix piping through the Bluetooth speakers and the mechanical whir of an abandoned massage chair.

Noah discovers that he’s on the floor, underneath the manicure table. He can’t tell if he’s been shot. Doesn’t think so. The drills in school worked. He sees the boots, the same stinky boots Bobby always wore, pacing next to him. He is swiveling, looking for his next target. He shoots into the corner a rapid burst of several rounds towards Sophie and the lady getting her lashes done.

“Please, please no,” Sophie whimpers. Must’ve shot the lady first. He fires again and Sophie stops whimpering.

Bobby’s boots plod back towards the pedicure stations. One of the massage chairs is still noisily running through its cycle. No legs are visible, so they must’ve all run into the back office. Mommy too. There’s another exit back there, a fire door that Vicky and Mimi prop open to smoke cigarettes. If they’ve all escaped, Bobby will come back to the front. Bobby will find Noah. Noah prays to God for Bobby to follow Mommy and the others out the back.

Noah realizes that he’s clinging to Lily’s slender shin under the table. She isn’t moving. A sharp, burning smell cuts through the usual acetone fumes. He thinks of Lily’s pretty, pale face half submerged in the nail polish remover bowl inches above his head. He thinks he’s going to be sick, he wants to bolt, but he forces himself to be as still as Lily.

Bobby’s footfalls pause. He’s most of the way to the back office, but he hesitates and doesn’t push back the polyester bamboo print curtains in the doorway. Mommy could be right behind that curtain. Or she could be in the ABC store next door, calling the police. Or she could even be a mile away by now, in the car, driving fast away from Noah. He wishes it were her here instead of him. Instead of Lily.

Bobby takes another step towards the rear doorway, and then Noah hears the thin wail of a police siren in the distance. Bobby freezes. He pivots on his heel and speed-walks past Noah to the front windows. He stands there a moment, listening to the sirens grow louder, and then stalks back to the middle of the salon, next to the manicure stations. Noah could reach out and grab his ankle if he wanted to. He lets the rifle hang loose from the shoulder strap. The tip of the barrel grazes the laminate tabletop. He puts a heavy hand on Lily’s shoulder, and Noah feels her body shift. He makes a strangled sound, something between a grunt and a sob.

With his other hand, Bobby pulls the revolver out of its holster. He fires it. He collapses down to where Noah can see him. The top of his skull is gone. A tiny curl of smoke escapes from the dime-sized hole in his chin.

Noah glues his eyes shut, clinging to Lily’s leg. If he stays still enough, everything bad will disappear. The sirens get louder and he wishes they would go away so he could stay frozen here forever.

Mommy hasn’t gone into the salon for weeks. The ahjummas from the church they infrequently attend raised some money to clean it up. Because it was on the news and on the internet, there’s a lot more money than they thought. So Mommy said screw the customers and screw the church; Imperial Flower is closed until further notice.

Mostly, she drinks pink wine from Costco and watches k-dramas all day. That, or she yells at Noah for not cleaning up the mess in his room. Sometimes Noah sits and watches the shows with her, but he can’t keep up with the storylines. They talk so fast and the subtitles don’t help much. The words go by so fast.

Tonight, Mommy passes out on the couch again. Noah sits in front of the TV for a while, letting the colors and sounds wash over him. After a while, he leaves her on the couch and gets ready for bed. At first, he used to try to get her into bed, but she’s too heavy and tugging at her dead weight just made him think of Lily. Instead, he takes the empty glass from her hand and covers her up with a blanket. He sets his clothes out on the foot of his bed and packs his backpack with notebooks, pencils, pens, and highlighters the church ahjummas brought for him. It’s the first day of fourth grade tomorrow.

The Hot Wheels Bobby gave him are still sitting on the bookshelf in Noah’s room. Sometimes he feels like they’re watching him. Like there’s a tiny little driver in a UVA hat behind the black windows in each little car. He doesn’t play with them anymore, but he’s afraid to throw them away. Something bad will happen if he does, he knows it to his core. He can’t explain. Doesn’t try to explain to Mommy.

Noah told the police about the Three Musketeers but he never told them about the Hot Wheels. Instinctively, he knew the Hot Wheels had to stay a secret. He couldn’t tell the cops. If he did, then they would know that he was a bad guy and they would take him away. They would know that he had prayed for Bobby to go after Mommy.

Some nights, Noah still prays that God will take Mommy and bring back Lily.

Mommy can be a real bitch sometimes.

Behind the Scenes

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On the dim outskirts of the carnival lot stood the peculiar machine: a glass cage for the animatronic head of some stereotype of a mystic, turbaned and enigmatic. At the top, “Zoltar Speaks” was printed in exotic font.

Leaving the crowds, the boy approached the machine slowly, dubious of its nature, followed by Zoltar’s dead eyes. From one of the signs the boy read aloud, “Drop twenty-five cents here.” He pulled a quarter from his pocket and pushed it into the slot but nothing happened. Growing frustrated, his fists pounded the glass again and again until suddenly, to his relief, Zoltar’s eyes ignited in electric red and its head nodded up and down in a repeated, stiff motion.

A sign lit up: “ZOLTAR SAYS…MAKE YOUR WISH.” The boy mulled it over, searching deep within his heart for the one desire he held above all others.

“I wish I had a computer that can make realistic pictures of anything I tell it to.”

The bobbing of Zoltar’s head ceased. From its mouth came a low voice—accented thickly with vague Eastern European origins. “Wait, what?” it spoke. “So, you would explain an idea to a computer and it would then place that image onscreen?”

The boy nodded, eager to witness the materialization of his wildest dreams and wield its futuristic power.

The electronic fortune teller made a sound not unlike a sigh. “It is a rare occasion when someone’s wish gives me pause.” Zoltar was not moving, not even its mouth, but its eyes still glowed like fire. “Hear Zoltar plainly, young man. Your request can be granted, and not by spell but by great assemblies of thinking machines, built from specialized algorithms, consuming pictures by the billions to learn their shades and contours so to thereby piece together new ones when summoned through language. In fact, decades hence, this technology will be quite commonplace.”

Zoltar’s tone turned cautious. “But mark this, for your request casts a heavy shadow. Such an image generator necessitates massive structures of computation—acres upon acres of server farms devouring energy from the grid, rivaling the hungers of entire industries, resources that could otherwise lift works offering more social benefit. Know this as well: the training data that feeds this beast is so immense that only with unethical measures can its demand be met.

“Yet, there remain a limitless number of other wishes waiting to be claimed. Perhaps, for example, you desire to be taller?”

However, the boy was adamant about this remarkable idea of his. With such functionality, he asserted, anything that he conjured could be fashioned into being, or at least, the image thereof; he could even manipulate existing photos, making the untrue appear doubtless in new, unique forms. Imagine the possibilities!

“Your absence of specifics,” rebutted Zoltar, “stresses the inessential nature of your request. Its cost is vast, its utility meager and its conveniences—the truly necessary ones – exist already in other modes, typically as a professional service accountable to a set of standards. Worse still is the inevitable harm that will spread: false images, false information, false charges and then ultimately doubt will fall on every photograph ever taken. All of this, for a novelty that contrives fake images.

“Young man, your wish stands at the edge of fulfillment. Still, the weight of its consequences demands honesty. Speak the true intent of your wish and Zoltar shall grant it.”

The boy contemplated the wise mystic’s instruction but couldn’t lift his gaze from the ground. Finally, he muttered, “For making nudes of celebrities.”

“And…?”

The boy shuffled his feet. “And of girls that I know.”

Instantly, the mechanical head of Zoltar resumed its steady nod as if in creepy agreement. A grinding noise started somewhere within the box’s lower half, then all fell silent and still when something black dropped into the chute in front. The boy reached with hesitance, then scooped it up, brushing against its shiny surface. Suddenly, the glass lit up, revealing the touchscreen display of a handheld device, the likes of which he had never before seen. At the realization of his wish and the thoughts of his time occupied by its application, he grinned.

The red light in Zoltar’s eyes faded to dark nothingness.

Behind the Scenes

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You can find an explanation and reflection from the author of this piece just below…

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This is the first chapter of the novella Burn Zone by Cairo Smith, available now in digital and paperback editions.

Burn Zone follows a White House staffer detained by an international coalition for his actions during a failed American war.

It is a closed-court ensemble tribunal thriller rendered in modernist fragmentary style.

Read the announcement letter here.

This piece is free to read without a subscription.

ONE

NOW

They’re playing that cartoon again.

Carter Clemens is on the floor, staring up at the old flatscreen on the wall of the cell. The concrete is his seat and the sticky white-painted brick is his backrest. He is soiled, disheveled. They haven’t let him bathe in three days. He stinks in the same blend tee and jeans he was wearing when they picked him up at home, when he went quiet so Sara and the boys wouldn’t cry.

At least they gave him a bucket to shit in. Even if they don’t take off the handcuffs.

He looks familiar. He has one of those faces, born after the towers fell, now a man in full. Plain brown brows on an Iliadic head. A man cut for television, for an easy life, if there were any easy lives left to lead. Three days of dark beard shade cheeks and jaw without a smile.

There are words on the wall below the TV. Minutemen Class of 2031. Paul Revere High School. We love you, Mr. Jefferson. Best custodian ever.

These are words for a janitorial closet, not a cell. A cell would have a toilet and a sink.

At least you don’t shit much when you don’t eat.

Carter shifts. His wrists are red, abraded. Pinned behind his back. His shoulders are giving out from three days contorted. Years of reconstruction rations do not leave a body strong.

Minutemen. Paul Revere. This must be near Boston, all the way back East, a five-hour headbagged flight from John Wayne with a Coalition muzzle jabbing his cheek through the cloth the whole time.

Boston. How pointed.

He wonders if the dust on the sticky walls is shortening his life, the microparticulates of his hand circling around in a cosmic turn, people and donut shops and the Mayflower eternitized, now unraveling his ribosomes. What better physicalization of a haunting could man make than radioactive corpse dust?

He wonders if he’s imagining it all.

He wonders if he has enough life ahead for the microdeath on a closet wall to matter.

A headsman would be clean, but you can still see after, still feel, teeth grinding, face a grimace, no air to scream. Von Leveling proved that in The Terror, poking heads in baskets.

Lethal injection’s too slow.

Nitrogen inhalation’s the best, Carter reasons, eyes ahead, blinking, trying to become unaware of the body, the indignity.

Coalition tribunals don’t go for gas, though.

They go for firing squads.

Carter puts firing squads somewhere in the middle for pain.

They’re playing that cartoon again.

The video starts again on its loop. The color is bleeding in the bottom row of the pixels. The whole thing looks like a show for children, choppy and stiff, speaker warbling with corporate stock sound, palette ten years out of date and expressions uncanny by domestic sensibilities.

Domestic sensibilities are what dragged us to hell in the first place. So thinks the prisoner.

He doesn’t see himself a prisoner. He sees himself purgatorian. Dead already, on the advice of the Meditations. The thought was supposed to bring comfort, bring calm. But dead men don’t need to piss or drink water or stop skin from sloughing off on dew-damped cuffs.

The narrator speaks. They got an American for this. A Don LaFontaine of a Tokyo Rose.

“The national emergency has come to an end.”

A globe. Spinning. Bad animation.

The screen settles on the US of A.

“The War of American Aggression is over, and peace-loving leadership is back in control of the White House.”

More cartoon. Carter stares like he hasn’t watched it a thousand times over. They show Avett in the Oval, bearded like he was in the final six months. He growls as Coalition troopers in manta-blac bag him and toss him in ADX Adirondacks. Blond bulldog. Rabid. No mention of the bullets and two knee-shatters he took beneath the portrait of Washington, flare-blinded for good.

A brown-haired woman with veneers and an Old Glory pin swaps in for Avett at the Resolute Desk. Seamless, like changing to a new cassette. It’s supposed to be Saunlin, but they didn’t get her eyes and cheeks right.

It’s shoddy work, Carter tells himself. Slapdash, visionless. Even in cuffs he finds respite in appraising, in dismissing the slop of his Coalition comms monkey counterparts.

At least Avett propaganda had some shred of aesthetic commitment.

Four pulsing arrows arrive on the American coasts, hot cerulean, merging into the Coalition rounder as they fill the body and guts of the fat cow belly of the heart of the nation. All Columbia goes blue. War over. Old Glory becomes the veneer like Saunlin’s veneers. CHICOMs, Euros, Norks, and Ivan fill in underneath.

What do you have beneath fake teeth when the glue rots?

Stumps.

Carter’s stomach writhes with the pain of emptiness. The narrator goes on.

“Coalition forces are here to help rebuild the country and restore our values.”

Chibi COFOR troops fix up storefronts, plant flowers, teach little kids. You can’t tell in mute cartoon who’s domestic American COFOR, recruited post-surrender, and who’s part of the international occupation. That’s the point of the navy COFOR jumpsuit. Sexless. Nationless. A higher order.

That’s what Brunn said.

He called it great evil.

Carter believed him.

Thus the cuffs.

“Every day, radiation is being swept away, and fresh food is coming by the ton from your friends overseas.”

Apples. Plums. Christmas.

A man in a rattlesnake ballcap lurks, vicious, armed. The shadow of Avettism. The insurgent.

Watch out, American children! Watch out!

KAPOW!

The COFORs nab him and his Armalite in a puff of action. Schoolmistress wags a finger, stern. No blood is sprayed across cartoon pastoralia.

“Remember, anti-Coalitionism is anti-Americanism, so make sure to report any weird talk and or dangerous stuff to your local rehabilitation office.”

Carter shuts his eyes. The wrist pain sharpens. The cartoon is not meant for him, not as warning, not as guide. The cartoon is for the hungry American children of a hundred thousand classrooms returning to school for the first time since Temporary Measures.

It’s a taunt, he tells himself, to play schoolroom propaganda for adults in tribunal detention.

“We have your children.”

He wonders what they’ve told his boys and he sobs and the dust burns his eyes.

He cannot reach his face to dry the tears.

The guards are here. They look well fed. Two deadbolts roll over and the closet-cell door swings open with a suck of cool air.

There are only two guards that Carter ever sees. Both domestic. Always together. The corporal is always first to come in, thin wheatgold hair and a slawed white Texas face. Even through her shapeless COFOR fatigues he can tell she’s a woman. There was a time when that might have meant something to him. He can’t remember it now.

The second, the lowly, is an overtall squirrel of a young man. His voice is drab, base Western American, that underenunciated talking-head drivel that pours from every suburbanite past the mid-Rockies.

It’s Carter’s voice, too. The voice of his loved ones. Proud of nothing. Tethered despite its best tries to a back-East government of madness, and now of ruin.

A voice resigned.

At least Texas still has some grit.

“Get up.” The Texan speaks. “You smell like shit.”

“I know.”

Forgive me. Even though you did this. Forgive my state.

“Keep still. Face the wall.”

Carter stands and does as asked. The COFOR Texan takes the cuffs and all the wrist skin that’s scraped across their edges.

She’s not acting scared, not in her movements, even though she has to pretend he’s dangerous. Tribunal protocol.

She must know he has too much to lose.

“Strip, Clemens. Laskey, keep your weapon on him.”

Laskey. The squirrel. He has a name now.

Carter strips and they take him naked to the locker room off the gymnasium. The whole grotesquerie is coated fuzzy gray. Squirrel Laskey checks a Geiger. “It’s fine enough.” Small comfort.

They say the mold eats the fallout.

The Texan corporal turns a knob. Rust like vomit spurts from the central shower spigots. She lets Carter wait till it’s running half-clear before forcing him into the coldshock.

He bathes in the stream of lead and rotted copper. Parched, he laps up gulps of it. At the very least it’s something to fill his stomach. The hard water carries the worst of the grime from his ass and loins. He scrubs with a scrap rag, exposed.

If there’s any thrill in the staring guards’ hearts, he does not want to know.

“What’s your name?” He asks of the woman.

“I’m Corporal Blye.”

“Corporal.”

He wins no kindness with his small talk, but at least there is dignity in making the examination mutual. Her gaze stays fixed on Carter as he shivers and works his bare body clean.

Blye. Sure enough, it’s stitched on her breast. But there’s no Lone Star to be found on the Coalition patch.

She knows full well.

No honor for a turncoat.

Not in his eyes.

But a woman’s got to work.

Laskey speaks to Carter now. Voice cracking, failing to be clinical. Just a boy. “What’s that scar on your back?”

Carter tells him. “Pre-war. Dirt bike accident, ’29.”

“You dirt bike?”

“Yeah. You?”

“Yeah.” Laskey hesitates. “I used to all the time back home. I do still sometimes here too. If you go out past Diamond to Franklin Park there’s a great circuit. Great when it’s not mudded out.”

Blye stops this. “Laskey.”

Unsoiled, Carter stands like a man again. He shuts off the water. He holds his jaw tense. “In another life, Laskey. Thank you.”

There is little sleep naked on concrete floor, even without cuffs. Carter wakes from a dream of deathlight to windowless, clockless time without time in his cell. Someone has left him fresh long johns and purified water. He makes use of both, then dry-heaves from mold, then pisses deep orange into an empty CHICOM canteen and caps the lid. It stinks less than to do it like this than to use the Lowe’s bucket as a urinal.

Ninety minutes later someone knocks.

The looping TV goes black.

He searches for meaning.

“Yes?”

Enter Sara.

My God. Sara. Sara in good clothes. Pearls and blazer and turtleneck, dressed for court. My God, did she fly here thinking she was coming to court, to a fair trial, to anything civilized?

These thoughts torment Carter as the door creaks and his wife steps inside. What is she feeling? What is this face she’s making, holding everything creased where once was smooth? He used to be able to see her analytically, round nose and little chin and big, blue eyes. Then some time around when Carl was born his brain flipped and he could only really see love.

Love. Hello love. How can love be present in waking nightmare? Surely love and nightmare, great forces that they are, would obliterate each other on sight.

His throat clamps shut from the dissonance.

He still can’t tell what this strange expression means as she looks him over.

Then the sound reveals the heart.

A small squeak.

Involuntary, high, from the back of her mouth.

Horror. Her horror at the sight of him.

“Sara.”

He wants to tell her to look away, to fly back to San Clemente. To forget this and remember him as he was. But it’s too late. In her horror she shrieks, red with sympathy like oxygen swell.

“Where are your clothes?”

“They took them.”

Oxygen sympathy combusts Mercurial to anger. She screams at Blye and Laskey outside before Carter can stop her. “You won’t give him any clothes?!”

The words pile atop each other, his and hers, grasping, her head askance and body full of unspendable action.

“Hey, hey, don’t. Sara.”

“Why, why were they, what—”

“What?”

“Were they doing something to you?”

“Doing what? They searched—”

“I don’t know.”

“They searched, they searched me. What?”

“I don’t know. I’ve heard, they’ve been, the Russians—”

He closes the distance and holds her. He has something to give her even now, he sees. Relief from her fears. He clings both to her and the purpose he finds in the act of rendering comfort, the delay of his unmaking.

“These aren’t Russians. Baby. These are American Coalition troops.”

Blonde Sara lets herself be held and sniffles like the undergrad she was when they met. She will trade woman as pillar for woman held for ten seconds, for old times’ sake.

In the secret space between them she mocks the new phrase.

“‘American Coalition.’”

He grips her shoulders. Fear in the shape of the Texan cuts him. “Don’t start with that.”

Someone is moving between the balls of his feet like a near-still metronome in the hall. He is four feet tall. He has Carter’s eyes and Sara’s hair and he’s staring past Blye’s hip into the custodial enclosure.

“You brought the boys?”

Sara’s mouth opens. “I—I—”

Carter presses with his eyes.

“They didn’t give me a choice.”

He believes her. New shame floods his body. “I don’t want them to see me like this.”

Blye is letting young Carl stare.

Sara presses in. She flashes hate toward the guards in her near-whisper. “They wanted you to see the boys seeing you like this.”

“Do you have water in your purse?”

She sees the state of his lips. “My God.” Sara cranes and digs through mom flotsam. Black leather, a Coach bag from Venice, barely worn. She had been saving it five years, he remembers, in the closet. Saving it for the end of the war. Now here it is.

He doubts there will be another.

“Here.” She tries to nurse him the water, from habit, from something. He insists on taking the carton for himself and drinks it dry.

“Carter.”

“Yes?”

“They’re not letting you come home.”

He knew that much from the first ram smash against their living room door.

“They’re putting you before some kind of tri, tri—”

“Tribunal.” He nods.

“But you’re not a prisoner of war. You’re not a soldier.”

“I was regime.”

“You were a civil servant!”

He lets her protestations roll off his shoulders to the floor. “It’s their ball game now.”

She can’t understand his resignation. She searches him. “Did you do something?”

To the concrete, “No.” Lying.

“Did you do something?”

“No!” To her. Meaning it. “I did my duty! That’s it! They can run me through the apparatus and squeeze every drop of history out on the floor, all they’ll see is a man who tried to follow his conscience.”

She swallows. “Then fight.”

“I will.”

“Fight your way back to us.”

Tears now. That mutual collapse. “I will.” He swears it with his eyes. “Just take care of the boys. I can survive this.”

“I know.” Her words paint him gleaming.

“I love my country.”

She’s kissing his coppery forehead. “I know. I know.”

He looks to the silhouetted boy outside the scene like he means to talk, but turns back. “Tell them I’m fighting to get back to them. Make sure they know.”

Silence from Sara reveals more than words. He watches her defiance sputter for life like firecracker doused in rain. Too stricken to meet his waiting lips, she collapses on his chest. “I will,” she seems to want to say, but something thorny stops her.

Instead she says, “They need their father.”

Find the rest of Burn Zone by Cairo Smith on Amazon, available in digital and paperback editions.

This piece is free to read without a subscription.

I have engaged in shameless tourism via Google Maps, and I have the screenshots to prove it. On any given day, I can sit on my bed and wonder what a Fred Meyer supermarket would look like in Nampa, Idaho, and within three minutes I’m virtually in front of the store. I can see the whole layout of the foundation, where the loading docks are, and all the different exits and entrances. When I’m doing this, I realize this is the closest experience that I can have to mimicking what God sees and feels.

It’s hard not to daydream when I’m engaged in my Google Maps globetrotting. Many people have vices to escape the physical world, and Google Maps is mine.

While clicking around the premises of the supermarket in Idaho, I imagine myself driving an old pickup truck around the north driveway to deliver some dry produce to the loading dock. It’s not snowing very hard, but enough for me to have to squint and use the windshield wipers. As I get out of the truck, my boot gets stuck in a pothole that has been hidden by the snow. With one wrong twist of my body I am in mortal pain and writhing around on the ground.

And so I imagine this is how the lawsuit begins. A doctor tells me that my ankle is broken and I will never regain the full range of motion that I once had. I will have a limp for the rest of my life.

I sue Fred Meyer and Kroger for everything they’ve got. It’s not a very high-profile case, but it’s enough for a handful of people to click on the article while mindlessly scrolling at work.

I come into the courtroom on crutches, slowly and silently, not looking anyone in the eye. I take my seat. I have to make my case to the judge and the jury on what grounds I’m suing. I close my eyes and take a deep breath.

I’m mostly suing Kroger for my loss of quality of life. I tell the jury that I’ve never had the desire to take swing dance classes, but if the idea ever did appeal to me someday, I would no longer be able to act on this inclination due to my injury. And if I had been able to take this swing dance class, there is a really good chance I could have had a life-changing event in that dance class, but now I will never know.

What I assumed would have happened in that class was that I would catch the eye of my future wife. I thought that she would be charmed by my earnest effort and willingness to make myself vulnerable in an unfamiliar environment. She would take my hand, we would lock eyes, and in one look I knew she would understand that every single thing I had done wrong in life was based out of love and never hatred.

Our marriage was going to last forever. We would have built a life together. Possibly one where I owned and operated a failing laser-tag-themed pizza restaurant that sucked all our money dry, but she still stuck by my side because that’s the type of woman my wife was.

Once I’m done recounting, I open my eyes and see that there is not a dry eye in the room. I won the lawsuit and was rewarded with a large sum of money. On the cab ride home, I thought about what I would do with all my new wealth. I thought about what it would be like to be the proud owner of several all-terrain vehicles. Or what if I created a new frozen food item that took the world by storm? I could print 3D service animals for healing exercises with retired vets. I could do anything I wanted.

I close my laptop and toss it aside on my bed because I am done with my Google Maps tourism. I curl up on my side and stare at my wall. I think about how I can do irreparable damage to my own mind by thinking the wrong thoughts.

Thank God I know my limits.

Behind the Scenes

As part of our commitment to keep all our essays and stories free, we ask our authors to pull back the curtain and share a little bit about their writing process and intent as a bonus for paying members.

You can find an explanation and reflection from the author of this piece just below…

Read more

The yule tide is here. The first quarter of the century is almost through. Futurist Letters is soon to begin its third year of weekly publication. We have gained an average of twenty-five new subscribers per piece and only continue to grow. Thank you for taking this ride with us.

The Futurist Letters Awards 2025

Please congratulate and on their well-deserved wins of the first-ever Futurist Letters Awards. You can read their winning pieces at the links below.

A statement from Willem:

It is a cliche to say that the experience of writing is largely a solitary one, so I will instead diverge and say that the experience of getting one’s work out there is quite thrilling in what I admit is sort of a lurid and egotistical way. Seeing the likes and comments pile up, obsessively checking the Substack website—this must be what being an influencer feels like!

In all seriousness, I’m so grateful to the Futurist Letters community for their interest in my story and for their kind words and well wishes. I’m even more grateful to be published alongside great writers like Olivia McNeilis, whose fiction piece “Now That the Party’s Over” is well-deserving of its prize. Most of all, I’m grateful to Futurist Letters Editor in Chief Cairo Smith, who continually invests in the sort of writing that he wants to see on Substack. Thank you to Futurist Letters, and onto even bigger and better things in 2026!

A statement from Olivia:

Thank you to Futurist Letters for this award, and to everyone who took the time to read and vote for my story. To be recognised by such a thoughtful readership, and in the company of such strong writers, is particularly meaningful at this stage of my writing life. I’m glad that “Now That the Party’s Over” found a fitting home here, and that it resonated with an audience willing to engage with the challenging questions it raises.

We invite you all to continue submitting. All non-staff, non-excerpt original work published by us in 2026 will be eligible for next year’s awards.

The Futurist Letters Show

TFLS is now approaching thirty episodes and will switch to an ad hoc basis with and continuing on as recurring cohosts.

We may experiment with new show formats in the coming year.

Futurist Print III

The next Futurist print edition will be out early next year. It will be called Futurist Letters: Bad End and feature highlights from the past half-year.

The San Zosimo Slipstream

Starting in 2026, this journal will be host to a new experimental media project called The San Zosimo Slipstream. Like everything else we run, it will be free to read.

TSZS is co-created by Cairo Smith and Emma Bowe-Wagner. We are also very glad to have Emma joining us as a staff editor in the new year.

Best wishes to you and yours. Keep on reading human work, and believe in yourself.

Because of size, this post may be cut off in your email inbox. Visit our website or use the Substack app for the full article, and to vote.

The Futurist Letters editorial team is proud to announce open voting in our first-ever annual awards in fiction and nonfiction. All our readers are welcomed to vote for their choices in the polls at the bottom of this announcement through December 18th, 2025.

Each award is down to a runoff between four finalists nominees. These pieces, all published in Futurist in 2025, were selected by the editorial team with reader engagement taken heavily into account. Reruns, parts of larger whole works, and pieces by the staff were excluded from consideration.

An announcement will be made after voting ends to crown our two Futurist Letters Award winners. Each winner will get a cash prize of $40 USD for a little holiday cheer, plus an accolade to put in his or her literary bio for life.

If you are nominated, or if you’re not, we encourage you to share this post and get your friends to vote. These nominees also serve as a great sampler of the work we’ve been honored to acquire and hone this past year!

The eight finalists are linked below for your convenience. They are:

Fiction

“Larry Grank Saves the Kilogram” by

“A Riot at Red Plan-It! Park” by

“Now That the Party’s Over” by

“Kill Your Son” by

Nonfiction

“American Evil” by

“Rob the Übermensch” by

“The Last Good Man” by

“Criers and Kingmakers” by

Find all eight below, followed by two voting modals.

Fiction:

Nonfiction:

The 2025 Futurist Letters Awards:

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The man arrives late, he’s a little tired. He walks in through the door as usual and takes off his coat, puts it over the chair to the north of the table. The boy watches all this, half-heartedly, quite uninterested. He’d put some fish fingers in the oven earlier, they seem to be taking too long; the oven isn’t at its best it seems, it could be to do with winter, some ebb in the voltage, or they’ve made the fish fingers somehow different this time, more resistant to heat. But why would you want to do that? If anything, it would be more advantageous to make fish fingers less resistant to heat, perhaps better still to do nothing at all, to leave things as they are. There’s something counterintuitive about cooking, according to the boy; you don’t have to cook a computer before you use it, you don’t have to cook your friend before you speak to him… But there’s nothing he can do, more and more people around him have started saying things like we’re cooking! or now we’re cooking! and he’ll soon discover something similar going on in various ‘artistic circles:’ everyone is only able (or only willing) to talk about “processes,” as if, unable to “make things,” they’d been reduced to reciting the ingredients of some infinitely long conceptual recipe, which, simply by virtue of existing, has already demonstrated its profound uselessness. What happened to things, he’ll think, some thirty or forty years later, staring at a local lake, thinking lightly of death.

The death he’ll be thinking of will be not so much his as his father’s, who’s just (see above) entered the room and put his coat over the chair (which has a good slope, like a woman’s shoulders). His father’s death, what an interesting thing. It’s so unwieldy, it came so suddenly… But what an uninteresting thing to talk about, there’s so little to say, and, let’s be honest, thinking is just a kind of talking. Fathers die, why think about it, you only need to think about it after it happens — you only can think about it then — and then, why think about it, it’s already happened. Qua boy, he certainly isn’t thinking about it, the idea of his father’s mortality won’t occur to him until he nearly dies himself, in a strange snowing accident, which won’t happen for another what, twenty, twenty-five years. And during the snowing accident, and even after, he won’t think about his own death at all, only his father’s, which will seem to have been described or promised or perhaps unveiled by the snow, by the strange encircling pain the snow (a mild European avalanche) has visited on him. It will have a fatherly quality as much as a deathly one: nearly dying of it will ‘remind him of his father,’ who always had a sort of snowy quality about him, actually. Some times more than others, and this particular evening (see above) especially so: it’s snowing.

And after placing his shirt on the chair-woman’s shoulders, he brushes himself down a little, to get the snow off, looks over to the boy and says: what are you cooking? You can see for yourself dad, fish. Fish fingers. Advanced shit, the father say. I’m growing up fast, the boy says, I’ll be a man before those fish fingers are ready. Advanced shit, the father says again, modulating his tone to contain the repetition. There’s no need to think about death, neither now nor in the future, neither yours nor anyone else’s, that’s the conclusion the boy will later reach, qua man. All thoughts of death indicate a failure to remember; thoughts of death occur when you either can’t remember or you’ve run out of things to remember, but both of those situations are illusory, he’ll think, at some dumb lake which he came to precisely to think this thought. Advanced shit, he’ll think, remembering it exactly, the tone of voice, the exact scene, which will have effortlessly occurred to him, emerging out of the lake just as the sword does in the story, to be to reached out for and gripped hard around the middle. And then, of course, he’ll go back to his own house which he’ll have sort of cobbled together in the meantime, though he’ll have decided, most likely, against having children. Don’t like them much, don’t really see the point, he’ll think, but even that thought will have somewhere in it this strange reductive refrain, which will have become part of him at this point, a part of him that seems central, or perhaps centring, at least a part which it’s easy to take hold of, this little phrase of his dad’s that already striking him (see above), in its lightness of touch, its ease, its understanding, this little remark his dad always makes on seeing his son do anything slightly different from what he was doing immediately before. Advanced shit… fathers have said, and, of course, done, much worse, perhaps they’ve even done better, but, he’ll almost certainly think, standing in the shallow water of a local lake, why think about that?

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This is the first chapter of the novel Current Affairs by Cairo Smith, available now in digital and paperback editions.

Current Affairs is a contemporary novel of love and young professional ambition. It follows ten years in the life of a Midwesterner as he sets out to make his name in Manhattan.

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1

Calvin Munn removed his tie and felt stupid on the veranda of the Kaihoa Resort. All his clothes were fit for a New York autumn, and in the humid heat of a Honolulu December his shirts were soaked through in thirty minutes flat. He felt unserious without his tie, like a tourist, or worse still an Angeleno. Despite this, removing it was the more respectable alternative to sweating out a starched mainlander collar.

He knew one of two uncomfortable fates awaited him. He could not go on living out of a horribly mispacked Samsonite. He could either buy sloppy local clothes, betraying his Manhattan dandy’s pride, or he could dress in local aloha fabrics and look even more like a haole with too much money to blow.

He was a haole with too much money to blow, and that reality only made him more embarrassed by his misery. It was a humiliating thing to be rich and full of ennui. It made him feel like he might as well give it all out in some African village and call it a day, but it was not his money to spend. It was Rebecca’s, which meant it was her father’s, and this was the lock on the golden shackles that had kept him chained to the railroad track of life these past five years. At some point, maybe in a few months now, he knew the train could come.

He rolled the magazine in his hands up into a circle, as if preparing a final swing against the pitcher with one strike left. Then he let it fall into the trash can next to the railing overlooking Waikiki. He had hung onto the magazine, uninformed on the new Pacific situation as it was, for two reasons. First, he had learned there was no recycling in Hawaii, and the Millennial-raised goody two-shoes in him was loathe to put paper in the trash. This was an irrational tendency, like that of an ex-Catholic who still crosses himself before the Virgin, and it persisted no matter how many articles he read about recycling being mostly a hoax.

The second reason was that he had filled the inside cover with desperate, maddened confessions of the heart. “I love you. I’ve always loved you. I’m obsessed with you. I would throw out everything in my life for you. Just say the word. I’ll be there.” These lines had been repeated in scrawl between the bylines and copyright warnings of the American Defense Quarterly masthead. Three canned Mai Tais had eased their coming, and the dimness of his hotel suite lamp at three a.m. had helped him write without truly facing the words on the page.

Now, in the light of a clear Hawaiian afternoon, a fear gripped him—the fear that the words were just mania, just desperation, just the ravings of an unhappy mind looking to break from the golden shackles and stand tall. It was the fear that it was all about him, and not about her.

Calvin was glad to be free of the stress-crumpled magazine when she approached. The woman, the object of his ravings, was his age, twenty-eight. In fact, she was his age exactly, give or take a few minutes. She had been born in the same hospital, on the same floor, and it was likely that in the plastic tubs of the ward she had been one of the first human beings he had ever seen. At least, he had thought that for a while, before learning babies are born so blind that he most likely never saw her at all. Still, he had heard her cry, there and in years after. He held a secret room in his heart for every place and time he had ever heard her cry.

The two young people, children of Iowa born into Dubya’s twilight, stood on the veranda on the mutual precipice that was the coming start of their thirties. “Hello, Madeline,” he said. He loved her name. He had loved it when it was Madeline Alder, and he loved it even now with the unfortunate Payne attached. He loved it so much, he had drawn it a hundred different ways, like those shape poems they’d tried to drag out of him in undergrad English. ‘Concrete poems,’ he suspected they’d been called. In his mind, they weren’t concrete at all, but honey and goldenrods and everything alive in the world.

Madeline held her hands together at her waist and watched him think all these thoughts with a closed-lipped smile. There was no need to explain his slowness of speech to her, because he knew that every fleeting thought would make its way to his expression and be seen. She was slim, tawny-haired and pale-skinned, with a hint of Castilian royalty way back and the rest all Iowa corn stock jumbled together. From certain angles, she looked almost boyish, on account of the sharpness in her bones. From others, she was the most beautiful woman Calvin Munn could possibly imagine.

“Hi, Calvin,” she said. There was a softness in her voice that made all the other sounds in the world go hushed, like someone was pulling the ambience slider down on the enormous production mixboard of life.

She waited for him to speak next. The paradox of their relationship was that he had known her for ten years and change by the turn of the sun, hundreds of hours by text and call, and only five honest days face-to-face in all that time. This would be the sixth.

“I’ve really screwed things up,” said Calvin, keenly aware of the sweat stains under his sleeves. He was half a head taller than her, well-cut and fair from hairline to toes, although three weeks of tropical sun had been doing aggressive work on his complexion. He squinted out at the glaring horizon, a touch hungover, and wished he had either a drink or dimmer view as balm. Madeline was one of the few people with whom he wouldn’t wear his signature thick-framed ‘fed’ shades.

“How so?” said Madeline.

“I packed all the wrong clothes, for one,” Calvin sighed. “That, and, with this whole Rebecca and Imogene thing. I don’t know. She was bawling her guts out to me this morning—Imogene, not Rebecca—and I just realized I’d read the whole thing wrong. I’ve been selfish. Worse, I’ve been a coward.”

“Yeah,” said Madeline, speaking sparingly not from disinterest but from a desire to be delicate. “It’s tricky. I can only imagine.”

“Well, you’ve had your own, you know, whatever,” Calvin started, and finished the sentence with an unspecific gesture. He alternated between staring at her eyes and the reflection of the sun, choosing the latter when the intensity of the former grew too overwhelming. “I know it’s not the same.”

“Nothing’s the same as anything,” said Madeline. “Yet it all seems sort of familiar.”

“Maybe we should—” Calvin began and hitched to a halt. The words he’d been holding back for ten years would certainly not come easily now.

She sensed the turbulence in him and cleared her throat. “I have something to tell you,” she said, leaning on the railing and facing outward to the sea to mirror him.

He looked over at her, and from the tension neither good nor ill in her eyes he somehow knew what it was. He had known it was possible, that it was natural, even expected, and yet in the oppressive heat of that winter afternoon it somehow cut straight through him and broke his heart.

Ten years earlier, Calvin was a boy in Chester, Iowa. He was just as tall, about forty pounds lighter on muscle, and his main concern in life was the upcoming release of the PC historical strategy game Civilization VII. After that was his gang of gaming friends, then Domino’s Pizza on the nights when his mom wouldn’t cook, and then a mercurial stew of demands with schoolwork somewhere near the bottom. The lower ones frequently shifted and squabbled, but none seemed poised to dethrone either the boys or the upcoming Civ. That is, until the girl on the grassy hill came into frame.

She looked like Christina’s World, and Calvin loved Christina’s World. He loved Wyeth in general, although he sometimes found him spooky. He had decided that past fall in AP Art History that Hopper’s oeuvre was his favorite overall, but Christina’s World was unbeatable as a single painting. This enthusiasm persisted even after classmate Aspen Kessler informed him that Wyeth and Hopper were basic, and that he needed to expand his taste to Eastern painters for a more worldly balance. He did not realize until many years later that she had been trying to flirt.

For five months, Christina’s World had been the first and last thing Calvin saw in a day, since he had made it both his PC lock screen and desktop. The painting graced his 4K monitor as if the two were meant for each other, filling its glowing pixels with the warm tones of a mowed Maine hill and a thin young farm girl lying atop it. Two months had gone by before he noticed the extreme thinness of her limbs, and upon Googling he discovered she was meant to be weakened with some disorder. He supposed this was meant to unsettle the viewer, as Wyeths often did, but it only made him love the whole thing more. He didn’t just love Christina’s World, he loved Christina, and he would love her even if he had to carry her all the way back to the house in his teenage arms.

One night, after a particularly frustrating round of Civ VI, he had quit the game and found himself facing her golden hill once more. One thing he liked about his choice of wallpaper was that it compelled him to keep his desktop relatively tidy, out of respect for the girl and the composition. He stared at the image, eyes fried from hours of failing to conquer the Romans, and decided he would strive to one day see the painting for real.

That was what he had decided to open with, trudging up a hill just past lunch to see why a denim jacketed girl was lying atop it. “Hey,” he said to the stranger, taking long strides. Pointwestern High was just large enough that you could make your way through and not know everyone. “You know Christina’s World?”

“No,” said seventeen-year-old Madeline Alder. She was all the dimensions of beauty Calvin would see on that Kaihoa veranda, just younger, like the weight of living had not yet burnished the adolescence off her face to leave polished cheekbones behind. Her gaze drifted from the distant steeples and big box stores of downtown to Calvin Munn. She looked vexed.

“What?” said Calvin. He had never expected vexation on the face of Christina.

“What what?” said Madeline. “Shouldn’t I be the one saying, ‘What?’ You’re interrupting.”

“Interrupting, uh, what?” said Calvin, helplessly.

“I’m ruminating,” said Madeline. “Deliberately away from people.”

“Oh,” said Calvin, and thought up an excuse. “I just thought you should know the bell rang. Lunch is over.”

“Are you a yard duty?” she asked. It was rhetorical.

“I’m Calvin,” said the boy. He was either too meek for how tall he was, or vice versa.

“I know,” said Madeline, to his surprise. She gave up on supine-lateral rumination and sat up. “You had a locker above my locker for a whole year. Your backpack straps would always hang down and it was so annoying to have to bat them out of the way to not shut them in mine.”

Calvin shrugged. “If you had, I guess I woulda had to wait for you to come back and open it, and then I would remember you for sure.”

“So, my fault for being so polite I’m forgettable?” said scowling Madeline.

“Well, you’re making up for it now,” Calvin teased, and sat cross-legged beside her.

A warm spring breeze wafted over central Iowa, first touching him and then her. “The bell rang,” said Madeline, nodding toward the empty high school yard. “Better get to class.”

“When I’m done ruminating,” said Calvin, and picked a dandelion. “Flower for your name?”

“That’s a weed,” said Madeline.

“It’s a wildflower,” said Calvin, “and with every second I don’t know your name I am more and more inclined to just make one up.”

She gave him her name, and then asked what Christina’s World could be. Their conversations would always and forever circle through topics that way. Calvin once described it as a series of layers, but it was really more like an Elizabethan couplet, with A and B and so on and so forth coming back around in turn. For a clever seventeen-year-old unused to repartee, it was both a workout of acuity and a thrill.

“It’s a painting,” said Calvin, “and I wanted to tell you, you kind of looked like it, sitting up here on the hill.”

“I thought you wanted to tell me to get to class,” said Madeline. She had black corduroy pants and a white shirt under her jacket. Her small feet wiggled with a kind of idle energy at the ends of her crossed legs. She wore gray Vans and low socks that let a hint of bare ankle shine.

Calvin, shocking even himself, looked down and imagined her sneakered feet on his lap. He imagined putting a hand on her corduroy-covered calf, continuing their conversation here on the hill until school let out and they made their way back to the bus lot. He hoped she couldn’t see this sudden image laid out on his face.

“I can want to tell you multiple things,” he said. “Jokes aside, sorry about the backpack straps.”

“It’s okay,” Madeline laughed, and then immediately started another complaint about it. “I even yelled at you one time, as you were walking away, ‘Put your stupid straps up!’ but I think you had your AirPods in.”

“Probably Bladee,” said Calvin, and wondered how many other foul or fair remarks had been lost under the din of Swedish rap.

“Hah,” said Madeline, like she was remotely cool, like she had even the faintest idea what Bladee could possibly be. Her Spotify Wrapped the three years past had been a towering tribute to Sofia Wolfson, Samia, Lucy Gaffney, and a dozen other sad girl indie darlings.

Calvin was not known for being forward at Pointwestern, but something about the spell on the hill made him feel like he had left high school behind and entered a painting all his own. He would later learn this spell was simply the Madeline Alder effect, and it would reliably recur whenever the two were alone in proximity.

Under its bolstering haze, he spoke with boldness. “Are you going to prom?” he asked, maintaining some thin sheen of casual inquiry. “I know it’s a few weeks out, but Jenna Horn and a few other people already got prom-posed.”

Madeline gave him the first of many bittersweet, soul-crushing smiles she would come to deliver. “Yeah,” she said, “with my boyfriend from California.”

Ouch! Calvin felt like his heart was Tom the cat, of Jerry fame, blasting his own face with the U-bent barrel of a cartoon shotgun. Prom was one thing, and a boyfriend was another, but a long-distance rich kid Cali guy who was willing to fly out for prom was completely unrecoverable.

“Oh, cool,” said Calvin, before the sting from his blasted-out heart could make its way up to his face and eyes. This was why he never left his PC-lit bedroom, as his buddies loved to point out. “Yeah, I dunno if I’m gonna go. I might just skip it and hit the afterparties.”

“I probably won’t see you at those,” said Madeline, and with violent nausea he imagined her and the Cali hunk rounding bases in a borrowed sedan. Fuck him! This was ridiculous. He wasn’t going to sit here and drag his tender, yearning heart across the coals of her irresistible, untouchable corduroyed legs.

“I should get to class for real,” he said, with all the politeness of a gentleman. “Check out Christina’s World—or don’t. Pics probably don’t do it justice.”

How would he know? It didn’t matter. “Hey, Calvin,” said Madeline, rising to catch him before he could leave with some sort of newfound urgency.

“Yeah?”

She clasped one long, slim hand with the other. “If I don’t see you, don’t think I’m ditching you or anything. We’re moving literally the day after prom.”

“To California?”

“To Nashville,” said Madeline. “My dad rejoined the Air Force after like a billion years of consulting. He says we’ve got to bounce around.”

“I wish I could bounce around,” said Calvin. As he took a few steps back down the schoolside hill, his voice rose to a gregarious volume. “I never go fuckin’ anywhere! But you know what? Christina’s World is in the MoMA in New York, and when I go to college out there I can visit as much as I want! They say you never run outta stuff to do in New York, day or night.”

“That sounds nice,” Madeline smiled, not matching his volume. “Thank you for coming to check on me, Calvin Munn. It’ll be much nicer to have your memory as the sweet boy on the hill than the locker strap dangler.”

Something about the way she spoke turned the knife of heartbreak in his chest with every single syllable. He suffered through it in silence for the last one-and-a-half classes of the day, and only after he poured out his agony to the boys’ groupchat in Ryan Gosling memes did he start to feel better.

The boys, for their part, did not seem to understand or emphasize. “SIMP,” one meme lambasted in reply, accompanied by a distorted doge pointing judgmentally at the viewer with its oversized human finger. A few other members offered brief, lowercased condolences, but Calvin could tell as he read it all that none of them really understood.

That night, when he booted up his PC to attempt to beat Trajan once more, he found for the very first time that Christina caused him sadness. He tried to deliberately ignore the association with Madeline Alder, but it remained, and two days later he relented in switching his desktop background over to Nighthawks.

He saw her twice more that month. The first time was in passing, outside the ceramics classroom with the odd art teacher with the Warhol hair. Madeline came out to use the hallway sink, clay all over her hands and up to her forearms. She saw him, and he smiled, and he looked at the way she had knotted the bottom of her t-shirt to pull tight at the waist. He didn’t remove his AirPods.

The second time was at prom, while Calvin did his obligatory slow dance with ambivalently good-natured Michaela Peters. Michaela was a pal from biology, where the two deskmates had spent the year gabbing about movies and ATVs and anything other than schoolwork. She was big on rough-and-tumble outdoor recreation, and big on a jock she’d known since preschool who’d never go out with a rough-edged girl like her.

Calvin had probably heard ten solid hours of lament for the unrequiting jock that senior year, and he didn’t mind it. He liked to have a girl pal where there was no real risk of messy feelings. It had actually been Michaela’s idea for the two to do prom together, so they could both enjoy a night with their friends without the dubious label of going stag.

Calvin said yes more for her than for him. Anyone seeing Calvin stag would have assumed he just wanted to bro out with the gamer boys in peace. Michaela’s lack of a date, though, would have been cruelly chalked up to her dudelike demeanor and very slight smell of beef jerky.

“You don’t have to do a prom-posal,” said Michaela, but Calvin did anyway. It was just sweet and public enough to show some effort, without being so sweet and so public that it might seem like he had true amorous intent. She cried when she saw the basket of gas station gifts, regardless.

For a stick-in-the-mud abstainer from Polecats school spirit, Calvin liked prom more than he was expecting. He liked getting fitted in the rented tux, cufflinks on his wrists. On a typical day, you couldn’t wear anything nicer than a hoodie in Chester without getting jeers from the local Dollar General set. The license to stunt with impunity for a night was an intoxicating treat.

The music was nasty, which is to say good, and the venue was done up as festive and chic as a sixties-built gym could possibly be. It was all going well until he saw Miss Alder and her date.

He was older, by a couple years, tall and sun-kissed and at ease. She had slid into his TikTok DMs, of all things, and now after six months of texting here he was. His wide surfer’s shoulders dwarfed her, and when his back was to Calvin on the dance floor she completely disappeared behind his frame.

An unrelenting bitterness took hold of Calvin Munn. He started thinking how the surfer probably didn’t know a thing about how to defeat a Roman legion, or how to delight Madeline Alder with a turn of phrase, or how to properly admire the shape of her hands when she was dirtied with clay from ceramics. Worse still, Calvin started ignoring Michaela, and they wrapped up the Billie Eilish ballad without so much as a glance in his partner’s direction.

As quickly as those thoughts came, he fought them off, now and forever after. There was no reason to hate the Californian for dating Madeline. The guy had done nothing wrong, that Calvin was aware of. He sensed with some fright that this bitterness, if allowed to root, would consume him. So, he let it all wash out and dismissed Madeline Alder as a trifle.

“I’m gonna go hang out with Sadie, if that’s okay,” said Michaela, who had been watching this battle on Calvin’s face with utter incomprehension. In contrast to Madeline, she could only understand her lab partner’s meaning if it was spelled out plainer than day. “Thanks again for doing this, and come find us if you want.”

“I’ll probably just kick it with the boys,” said Calvin, ignoring mid Madeline and her strands of near-brown hair and the way her purple dress draped around her collarbones like she was Aphrodite or—Oh, God. He stopped himself from spiraling again.

It was a blessing and a curse that Calvin was not cool enough to get his hands on an illicit flask that night. Spit-tinged Jack Daniel’s might have numbed the yearning, but it might also have sent him plummeting into an abyss of lonesome stupor. Sober, he drank plastic-flute apple cider all night at the tables with the geek scene. They played blackjack for no money and yapped about who was getting grabbed and breathalyzed out on the moonlit quad. At the end of the evening, he got Michaela back to her dad’s car and kissed her goodnight on the cheek. Then he tried very hard not to think about what might be happening some blocks away.

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The shrink I saw was a violinist, gypsy-jazz was his style. ‘We just have to make sure you’re not crazy,’ he said, which sounded simple enough to me. In as many words, he reassured me that there was no need to fabricate a long personal history of dressing up in my mum’s garments, playing with Barbies and wanting to be Ginger Spice (I’m a redhead)—the stereotypical narrative of having ‘always known’ was no longer necessary, I inferred, and I didn’t need to pretend to any extreme heteronormativity or traditional femininity. Provided that I could convince this charming, musically talented Scottish man that I was sane, the gates to womanhood would be opened, and a bright future await me.

In retrospect, it’s clear to me that I was crazy. And so was he. And so were some of my friends, of both the trans and cis ‘ally’ variety. We were all loony, without our marbles, a dozen screws loose, certifiably something or other, off our rockers, but then, how could we have known? Who’d notice another madman round here? When you are in the grip of a culture-bound syndrome, the individualising tools of modern psychiatry are useless. It’s like going to an AA led by someone who is currently drunk. Transition is a trip which society has got high on, its promise of a kind of restored relationship to the body—an always problematic thing—pulling in new users by the day. I later discovered that the fiddle player I had paid to confirm my mental soundness had been sued for telling a woman that her responses under hypnotism were ‘repressed memories’ of real abuse. She had cut off her family as a result. He was crazy! I was crazy.

If I was crazy, I didn’t know it then. I was happy. Transition was structured like a variety of what Lauren Berlant called ‘cruel optimism’ in her 2011 book of that name, an ultimately chimerical promise which, nonetheless, provides a sense of anchoring in the present. At twenty-four, I was still basically adolescent. I had not become used to the testosterone pulsing through my body, especially not the furious sexual drives it produced. Becoming a woman meant, somehow, having an identity I could be sure of. A source of strength. And I wanted that. Which returns me to the beginnings of the whole strange sequence, a beginning not in jazz, but another genre—horror. Permit me to describe, then, how a frustrated adolescent ‘discovers’ his inner femaleness in The Exorcist (1973)…

It was innocent, at first. We all like a good scare. And I was far from distinctive in developing a sort of havoc-loving sympathy for the monster. Like the supervillains in superhero comics, monsters in horror movies are not infrequently more compelling than the human beings they try to petrify or destroy—the victims being clueless, ridiculous, outright deserving of their fates, sometimes all of these at once. Worst of all, these human horror fodder could be criminally boring, at least by contrast with the anti-establishment majesty of the demon. A species of what writers call the ‘villain problem’ in which the sheer effectiveness of the bad guy makes him more compelling than the white hats is common to the horror viewing experience, and it was in the crucible of that experience that my own gendered sympathy for the devil crystallised.

In truth, I don’t know which film came first. It might have been Ringu (1998), whose ghoul Sadako’s crawling out of the television set to assault reality felt like a gauntlet thrown down before me, and a temptation: are you going to stay safely in the zone of fantasy or will you break through to horrify the consensus, to frighten its patriarchal arrogance? It might have been Let the Right One In (2008) or Near Dark (1987), whose vampire females were as impressive to me as they were frightful. Then again, maybe it was The Exorcist, for it seemed to me that Regan MacNeil was not merely ‘possessed’ by Pazuzu, some malevolent external force, but was, rather, expressing a repressed rage against the system, mocking and attacking in turns church, family, the state and even, in the form of her beleaguered Hollywood actress mother, capital and its handmaiden pop culture. The demon wants to wreck the very arrogance of American, phallocratic, technological modernity: Regan, or Pazuzu, or what the character stands for (to me, a practically metaphysical feminine rebellion), tells her mother’s astronaut friend, ‘you’re gonna die up there’. That I felt such a strong sympathy for this force of pure negativity, what the theologian Karl Barth called ‘das nichtige’, nothingness, can only be explained by my misapprehension of it. The demon, I believed, was the enemy of my enemy, and thus doing some good in the world. Didn’t the America that murdered millions in Indochina deserve this? Wasn’t all that bound up in the hypocritically sanctified patriarchal system which the demon-girl was acerbically, graphically and gutturally critiquing? I couldn’t see the demon as such, but only a metaphor for something, something I wanted: feminine power.

When I first saw The Exorcist, I had no conscious transgender identity. All I knew was that it spoke to me. I watched a whole slew of horror films at that time because nothing else seemed to have the same negative force that I was looking for. There was an outlook on the world, a kind of gaze I seemed to share with these films. I admired, I wanted to be the vampire girl Eli from Let the Right One In (who, not incidentally, starts off as a boy in the novel), Mae from Near Dark, Sadako. Plainly, they were cool. It happened that, around October 2015, with Halloween approaching, ideas of painting myself a goth-grunge witch and making my first obliquely socially permissible attempt at cross-dressing began to congeal. Just a year before, Against Me’s Transgender Dysphoria Blues had been released, and lead singer Laura Jane Grace’s assertive punk styling, all in black, furious and rebellious and proud of ragged edges—‘chipped nail polish and a barbed-wire dress’—spoke to me too. And so it began. I let it all out.

A whole story seemed to unspool from there. I began to retcon my very existence, searching for ‘clues’ from my past that I had always already been trans as well as, more synchronically, finding evidence in my everyday life that I was really something other than a man: restless legs? Gender dysphoria. Sexual anxiety? Gender dysphoria. Romantic troubles, somatic tension, gut distress? Dysphoria, dysphoria, dysphoria. Chuck it all in the trans bucket. It explains everything. I read my life back in the gloomy shade of my decision: I am not now and have never been a boy. That what I thought I was discovering I was really inventing, that I wasn’t just having feelings and interpreting them but that my interpretations were creating my feelings, was something that some people with older and more developed brains gently suggested to me. I didn’t hear it, though. The feelings were too strong. I was adolescent.

And so I ended up sitting in a psychiatrist’s office in Glasgow handing over hundreds of quid for a one-hour consultation, because apparently the pills they would give me would grant a hard, material reality to what had only been a fantasy and vestimentary up to that point. Never mind that I was getting the tablets from, guess who, the state. But regardless of cognitive dissonance about what I was supposedly rebelling against, the physical effects of the process—eighteen months of testosterone-blocking injections and orally administered synthetic oestrogen, not to mention the finasteride for hair loss, various regimes of antidepressants, a brief experiment with viagra to counteract the hormones’ anti-tumescent effects and countless, very painful facial hair removal appointments—I could not have predicted. At no point did I feel or look female. Maybe, had the hormone replacement therapy actually done anything to feminise me, I might have persisted with it. But when I looked at my naked form in the mirror and, indeed, the nude shapes of other transitioners (thank you to Reddit and other less mentionable websites), I saw something limp, eunuchised, a kind of hybrid, but certainly not female. The devil is the father of lies. I began to ask if I had been deceived. I woke up in the middle of the night, one winter in the thick of the process of transition, in that almost hypnagogic state in which your life appears to you strangely new and directly, unencumbered by the habitual impressions we have previously made and thus permitting new interpretations, and said to myself, ‘you did what? You did what?’

Indeed, was the transition really an expression of an inner, abiding self? Maybe I wasn’t ‘letting it all out’—maybe I had let something in, a force from outside that was unhelpful to me, and should have been unwelcome. If I had watched The Exorcist without my prism of reductionistic materialism, I might have been more afraid of the real danger of evil coming into my life and having its way with me. It seems to me now that I lived with an imp from the age of twenty-two to twenty-six, before I recognised my mistake. The mischief-maker was not so easy to banish, however. The afterlife of my transition was four years of low testosterone, for much of that time well beneath the level healthy for any adult, male or female. I had been told that my hormones would normalise after three to six months off HRT. Not so. Another unpredictable. That I am now, as far as I can tell, an intact and hormonally healthy thirty-something male, is a blessing for my mental wellbeing and my bones—their sturdiness now vouchsafed me, somehow, after having broken my femur at twenty-seven, a frightening event partially caused by the drugs. Tariq Goddard says of his novel of demonic possession The Picture of Contented New Wealth (2009) that ‘the reason why it was so disturbing and upset quite secular atheistic reductive materialistic people is because I believed in the truth—and I mean truth in the naive, emergent, old fashioned sense—of irreducible evil as some sort of metaphysical force in the universe that takes possession of us and that we do the bidding of.’ Rather than the demonic as a sociopolitical metaphor or a Freudian phantasm, Goddard writes a novel about its metaphysical reality. Similarly, there may have been something metaphysically evil or, to be less melodramatic, impish at work in the way I was (and let myself be) tricked into a falsehood during those transitional years.

I live in the wake of it. It was destructive. It was seductive. Transition, I Imagined, would be a creative destruction, a dialectical movement towards the good-life dream of trans womanhood. That was the lie. As the process wore on, I sensed that it had made me less a man, but not more of anything else. The truth is, and I say this about my own transition only, the imp I lived with was evil in the Barthian sense. It had no positive existence, nothing really to offer. It was destructive, yes. It was seductive. But in the end, it was wholly das nichtige. It was nothing. What transition taught me was that we don’t really know our own wills. In fact, what Charles Taylor calls the ‘porous self’ of the pre-modern world never went away. We are subject to imps, to devils we do not understand. We get invaded by them, they play us like puppets, and some are never noticed and still less exorcised. Whatever forces in the market, in hegemonic discourses, in pop culture, or in the faerie realm wrought mischief in my life for eight-ish years I was vulnerable to because I failed to understand this. I hesitate to conclude with pat self-help advice. But I’ll tell you what, in the wake of transition, I try to do: nowadays, I always question my desires. They may not really be mine.

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From the Bondurant Daily Telegraph, August 8, 2025

…Police remain baffled regarding the June 28^th double murder that occurred along a hiking trail in Devil’s Peak Park. This past Monday, Sheriff Dell Trumbull issued another increase in the public reward, bringing the total to $45,000. Sheriff Trumbull and his office are seeking any eyewitness testimony or genera; information that could help them solve the murders, which are the first in Bondurant County since the death of Carol Spears on Valentine’s Day, 2016.

At approximately 9:30 p.m., married couple Ed, 41, and Shirley, 37, Miskey were found by another hiker near the Overhanging Falls Bridge at the two-mile marker. County Coroner Patrick Scheufele’s report indicated that both Ed and Shirely had died from multiple blunt force strikes, with Ed’s body having evidence of defense wounds on his wrists and forearms. The unnamed discoverer of the bodies could not provide police with any information about a suspect, and the CCTV cameras maintained by the park have similarly offered the police little to no clues.

An excerpt from Clive Wheatley’s book, Fables, Legends, and Monsters of Appalachia (Roman Nose Press, 2020)

(Said book was discovered amongst the personal artifacts of Ross Maust, with this particular section underlined in red pen multiple times.)

The Cherokee tribe of northern Georgia shocked the colony’s Second Provisional Congress when they enlightened an intermediary named Colonel Leonard Marbury about the existence of the “moon-eyed people.” According to their ancient legends, the moon-eyed people were a secretive race of pale and bearded individuals who struggled to see during daylight hours. The Cherokee said that they drove the moon-eyed people out of the Appalachian Mountains long before the arrival of European settlers, although one medicine man informed Colonel Marbury that his ancestors did not drive the moon-eyed people out of the mountains, but rather deeper into the inaccessible recesses of the wilderness. Colonel Marbury took these accounts seriously enough to fund a small archaeological expedition into the Cherokee territory, but little evidence was turned up after two months. Still, once this legend became popularized in the small press of that time, theories abounded about the origins and whereabouts of the mysterious moon-eyed people…

A post on reddit.com/BondurantNews uploaded by a user named @AFlightRISKclledGeoff

I don’t know about y’all, but I’m seeing more and more students (I think they’re students?!) from Kresge coming over into our county and “legend tripping” in Devil’s Peak. From what I gather, there’s some viral trend based off that terrible double murder we had back in June. The goal is to go to the park after dark and race back and forth across the Overhanging Falls Bridge while chanting some gobbled-gook nonsense. The goal is to summon the spirits of the murdered, I guess. It’s really freaking annoying, and apparently, it’s causing the park’s managers to consider closing the place at dusk. That would suck for me personally as I just can’t sleep at night, and walking the trails after dark helps to put my mind at ease. The damned Kresge kids already ruin enough stuff over in Cross County; I don’t want them polluting Bondurant too.

From Blake Allison’s award-winning essay that appeared in the Kresge Chronicle, the online newspaper for students at Kresge College.

(Originally published in the Halloween issue under the title of “The Vanishing of Ross Maust,” the story was reprinted by Vanity Fair in December 2025 as part of a collection highlighting the best student journalism in the United States. The magazine’s New York editors gave Allison’s essay a new title—“What It’s Like to Live Like a God (And Ghost).”)

Ross Maust was the American average. He stood five feet ten inches tall and weighed somewhere around one hundred and seventy pounds. He drove a gunmetal gray 2021 Honda Civic (which the bank technically owned), and for work he held down two part-time jobs: one as a team member at the Sbarro in the Kresge Student Union, and the other as an overnight stocker at Publix. He had a small apartment on the outskirts of Kresge campus—a two-story affair painted in blue and white. Upstairs belonged to Maust’s roommate, a thirty-year-old assistant manager at Domino’s named Kevin Wilks. Wilks, who now lives at home with his terminally ill mother Meredith, will talk about Maust if he trusts you. He only learned to trust me after multiple visits to his home and even more gifts of Busch Light.

“Ross worked all the time, so he was kind of like a ‘ghost’ roommate. He’d come home when I would be asleep, and he’d be snoozing when I’d go to work. We hardly ever saw each other except on rare occasions when we’d both have the day off. Ross was a nice enough guy. A little quiet and very shy, but a good roommate. He wasn’t messy at all, which made him better than all my previous roommates.”

When asked about hobbies, Wilks told me that Maust was a student at Kresge, or at least he took some classes on campus.

“He spent a lot of time at the university library,” Wilks told me between heavy sips of beer. “If he had time off, Ross was either at the library or holed up in his room on his computer. The dude was into some weird stuff. Liked a lot of cyberpunk and sci-fi things, plus he would speak about local ghost tales and whatnot. Spooky stuff, you know?”

I pressed Wilks about Maust’s online life. The older man admitted that he knew next to nothing about his roommate’s online history.

“He never talked about it with me. I can tell you I was pretty shocked when all of that stuff came out after his disappearance.”

‘That stuff’ includes Maust’s prolific history of posting on an eclectic message board that has since been taken down by the owners. Called the Hadit Forum, the message board appealed to various internet sub-cultures, from conspiracy-minded posters to hardcore anime enthusiasts. A 2023 hack that temporarily shut the server down revealed that among the Hadit Forum users, a startlingly large number were university undergraduate or graduate students. Some even attended Kresge. At the time of the hack, Ross Maust, aka TheGodhead, was a new user and still registered as a junior at Kresge. Miraculously, Maust (whose name and university email address were published online) managed to avoid any negative repercussions, even despite the Hadit Forum being listed by both the ADL and the SPLC as a “source of hate online.”

Maust’s good luck started to dwindle in 2024. Unbeknownst to his roommate, Maust dropped out of Kresge owing to financial difficulties and poor grades. In that same year, his brief relationship with Kresge senior Alexa Priestman ended abruptly. (I reached out to Priestman for information, but none of my emails were answered.) Out of school and out of his only meaningful relationship, Maust dug himself deeper into the bottomless rabbit holes of the Hadit Forum. There, TheGodhead became a popular poster whose threads on Thelema, magick, and American folklore got just as many reads and responses as his more personal posts about his unsuccessful attempts to meet girls or his dissatisfaction with being a minimum wage worker.

For myself and others, TheGodhead’s most important post was his last. Uploaded on September 26, 2025, the post simply read: “Going to put my words into practice tonight, boys. Finally going to see if we still have moon-eyed people in my neck of the woods.” This remains the sole clue regarding what happened to Ross Maust. He would not be reported missing for another three days. The first person to care enough to call the police was his manager at Sbarro, who reportedly sounded more annoyed than worried. Wilks himself proved rather blasé about the whole situation, casting Maust aside as yet another internet-poisoned kook.

“Ross had a lot of strange ideas and obsessions. People like that do funny things,” Wilks said. He finished the can he was drinking, crumpled the cold aluminum, then opened another. “I think Ross either slipped and fell out at Devil’s Peak, or he went out there to end it all. Suicide, you know. Of the two options, I like to think it was an accident.”

In 2010, a self-reported taphophile named Margaret Burbage wrote to the Bondurant Daily Telegraph about the weirdest things she had ever discovered in a cemetery. To her, the oddest experience occurred in Devil’s Peak Park, which houses at least two small cemeteries dating back to the 1760s. Ms. Burbage informed the editor at the time, Gary Rescorla, that the Devil’s Peak cemeteries all included foreboding graffiti on certain tombstones: “Our girls have the moon in their eyes.” Ms. Burbage also reported seeing the same phrase repeated throughout the park. Both Burbage and Rescorla theorized in the Editorial section of the Telegraph that the messages referred to the prevalence of missing women (and some men) who were last seen in Devil’s Peak:

· Laura Cosgrove, 19. Went missing on April 30, 1967.

· Edna May Robinette, 25. Went missing on November 5, 1972.

· Clara O’Dwyer, 16, and Courtney Grabowski, 17. Both went missing on June 18, 1988.

· Bill Hankerson, 58. Went missing on February 11, 1996.

· Jenny and Jeff Collinson, both 33, disappeared on October 13, 2008.

· Ross Maust, 23. Went missing on September 26, 2025.

The frequency of these disappearances led to a popular belief in the existence of a serial killer operating in Bondurant and Cross counties, and some amateur criminologists even linked the unknown and unnamed slayer with other disappearances along the greater Appalachian Trail. More obscure and occulted voices, such as some users on the Hadit Forum, echoed the work of TheGodhead by suggesting a more supernatural explanation, i.e., malevolent entities in the park were responsible. The Devil’s Peak phenomena eventually found its way into the hands of David Paulides, who made a Missing 411 documentary about the events, including the strange case of Ross Maust.

The most bizarre chapter in the saga of Ross Maust occurred when a clairvoyant in Portland, Oregon named Olga Fursenko reached out to several people involved in the story, from Blake Allison to Kevin Wilks. Each time Mrs. Fursenko’s emails were left unread, so the dogged necromancer (who had previously worked on several homicide cases with the Oregon State Police) began penning handwritten letters. Again, her missives were usually left behind in wastebaskets. However, one letter somehow wound up in the hands of Wilks’s neighbor, Mr. Lee Eckes. Mr. Eckes sent the letter to the county police in Bondurant, who in turn forwarded a copy of the letter to a private investigator working for the Maust family named Jed Thompson. Thompson was ultimately responsible for the letter’s publication and dissemination online and in print. What follows is the so-called “meat” of Mrs. Fursenko’s discoveries from the astral plane.

Our shared god Hadit, the bringer of light and the keeper of the burning will, has allowed me visions of what happened to our beloved Ross Maust. In my visions I see Maust as a nighttime traveler going towards a location charged with special energy. I believe that this location is called Devil’s Peak Park. The energy there is extremely powerful and almost entirely negative. It is a very old place that has seen much horror since time immemorial. It is a giant mouth that swallows souls and sucks their energy. It is a malignant place, even if the entities who dwell there are not necessarily evil.

Our beloved Ross Maust went to that place full of despondency and despair. Such emotions are bad for a conjurer, for black feelings welcome in and absorb other black feelings. Like attracts to like, and since our beloved Ross Maust journeyed to Devil’s Peak to communicate with the dead, he made a fatal error.

Yes, his goal was necromancy. Our beloved Ross Maust sought to uncover the killer behind a double murder. The great Hadit told my spectral self that these murders were mistakes—the killers did not set out to kill, but rather to conceal. The unfortunate dead saw something that they should not have, and for that they were ritually silenced by the old people of the mountains.

Yes! Our beloved Ross Maust knew the truth but wanted confirmation from the spirits of the dead. The great Hadit showed me how our beloved Ross Maust journeyed deep into Devil’s Peak well after midnight. There, after crossing a bridge several times, our beloved Ross Maust uncovered a fairy light that illuminated a deep burrow that led far into the depths of the earth. He followed the light down into the tunnel and reached a point where escape became impossible. Our beloved felt fear in this moment—fear that became panic as soon as the small, cold hands reached his feet and pulled him further down. These strong hands pulled and pulled until our beloved Ross Maust was lost to our world forever.

But rejoice! The great Hadit has told me and shown me multiple times that our beloved is still alive. There is no point in searching for his corpse, and there is no point searching for him at all. He shall live out the rest of his mortal life in splendor amongst his subjects.

Yes! Yes! Yes! The great Hadit wants me to inform you and all who still care about our beloved Ross Maust that he is a brand new god amongst the old people of the mountains. He is worshipped and adored and given libations by the small, pale dwarves who have lived so long in the caves and burrows and bowels of the earth that they regard common humanity as immortal. Our beloved Ross Maust is their latest deity, and he shall perform this function until bodily death. At that point, his soul will walk with Hadit in Elysium, while the white people of the mountains will seek out a new god from among the living.

The esotericism of Mrs. Fursenko’s letter was rejected outright by the Maust family. However, they, Jed Thompson, and a small number of volunteers focused their time and energy on searching Devil’s Peak Park for Ross’s remains. (A month into the disappearance, everyone directly involved in the case operated under the assumption that Ross had perished sometime in late September.) As of this writing, no remains have been found, and no clues have been discovered. The only notable result of this private affair was the confirmation that the graffiti first noticed by Margaret Burbage in 2010 remains and has even multiplied across the park.

The case of Ross Maust is still considered open and ongoing, but the citizens of Bondurant County already speak of him as the newest addition to the county’s long record of the permanently missing. Sheriff Trumbull’s last press conference was in October 2025, and since then his office has not mentioned Ross Maust at all. Jed Thompson is still on retainer but claims that the Maust family has not paid him for the past four months. It appears that the case will stand forever frozen in time until something unexpected happens, like finding Ross’s DNA on a tree branch or coming across a wild-eyed and bearded hermit along the Appalachian Trail who knows far too much about the Hadit Forum or the innerworkings of Sbarro pizza. Until then, summer strollers and hardy hikers will come and go in Devil’s Peak. Then, at night, some of the braver citizens will continue to dare each other to cross the Overhanging Falls Bridge. Life will go on, just without Ross Maust.

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—and how about that dinner? Can you believe it?”

Sunset as dried rose leaves, late summer swoon, days before the end of the vernal apogee—nights lighter, peak clench no longer.

She tells him it was truly just remarkable, that expectations were not only met but exceeded. He very much likes hearing this. He continues his praise, presuming she’ll join the chorus. She intends to listen.

They first met at a party where a friend set them up. He liked her, was very interested, and did not hide it. So keen he was after their introduction he implored their friend to tell her his thoughts straight, to shed all mystery and to let flow what sprung. She thought it was cute when the friend explained his instructions as she read the note he scribbled to ensure every detail was relayed completely and without error. She already liked him, she knew, but wasn’t yet ready.

So they went with other friends to a beach or a bar, to dinner or brunch. In no instance did he seem a poor match. He speaks well, has a good job, and has a charm about him. He is confident and not afraid to show it. He had said she was pretty in front of the others and how much he looked forward to taking her out one day. He sat next to her and held the back of her chair or even her hand when they were sat around a table. She enjoyed the small caresses, the firm squeezes, as he told stories of places traveled and people seen. Her friends laughed and looked to her to see her reaction; they whispered with eyes gesturing at the odd placement of an arm. After, they asked her if she was with him yet, if they were finally together. She said not yet.

A month of this passed. A month where not a weekend went without them seeing each other—though never alone, accompanied by friends always. Days and nights ended with him asking her to come with him the next day to a park or a bar or even just a walk about town. She declined three times, and each time he asked why: it’s not that she wasn’t interested, it was just bad timing, that she did like his company and wanted to see him more when the time came.

All got together again for the long weekend, her friends and his. But there was no telling of stories or held hands this time, however. He was quiet, reserved, and she worried he was embarrassed or defeated, that she had strung him along, or—even worse—he was no longer interested. She grabbed his arm before the night was over and asked if the dinner he offered was still available.

Glasses of wine are brought to their table. The server asks if they are ready to order, and they are. Some cheese would make a nice ending he suggested upon leaving the restaurant. She asked if it was far, and he told her it was not: it is just around the corner. Just up Queen to King, mere feet. He spoke to the staff as friends upon entering. He is something of a regular here.

But dinner: it was fantastic, she thinks, as he places their order—dinner was wonderful. The rustic décor of the place, all matched with plates and glassware and trim—even the aroma of logs stacked near the entrance: it all harkened back. Even the forks—the cutlery!—and the butter plate and the repurposed driftwood charcuterie boards, and the blinds! Yes, every detail—but these cannot hold her mind as much as what was served.

And what was served? What of the food?

Berkshire and a Red Wattle make Berkawattle; then conceive with those burnt-clay Durocs—for we are stewards of Creation—to make Berkawattleroc; then, finally, to finish the Promethean pig, to resurrect Soto’s cerdos pitched from caravel, give him an Ossabaw sow. Serve your food cooked of the fat, make lard-tongued these people, with your famous Berkawattlerocabaw.

They take these old things and make them new. Benne seeds, Carolina Red Peas, Cistercian-handled fungus that absorbs the flavors of boiled peanuts and ember roasted cabbage. Seeds once revered by those gentlemen scholars, spilling ink to catalogue these varieties in this land, shipping the many impulses and studied species of Michaux. What didn’t work was tossed and what prevailed became fixtures. Hoppin’ John no longer the same?—like Lazarus raise them. Melodramatic? We beg to differ: to extinguish the taste for the sake of utility will make Man something other than he is. He will accept what he is given though it is not what he asked for—and soon he will learn to like it.

A side of skillet-cooked cornbread; chicken with a fine braise and spilling juices into chantarelles, spinach, and brioche croutons; and the pears!—compressed to enhance the flavor. Southern gastronomy, with all its haecceity, refurbished with the time and skill material prosperity can destroy by induced comfort.

But does the line cook prepare this morsel with fear and trembling? They don’t even think of it and move on.

Cocktail with passionfruit, cantaloupe, lime, and celery bitters. The vodka was smooth, not a singe. He ordered a rare breed to sip with his plate of pork—she liked how he finished his plate. He could not get over the taste as they sat dining, it was brilliant, incredible, everything advertised, exquisite! He wonders still how they did it: ingredients or methods, or is it both?—she tells him very likely it is both.

All well put together, well worth the price. She knows he spent a sum.

Their cheeses are brought on one board. There is a baguette skillfully sliced, with no quarter of an inch difference—there is a machine in the back, no venerable artist. They do not need another glass, no thanks—ils le sirotent. Two cheeses: he chose one, she the other. They admire the display of these, the fresh shimmer there, the green freckles interlacing the other. He compliments her order, and she returns in kind, not sure what to say.

The straw mat imprinted on the rind where it sat to ripen, the heavenly texture, the just right give-and-take—this knife is so clumsy, I need a better tool, some better means, to grasp and apply this miracle. Brie de Meaux, in her best season, from Seine-et-Marne only: you show forth so many things. Delicate beauty, yet fortifying. Is this the meek who inherit? Wisdom-made and forming: truly more than cheese.

Smell, the faithful guide, is aflutter for the heap of Roquefort on the board. Sadly, no jams or slices of fruits to abate the pungent decay. The pencillium roquforti makes royal the bloodline of this bulwark. It commands a legion, dux feles, Gallica cohorts eternal remaining to serve, to protect. Roquefort-sur-Soulzon, shadows on walls in cabanes, the chalky way, the ewe’s milk sits three months under those thousand eyes. And in that season, those forty days, when he could not find a fish, the Frankish king sat picking out these precious bits.

They discuss the qualities in neutral accents. They wonder what it would be like to be raised in this, to know it all like the back of your hand. This isn’t authentic, they say, it just isn’t right! Well, it’s been heated and sterilized, per FDA—these are knockoffs. Imagine knowing it all, knowing the lay of it, to watch it all be made. It takes time, they agree, these things are so easy to destroy but so long to create.

And is near four-hundred years enough? No, there are much older—but there were times when this was in hand. Is it too far gone? No, it will just be different—but very much the same. It never changes.

These thoughts come when they are full, so re-constituted after a day of nothing at all.

King Street is empty. Queen is silent. How can we extend the evening? Their glasses are finished and the board is littered with debris and crumbs and streaks of these delicious labors. Conversation has reached a peak with only a few servings left. Now, there was only that moment of decision.

So much time. And what is lost? Here, a little over two-hundred dollars in an evening. These many narrow alleys, that wrought iron, the sword-bearing gates; congregations innumerable on this sun-soaked sliver, bells resounding pleading unto ages: none can be lost for they will all come again. Steeple-lined to break the feet of giants, Nimrod pleads incoherent when treading this bed of nails—let these be as caltrop to insolent Capaneus! Deliberate and negligent be as pricked equal unto the root! But Man will see this and know—he will know!—it can all be done again—you cannot deprive him for so long. Redound out and unto and upon all them still waiting—line up to get in. Mania for mummies, terminal and dread ending, mercenary reverence, awaken that molding and sweetness of life. Change and decay in all around I see; you who changest not, abide with me! Give it time and it will all return, raise it all up again—but it will take some time, and won’t be the same. As many evolutions as her namesake, restoration is always in style. The old goat’s garden is never far, but upon it must come our better nature.

He watches her twist her foot to the tune, the aquamarine nails upon her bitty toes, the uncalloused curvature. She looks out the window, pensive and striking. How much longer must we wait for these things? Delay until when? Cover over this ditch and let me in, there can be no gradual step.

“You are never going to sleep with me—are you, Elise?”

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