Fiction: John Gordon

Tony says: My girlfriend is so sick. She hasn’t pooped in, like, four days.
I think about his girlfriend. It makes sense. I met her once, on a Tuesday—I know it was a Tuesday, because Tony brought her to the science museum, introduced us, and then, as they walked away, Tony said: “Who works on a Tuesday? What a loser!” She seemed impressed by that, so I didn’t feel bad when my brain filed her under “looks a little like a troll doll.”
Troll dolls, of course, have no orifices, and so cannot poop.

Tony says: Why do I have a sesame seed on my cheek? Where did that come from?!
From a hamburger bun, prepared by the museum café chefs, I think. That should be obvious. I saw you eat it. Tony says: I can only stay for part of the day—I have strep throat.
That’s ok, I say. You’re just a volunteer. Not a real employee in any way, I think. And I wonder if he should be working with children at all today. That would be a harsh way to learn about microbial life.
Tony says: Never try to anally rape someone.
You’re right! I say. But why, Tony, would you even bring that up?
Tony just thought he’d tell me, because, he says, I look like a rapist.
That’s a tough pill to swallow, but I’m proud that he didn’t reference my “Jew nose” again. I think Tony is growing as a person.
And then Tony takes the leg of a plush toy buffalo and pretends it’s his penis. He thrusts into the air above the anthropology play area, and says: You should have heard how many times I farted at school today.
Did you fart a lot, I ask. Tony shouts: Yeah!
Don’t fart now, Tony, I warn him.
Tony says: I was going to, but it went back inside me.
I give Tony a present, and I say: That’s what she said.
Tony laughs and laughs, and the fart comes back out. He bumps into the desk, toppling a display of sand dollars.
Tony! I say. You broke the one with the hole!
Tony looks sly, and Tony says: I break my girlfriend’s hole every day.
Troll dolls, I think. I don’t even know what that means, I say.

Tony says: Yes you do, you sick freak.
No, I say.
Tony is exasperated with me. Tony says: I pound her hole every day. Is that better?
I am honest with Tony when I say, no, it is not.
Tony says: You’re sick.
Tony’s mom asked my boss to let him come in on Thursdays, to give him something to do. My boss asks me sometimes how Tony’s doing. He’s a good kid, I say. Yeah, she says. He just gets…distracted.
Tony is distracted now. Tony, I ask, what’s up?
Tony says: I’m just super tired today.
Dot dot dot, I think.
Tony puffs out his chest and says: Long sex last night.
You’re lying, I say. Troll dolls, I think.
Tony says: No, see, I’m worried she might be pregnant! That’s a side effect of being pregnant!
Long sex? I ask, trying not to let the words touch anything on their way out of my mouth.
Tony says: No. Not pooping for so long.
I think there’s a better test, I tell him.
Tony says: Well, if she starts to grow a big fat belly, then I’ll know it’s a baby.
I guess so. I guess that’s a way to tell. But Tony’s education may be lacking in that area. Tony goes to a school with only five other students, because he got beat up at his old school. The new school is better, but not perfect.
Tony says: One kid at my school…
Which one, I ask.
Tony says: Not my girlfriend, and not the kid who takes a taxi every day, and not Jeff, and not the big fat guy. The other one. He thinks he’s so cool, because he carries a staff around.
A cane? I ask.
Tony says: No, a staff. Like a wizard. But he’s not cool at all.
And then Tony tries to reassemble the broken sand dollar. And then he sings a song with words I would never, ever repeat. Distracted.
Tony, I say. What are you going to do about you and your girlfriend?
Tony says: I’ll just stick my hand up her…thing, and yank the baby out. 
Tony and I sit with this for a little while.

Tony says, sadly: Black people call condoms gloves.
Why didn’t you wear a glove, Tony? I ask.
Tony says: I don’t knooow!
He starts to collect his things, and adds: I don’t think she’s even pregnant.
You have to be sure about that, I say. What are you going to do, Tony?
Tony says: Well, I didn’t…we never…I didn’t have… sex with her.
Tony has stopped me in my tracks again. How can she be pregnant then?
Tony says: I don’t know! That’s just what she says. She’s worried because she can’t poop!
Tony and his girlfriend are a good pair. Two little dolls, keeping each other company.
See you next week, dude, I say.
Tony says: Whatever, pervert.

All rights reserved to John Gordon.

Fiction: Matt Jones

I watched them through a slit in the fence, a microcosm of wood so rotten and waterlogged that I could push my fingers through it like warm clay, squeeze it in my hand. I let the gray moisture into my mouth, the splinters catching in my throat, so I could not call out or speak without a burning in my eyes. I pressed my face up to the slit, my knees burrowing into the damp grass, the pixilated wood grain bouncing in and out of my peripheral. I saw three boys, three boys through a slit that would prove to constitute everything that world was and could be in that exact time and place. I saw three boys, dressed by their mothers, cowlicks in their hair reaching out to the sun like daisies, and freckles on their cheeks catching that very sun in pinprick pools that spilled over into wrinkles and hard lines when they grew older.

These boys were cruel and novice and boys in every sense of the word. These boys would grow into men that I would know later in life, men who were worse off than me in only the most superficial sense of the word. All would be married, all to wives that I would rather stable and board across the county line than share a bed with. All would have jobs that held weight, a weight that could only crowd the jowls and clog the arteries of a man who knew weight to be anything other than something that hurt to carry.

One boy held a knee to the chest of a writhing and whimpering canine, a canine that I had befriended over the preceding months. The other two, leaner and cast like crumbling stone in the sun, stood over his shoulder with looks that ranged somewhere between devious triumph and inquisitive disgust, a coal shovel propped up against one of their thin frames. Often, I walked home with him through the alleyways between the houses, alleyways overrun with chinch bugs and tall grass and rusted wrought iron that snaked its way up fence boards and around gate posts like it was trying to grow. I called him Rodger because that was his name and he walked with me.

His hair was wiry and gray and grease-tipped and knotted at the roots. One of his incisors could not be tucked into his lip and always stood out to give the appearance of an ugly and misinformed snarl. My parents did not like Rodger, or dogs, and I spent many days after school with him between the fences, among the chinch bugs.

One of these boys was Joseph Turner, the one with his knee pressed into Rodger’s chest, the weight of his body breaking shallow breaths down into heaving sighs that eventually turned into quiet. Joseph Turner was fat and his mom was fat and his dad was a pussy and couldn’t integrate himself into a world of fat, so he often spent his nights on the porch with warm tea and a sweat-stained collar while Joseph and his mother raided the refrigerator inside. The men in our town were so tired. They spent their days breaking the most vile parts of the earth into ash and dust that they inhaled quicker and deeper than the beers that they used to chase down the dryness. They inhaled deep enough so that it would sit in the pits of their chest and collect into loose piles that they would breathe and cough into the air around them, so much so that it coated the linings of their throats and blew toxic into everything they touched. The women were the first ones waiting at the door when they came home, ready for open-mouthed kisses that rivaled sucking the orifice of a chimney.

Joseph’s dad was a teacher. He did not drink or make love but I’d seen him crying many times.

It was hard for me to sit there behind my slit, that infinitesimal tear so gaping it could pull you through with the force of a black hole and shred your being into lunchmeat. However, that is what I did. I knelt in the grass and did not make a peep when Joseph Turner raised the coal shovel high above his head. I did not move a muscle when he brought it down once and then twice and then a third time, cracking what was surely the larynx. And I surely did not bat an eye when he looked through that slit with an expression that could suck the stitches off of a freshly sewn wound. Instead, I went to a sleepover at his house in the sixth grade, one where Mr. Turner made nice eyes at me and traced my skin so that it tingled while the other boys disemboweled nascent rodents born in a bubbling broth under the gooey glow of the moon. I got drunk with him in the eighth grade and many times after that. We chased the same girls and played on the same baseball team in high school. We bummed cigarettes off each other and spent late nights lamenting the fate of our town. During a party after high school graduation, I told him his dad was a faggot and he said he knew, and he said that I was a faggot too. I told him that he killed my dog and he said that it wasn’t my dog and we were never friends again after that, or before that. Just stuck in the same town.

However, before all of this, on the day of Rodger’s death, I did not go home. I stared through the slit until the sun fell and I could no longer see the tiny mass of gray hair, speckled red. I walked between the alleyways and the biting chinch bugs avoided my blood for they would have died of sadness if they took a taste. I walked past the houses out on the main road, the one that took the men away every morning to journey down to the molten center of the earth so they could beat on solid stone until their knuckles bloomed purple and their respiratory systems were transformed into an anomaly of modern science and an adaptation of brute industry.

I walked out into the mines, the mountains and the mounds of ashen rock dust and gray matter. I took a lift down the central mineshaft, the cables reeling in agony as they made their way further into a system of tiny tunnels that had been chipped away by those men, our men, the ones whose knuckles bloomed purple from the work and blossomed a blackness that grew like loosestrife into their lungs until the day the mine closed. When the lift got to the bottom, I could no longer see. I did not bring a light, and instead placed my hand on the wall and walked, the jagged lines of the rock smooth on my fingertips. I walked in the pitch black for over an hour. Eventually, I placed my forehead on the cool surface of the stone and screamed, hoping that the weight of it all might crush me into such a fine spray that I could be swallowed by someone on the next shift and coughed back out into the sun and float into a layer of the atmosphere free of toxicity. When that didn’t happen, I sprinted off in a direction that I thought would lead me to an exit. I made it about four feet and crushed my nose so hard that I spent the next week and a half sneezing up loose gobs of blood and bone that looked more like melted lipstick and pepper flakes than anything else. They found me there the next morning and my dad grounded me for what would have seemed like a lifetime if I had been missing anything.

The next couple of months after Rodger died constituted the summer before the sixth grade. I spent the majority of my time throwing gravel at the side of my dad’s car, the passenger side door left pockmarked with nickel-deep dings that could only be seen in particular angles of the sun.

School started in September and Joseph Turner was fifteen pounds heavier and half a foot taller and I would spend the night at his house in a few weeks.

When class let out, I made my way back to the slit and knelt down in the shallow grooves of the dirt, made from my knees each day before that one. I pressed my face close enough to the slit that the wood splinters looked like tiny twigs floating aimlessly in the fluid of my eye. I knelt there through rain and sun and snow and market collapses and new millenniums. I knelt there until the slit was no longer a slit and just an open space where a fence had fallen and melded into the earth. I knelt there until the space was filled with concrete and the pattering of small feet and the squeaky groan of shopping cart wheels. I knelt there until my shoulders were broad and my voice had deepened and my father had gone. I knelt there until Joseph Turner was married and had kids of his own and his father had gone and I never blinked.

All rights reserved to Matt Jones.

Poetry: Tim Kahl

The gut flora of a Disney princess
possesses a natural bouquet that the experts
say has a hint of vanilla in it.
The skatole churns in the bowel of Cinderella
even when she dreams a history
with the prince, the solemn kiss,
the spit swap that travels the esophagus
to introduce another species to them
both. Snow White is no less a nuisance
to the gastrointestinal tract of men.
The growth in her dry mouth is a toxic cocktail
of microbial trouble, and rumor has it
she has a tendency to bite.

But Disney princesses are not Tasmanian
devils who gouge each other in love battles
and let leaping tumors fly from face
to face. They smear, spit, bite, and dribble,
then wake up the next morning with a mask
of death growing on their snouts.
The tumors act like parasites and evolve,
transmitting fate like a traveling colon cancer
on the hand of a lab worker who
accidentally stuck herself with a syringe.

But no Disney princess has ever died of
colon cancer. They can live forever on
the screen and on little girls’ lunch boxes.
All they need is one long kiss to sustain them
in their precious moment. It is so delightful
to see Pocahontas and John Smith, Jasmine
and Aladdin, Belle and the Beast
in consort position, one tends to forget
the bacterial circus that performs all things
nutritious, deep in the gut, instinctive. Without it,
we might be too clean to live and
“love” would be just another word on the heap.

All rights reserved to Tim Kahl.

Nonfiction: Kirk Wisland

We are a generation of worthless men.

Watching and waiting.

Making nothing. Building nothing. Planting no seed.

What do we know?

We know drugs—we got high, baked, buzzed, tripped, dosed, shroomed, zoomed, huffed, puffed; we snorted and jammed needles into our arms and legs and between our toes, and we rode the wave of euphoria that was ecstasy like the second coming of the love revolution, which they killed, they who had watched in horror as their order had disintegrated twenty-five years earlier with a whole generation checking out to become hippie pacifist non-consumers—and they were not going to be caught unprepared like that again, no sir! So when ecstasy took off, when the raves washed ashore in Puritan America like the second coming of the British invasion but this time from Manchester, and the dancing

dancing

dancing to the point of dizzy dehydration, of dropping like suddenly paralyzed squirrels from trees, the dancing and the emphatic oneness, the cuddling—when they saw this burgeoning new love movement, they sprang into congressional action with the cleverly acronym-ed Reducing Americans’ Vulnerability to Ecstasy

Act,

the RAVE Act,

which stated that the promoter of a rave was responsible for the drugs that might be used or sold at their events, that the promoters were responsible for every single person in the warehouse, under the night sky, wherever the rave was, that the local authorities could assume illegal activity based on the visual sighting of water bottles, pacifiers, and glow-sticks—and thus the burgeoning threat of the raver was quashed like the dope fiend in Reefer Madness and the raves were legislated to near-extinction by a gaggle of future presidential wannabes led by Joe Fucking Lieberman, all eager to bestow their benign providence in order to protect us from all that dangerous peace, love, and understanding, and thus with the gavel strike and presidential pen, that fire of love was doused and order restored.

We worthless men,

What do we know?

We know boozing—we know beer bongs and quarters and binge drinking. We are the international champions of drunk driving, date rape, puking on our shoes—the vast celebrations of our regrettable ridiculous inebriations. We follow our boozy-writer dreams, as if it was F. Scott’s highball that wrote Gatsby or Ernest’s bag of matador red wine that made the sun also rise. We know fucking. And then fucking crying about fucking, or the loss of fucking, or the fucking of others who used to do their fucking with us.
We know profanity. We are vulgar in ways that make George Carlin and Lenny Bruce smile down from heaven—we are so fucking full of shit, shithead, bitch, ass, asshole, asswipe, and of course fuck, with all of the awesome grammatical “Noun! Verb! Adjective!” and cultural usage opportunities that come with such a versatile four-letter word. We have stripped swearing of almost all meaning now. When we were young, thirty years back in the pleasantness of the post-Vietnam 1970s, a loud public utterance of the F-bomb would have elicited shock and awe, gasps and tut-tutting from our elderly ancestors, possibly even rebuke from parents with young children in tow, but now fuck is almost boring—the lazy verbal hackery of a clichéd script in which we utter it, in a whiskey-soaked two-packs-a-day drawl, as a compliment—this is good fucking soup, Ma. What do we know?

We know abortion—the only seed we planted the one we desperately wished to spill on fallow ground. We are the delinquent fathers of a million zygotes flushed from this world in sterile stainless steel clinics by women who were as unwilling to carry our babies as we were to prevent their conceptions.

What do we know?

We know how to break things—how to smash, crash, crack, blast, shoot, shatter, splatter. We litter the Internet with videos of our comic-inspired mayhem, our ritual need to immaturely ape masculine idiocy. We are a generation of Jackasses.

But we don’t know how to fix things.

When we were kids, our dads drove cars up onto ramps and drained thick gritty black oil into greasy metal pans, popped hoods and fixed plugs and wires, gaskets, valves, brake-lines, carburetors. Our dads knew how to work the hand-throttle to choke a winter-frozen car to life. But we can’t fix things. We can’t change our oil or jack up the car to fix a flat—why bother when Jiffy Lube does oil changes for twenty dollars while we sip complimentary coffee with non-dairy creamer in Styrofoam cups and hum along to the pleasant Muzak, and why learn the machinations of the jack and tire iron when the ubiquitous cell phone means we’re never alone anymore anyway, so we can just call some guy, some tattooed retro-dude with a pompadour, one of the last few who know the ancient secrets of changing a flat on the dangerous shoulder of the freeway, those wizards who know the proper alchemy of the engine, how to talk to our machines and make them purr. So we drive our cars on pancake-flat tires at seventy miles an hour, never thinking to wonder why our hood slopes down from left to right, because there’s a light that’s supposed to blink to life on the dashboard and warn us when the air pressure in the tire gets too low—the light that tells us it’s time to take it somewhere so that somebody can do something about it. What do we know?

We know information. We know everything about everything. We are Googled, Twittering and tweeted, spammed, hyperlinked and Wiki-fucking-pediaed. We have near-godlike knowledge at our constant fingertips; we are all now Gods of Information; we are the envy of our forbearers, who, with their near-pagan superstitions, watched the sky while trying to the divine the intent of a cruel and capricious Mother Nature—will it be rain or hail?

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Music: Crimes

Originally a solo project inspired by the seedy lives of fictional criminals, frontman Andrew Jansen and his Minneapolis band Crimes—comprised of Luke Friedrich, Hannah Fraiser, and Reese Hagy— are now a fully-fledged, semi-psychedelic foursome. Their jangly, dark songs sound like something you’d hear echoing down a shady alleyway in the wee hours. Excellent music to scare yourself shitless with while exploring the city at night. 

The themes of vice and depravity pervade the band on all levels, from their name, to their lyrical content, to their darkly alluring and mysterious sound. Give a listen to these featured tracks then head over to their website to buy their new album, Good Hope.

Also make sure to check out their amazing answers to our Five Pressing Questions, which they turned in to a perfect interview with the band opportunity.

Track 1: Afraid

Track 2: Bathe

Track 3: Drifting Funeral

All rights reserved to Crimes.