Some Books and Authors mentioned in this interview:

Kevin Wilson: The Family Fang / Tunneling to the Center of the Earth: Stories

Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions / Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings / The Aleph and Other Stories

Etgar Keret: Suddenly, A Knock on the Door / The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God & Other Stories / The Nimrod Flipout: Stories

Stephenie Meyer: Twilight / New Moon / Eclipse / Breaking Dawn

Orson Scott Card: Ender’s Game / Speaker for the Dead / Xenocide / Children of the Mind

Tomas Transtromer: The Great Enigma / The Half-Finished Heaven / The Deleted World

Roberto Bolaño: 2666 / The Savage Detectives / By Night in Chile

J. R. R. Tolkien: The Fellowship of the Ring / The Two Towers / The Return of the King

Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities / If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler / The Baron in the Trees

I Have a Confession

—from Vertigo Browning’s Hello, Hella Hot Cyborgs!, Part 3: Security Status

At the bookstore, I hit on the girl who works here by reversing the order of the books she’s sorted from A to B. I also point their spines toward the inside of the shelf so she sees only the paper edges. She might be half my age. I dig in my already-pink eyes (I’m thirty-something years old, and I still eat my eye-boogers). I think I’ve “turned her off”—which makes me smile since we’re in the sci-fi section with the series about robot girls who can literally be turned off. The bad guys always beat them by pressing their power-off buttons.

“There are so many,” she says, re-rearranging the books.

She’s seen my eye-boogers. I wipe my finger on my shirt.

“I must have a medical problem,” I say.

She twitches: “You like these books? They’re awful.”

Oh, she means the books about the robot girls.

“What,” I say. “God, what, no, they’re terrible.”

She’s quiet.

I ha, nervously.  

“Can I help you find something,” she says.

“Your ‘on’ button,” I say, and I motion as if poking her belly.

I’m so nervous, I dig for another eye-booger. To my surprise, she eats one of her own. Then she struts away. On my way out, I see the same girl, calm behind the counter, reading the third book in the series.

This story originally appeared in Monkeybicycle.

Jason Gordy Walker lives in Birmingham, Alabama. His poems have been published in Measure, Town Creek Poetry, Think Journal, Cellpoems, and elsewhere, and his brief fictions have appeared online in Monkeybicycle, Journal of Microliterature, Nap, Cafe Irreal, and others. He teaches composition at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, washes dishes at a local restaurant, and plays bass in a rock band called Limbs.

**

Image: Flickr / Rooners Toy Photography

Julian Tepper: Balls: A Novel / Ark

Woody Allen: Mere Anarchy / Without Feathers / Side Effects

The Cohen Brothers: The Gates of Eden / The Big Lebowski / Burn After Reading

Liquidation Sale

Like every day, Ben Arkin woke this morning at 4 a.m. and went into his office, a small room at the back of his Wooster Street loft cluttered with stacks of newspapers and books, and commenced with his routine.

A new journal rested on the antique desk and Ben turned to the first page, spreading his hand over the smooth paper, reached for an obituary from his obituary file, “Thomas Posner, fifty-three, pancreatic cancer,” taped the clipping to the journal page and circled the age with a red marker. After Posner, there was:

Newman, forty-two, car accident Smith, seventy-six, liver failure Hicks, sixty-one, aneurysm Vanderbilt, seventy-two, heart attack Morris, forty-nine, lung cancer

With each obituary Ben drew the red loop around the age of the deceased and taped the square of newspaper into the jour- nal. Why, at eighty-three, to see that he had outlived other men gave Ben a good feeling about himself and the day at hand.

Exercise followed. Two sets of ten push ups, three sets of twelve sit ups, three sets of eight barbell curls, four sets of ten jumping jacks, one minute of toe-touches, five squats. Below the last obit he wrote down his stats. He took pleasure in looking over the numbers. They were proof of effort in his battle against aging. He liked to clear away his long list of enemies and concentrate on the one named aging, in particular. Doing this now, he closed his eyes, pressed his hands together before his chest and hummed aloud a long deep note.

Moving on, he addressed sleep. Looking at the chart, he saw:

May 1st, 2012 – 7 hours
May 2nd, 2012 – 8.5 hours
May 3rd, 2012 – 7.5 hours
May 4th, 2012 – 8.25 hours
May 5th, 2012 – 7.5 hours

For last night, the 6th of May, Ben, checking his Mickey Mouse watch and doing the math, wrote down eight hours. It pained him to think of all the time he slept away, creating nothing. Yet he knew that his genius depended more than anything on a good night’s rest. In fact, as far as his list of enemies, fatigue directly followed aging. She was a true bitch. But he had methods for fending her off, too. The ten-minute nap was king. Coffee, yes. However, he also liked to run the bristles of a brush along his body, first the palms, then the neck, then the stomach and chest, for this inspired the skin and senses to awaken.

On the next journal page, he listed yesterday’s fruit and vegetable consumption, his vitamin intake, as well as the herbs, roots and powders he had bought in Chinatown and ingested after lunch:

One multivitamin
Two tablespoons of fresh ginger
Handful of goji berries
One stalk of Broccoli
Small scoop of cinnamon
One apple

Go to Chinatown, observe the physical toughness of the very oldest Chinese-New Yorkers and soak in that energy. This was Ben’s order to himself and he did it nearly every day for inspiration. In the last year, as well, Ben had begun posting notes around the loft, by the toilet, at the front door. Things like:

Swoop down. Scoop up. Not me. Not yet.
That Pain Is In Your Head.
I Remember.

At the next moment, he prepared a new note, “Picasso died young,” and glued it to door of his office. Then he read yesterday’s newspapers, showered, shaved and drank two cups of strong black coffee.

By 7:30 a.m., he was in the art studio with his assistant, Jerome, wrapping the edges of a blank six-by-four foot canvas in dress-tie material. Many of the ties were the first-ever made by Ralph Lauren, worn by Ben thirty-five years earlier, when he was still an ad man. The artist, in his white robe, his gray fringe standing on end from nervous stroking and blue eyes pulsating, was using a scalpel to open the stitching and then stapling the material to the edge of the canvas. He gave the impression of an escapee from a mental ward, a subway panhandler, one of the down-and-out forgotten. It was a look he had spent years cultivating.

His wife, Eliza Arkin, stood behind him, in leopard-print pajamas. Her haircut was a perfect dark red bob. Her earrings were gold and jade. Although her Parkinson’s medication worked mornings, there was still the semi-paralysis to com- bat, and her nurse, Violet, a short, heavy yet strong Jamaican woman waited in the nearby doorway. Grinding out a pain-free look on her china doll face, Eliza was thinking of how hideous a thing her husband had made. Of course, having heard him complain many times of how the paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art were hung in such extravagant frames that you couldn’t even see the artwork, Eliza knew what this was about. And it wasn’t beauty. This was an act of rebellion. But her husband, at eighty-three, was too old to rebel. At his age, and hers, eighty-one, they should be living in Miami Beach, Collins Avenue, in a simple apartment along the beach, with a balcony overlooking the Atlantic, and not in this factory. Granted, it gave her enormous satisfaction to tell anyone how she’d paid only one hundred and sixty-three thousand for her SoHo residence in 1976 and that these days it would fetch six million easily. Yet the envy of those passing below her windows didn’t justify the trouble of making a home here. In winter, they froze, the draughts terrible. During summer they spent five-figures on air conditioning. The wood floors had a unique octagonal pattern. However, they’d had to replace a panel just last month, and it had cost the same as a pair of roundtrip plane tickets to Paris. Pipes ran everywhere, along the walls, across the ceilings, at the backs of closets and the pantry, the laundry room and bathrooms. They could cover them up, but the old pipes would inevitably leak. Then they were cutting into walls, and the bills for reconstruction were astronomical. Worst of all, her husband’s art was everywhere. The living room was over two thousand square feet, and there was hardly room for the sofa and television—his paintings and sculptures were packed in, giving her home the feel of a warehouse. As it were, Ben rented a warehouse in Jersey City, a six thousand square foot basement space where thousands of his works were stored. And yet why did he even make any of this art? He had never sold a single piece!

She said to him, “You waste all my money on this nonsense.”

Ben snatched another tie from the box, slashing it up the belly, saying nothing. He’d never believed Beethoven’s late-life deafness was anything more than wishful thinking brought to fruition. You had to want to tune out the world that badly. Then you might wake one morning to discover your prayers had been answered. Ben tapped one ear and then the other to test his own. They were big ears.

To support his back, the artist wore a brown weight-lifter’s belt, and beneath the white robe, on top and bottom, were gray sweats. His feet were bare. He stood with his knuckles propped on his ribs, so that his elbows stuck out wide, muttering under his breath. Now he took a pink tie in his hand. In an adjacent box, awaiting his scalpel, were eight suits handmade on the Sa- vile Row. He hadn’t put one on in over fourteen years. The occasion had been his fiftieth wedding anniversary. He saw no reason to hold on to any of them. He would never get dressed up again. He draped the tie along the edge of the canvas, readied the staple gun and released:

Pop!

Eliza’s thirteen medications gave her dry-mouth and there was the sound of her tongue sticking and unsticking to the insides of her cheeks. She said, “I’ve made up my mind, Ben. We’ll sell some of my diamonds to the Russian. We can go to

47th Street tomorrow and speak with him. He gives the best prices for diamonds. It’s what we’ll do. And I’m comfortable leaving the diamonds with the Russian. The thing is, he’s not going to pay up front.”

Ben’s thumb massaged the dimple in his chin.

“…you have to let him sell the diamonds first,” Eliza was saying. “He’s very good, though. He’ll sell them, and then we’ll get the money. Probably next week at the earliest.”

“Good,” Ben replied.

“But it’s okay to give him a little time. We don’t need the money today. All the same, tomorrow we’ll go to 47th Street.”

Having already given his answer, Ben wouldn’t waste physical or mental energy on speaking to the same point twice. Instead, he grunted. For a grunt, Ben had concluded long ago, did give the body and spirit a worthy lift.

“Then it’s settled,” Eliza said. “Tomorrow.”

Eliza went to lie on the sofa at the back of the loft. She spent whole days there, watching cable news on the 14” television, reading fashion and tabloid magazines, dozing in and out of sleep. At the moment she was thinking of all the money she would get from selling the diamonds. She felt extremely confi- dent. Why shouldn’t she? Ask a man to turn shit into gold—it was doable but hardly easy. She would give the Russian great stuff. Her father, Karl Fischer, had only bought her mother, Ruth, the very best. Karl had done so well for himself. His business? Steel file cabinets. He’d locked down the account with the U.S. Armed Services and then it had been big money from there out. Ruth would sit with her daughter on the large brass bed—a pile of diamonds, so bright, so pretty, between them—and Eliza would tell her mother how they were the most beautiful things.

“Never say a word of this to your brothers and sisters, but I’m going to give them all to you one day,” her mother told her.

An eager young girl, enthralled with the stones, Eliza asked, “When?”

“Right after you marry,” her mother replied.

And three years later Ben did propose to Eliza. She was in love with him. So she thought. A very handsome man, at the time giving full financial support to his mother and three siblings, earning a good salary and clearly on his way to making a heck of a lot more. Yes, both Eliza and her parents felt extremely optimistic about Ben’s economic outlook. That said, when Ben first kissed Eliza it was the diamonds which flashed through her mind. Even now she could recall Ben returning to her lips for a second kiss. A fine kisser, indeed. But she knew the truth of her weakening stomach, her sweaty palms and feet.

Then on the day after the wedding while with her mother at the house in Forest Hills—Ruth, who’d had that Old World physique, the tremendous bosom, a full-barreled middle, an elephant’s buttocks and thick rings of flesh for a neck, said to her daughter, “I have a gift for you. Come with me.”

In Ruth’s bedroom, it was difficult for Eliza to help her mother move the brass bed. Her hands were damp against the metal. Her legs were unstable. But she managed, yes. And with the bed set at an angle, Ruth lifted up a piece of the floorboard, reached down and pulled out a cigar box. She said, “You remember what I promised you, dear?” And she flipped open the lid of the cigar box, revealing the stones. “Take any one you like.”

Eliza had suffered neuralgia as a child, and with her fingers massaging her face she seemed just then to be enduring the painful symptoms of that condition. She said, “Only one?”

Ruth nodded.

“You told me I could have them all.”

“Better I give you one a year.”

“Why?”

“It will be our special thing.”

“But you said I could have them all when I married. That’s what you said.”

“Eliza.”

“Well, it’s what you said!”

“Eliza!”

“But you said it! You did!”

“Would you rather I gave you nothing!”

And at that, Eliza took command of herself, apologized, and left with a single diamond.

As it were, Ruth lived till her early nineties, and their tradition was observed each year. But towards the end of her mother’s life, although Ruth was handing off a stone whose value was high, the ritual of sitting on her mother’s bed and choosing her diamond had long felt silly to Eliza. That is to say, it made her feel young, like a child, and for that reason, Eliza told herself, she held little attachment to the diamonds and didn’t mind exchanging them for so much cash.

The next morning, the Arkins rode in the Cadillac to the Diamond District. From the passenger seat Ben punched the end of his cane into the floor of the car and groaned, oblivious to his noise-making and the unhappiness it was causing his wife in the back seat and his assistant, Jerome, behind the wheel. For the third time today, Ben was calculating Jerome’s and Violet’s wages, the cost of Eliza’s medication, the upkeep for the loft and the house in Southampton, the loans against both homes which he had to pay back each month, as well as his art supplies. It all ran him about twenty-five thousand-a-month. The Arkins only had sixty thousand in the bank. To think there’d once been so much money, many millions. Over the decades, with the sizeable expenses and no earnings, that figure had dwindled. It was true that there was much more jewelry, gold and other diamond pieces, perhaps two million dollars’ worth. And the houses, yes. Ben wanted to sell Southampton, but he knew it might kill Eliza. He had bought the place in 1981, for her. Leisure meant little to him. Of course, a mere hundred yards from the ocean and sand, it was where he did his thinking. Every Saturday and Sunday morning, sitting at the head of the dining table with books, his pile of newspaper clippings, his journals and a cup of red and black pens, and staying there and Einsteining-it until 5 p.m. He believed that this practice opened up a side of his brain that made the never-before-seen possible.

Could he execute and dream up his new ideas in New York? Perhaps he would have to, he reckoned.

Yes, perhaps so.

Reproduced courtesy of Dzanc Books

**

Julian Tepper’s writing has appeared in the Paris Review, the Daily Beast, Huffington Post, and Manhattanville Magazine, among many others. His first novel, Balls garnered a great deal of attention, marking Tepper as a writer to watch. Since its founding in December of 2011, Tepper’s Oracle Club has become an important cultural center for writers, artists, and musicians, even bringing about his self-portrayal in the popular television series Gossip Girl. He lives in New York.

Some Books and Authors Mentioned in This Episode:

Martin Pousson: Black Sheep Boy: A Novel in Stories

Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn / The Adventures of Tom Sawyer / The Prince and the Pauper

The Brothers Grimm: Grimm’s Fairy Tales

Ernest Hemingway: The Old Man and the Sea / The Sun Also Rises / A Farewell to Arms

William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury / As I Lay Dying / Absalom, Absalom!

Emily Dickinson: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

Armistead Maupin: The Days of Anna Madrigal / Tales of the City / Babycakes

Jesmyn Ward: Salvage the Bones / Men We Reaped / The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race

Natasha Trethewey: Native Guard / Thrall / Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast

Black Sheep Boy

Like a morgue, no matter the blistering pavement or the bulb red temperature outside, the classroom remained a cold chamber. Windows frosted inside with tiny stalagmites of ice rising around the edges. Books stiffened like frozen meat and made slapping sounds when the covers shut. And chairs all stuck in place, screwed down by the alabaster man in front of the room.

“Morphodites and Bedlamites,” our junior-year English teacher shouted over the heads of the class, while a cloud of white smoke billowed out of his mouth.

Mr. Hedgehog, as we called him, was a prickly short-limbed monster who wore a frock coat no matter the weather and wielded a baton like the conductor of a manic orchestra. He brought the baton down on our essays as if they were hideous scores of sheet music.  He beat on the covers of books as if they were hidebound drums. More than once, he beat on the back of a pupil’s hand. Then, lightning quick, he’d snap out the words: “just a love tap!” His tongue practically hissed against his teeth.

Before we were born, he often told us, before we were “dirty thoughts in our dirty parents’ minds,” our city had been the site of famous riots, with fire hoses, street bombs, and bloodhounds. At the start of one long hot summer, “the Blacks just rose up,” he said, “and the South fell down.”

He taught English but rewrote history with every book we read. His baton slapped my desk and sometimes slapped my hand too when I corrected a fact or a date. About the riots, he had the year right, but the city and state were wrong—and there was something else wrong too. He spoke the word “Black,” as if it was the sound you made at the first bite of a wretched meal.

During exams, he paced the aisles with his baton, bringing it down on the head of the student who reached for an eraser or a bottle of whiteout. He saw any answer but the first as evidence of cheating and any stray ink on the page as evidence of guessing, more vile than cheating. He saw closed eyes as the work of moles and crossed-out words as the mark of worms. He saw errors in us all and even foresaw our end, as he put it, “scratching out the days like birds on a shrinking shore.” What exactly he meant, we couldn’t figure out, except that it sounded like the last line of a novel. Maybe one he wrote? Like a lot of our teachers, he hated teaching, hated especially teaching his subject and dropped reminders of his once promising writing career before the Great Sacrifice he made for us all. He trusted no book and told us how every author got it all wrong except one. Dizzy with opium and teenage girls, with salty air and sailors, with jazz and martinis, with gunpowder and arms, every American writer wrote a pack of lies, he said, except the one who came on like a liar—with a fake name and the full costume of a fake Southern gentleman. When we read The Only Great American Novel, our teacher fondled the ribbon tie he wore and, at each dramatic plot twist, brought one of the tips into his mouth for punctuation.

“Can’t depend on nobody but your slave,” he told us when we reached the sidewinder ending.  “That, mes enfants, is the moral.”

When I raised my hand with a correction, he delivered a sharp love tap to my knuckles with his baton and said, “Not this time, smarty pants. This time you let it stand or dance those prissy feet right back to the counselor’s office!”

No else said a word, frozen in their seats, frozen in time, so I let my hand fall. In the next row, another student sat stiff but angled his head around to look me dead in the eye. Boogie, the sole senior in our class, almost never looked up from his desk and never raised a hand. Yet on the field, his wide hands tore through the air to catch pass after pass and run play after play. “Best Offensive Player in Acadiana” the papers said, “Best Running Back in Louisiana.” He had another title on campus too: “Best All-Around Black.” Black and white students sat in the same class but on different student councils and for different award ceremonies, long after that long hot summer and long long after Reconstruction. To most, that was just a fact, no question. So when Boogie wouldn’t pose with his Best All-Around Black trophy, the other students chalked it up to vanity.

“Too big a star for us already, Boogie,” they teased, but our teacher put it another way.

“Maybe he’s holding out for valedictorian,” Mr. Hedgehog said. “Now that’d be a plot twist!” Then he clapped the air in applause.

Boogie was barely passing English, barely passing all his classes, even though, rumor had it, his college test scores set a campus record. Teachers constantly found him dozing in his seat—when he showed—or drawing odd shapes instead of writing answers for fill-in-the-blank exams. For multiple choice or true/false, Boogie placed an X in every box, and for essays, he wrote with backward letters in a cursive hand that caused our English teacher to wrinkle his nose.

“Give a jock a pen,” Mr. Hedgehog said, “and he uses it like a rip saw.”

When he taught Civics, his other subject, he called us “miscreants and reprobates” and pronounced civilization like it was a congenitally contracted disease. Close contact with Mr. Hedgehog, we were sure, would be worse than any STD. He’d leave you bloody with quills.

We were riding across the Atchafalaya Basin, Boogie and me, down one of the longest bridges in the world, eighteen miles of concrete rising over muddy swamp. The water below looked nearly black, but it was covered in patches with a green overgrowth that looked like the hide of some prehistoric creature. Through the patches, tall gray trees rose up, bald and spiny, the skeletons of a day when cypress was cut down like reeds. They looked like old debutantes, those trees, with their branches spread out for a waltz and their trunks arranged in billowing rows of pleats. The whole picture was frozen in time, except for the quivering nose of the car and the quick tongue of the running back next to me. For that moment, I had no idea where we were headed and little idea of where we’d been. As if the swamp itself gave us permission, we lifted right out of the car, right out of high school and the roles we played: the football star and the quiz kid, the stag and the fag.

Nearly dizzy from the night heat, I struggled to remember how Boogie ended up in my car. Already painted a Jenny Woman at school, I’d openly set my sights on studying the cheerleader stunts. During the game, I couldn’t tell a route from a sweep, but I knew every step of an arabesque. All season, I followed our football team to away games, this time to a school in Assumption Parish in a town called Confederate. I secretly hoped to join the cheerleaders, to sit on the bus next to the players and their broad backs and wide grins. In the locker room, I might’ve been taunted for the direction of my eye, but in the bleachers I could stare openly at the boys in padded shoulders and tight lace-up pants. And when they lifted each other off the ground or delivered slaps to backs and rear ends, I could throw my hands together with the cheerleaders and yell each player’s name out loud.

After the game in Confederate, I’d sat at a red light, yards behind the school bus, while tumbles and twirls ran through my head and a circle of players huddled before my eyes. Without warning, the passenger door opened and Boogie sat down beside me. He said not a word. He just looked straight ahead until the light turned green.

On the long drive back, he pumped me with questions, and to each one, I lied. Yes, I drank every lewd shot he could name. Yes, I smoked this, snorted that. Yes, I yanked it in the lockers, in the bleachers. Yes, I’d nailed a girl, nailed her good, nailed her again and again. I hadn’t done any of it, not yet, but I knew the signs of a test, and I knew how to score an A. Still, I didn’t know where the test would end. Suddenly, Boogie looked me in the eye and asked, “Ever stick it in a guy?”

I stammered and pretended to look at traffic, not ready to switch on the truth.

“A guy ever stick it in you?”

My eyes stared at the school bus ahead, and my tongue thickened.

“Ain’t any different,” he said. “A hole is a hole.”

The words hit the windshield and burst like fruit. No one had ever talked to me like Boogie, like I was another player on the field. His talk made my ears burn and my head throb, but his voice wasn’t the only one I heard. All around, I heard the furious sound of pent-up laughter. The laughs slipped out of the cracked windows of the school bus ahead, crammed with the rest of the football team, the pep squad, and the cheerleaders. The players rose and fell in shadows against the window with pantomime movements and quick jerking arms. The cheerleaders beat time with their gloved hands, and the pep squad opened their mouths in unison. They looked like they were cheering Boogie and me from the back of the bus, but I knew they weren’t. Already the rumors were starting, already the talk was hitting the air like splinters of glass, clear and piercing. What was Boogie doing with that fag?

I opened my mouth and laughed, a tinny nervous laugh. Boogie laughed along, his eyes shining like copper pennies in a fire. Did either of us know what the hell we were doing together?

To avoid any more of his questions, I started asking Boogie some of my own. Why didn’t he talk in class? I’d seen him write down an answer when Mr. Hedgehog called a question, but Boogie never spoke it out loud. Why?

“Don’t play by the rules,” he said, “when the game is rigged.”

“But what about your grade?” I asked.

“Got that in the bag.”

“How?”

For a moment, Boogie fell silent, his face set in concentration. Whether from the stadium bleachers or the seat next to him, his sturdy body looked built for the game, built for running, catching, and tackling men on a wide field. Yet up close his face looked delicate, like a guy about to play a cornet, with a shadow around his eyes and a worry on his lips. Did he have the breath ready? The notes right?

“Oh, I’ll pass,” he said, almost in a whisper. “Wanna see my study guide?”

I gripped the steering wheel and nodded yes. What would he show me?

The bar was named after one of its lewd shots: Between the Sheets. Only everybody called it Sheets. “Don’t skid the Sheets,” I heard one guy say to a burst of laughter—before a cloud of silence moved overhead. Once Boogie passed through the door, a hand went up in my direction, palm forward. Then a string of eyes lit up, feet spread, and nostrils flared. No one said a word, but I heard them clearly. What is it you want? Drinks rattled in glasses, and a funk song throttled the floor. What is it you want, white boy?

Suddenly, I wasn’t just the fag. I wasn’t just the queer quiz kid. Here, I was white before all. Even with the red flashes of Sabine skin, even with the wild bush of hair, I wasn’t black. At Sheets, there were only two options, no choice, the same as Boogie’s award at school. Other people may have argued about prairie Cajuns and swamp Cajuns. Other people may have argued about pure French and Sabine French, Creole and mulatto, quadroon and octoroon. Here, there was no argument. Everything was clear as black and white, and I was the pink-eyed opossum in the room.

In the static of the moment, a hand on my shoulder jolted me into a chest-exploding gasp. When Boogie shouted “Boo” into my ear, and I jumped, the rest of the crowd laughed then turned back to pound the bar for more shots. “Slippery Nipple!” “Screaming Orgasm!” “Cocksucking Cowboy!” they hollered, and the names echoed in my head. Down at the end of the bar, Boogie introduced me as “little bro” and told everyone I was there to help with his studies. The guys in jerseys scoffed but looked at me as if a quiz kid might have some use after all. First time at Sheets, first time as little bro, I thought. What was next?

Most of the guys towered over me, and their hair rose even higher in geometric shapes, flat tops, blunt sides, sharp tips, sometimes with angular lines cut through the hair and to the scalp. Or else, their hair fell in a sheen of loose curls. The cloud of pomade filled my nose like musk, and I would’ve played little bro to any guy in the room. None of them laid a hand on me, though. None grabbed my shoulder. Instead, they barked at the girls in shiny spandex and chunky gold necklaces and grabbed at the air left in their path.

Just past the bar, the dance floor filled with couples jerking hips to songs about freak-a-zoids, robots, and neutron bombs falling from the sky. The whole place shook when a growling singer commanded them to “tear the roof off the sucker” and hands testified when a voice shouted about a black First Lady, but the dance floor really turned to riot with a song about an atomic dog. All at once, everyone shouted “dogcatcher” and bared teeth at the mirror ball as if it was the moon. The glistening bodies and surging beats drove the heat way up until bottles exploded and the guys in jerseys rained forty-ounces of beer over Boogie’s head, and I suddenly remembered they won, our team won, and Boogie’s name would splash all over the papers again. With fiery eyes, he schooled everybody on his moves and boasted of going pro faster than any rookie in history. His voice roared in a way it never did in class, and his hands looked wider than ever as they arced the air. Right then, I wanted to be the hips jerking next to him, the knees dropping to the floor and the feet twisting into the ground. I wanted to be his freak-a-zoid little bro.

Instead, I was the hands on the wheel leaving the bar, taking directions from Boogie as the car winded through a neighborhood nearly as crooked as the bayou next to it. Lights from another car blazed in the rear view mirror then vanished before blazing again. Houses leaned in and out of view, most with a steep pitched roof and long galley porch. Then Boogie pointed his finger at the only Victorian house I’d seen in Lafayette, with millwork like tattered lace and a small domed doorway. On the steps, he grinned at me, and I grinned back. What would he show me now? At Boogie’s first knock, a voice shouted “Entrez” and he pushed the door open with one hand. The night was hot and damp, but the house was cold and dry, with vents blowing from the floor. A single light clicked on at the end of the hall. Boogie walked straight ahead with sure steps, but I held back and eyed the street. When I heard the hum of a car engine, I slipped inside the house, feeling for the wall and blinking at the dark until my hands tipped over a coat rack. As I set it back, I could barely see the outline of a frock coat. I froze. Now I knew Boogie’s study guide. It wasn’t any spandex girl at Sheets and it wasn’t ever to be me.

Down the hall, Boogie’s hands flagged me toward an open door. His face beamed like a fugitive with a free boat and a way out. On the bed, a man’s bare ass rose in the air, while a white silk nightshirt pooled around his face. Could he see me? I worried. Could he see anything? A chill had me rubbing my arms until Boogie laid his hand on my shoulder.

“You first,” he said.

My hands dug deep into my pockets, and I shrank into my shoes then shook my head. So Boogie dropped his pants and jumped right onto the bed and right into Mr. Hedgehog, thrusting his haunches back and forth with his teeth bared and his head aimed at the ceiling. Outside, the moon shone like a disc of ice, white and cool and quiet. Yet inside, a grunting sound came from the bed, and it wasn’t Boogie. The sheets were twisting and a set of hands were shaking and Mr. Hedgehog started to scream. A shrill sound tore out of his throat and rang overhead. In the window, a face eclipsed the moon. First one, then half a dozen guys in jerseys stared straight at the bed, straight at Boogie riding Mr. Hedgehog. They’d tailed us here, the football players, and now they crowded the window with flared eyes. Boogie didn’t stop, though. He didn’t see them, so he kept thrusting into our teacher while his teammates kept moving their mouths until a loud word rose up, then two: “Dog! Gay dog!”

At that, Boogie’s head whipped down and caught sight of the players in the window. Suddenly, he was the dead-eyed guy in class again, wordless and blank. He slipped out of Mr. Hedgehog, slipped off the sheets and onto the floor. Then Mr. Hedgehog fell too, clawing at the air and gnashing his teeth. He tore a chunk off Boogie’s shoulder and anointed his own skin with the blood. Then he curled into a ball and started moaning about headlines and reputation and a wrecked career.

Boogie’s eyes flickered back to life, and he bolted down the hall, out the back door and hit the ground running. The players howled into the air, shaking the houses awake, then revved their car and left a hot streak on the road. I should’ve busted through the window and emptied my chest to the night. I should’ve torn the roof off the house and chased the players with a mad fury. I should’ve run after Boogie and hollered his name to the moon. Instead, I dropped to the floor and tucked tail, lower than any dog and stiffer than any opossum.

Yet when the cops showed, I found my feet and a story, however wrong or full of lies. I told them Mr. Hedgehog had lured me to his place with the promise of an A and a shot at a trophy. I told them he had pounced on me in his nightshirt and had shoved my face into a pillow. I told them he had a seizure in bed and had fallen to the floor. The teacher stayed silent as a corpse in a morgue. What could he say? That the promise went to a black boy? What could he do? Point his baton at the truth? No, he kept his thin lips shut while I told the cops my sidewinder of a story and Boogie ran free, with his long legs and his strong back leaving not a trace on the ground or a scent in the air.

Behind closed eyes, I followed his moves. He ran all the way down the street, to the end of the bayou and right out of this city, right out of this state, right out of history, as far away as his feet could take him. Come winter, he wore a second hide, wrapped himself in a cloak of wool and slept under the northern lights. No one’s dog, he studied the sky and redrew the constellations. No shepherd to heed, no flock to fold, he cut a crisscross path in the snow like a guide for the outlaw and the wayward, the outcast and the misfit. When I finally reached him, he shaded me in the sun, warmed me in the moon. Under his cloak, we lay together, and no one could tell the black sheep from the white or the field of stars from the dome of night.

**

The above was excerpted from Black Sheep Boy and first appeared in Eclectica Magazine’s July/August 2016 issue

Martin Pousson was born and raised in Acadiana, the Cajun French bayou land of Louisiana. His new novel, Black Sheep Boy, includes stories that won a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. Two of his stories were finalists for the Glimmer Train Fiction Awards. His collection of poetry, Sugar, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, and his first novel, No Place, Louisiana, was a finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. His writing has appeared in The Advocate, Antioch Review, Epoch, Five Points, New Orleans Review, StoryQuarterly, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere.

He earned a Bachelor of Arts in English at Loyola University, New Orleans, and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Columbia University, New York. As a student, he founded Out/Here, marched with NO/AIDS Task Force, and protested with ACT UP and Queer Nation. Then he taught at Columbia University, Rutgers University, and Loyola University. As a professor, he advised LGBTQA, Queer Ambassadors, Queer People of Color Collective, and the Pride Center Coalition. He now teaches at California State University Northridge and lives in downtown Los Angeles.

Some Books and Authors Discussed:

Sarah Benincasa: Real Artists Have Day Jobs: (And Other Awesome Things They Don’t Teach You In School) / Agorafabulous: Dispatches From My Bedroom / Great

Megan Abbott: The Fever / Dare Me / The End of Everything

Marvel: Ms. Marvel Volume 1 / Wolverine: Old Man Logan, Volume 1 / Deadpool: The Complete Collection by Daniel Way, Volume 1

Janette Sebring Lowrey: The Poky Little Puppy

Excerpt from DC Trip

“Hi, Mr. Kenner,” Rachel said sweetly, but her voice squeaked a little. “Hi, Ms. Deats. We were just, um . . .” She looked at Gertie and Sivan for help, but they were staring at the ground.

“We know what you were just doing, Rachel,” Mr. Kenner snapped. “How could you violate our trust like this? This is definitely a strike one. This should be beyond a strike one. This should be strikes one, two, and three!” At this, the girls looked horrified. Gertie began to cry. Sivan’s eyes watered and threatened to spill over. Even Rachel choked back a sob. “Oh, no,” Mr. Kenner said, throwing up his hands. “Don’t cry.” He looked at Ms. Deats pleadingly. She returned his gaze and seemed to grow a little taller.

“We’re very sorry about this,” Ms. Deats said smoothly to the security guy, who nodded gruffly. “Thank you, Mr.—” She looked at his name tag.

“Reina,” he said. “Bob Reina. Chief of security.”

“Thank you, Mr. Reina,” she said. “Girls, tell Mr. Reina you’re sorry you tried to sneak out.”

“Oh, there’s no need for that,” Bob Reina said, shaking his head. “It’s not my rule they broke. But I’d say you folks ought to keep a closer eye on this three. I’ve seen this before. Kids like this—they can get up to all kinds of shenanigans.”

“Absolutely,” Mr. Kenner said, seeming embarrassed.

“Thank you.” Ms. Deats ushered them all into the elevator, where they silently rode up. Then she marched to the girls’ room and held out her hand. “Everybody give me your keys,” she said firmly, and Rachel thought she saw her shoot a little sideways glance at Mr. Kenner. He looked surprised. Reluctantly, the girls handed over their room keys. “You won’t get these back until tomorrow night, and that’s if I decide you’ve earned them back,” Ms. Deats said.

The girls nodded obediently. Ms. Deats opened the door, and everyone filed into the room except Mr. Kenner, who hovered outside.

“You come in too, Mr. Kenner,” Ms. Deats said. He gingerly stepped through the door.“Now this is a serious infraction, isn’t it, Mr. Kenner?” Ms. Deats said.

“Yes it is,” he said. “This is definitely a strike one at least.”

“I agree,” Ms. Deats said. “And to make sure this never happens again, we’re going to tape your door.”

“That’s an excellent idea,” Mr. Kenner said. Then he dropped his voice and whispered, “Do we actually have tape?” The girls totally heard him.

“I brought some in my bag,” Ms. Deats said. Again, Mr. Kenner looked surprised.

“Really?” he said, and he sounded kind of impressed.

“Yes,” Ms. Deats said with evident pride. “It’s in my room. Patti Bump told me I should bring it just in case. She always brings tape when she chaperones.”

“I never thought to do that,” Mr. Kenner said. “That’s a really good idea.”

“I know, right?” Ms. Deats said, and grinned.

Rachel looked at Sivan and Gertie. Sivan and Gertie looked at Rachel. All three shrugged. Awkwardly, Rachel cleared her throat. “Um, you don’t have to call our parents, do you?” she asked. “Because I think mine would . . . not like it.”

“I don’t imagine they would like it at all, Rachel,” Ms. Deats said. “If you behave yourselves and don’t repeat this stunt, I don’t think we need to tell your parents.”

Mr. Kenner opened his mouth and then shut it without saying anything. “Whatever you say,” he said.

“Now you girls get in bed,” Ms. Deats said. “I’ll come back and tape your door. I don’t want to hear one peep out of you for the rest of the night.” She and Mr. Kenner opened the door on the cuntriad, all clad in pajamas, looking joyful.

“Girls!” Mr. Kenner said sharply. “What are you doing out of bed?”

“We were worried,” Brooklynn said. “We were scared somebody got sick. Like we did.”

“Everything is fine, girls,” Ms. Deats said gently. “That’s very kind of you. Now go back to bed.” Brooklynn smiled over Ms. Deats’s shoulder at the trio. She blew them a kiss. Then the door shut.

“That fucking bitch,” Rachel said. “She loves this shit.”

“They all do,” Gertie said.

“How did they know we were up?” Sivan asked. “It’s not like we were loud in the hallway or something.”

Rachel’s eyes narrowed. “They got us in trouble,” she said. “I know they did it somehow.”

“How?” Gertie asked. “We got us in trouble when that Bob Reina dude overheard us.”

“Yeah, but why was the chief of security out in front of the hotel and not in some office somewhere?” Rachel said. “There were other security guards in the lobby. Why did he come out of nowhere?”

“Maybe he was walking by,” Sivan said.

“Sivan,” Rachel said. “You study this stuff all the time.”

“What stuff?” Sivan asked.

“Rebellions,” Rachel said. “Insurrections. Protests. Whatever.”

“Is that what this is?” Sivan said.

“Sivan,” Rachel said. “Does the Man ever just show up out of nowhere, by accident, without any information provided by a third party?”

“That’s a good point,” Sivan said thoughtfully. “There are informants in every movement.”

“Exactly,” Rachel said. “We were informed on.” She walked around the room with her hands folded behind her back. Then she put her ear to the wall.

“That’s Miriam and Allison’s room,” Gertie said to Sivan.

“Exactly,” Rachel said. She raised her voice and spoke loudly, right into the wall. “AND MIRIAM AND ALLISON PLAY FIELD HOCKEY WITH PEIGHTON.”

“Rachel!” Gertie was aghast. “You’ll wake them up.”

“Oh, they’re already up,” Rachel said, practically growling at the wall. “They heard everything we said and they told Peighton. I know they did.” She smacked the wall.

“Maybe don’t do that,” Sivan said. “Somebody else could hear and complain.”

“Those field hockey girls all kiss Peighton’s ass,” Gertie whispered. “You could be right.”

“Yeah, I think she’s right too,” Sivan whispered. “And then Peighton called security.”

Rachel stalked over to the hotel phone and pointed at a red button emblazoned with the word SECURITY. “Look, right there. You can just call security. You can just call!” she whispered loudly. “Those bitches next door ratted us out to those cunts and then those cunts called that douchebag.”

“I kind of liked Bob Reina,” Sivan said. “It was kind of funny how he called out the teachers for not paying enough attention to us.”

Rachel smacked her fist into her palm. Then she looked at her friends, who were a little surprised by how pissed she was. “Let’s get some sleep,” she said. “They’re not going to destroy our trip. But we’re going to destroy theirs.”

“How?” Gertie asked. “Wasn’t explosive diarrhea enough?”

“I thought so,” Rachel said. “But you were right, Gertie. You said they’d come back at us, and they did. So now we go on offense.”

“Maybe we could just have a nice chill trip from here on out,” Sivan said. “It would’ve been cool to sneak out, but maybe it’s not meant to be.”

“Which one of us is kind of psychic?” Rachel asked with a sudden smile.

“You,” Gertie said.

“Allegedly,” Sivan said.

“Well, I think there are great things in store for us,” Rachel said. “I know there are. I just have to figure out what they are, exactly. But we’re going to win this thing.”

“Is it a game?” Gertie asked.

“No,” Rachel said, a look of grim determination on her face. “This is war.”

**

Copyright © 2015 Adaptive Books

**

Sara Benincasa is a comedian and the author of Real Artists Have Day Jobs (William Morrow 2016) as well as the books DC Trip (Adaptive Studios 2016), Great (HarperTeen 2014), and Agorafabulous!: Dispatches From My Bedroom (William Morrow 2012). She is currently adapting DC Trip as a film with producers Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa (“Little Miss Sunshine,” “Nebraska,” “Election”), Van Toffler, and Adaptive Studios; Agorafabulous! for TV with Diablo Cody; and Great for TV with Muse Entertainment. She was born and raised in New Jersey and graduated from Warren Wilson College and Columbia University Teachers College. She lives in Los Angeles, CA. She travels frequently to speak to college students about mental health awareness. 

Excerpt from Falter Kingdom

This is the place.

Falter Kingdom.

I’ll try to explain it. It’s kind of a simple picture, nothing really wrong with it. You might see it and think, ‘So? Just another place where high school kids chill and smoke.’ But the first clue is how it should be a sewer tunnel but it’s too big to be one. The opening is the size of a car tunnel, made of concrete, and looking in you see nothing but darkness.

That darkness, it doesn’t let up.

Someone painted a crown around the concrete opening of the tunnel.

You can see the black paint, the spikes of the crown, from really far away. It has something to do with the lore, what people say about it.

I’ve been here a number of times but I’ve never taken part.

The thing about Falter Kingdom is that it’s not just any tunnel.

The tunnel is full of darkness and it goes on and on and on, without end. People say that initially it was a tunnel supposed to be part of the city subway system but the mass transit authority discovered that a couple miles in, there was a weak point, a sort of fissure. The fissure opened itself up to all sorts of frequencies and energies and stuff. That’s what you get when people turn spirituality into hard science.

People used to play around with the thought that there was another plane of existence, probably because ours was too much of a bummer to be the only one. Everyone knew ghosts existed; they’d speak to you if you dared to listen. But demons want what people want, whatever that means.

Nearly half of the employees working on the tunnel attracted demons. Like anywhere else, the demon chooses you and you’ve got no choice. It latches to you and you don’t have a whole lot of options.

Back then, it was really expensive to get rid of them. You couldn’t just call up a priest and get exorcized. You had to fill out a ton of paperwork, go to a number of experts, and stuff. By the time they could get rid of it, there was basically only the demon left. The person gone, fully possessed.

So that’s how the legend goes. The legend of Falter Kingdom.

A bunch of us go here just to feel the change in atmosphere. A lot of Meadows students go here to prove a point.

But see, when we arrived here that day, we just wanted to be alone.

I wanted to get drunk. I was willing to listen to Brad if it meant getting a head start on the weekend.

I didn’t think I would have to run the gauntlet.

But I’ll get to that.

We arrived at Falter Kingdom and the first thing that happened was our cellphones all lost signal. Again, that’s part of the fun of the place.

That kid, Steve, stood at the opening looking in.

Brad shouted back at him, “Careful or you’ll be dragged in!”

Blaire snickered, “You’re a walking cliché.”

Brad signaled to me, wanting me to toss him a beer. “Yeah?” Cracking open the beer and taking a gulp, “You know what they say about being judgmental?”

This went on—back and forth—for longer than it should have. I listened and I observed the conversation from where I sat, on a rock, drinking the beer probably way too fast.

Blaire wouldn’t let up.

Brad was too oblivious to care about anything Blaire could say.

Eventually the conversation made its way back to me. Brad saying something like, “Why do you keep this chick around?”

But that really wasn’t a question. Brad’s good at being a jerk. He’s a jerk. I can’t stand the guy. But he’s there. He’s around. We were freshmen when we met. I think it was Biology. Yeah, that was the one. We both sucked at the subject. We were failing and quickly facing summer school. We got assigned to some peer group for people that suck at science. We had to be tutored by substitute teachers, meaning we had to take the class twice in one day. It was horrible. Brad being around made it a little less horrible but only because he knew how to get the answers. He knew people.

He still knows people. I don’t think anyone really likes the guy but they see value in how he can slack his way through anything.

Brad gets his way. Brad always has beer.

I guess we’re friends because I’ve gotten used to him being around.

Sort of like most people, I get used to them and in time, it’s all the same. This is as close to getting along as I’ll probably ever know.
But yeah, Brad can be a real jerk and I was the one to break up the argument. It was easy—all I had to do was tell Brad to shut up and catch up.

“I’m on my third.” I dangled the can, “Which one are you on?”

That’s enough to end it, but nothing would change the fact that Blaire wouldn’t end up having much fun. Not that she would have. This is what Blaire always does. She spent most of the afternoon sitting on some far rock working on our homework assignments for next week.

I let her do her thing. We all did.

She was doing my homework, too.

Steve, Brad, and I stood at the opening of the tunnel. That made me take another drink.

And looking back, I got really drunk that afternoon.

Drunker than I should have. Even Steve got on me about Becca. He talked about how my situation took me off the radar, how nothing good can come from being trapped like that.

Yeah, I went with them to Falter Kingdom of my own free will.

But alcohol and competition go hand-in-hand and all it took was one mention of the tunnel and Steve shut up.

It was obvious that he had never run the gauntlet.

It was a little less obvious that I hadn’t either. Every other time I hung out at Falter Kingdom, I got out of having to run. Trick is to wait until it becomes a possibility, the talking about running, and you encourage whoever it is that’s being pressured to run, but when they turn it on you, don’t freeze. Don’t stop and worry. Don’t say no. You pretend to consider and then you pretend to think about it. If there’s beer, take a sip. By the time any pressure is given, you can ask someone that hasn’t run and have them mess up and take on the pressure. So they end up running and you don’t. That’s how it works.

End lesson, or whatever.

But yeah, I was drunk and on a short string, Brad selling Steve on the whole thing, legend and all, I downed the last of the beer in that can.

Then I said it, “I’ll do it.”

Instantly the conditions changed.

“…Really?” Blaire had joined us, standing at my side.

Brad grinned, “My man!”

Steve didn’t say anything. He wanted to run it. He wanted the respect.

I just wanted the conversation to end.

I didn’t want to hear any more about Becca.

So they crowded around me as I took my first steps into the tunnel.

“Ten minutes bud, you got this,” Brad said.

Running the gauntlet is more or less exactly how it sounds. You run into the tunnel, into the darkness, for ten whole minutes or until you reach the end. But no one’s ever reached the end. So I had to run, sprint really, for ten whole minutes. They synced up and set a timer on each of their phones.

On their count—three, two, one—I ran.

It was actually kind of easy, going through with it.

Everything leading up made it feel impossible. I wasn’t into running it; I had nothing to really prove, which could be cause for a bigger problem. But, I don’t know—

I guess it had a lot to do with being fed up.

With their voices. With their claims. With the fact that they were kind of right: It’s almost graduation and nothing’s changed.

It’s like I needed something to prove to myself. I needed to do some- thing that anyone that knew me would have problems believing if told in the context of some story.

*

The actual running was the hard part.

I felt like I couldn’t keep to a straight line.

I felt like I couldn’t run fast enough. The air was thick in the tunnel.

Kind of a strange musk, the same kind you smell in old basements or places with stale air. The ground muddy and wet, each step had that sinking feeling that you get when you find out you spaced a test or some other important event.

But I ran the whole ten.

It didn’t even last that long.

I ran with my eyes wide but they might as well have been closed. The dark was so thick it was like running in place.

You can’t really hear anything in the tunnel. You can’t hear your own footsteps. I ran until it felt right to stop and turn around. Something worth mentioning—I didn’t hear anything. I didn’t hear my feet slip- ping in the mud. I didn’t hear my lungs gasping for air. I didn’t hear.

If I didn’t hear my own breath, there’s no way I heard their phones. It probably doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it?

It’s hard to explain. Telling it right is usually tougher than you think; it’s all about using the right amount of words to get your point across. You say too little and it’s just strange; say too much and it’s you’re not really making any sense. This is probably one of those situations. It’s just that, being inside the tunnel felt like… what’s that term for when you are frozen in a chamber?

Cryosleep?

It’s kind of like that. But there’s a better word.

Let me look it up.

Oh, right—

It’s like being in suspended animation.

Stuck in place, but you also know that your body is moving, your thoughts racing, because I could feel the sweat dripping from my forehead.

While inside, I could think only about one thing.

I thought about my body breaking into pieces.

And even now I can’t make complete sense of why.

When I made it back to them, you can bet they were surprised.

Brad saw me first.

I was drenched in sweat. Dirt caked in layers all over my body.

Steve didn’t say anything.

Blaire played concerned friend, “Are you insane?”

I asked them if I lasted the full ten, but the words didn’t come out until later, after I had laid down against the cool rock.

By then Brad and Steve had left.

Blaire stayed with me. She was sitting next to me when I woke up.

I stirred shortly before the sun completely disappeared.

“Did I make the full ten?”

Blaire looked at me with this strange look. Maybe she really was worried. I’m not sure what she felt that day. But when she told me I had been in there for twenty-five minutes, it clicked into place.

I didn’t feel any different but, well, it kind of made sense. I felt peaceful sitting there, letting the information sink in. Like I did something I wanted to do.

We walked back in silence.

I didn’t say anything and she didn’t say anything.

When we got back to Meadows, our cars were the only ones left in the parking lot. “Where’d Brad and that other guy go?”

Blaire kind of ignored me but also kind of didn’t. It was a mumble, one that I maybe imagined. “They went for help.”

We left without saying goodbye.

By the time I got home, I felt nothing. Not tired at all.
I stayed up with a six-pack that I finished and watched walk-throughs of two different videogames. I didn’t have trouble sleeping at all that night.

Stu started happening the following day. Minor things: mostly the broken vase and my bedroom door opening and closing on its own. I misplaced my cellphone twice only to find it where I couldn’t have left it. Why would I leave my phone in my locker at school if I had it with me when I left for Falter? Why would my phone turn up in my dad’s pocket when he had been at work all day and I used the phone not ten minutes before it went missing? These aren’t really questions, really, just the mind fighting the facts.

And I knew the symptoms.

They say it’s best to get rid of a demon quick.

Yeah, I know, I know.

But just thinking about how much e ort it would have been to tell my parents… what it would mean for them—their only son, haunted— made me feel exhausted. I would never hear the end of it.

So then it just felt better to put o telling them for a little bit.

It won’t be much longer.

Soon everyone would know.

Excerpt taken from Falter Kingdom by Michael J. Seidlinger. © 2016, The Unnamed Press

Michael J. Seidlinger is the author of a number of novels including The Strangest, The Fun We’ve Had, and The Laughter of Strangers. He serves as Electric Literature‘s Book Reviews Editor as well as Publisher-in-Chief of Civil Coping Mechanisms, an indie press specializing in innovative fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Falter Kingdom is his first YA novel.

**

As promised in the episode, please find an example of that show that your host has never heard of below:

You can buy The Last One HERE or Enter Our Giveway HERE

The Last One – Chapter 5

The sky trembles. My first thought is that it’s a camera drone, crashing, and this is something I want to see. I look up, raising an arm to block out the sun. Instead of a drone come undone, I see an airplane plowing through the high blue to leave a wispy white trail. It takes me a moment to process the sight, the sound, the sensation of having my small human presence overwhelmed so completely. This is the first time I’ve noticed a plane since taping began. I don’t know if this is because I wasn’t paying attention or because they weren’t around to notice.

Either way, this is important—­it means they can’t control every aspect of my surroundings. A small assurance, but it inhabits me like a revelation. I feel my insularity retreating. For the first time in too long, I am not the but a. Just one person among many. I think of the men and women above me. The plane is huge; there must be hundreds of passengers seated up there beneath nubby air vents, napping, reading, watching movies on their iPads. One or two crying, perhaps, frightened by the enormity of the journey they’re embarking on.

I stand still, neck craned, until the airplane is out of sight, its contrail dispersing. I hope someone up there is going home. That there is at least one person in that plane who knows unselfish love and is returning to it.

The next few hours are easier than what came before, except that I’m wretched with hunger. I reach a brook a few hours before sunset and decide to make camp early to try to catch some protein. The pieces of the figure-­four deadfall I carved during group camp are in my pack, and now that I have something other than pinecones to use as bait it might actually work.

I take the trio of sticks and set them under a tall tree. It takes me a minute to figure out which stick goes where, then I align the notches, balancing and steadying. Once I can keep the trap in its distinctive angular pattern by pinching the top nexus, I smear the end of the bait stick with peanut butter and lean a heavy log over the top to take the place of my hand. It’s a precarious piece of work, but it’s meant to be, and it holds.

I boil water in batches and build my shelter, glancing regularly toward the trap. The bait lies in the log’s shadow, untouched. The woods grow dim and I’m sitting at the fire, waiting, trying not to think the thoughts that come most readily. I hate it. I need to keep busy, so I decide to carve a second trap. I salvage appropriate-­sized sticks—­each about a half inch thick and a foot long—­and start carving. It’s only four notches and two sharpened points, but they have to be aligned perfectly. Carving takes me longer than I’d like—­the knife I was issued is so dull at this point I wouldn’t trust it to slice cold butter. By the time I’m done, my hands are aching, my fingers blistered. I drop the sticks at the base of a tree and head to the brook to collect a long flat stone to use as the trap’s weight.

I take off my boots and socks and wade in. Pebbles massage my feet, a small pain. As I pry up the rock, I think that I could never do all this if it wasn’t part of the show. This adventure I asked for, it’s not what I was expecting, not what I wanted. I thought I would feel empowered, but I’m only exhausted.

I heave the stone upright. It’s too heavy to lift, so I drag it out of the water and to the tree. The stone leaves a six-­inch-­wide trail through my camp. I remember a driveway much wider twisting through the woods, leading from a mailbox choked by blue balloons to a cabin with more balloons by the door. The cabin itself was blue too, maybe, I’m not sure. Maybe it just had blue trim. And there were so many balloons; every time I remember I remember more. The balloons weren’t all: a bottle in the sink, a handful of wrapped packages on the table. All blue. Even the bedroom light felt blue when I found him—­found it.

I didn’t quit then. I didn’t quit when I got sick afterward, days of shivering and feeding the fire, boiling water constantly because I was losing fluids and I didn’t boil the tap water in the cabin and that must be what made me sick. Vomit and diarrhea, feeling so cold, endlessly cold.

I drop the stone by the tree.

Nothing can be worse than what they’ve already put me through. I’d never choose this, not again. But I’m here and I’m a woman of my word and I promised myself I wouldn’t quit.

I put my boots back on, then kneel to assemble the second trap. As I’m testing the fulcrum stick, there’s a soft thud behind me. I turn; the first trap’s been triggered. I think I see movement, but by the time I get there the squirrel is dead, its front half compressed into the dirt beneath the log. The thinnest sliver of black is exposed between its fuzzy eyelids. I’ve never been fond of squirrels; I prefer chipmunks with their racing stripes. When I was six or seven I spent an entire summer prone among the maples and birches behind my parents’ house, hoping a chipmunk would mistake me for a log. I wanted so badly to know the feel of his little feet on my skin. That never happened, but once one did scamper close, until we were eye-­to-­eye. And then he sneezed in my face and disappeared. Like a magic trick, I told my husband on our first date. Poof. A story I’ve told so many times I no longer know if it’s true.

Gray squirrels, though—­I associate them with cities, with overcrowding and litter. Even so, I feel bad as I pick up the squirrel by its tail. Killing mammals is tough, even when it’s a squirrel, even when it’s to eat. “Sorry, little guy,” I say.

Cooper could field-­dress a squirrel in less than a minute. We timed him once using Mississippi seconds. I was usually tending the fire. I’ve cooked squirrel, but I’ve never skinned one.

It didn’t look too hard.

I lay the squirrel belly-­down atop a log. Cooper started with a slit under the tail, so that’s what I do, forcing my dull knife through the skin. I saw across the base of the tail. And then—­this part astonished me every time I saw it, how easy it was—­I cover the tail with my foot, stepping hard, and yank the squirrel’s back legs up.

Red spritzes through the air as the squirrel rips in half and I stumble backward. Unexpected motion makes my head float; I feel like I’m on a raft, rocking in a ship’s wake. Clutching the chunk of the squirrel that came with me, I take a knee and force three slow, deep breaths.

I don’t know what I did wrong. When Cooper pulled, the skin of his squirrel always slid right off, like a banana peel.

It doesn’t matter what I did wrong, I need to salvage what I can. I look at the carcass dangling from my right hand. A happy surprise—­it didn’t rip in half. I’m holding everything but the tail. This is correctable, with patience.

I walk back to the log and see the detached tail sitting there, a fluffy gray-­and-­white lump. Memory brings me an image: Randy, his sweaty red hair puffing up anime-­style, his bile-­green bandana tight across his brow, a squirrel tail dangling over each ear. I see him dancing wildly around the fire, his tail-­ears flapping as he howls a howl that is supposed to sound like a wolf but is purely a showman’s call.

I sit on the log and flick the disembodied tail onto the ground, trying to focus. Randy doesn’t matter. All that matters right now is skinning this squirrel. Maybe my cut was too deep or I pulled too fast, I don’t know, but I think I know what to do next. I creep my fingers along the muscle, separating the skin in tiny increments. It takes forever. I’m probably doing it wrong. But eventually the hide is pulled up to the squirrel’s front legs. I place the blade of my knife flat against the midpoint of a front leg, and then I lean over it, pushing. The bone snaps, and the knife digs through into the log; I have to jerk it free. I use less force for the next three legs and the neck. My hands are slick and aching, but I’m almost done. I just have to gut it now. I flip the carcass so it’s belly-­up, then turn the knife so the blade faces me.

Don’t puncture the organs. I know that much, at least.

I ease the tip of my knife through the top of the chest, piercing. Then I bring the blade in tiny jerks toward myself, cutting through the skin from beneath like popping stitches. This time, I don’t fuck up. The underside opens and I dig my fingers in. I grab the esophagus and lungs and everything else I can curl my fingers around, and I pull. The innards come out together, a cohesive system I toss to the ground. The squirrel’s nubby spine winks up at me from inside the cavity.

I walk over to the brook and scrub the squirrel blood off my hands and wrists, digging into the dirt at the bottom for abrasion. Afterward I chop up the squirrel and set it to boil in my cup. I wish I had some salt and pepper, some carrots and onion. If I felt stronger, I’d forage for some Queen Anne’s lace, but I haven’t noticed any and I don’t trust myself to identify plants right now, especially not one with poisonous look-­alikes.

While the squirrel stews, I gather its inedible parts and take them away from my camp. Not far, maybe fifty feet. I should bury them, but I don’t. I’m tired and they’re such a small amount, I leave them in a pile, then wash my hands again. I let the squirrel boil until the meat pulls away from the bone when prodded, then pull the cup from the fire and fish out a piece. It’s too hot and I hold it between my teeth until I can chew without blistering my tongue. The meat has little taste that I can discern, but it’s not peanut butter. There is, I don’t know, half a pound of meat, probably less. I suck down every thread and when the liquid is cool enough, I drink that too. By the time it’s dark, all that’s left of the squirrel is a pile of skinny bones, which I toss into the woods.

Full, I could sleep for a month. But first I stretch my arms and legs, stand straight and tip side to side, fulfilling my pledge. I pour water over my fire, crawl into my shelter, and hang my glasses on the top loop of my backpack. I drift toward unconsciousness, content.

I awake to a snuffling sound. For a drowsy moment I think it’s my husband’s breath. I move to nudge him, and something pricks my hand. I jolt to full awareness, remember where I am, see the twig that scratched me.

Something is moving outside the shelter. I focus on the sounds: a powerful, rooting huff, crunching steps. I should have buried the squirrel offal. A black bear found it and now it wants my peanut butter too. The animal sounds too big to be anything other than a bear. It noses the side of the debris hut; leaves rattle, and a skinny ray of moonlight peeps through near the entrance. I hate peanut butter more than ever.

But I’m not scared, not really. As soon as I make it clear that I’m not prey, the bear will retreat. I won’t have a problem unless it’s habituated to people, and even then it’ll most likely back off once I make myself big, holler a bit. Wild animals don’t like a ruckus.

I reach for my pack, slowly, quietly, creeping my fingers toward my glasses as my shoulder muscles pinch and ache, resisting.

A rumbling growl; hot, wet breath. A blurred gray-­brown muzzle dripping thick white foam three feet from my face. I feel my next heartbeat like a hammer’s blow. Even in the dark, even without my glasses, the aggression and frothed saliva of disease are unmistakable. Perched at the only exit from my shelter is not a bear but a rabid wolf.

The only rabid animals I’ve ever seen before were raccoons and a few emaciated bats, and those in cages—­or dead, awaiting necropsy. No danger, not really, not like this: a wolf the size of a bear, the size of a house. A dire wolf brought back from extinction for the sole purpose of ripping out my throat.

I feel terror like a hardening of my veins as the beast growls and ducks its huge head. A glob of slime drops from bared teeth and lands on my backpack.

I grab the pack as the wolf lunges toward me. I’m not a screamer. Roller coasters, haunted houses, a RAV4 running a red light coming straight at me—­none of this has ever made me scream, but I scream now. My scream strains my throat and the pressure of the wolf against my pack strains the rest of me. I hear snapping jaws, feel wetness—­my sweat, its saliva, not-­blood-­please-­not-­blood—­and I see the black of my pack, flashes of fur and teeth. I’m compressed behind the pack, tucked into the end of the shelter, shoulders pressing against the roof.

The wolf retreats, only a step or two, and sways side to side, stumbles a step. It growls again.

And though I can hardly breathe, a thought pierces me: There is no way I can fight off a rabid wolf confined like this. There’s no way I can fight off a rabid wolf at all, but especially not like this. But I have to; I have to get home. I heave my pack at the wolf and shove myself against the wall of my shelter. With a yell, I push through. The garbage-­bag liner resists, then gives, scattering leaves and twigs. As my shoulders break through, the debris hut begins to crumble around me—­and I feel a tug, a violent pull on my leg.

The wolf has my foot. I feel the pressure of its bite through my boot, pinching. Like bait on a line, I’m being jolted down, down, down.

All I can see is the back of my tears. Starlight glints in the liquid, a magnification not of detail but of the ethereal splendor of a world I’m not ready to leave.

I kick. I kick and scream and claw at the earth. I fight through the rubble everywhere. My unhindered foot connects against skull; I feel the impact through the heel of my boot like striking concrete, and my other foot is suddenly free too. I scramble toward the expanse of predawn light, the patchy grass and gurgling brook. Behind me, the wolf thrashes as the debris hut collapses atop it.

I clamber to my feet and grab a thick branch, and as the wolf’s sharp muzzle appears from the leaves I bash at the emerging form. I feel the thunk of impact, hear the cracking of bone or wood, and I keep swinging. Over and over I swing, until I’ve lost my breath, until the leaves are dark and heavy. I swing for as long as adrenaline allows, an endless instant, and then my strength abandons me. I stumble backward, my club hanging between my knees. The remains of my shelter are fuzzy stillness and liquid glimmer.

I hurt, everywhere. Not soreness, real pain. Pain like death.

My foot.

I collapse to the ground in my haste to check myself for injury.

My every nerve is screaming so loudly I cannot sense particulars, cannot separate fear from physical wound. Pawing at my leg, I feel prickling growth but don’t find any breaks in the skin. The hem of my left pant leg is tattered and wet, but not bloodied, I don’t think.

My boot has been torn from my foot. I run my hands over the wool sock that remains. Twigs and leaves poke my fingers. No holes.

I’m okay.

If I were still in the habit of taking off my boots to sleep—­no, don’t think about it.

I raise my hands to wipe at my eyes, and see that my fingers and palms are thickly wet with the wolf’s saliva, like a mucous membrane.

I launch myself toward the brook.

So many scrapes, so many tiny cuts through which the rabies virus could enter. I rub my hands frantically in the water.

And then I freeze.

Will rubbing my hands push the virus into a cut? Is that possible?

I don’t know the answer. I should know the answer; I work with animals, and this is the kind of thing I know. Except that I don’t.

I sit in the water, shaking. Sopping wet from the waist down, and cold, I’m not myself. I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what to do, what to think. All I know is where I am: alone, sitting in a brook.

In time I realize I do know one other thing: Wolves don’t live around here. The closest wild wolf would have to be in Canada, or maybe North Carolina. The probability of the animal that attacked me being a wolf is infinitesimal.

Whatever it was, I killed it. Not to eat, not cleanly with a trap. Animal-­loving me, who has spent her professional life working with children to inspire in them a respect for—­a love of—­nature. Not for the kids’ sakes. That’s what everyone gets wrong. It’s not the teaching that I like. I think of Eddie the red-­tailed hawk, Penny the fox. 
I’m not supposed to name the ones slated for release, but I do. I always do.

Eventually, I regain my feet and stumble out of the brook. My legs are numb as I return to the destroyed debris hut. Twilight has given way to dawn; squinting, drawing closer in tiny movements, I’m just able to make out the animal, the front half of which juts from the leaves. Its head looks like a boulder was dropped on it.

Is that what I am now—­a boulder careening downhill, driven by inertia instead of will?

I pick up a branch and sweep the crimson leaves off the top of the shelter, then pry up the sticks covering the body. I’m still shaking and my throat is raw.

The animal is smaller than I thought—­about the size of a collie—­thin-­legged, its bushy tail stained with excrement.

Not a wolf, but a coyote. The longer I look at it, the smaller it seems.

I’m sorry.

I’m sorry you got sick.

I’m sorry I killed you.

I dig out my boot and backpack from the rubble. Thick rents run through the toe of the boot. I poke it with a stick, which slips through easily to strike the inner sole. Some of the holes go all the way through the sole; the boot is useless. The front of my backpack is shredded too, and it’s several minutes before I find my glasses. The frames are twisted, both earpieces snapped off. Only one lens is intact, the other shattered where a tooth struck it like a bullet.

Fear distinct from the fear I felt during the attack drifts over me. An equal, opposing fear. A slow fear. My vision isn’t bad compared to a mole’s, but it’s bad enough. I haven’t gone a day without corrective lenses since fourth grade.

“I can’t see,” I say, turning around. I lift my chin, hold up my ruined glasses, and directly address the cameras for the first time since Solo started. “I can’t see.”

Help should be here by now. An EMT should be sitting me down, handing me the ugly backup pair of glasses I entrusted to the producer the day before we started. I look at a bright red scratch that runs across the back of my right hand, dotted with pinpricks of drying blood.

“I need the vaccine,” I say to the trees. My heart is speeding. “Day zero and day three, post-­exposure.”

They required us to get rabies vaccinations before we came. It was one among a plethora of requirements: a full physical, a tetanus booster, proof of a whole host of other shots that I already had for school and work. Rabies was all that I needed to meet their requirements.

“I’m not immune,” I call. My voice cracks. The rabies vaccine is atypical in that instead of creating immunity, receiving it pre-­exposure only decreases how many doses one needs after exposure. I hold up my hand and turn in a circle. “I have a cut, look. I touched its saliva. I need the shots.”

There’s no answer. I stare at the blur of leaves, squinting, searching for a camera mounted on a branch, a drone hovering above. It must be there, it must be. I think of the boulder, of Heather’s taxidermy bear and the first prop splattered at the base of a cliff. I think of the doll, its mechanical cries twisting through the cabin’s suffocating air. My fear begins to morph, to sharpen, and even as I wait, I know no one’s coming.

Because they planned this.

I don’t know how, but they planned this and now my glasses are broken and I can’t see.

I feel as though my anger will split my skin, flay me alive from the inside.

I can’t fucking see.

**

Excerpted from THE LAST ONE by Alexandra Oliva. Copyright © 2016 by Alexandra Oliva. Excerpted by permission of Random House, A Penguin Random House Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Alexandra Oliva was born and raised in upstate New York. She has a BA in history from Yale University and an MFA in creative writing from The New School. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband. The Last One is her first novel.