DEAD ENDS

A HOUSE OF VLAD PRODUCTION

© 2024 by House of Vlad Press

All rights reserved. No part of this content may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publish­er, with the exception of excerpts used for critical essays and reviews.

These are mostly works of fiction. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. 

Release Date: September 27, 2024

Guest Editor: Lex Briscuso

Cover design: Percy Hearst

Cover photo: Andrew Chadwick 

Author photos © the authors

Founder and editor: Brian Alan Ellis 

Contributors: Hugh Behm-Steinberg, Veronica Bennett, Jon Doughboy, Katie Haley, Elizabeth Horner Turner, Jack Lennon, PJ Lombardo, Lee Pearson, L Scully, Gabrielle Sicam

Thanks for reading.

HOUSEOFVLADPRESS.COM

COOKIES

It’s open house at the local monastery. There’s a plate of cookies near the chapel—baked by the monks, I hope—on the table with the brochures.

Grabbing one, I take little mouse bites as I stroll, observing the ascetic way and all those stone blocks and statues, imagining losing myself in the contemplative life. No more possessions, just thinking about spiritual matters all day long. The thrill of going to confession! Pouring out my heart describing all the things I ruined in this life, the slow burn of the joy I’d feel as my sins diminish day by day, until I’m as good as a baby on the day he is born. Then off to bake more cookies.

I bet wool and sandals would look good on me.

So, on the spot I buy the place. I pay more money than I have to because I want to show that I mean business.

To take care of the essentials, I kick everyone out except for a monk—plus another monk who’s sworn a vow of silence to come in and clean, a couple of baker monks to help with the cookies, and a priest of course because while you can get anybody to listen to your confessions, you need a priest if it’s going to count.

I get the robe and sandals, and I go to work praying day and night, sometimes with the other monks, to keep their spirits up while they focus on my salvation, but mostly by myself. I pray hard. I pray like an animal.

Weeks pass: I’m praying around the clock, blasting out my sins three times a day to the priest, getting up super early and doing honest to god manual labor, but even as I get really good at baking, I wonder what’s the point as the influencers stop talking about my turn towards the contemplative life.

I consider buying a couple social media sites, if only so I could have forums to describe each of my insights. Maybe I could even buy the Vatican News out from under his Holiness. If I did, I’d confess a lot about pride; since any number of priests would have to pay attention, that alone would almost make baking all those goddamn cookies worth it.

Still, I’m waiting for that sign, that change, of me no longer being who I was, of me now being the person I’m going to be. I wait for the beam of light to wash over me in my cell, but all I get is the same sort of sunlight everybody else gets for free.

I should investigate that, by the way.

And yes, I know I’m not supposed to think it, but when are the temptations supposed to start? When is the devil going to show up? Because that’s how you know you’ve truly arrived in the contemplative game. The devil takes note of how much holiness you’re putting out and he shows up to acquire a piece of you for his collection. But only the best gets the devil. The rest just have to worry that their devotions are meaningless because neither God nor Satan pays any attention to them. They are forced to wonder, what with all the praying and cookie baking and confessing, even the vows of silence, if all these things are not just a waste of time. Because if your soul is so valuable, how come nobody is showing up to make an offer?

Don’t get me started on the whipping, or the kneeling on glass.

Whatever I’m doing, it’s not enough. That’s why I need to buy another monastery, and another one after that, and if they ask me, how many monasteries do you have to buy? I’d tell them, as many as necessary, until someone makes a bid.

“A bid on what?” the priest asks.

“My soul,” I tell him. “On my soul.”

And when I say that the priest takes all the cookies and crumbles them, letting the bits fall all over the floor.

I am not going to sweep up those crumbs.

HUGH BEHM-STEINBERG’s prose can be found in X-R-A-Y, The Pinch, Invisible City, Heavy Feather Review, and The Offing. His short story, “Taylor Swift,” won the Barthelme Prize from Gulf Coast, and his story, “Goodwill,” was picked as one of the Wigleaf Top Fifty Very Short Fictions. A collection of prose poems and micro-fiction, Animal Children, was published by Nomadic/Black Lawrence Press.

ISO SOUTH PHILADELPHIA BRUNETTES

Tuesday night twosome seeks

respite from karaoke stars

in free poppers at dive bar

(friend sloshed some into their right eye

and sprinted to the bathroom sink)

hydrocolloid bandage on blistered heel

from new old Doc Martens

stomping through street garbage

swiveling in my vinyl barstool

I lean across the counter

Do you have a girlfriend?

friend asks; we post:

Who’s around?

VERONICA BENNETT (she/they) is a writer, designer, editor, lover, hater, and Texan in Philadelphia. She founded Bullshit Lit in 2021 and remains the only person on the masthead. 

BUMPER STICKERS

The tailgate of a black Ford F-150 gleaming in the sun shining on our nation’s capital insisted babies in the womb should, must, have equal rights. I didn’t know equal to what or who or whom, how these rights were allocated and what authorities assessed whether they were equal, before whose eyes, but the little white feet in the blue circle were cute and the light was changing. I’m no pedant though. I thought about telling them there’s no such thing as equality or rights, no such things as all those things people advocate for or condemn or preach about via stickers stuck on bumpers and tailgates and hatchback doors across the land. Sloganic gospels penetrate us and we them in a nonconsensual orgy of ideologies, the corridor of billboards in Brazil emblazoned on our minds’ many myopic eyes—blinks—See Seamans First—rubs eye crust—You’ll Like the Way You Look, I Guarantee It—wipes the whisper of a tear—We Will Sell No Wine Before Its Time—jams both thumbs in eyes, Oedipal gouging—My Bologna has a First Name—a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand such ads, imperatives, and promises on the endless fuckfest called the American Road, carved into the American Soul.

I wanted that bumper sticker, gimme, gimme. I wanted my bumper to host such a sticker. Alas, the light changed. Foot to pedal to future unknown. My life, too, changed. I’d discovered my calling. I was going to traverse the land rehoming such stickers, coating my car in them, thus becoming America’s avatar on the road. I had something to learn. A North American-shaped hole in my heart that needed immediate filling.

In D.C., I picked up Ridin’ with Biden and in Maryland I learned that Guns Don’t Kill People and chased the sunset west. In West Virginia I was taught Trump Loves Energy and Jesus Saves and that I Stand with Israel. I wasn’t sure what sort of energy Trump loved, how or why, physically, fiscally, or if Jesus was committed to saving everyone or just Christians or certain denominations and sects or if his second coming was a single visit to the strip mines of West Virginia but I figured this knowledge, a fuller understanding, would come with time. The point was to move. To capture. To explore, embody, reflect and express. In Western Pennsylvania I learned that food is preferable to bombs and that we need to support our farmers and our troops and the United Steelworkers. Ohio told me we call COVID the China Virus and that Colombus is for Lovers and there are still many Deadheads alive across the Midwest. Indiana: I Could Shit a Better President than Biden. Chicago: Make Donuts, Not War. Black Lives Matter. Blue Lives Matter. All Lives Matter. I headed west like a good young man minding the famous admonition. Have You Dug Wall Drug. Divers Do It Better. Love is Love. My Other Ride is a UFO. I learned that only I can prevent forest fires and Jared Diamond is in bed with Big Oil and to say no to fracking and flag burners will be burned and love it or leave it and coexist.

I yearned and learned, buying stickers, stealing stickers, prying stickers off cold bumpers in dark motel parking lots and rest areas. Armed with commercial jugs of Goof Off, a sturdy scraper, and almost 248-years’ worth of American elbow grease, I rehomed hundreds of stickers, coating my car in the platitudes and prophesies of this land of liberty. My jalopy became a schizophrenic agent of political, religious, and cultural chaos, chugging ever westward, a mobile reflection of our fractured psyche. I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why. Home. To a new and shiny place. Make our bed and we’ll say our grace. Raised on promises. I couldn’t even see my car anymore and had forgotten what it was, the make or model or year. A Civic? A Toyota Pickup? Surely it was American—Popeye Doyle’s commandeered Le Mans, Rockford’s j-turning Firebird, Chaplin’s Model T for modern times.

I careened across Idaho in a state of confusion, a nation divided, divisible, forfeiting the privilege of being neutral, a shining sinner in the hands of an unexceptional blue-jeaned God. Would I reach the Pacific or starve to death in this land of plenty? If I can change, and you can change, everybody can… 

To cross into Washington State, I had to climb, all four, six or eight cylinders firing like bombs bursting through air, up and up, wearing this sticky skin of platforms and conspiracies, hopes and hates and fever dreams, and there, right before me, in the way, way, way back of an old, rusting heap and rolling fire hazard of a Ford Pinto, sat a child. A grubby little Christ Child sporting a tiny gray flannel suit and reading the CliffsNotes to Atlas Shrugged. Our darling savior in my very sights. I had already learned so much but beneath the rear window, of course: a bumper sticker. Vitally important. Something of universal, portentous, and eternal truth, the keystone to hold up the rotting edifice of America. But I couldn’t read it. The glare, perhaps. Or the road grime smeared across it. I accelerated, trying to keep up, catch up, but the layers and layers of bumper stickers weighed me down and as the road grew steeper, my front end began to lift off the ground, the whole car—my whole project, calling, mission—tumbling backwards and the last thing I saw, the last image I beheld in that transitory enchanted moment before sky became windshield became glass shattering across pavement became extinction, was that little dear, our savior, giving me the finger and smiling as he was chauffeured ahead, beyond, far, far away.

JON DOUGHBOY is a hobbyist scribbler pissing up literature’s frayed rope. See this farce play out from the dry seats in the rafters: @doughboywrites

HOLES

A few of my friends have that phobia of holes. They drunkenly tell me that it started when someone showed them a honeycomb or when a summer camp counselor kicked over a log of wood with maggot filled holes. I nod sympathetically as they tell me pomegranates and bubble wrap make them gag. 

“Do you wanna hear what made me kind of get over it?” I heard a friend, formerly afraid of holes, say to another girl in line for the bathroom at the club. 

“Sure.” 

“So, it’s like an evolution thing, because bugs or bacteria can be inside holes and can lead to death. It’s your body’s way of making sure you don’t eat it.” 

The other girl nodded, wondering if it was true that her body thought she might eat a dish sponge. 

I have whatever the opposite of this phobia is, a fascination with holes. I love them. Always have. My fingers don’t care if it’s a singular hole or a cluster, they’ll find their way inside just the same. As a kid my dad broke the house instead of getting a job, which meant there were holes in all the walls and floors. I didn’t mind, I was in love. The one in front of the sink made to find a pipe was my favorite. I’d stick each of my toes through it, one at a time, while brushing my teeth. There was another in the door of my bedroom from my brother punching out the plaster. Small and messy. I’d run my fingers along the edge any chance I got. 

It only became a problem in public. My family made concerned eyes at my mom while I stacked plates on the corner of a table to make room for my face, dragging it along the holes. When my wisdom teeth came out it was ecstasy. Rubbing the holes with my tongue, the back left was my favorite. Keychains and hole punchers every Christmas. Now I have a few special shirts and socks, with little tears in the fabric that I wear when alone, falling asleep feeling holes. 

When I was nineteen my ex used to come over every night for a massage. He would take his shirt off, lay down on his stomach, as I would sit on his legs and run my fingers along his pores. Blackheads and bumps for thirty minutes. I fell in love with him the first time I saw his patterned back. When we broke up, I cried for years about the holes I missed, his gapped scars, the pockets of his skin. He left me after we started to hate each other, the cliche stuff like we told all the jokes we could, and he wasn’t eating me out anymore. But my begging to stay together confused him. 

“If you had cared about me while we were together like you do now that we’re not, I would have never broken up with you.” 

“I’ll be better, please.” 

He moved on fast, but still calls me drunk occasionally, to say he misses my back rubs. I miss knowing someone, knowing the space in their body, where their skin spreads apart. It’s easy to know what’s filled in, what’s taken up, harder to know the gaps. 

A few months back I went over to a drummer’s house, they were hungover, and I couldn’t keep my desperation to myself. When I walked in, I commented on how nice the living room was, eyes wide and half whispering to not wake the roommates. We sat on the couch, the broken TV in front of us, bad omens were everywhere. 

“When do you work this week?” 

“Only Monday through Wednesday,” I lied. I’m unemployed. 

“Okay, well on Thursday we’ll do something. We can go downtown,” they said, rubbing their eyelids. 

“Uh huh,” I answered, my hands found a rip in the cushion. I spread it enough to fit three fingers. 

After five minutes of listening to the busted remote being banged against the coffee table, I offered to leave. Disappointed I had even come at all. The drummer pulled me in for a long hug, drawn out goodbye. We laid together, hands in pockets. Finding holes. Before pulling away, they stuck a thumb in my mouth, I watched them stare at their finger filling my lips. Taking up room in me. I knew we’d never see each other again. The night had been short and more boring than either of us expected. But I drove home, grateful to have felt at least some of their gaps, to have touched the empty space in them. 

I’m cautious of things without room, that are as full as they can be. I don’t like things that are done. I pluck holes out anywhere I can, always able to find a cavity. And this is how it will always be. In love with dents, rips, what’s apart. 

KATIE HALEY is a twenty-something writer from California who likes making honest and surreal work. Most recently her words can be read in Paloma Mag, NeverMind Magazine, Limit Experience Journal, and her self-indulgent Substack blog, “Somewhere.” 

Bonus Vlad Mag Pick by Brian Alan Ellis:

HER GOLDEN ZIPPER

[An Excerpt from Horsemouth and Aquariumhead (Black Lawrence Press, 2024)]

They swam all over him, around his body and into his head and through his eyes. At first, the words were rough and painful as they penetrated, things about himself he didn’t want to face. But as he started to really listen, he said it was like the best warm bath ever. Like pure, pure love tonic. He had never felt that safe before, he said. After a while, it got lonely in there, so when she was asleep one night, he climbed up her throat like a tickle and pulled his way out on her molars. 

“I wanted to make her something,” he said, “so she knew that I understood.” 

The villagers said her screaming began around six the next morning. They said she must have walked from the river because when they saw her, she was naked and covered in mud, scooping up anything she could get her hands on—dirty napkins, pigeons, coffee cups—and pressing them to her chest, trying to force them inside her body. They said she fought off four cops until she finally collapsed and was taken away.

ELIZABETH HORNER TURNER’s debut poetry chapbook, The Tales of Flaxie Char, was published through dancing girl press in 2017.  Her work has been published widely in journals such as Cutbank, Fairy Tale Review, Gulf Coast, Lost Balloon, and trampset, and it has also been selected for inclusion in Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf’s Top 50 and Long List.  She’s been awarded scholarships to Tin House Workshop and Sewanee Writers’ Conference.  She earned a BA from Hamilton College, an MFA From Sarah Lawrence College, and now lives in San Francisco with her family.

MY GUARDIAN ANGEL SIPS A STARBUCKS AS SHE DROWNS ME 

one handed in the bathtub

i think it’s a frappe or something like that 

something they blend with ice 

the night before at the anime convention

I let a guy in a sasuke cosplay fuck me 

in the disabled toilets

It wasn’t even original sasuke

It was shippuden sasuke

I think I’m sick of myself too 

So, i just let her do it

My cigarette falls in with the seashell ashtray 

About halfway through and I can hear

The gentle hiss as it dies 

In silence

SCENES FROM HORROR MOVIES THAT DO NOT EXIST

After Claire Cronin

You are playing in your mothers’ makeup. Once you have slathered your face in it, the makeup hardens, sealing your mouth closed and eyes open. 

You wake one morning to find the windows, walls and contents of your bedroom coated in a thick white mold. You call your landlord. He will fix it next week.

You are killed and god immediately resurrects you. She loves you too much to see you die. This happens again and again and again.

You are introduced to the person who will take over your body after you die. They don’t want to know anything about you.

You are introduced to the person who will take over your body after you die. They want to know everything about you.

You find it hard to believe in things you used to.

Your father rises from the grave. He says everything you wished he’d say when you were a child, but it doesn’t sound how you thought it would. His vocal cords are rotted.

There isn’t any time left to do anything else. 

Draculas are real.

JACK LENNON is bi and trans as hell. You can find their work in Witch Craft Magazine, The Selkie, Mycelia, God’s Cruel Joke, MEMEZINE, BarBar, and 404 Ink’s The F Word. They live in Edinburgh. They are one of the few still posting on Tumblr.

BLOOD MAKES GRASS GROW KILL KILL KILL

After Aberration in the Heartland of the Real by Wendy Painting

Under oklahoman april 

every syllable leaks bent 

out bent elbows into 

unrequitable prairies 

Microchipped crucifixion 

ladles a holographic schism

out the tv screen

where everybody’s children 

eat up everybody else 

On a different star i might have a name I might have a city

but between this syndrome this 

empty mill and this

ballistic camp instead i have 

the face of american terror

I have eight billion letters 

some other hand scribbled

while i swilled sodium pentothal 

middle fingers daggered out each of my nostrils 

LET THEM VANISH AS DOES WATER

Squeezed like a rag in the colombian heat

Nameless into your evaporating district 

Wayward from the womb like a sadist’s iris

Regret cooks where my fists land

roused at dawn

screwed untrue

This is the anger of where i live: 

a city of cheers a lakeside undead

PJ LOMBARDO is a writer from New Jersey. He serves as co-founding editor of GROTTO, a journal of grotesque-surrealist poetry, and he has previously worked for Action Books. His recent chapbook, HATE, DANCE, was published in January of 2024. Read his writing in Hobart, Tripwire, Sarka, Spectra Poets, Brooklyn Rail and elsewhere.

SEX TAPE (2017)—PETER BRÖTZMANN & HEATHER LEIGH

Winter 2020

It always feels like rent day comes and never goes, just churns from one swallowed paycheck to the next, perpetual wave motion machine turning me in on myself, bent into autofellatio origami, money spewing out the pinky unsheathed crown faster than replenishment rates can sustain, watered-down post-Taco Bell medium Diet Pepsi diuretic emission into eager, cavity-filled piss receptacle. Save piss, save money. 

Desperation painted black over every first of the month, drove me to sell as much of myself as I could just so I could get by another thirty days. Sell off all my tiny parts, one at a time, discounted relics of those brighter days when warm sentiment could be afforded. Month to month, hoping the poverty rigmarole would eventually settle before all that was left of me were my kidneys and a mountain of debt. Desperation carried my veins out the apartment, down the street where the plasma donation place was tucked near the Smoke 4 Less where me and roommate Andre sometimes scored low-grade sativa if we got the cash for it. Sidestepping the remnants of shattered needles, charred crack pipes, rolls of F-stenching aluminum, sleeping bags huddled together for warmth under swiss-cheese tarps and aerated tents, ceaseless Portland drizzle seeping its way into everything.

Inside, I filled out a questionnaire asking about my second cousin’s sex life and the most embarrassing thing that’s ever happened to me—weird questions, but I was desperate. I figured I probably wouldn’t be disqualified from donating if I’d accidentally pissed my sweatpants on the playground in kindergarten in front of everyone and my mom had to bring me a pair of clean ones and I always cried about it while all the other kids snickered behind my back for the rest of the year.

The receptionist gestured to me from out of the front lobby and into a disorderly row of two dozen meandering souls. It smelled of cheesy body odor. We shuffled through an industrial assembly line of needles being eased in and out of desperate veins willing to give every drop to feed the kids, pay rent, keep heads above water. The chairs were all taken, so I stood and watched the misery unfold, being herded here and there by confused employees. One dude, an employee maybe a little older than me, tossed a used needle in the direction of a trashcan but missed. He looked down at his missed shot, at me, then scowled and walked off without picking it up. The thing leaked a sum of red onto the floor and eventually disappeared under the heel of someone’s New Balances.

A younger girl held a baby in one arm while blood trailed down the other from out a blown-out vein, trickled floorward in pitter-patters, gathering in a pool on the dirty, cracked linoleum with scabified red-turned-sickly-brown spilling out the grout between the tiles. Her attending phlebotomist told her to keep pressure on the gaping hole while she went to get help, handing over a roll of toilet paper that didn’t end up helping much at all. I watched for several minutes as blood began to collect on her clothes and on the infant. The mother began to cry, left to bleed out alone—then the baby started crying, then I started crying, then I got the fuck outta there before things got any worse.

My car’s fuel gauge was bobbing somewhere near empty as I drove home to feast on ramen, to try to forget about it all. I easily could have rode a bike, if I hadn’t sold my bike the month before. All I had left was a guitar and a few microscopic shreds of dignity. I don’t generally become too attached to things, but the instrument was perfect in every way. It wasn’t particularly expensive, but it was the best gift I’d ever received and the sound it could make was what I always wanted. I resolved myself to use the last of my gas to go and hock it for quick cash. After the second week of eating ramen once every two days, I couldn’t have cared less that the pawn shop would most likely buy it for less than a fourth of what it’s worth.

I don’t know anything about free jazz except that, in its chaos, it reminds me that I only keep going on out of spite most days. And that reminder eases the burden of existing in such a derelict, uncaring universe, somehow. Andre had recommended Brötzmann’s Machine Gun months ago, and only then, on my way to the pawn shop, did I figure I didn’t have much to lose. Sex Tape was what caught my eye, though. The cover depicted Jesus of Nazareth, lead actor in the pornography of Matthew 27—amid highest eroticism, zenithing lewd sensation of body and soul, his blood-drenched Passion on the Cross, La Grande Mort, cumming buckets of divine nut sap—getting sucked off by the Serpent of Temptation.

The sounds on the recording, captured from a performance in Wels, Austria in 2016, comes off as a ritual enactment of some loud, raucous copulation, almost an hour of Brötzmann’s sax accompanied by Leigh on a pedal steel guitar in varying modes of coital chit-chat, shifting positions often, the dominant lead being subverted off-and-on, the sounds of rising orgasm evoked in the hoarse saxophone barks and the whining of the pedal steel. What rhythm that can be momentarily discerned is visceral, an awkward yet profound dance that can never be reproduced, two individuals in a collection of sweaty, fleeting minutes, heavy bodies, sudden explosions, lush passion coming and going like the breeze. They shudder moment to moment in states of ecstasy, musical improvisation as sex. I’d never heard anything like it.

I died a little death in the pawn shop parking lot and, in a moment of perfect clarity, decided not to sell the guitar.

LEE PEARSON is a writer from Northwest Arkansas. He has no real credentials or accolades, but some of his work has been featured with the likes of JAKE, Always Crashing, Cephalophore, and SCAB. He’s been ineptly running a literary magazine, God’s Cruel Joke, since late 2022. He can occasionally be found whining on X: @leeisscum. 

H.A.G.S.

trees are shedding like

skin off heels

a moth dies and 

smushes

into the bathmat of a 

dead house

feels like you’re always

on a business trip just 

down the street

sorta reminds me of a dad

I sorta remind me of a dog

both pretending to work on our 

laptops 

old man across the street

walks real slow takes breaks

to sit on the rocks outside my 

window

I joke he is a retired Olympic sprinter

who couldn’t lose the limp

neither of us say

what we 

mean

L SCULLY (they/them) is a living writer.  

BOYFACE

I’ve always been told that I look like my dad

Or maybe more so his side:

four boys, little women, named after fascists

cool enough in high school to ignore

the hard-worked intellectual pickings

of their forefathers

(boys don’t need to impress at literary salons)

Yes, befitting our ilk, I inherited bad ankles

worse eyesight

a permissive outlook on adultery

and boyface

beautiful fluttering boyface

I tried Feeld and it told me I had boyface

I matched with an old man and in his column of desires

he had a single, bright, blinking tab:

ANDROGYNOUS ! XXX.

yr perfect, he said, sweet boyface

I was very jealous

for him to make it all so easy for himself

to compound it all into one big love

one big want for boyface

I fucked someone I met in a bar instead

and waited for the greco-roman bath joke

and it never came

and neither did I

(so i finished in front of the mirror at home,

looking at my boyface

my fourboyface

that got my great-grandfather out of the war

that got my grandfather into the bank

that got my father into the arms of my mother

that got me to come)

And last night I went to a party

we played that stupid game with the cards

I don’t know, I’m bad at those

I only remember 2 rules:

1. when someone picks a seven, all the girls have to drink
2. six, that’s dicks, that’s boys

Take a shot on both, said my friend

Take a shot on both, boyface

GABRIELLE SICAM is a writer and bookseller from South London. 

LEX BRISCUSO is an entertainment, film and culture writer with work at FANGORIA, Paste, The Guardian, Life & Style, In Touch Weekly, Shudder’s The Bite and EUPHORIA. She spends too much time thinking about One Direction and the leftover moments writing poetry, fiction and screenplays. Her horror radio show, YOUR NICHE IS DEAD, is live Mondays 5pm ET only on KPISSFM.