SUMMER BUMMER

A HOUSE OF VLAD PRODUCTION

© 2025 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: July 4, 2025

Cover design: Percy Hearst

Cover photo: Andrew Chadwick 

Author photos © the authors

Founder and editor: Brian Alan Ellis 

Contributors: Ryan-Ashley Anderson, Frankie Baby, Ana Carrete, Heather Halak, Gabriel Hart, Homeless, Kirsti MacKenzie, Kevin Maloney

Thanks for reading.

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DROOLING PUDDLE OF GOO

My friends are always surprised to learn that 80% of my callers are gay men and sissies. Yes, they’re two separate groups. There’s some overlap, sure, but not always. I especially love the sissies because we get to talk about makeup and dress-up and shoes–things that they probably can’t imagine are just as novel for me as for them.

I’m less into my stealth gay callers because all they want to do is send unsolicited photos of themselves deep-throating dildos or revealing their gaping assholes. They want me to say things like, “Wow! Look how deep you can go!” and “Good job, baby, look how much you’ve stretched!” But the thing is, I can’t stare at these images straight on. I look at them sideways, just long enough from the blurry corner of my eye to delete them from the feed. Seeing somebody choking on a veiny glass phallus, lips stretched taut, tears and snot intersecting at the corners of their mouths, does not turn me on. And seeing a gaping hole come through the chat—ass in the air, greedy fingers tugging at the sides of one’s own hole—makes me want to vomit. Don’t get me wrong—I love ass. I just don’t want to see the inside of a stranger’s body. I, perhaps naively, didn’t imagine this would be part of the deal when I decided to become a phone sex operator. 

Worse than being forced to look inside the inflamed rectum of someone who has newly discovered anal fisting, though, is being called by a boring straight man who doesn’t know how to articulate what he wants from the call and expects me to tease desire out of him like a magician, or a psychic. I hate these calls because they feel like too many boring Tinder chats and real first dates, which I cut short before dessert. It’s too much like life and this, here, is supposed to be something else. Tell me you want to be shrunk down to the size of a flea and forced to live between my toes. Tell me you want to hire me as your secretary and fuck me in hotel rooms wearing bear suits on business trips. It’s all good. Just don’t say, when I ask what you’re interested in, “You.” Just don’t say, when I ask what’s on your mind, “Jerking off.” Because jerking off isn’t what’s on your mind, it’s what you’re literally doing. Right now. And that is not the same thing.

“But what are you thinking about?” I’m forced to plead, giving examples like, “Big titties? Round asses? Cheating with your neighbor?” I tell them, sternly, that they must provide me with at least one single tiny nugget to start from because, much to their dismay, I, like most women, am not psychic. 

Most of my straight callers are the worst. I have some favorites—outliers who know how to have an actual conversation, communicate desire, and craft a narrative—but most are either boring as fuck in a basic way, violently misogynistic in a boring way, or violently misogynistic in a really interesting and terrifying way which ends up haunting me in my sleep. I wonder sometimes if they are practicing? What happens when fantasy isn’t enough? I shudder.

So, when I got a call from the straight lawyer in New York with a sexy voice who could string more than two sentences together and was calling me because I was clearly an intelligent woman, I was relieved. He wanted to know what I was studying. 

In seconds, he had created a roleplay for us. I was an investigative journalist, working on stories of missing girls from poor neighborhoods that nobody cared about. This was a strange fantasy, I thought, but maybe his kink is saving disadvantaged girls and then—I cringe at this—being thanked by them?

“You’re searching for these girls, but the traffickers get a whiff of your investigation. They plan a coup to entrap you.”

“And what becomes of me?”

Between deep, gasping breaths which I imagine must reflect the rhythm of his stroking, he says, “You get too close to the truth. They trap you. Take you to a warehouse filled with all these other missing girls, and you see that they’re hooked up to machines, unconscious in warm vats of white goo, being fed through tubes, and you realize that they’ve become human incubators. For months, they’ve been given brain-squishing drugs and semen and denied the use of language. Their legs are permanently open so the men can fill them any time they want. They’ve forgotten how to speak, and you will, too. All these things you’ve learned—the theory, the philosophy—are forgotten. All the hard work you did to escape the life you came from will be for naught. None of it will serve you and none of it will have meant anything, because you will be fulfilling your ultimate purpose as a pre-lingual incubator, a mindless body, a drooling puddle of goo.” 

The calls that stick with me are the ones that leave me with a twisted stomach and a sour mouth. The ones that make me think things like, “There are men out there who really do see me as, simply, something they haven’t consumed or deposited into in some way yet.” 

I remember the 1977 film, The Stepford Wives, based on Ira Levin’s novel about wives being murdered by their husbands, replaced by robots created in their idealized likenesses. The robots aren’t exact replicas—they’re improved versions of the originals, with bigger breasts, smaller waists, and more perfect hair, who scoff at distracting hobbies and focus on more meaningful activities, like keeping the house clean and fixing meals for their man. 

I think about the girls that nobody is missing or looking for. I think about the people who take them, use them, kill them, then forget them. I stop taking shortcuts across lots between parked cars and wonder if my New Yorker has ever given the real thing a try.

RYAN-ASHLEY ANDERSON, a conceptual artist and writer from the rural South currently living in the Pacific Northwest, has been published by X-R-A-Y, Icebreakers, and Rejection Letters. Anderson excavates her personal narrative as a queer, female, neurodivergent, autoimmune sex worker to explore ideas of temporality, grief, and precarity, and is currently writing a memoir about sex work, ageing, and belonging. 

REVELATIONS

what is heaven like

i wonder

while i gaze

into tired eyes

sandpaper hands

graze mine 

the answer is this moment

eternity is hell 

*

your rope 

my demise

tie me up

i want to be stuck 

inside you 

your web

of delusion

of discourse 

of dumb shit 

haha whatever 

his loss 

i try to be chill

his fingers 

around my neck

his noose 

is my heaven 

he hangs me with pride 

i am the jester 

he is the king 

poison me

turn me inside out 

one last spectacle 

all the gold in the world 

and to you i’m worthy

of nothing 

*

life is what they give you 

hell is what you make it

baby, i made it

half a gram of k by accident 

when you thought it was coke

invincibility is not equal to invisibility 

but if you do enough

you can’t see

i can’t see

me

i do not exist

eternity 

is the breathe

when the sun is rising

when the clouds change colors

the hues

otherworldly 

and in that moment 

i can’t feel my nose

my teeth

my lips

but i feel this

you

us

i feel the clouds passing

i feel the sun

passing the moon

i feel all the things

you’d pay to feel 

*

if i wanted to die would you let me

would you help me

or would you put on schitt’s creek

cus you wanna laugh

you wanna laugh

don’t ask why i’d rip half a gram at once

or why i looked at the white powder 

on the key

and for once 

knew it was for me

for once

kismet 

the powder 

tiny ribbons 

little shards

floating 

to take me away 

it’s crazy how when you leave 

the only thing you want to do is come back 

IF I HAD A BARBIE DREAM HOUSE I’D PAINT IT BLACK SO EVERYONE KNOWS THERE’S NO VACANCY

in this poetry class i was taking at the new school we did a workshop with this poet and she came and discussed her pieces and i don’t remember her name or her poems or her book but i see everything i can see this so vividly i will never forget it her poem was in the shape of a body so clear i can’t imagine how long it took to format it—perfect—i was mesmerized i couldn’t even pay attention to the words within the body the words she read aloud that came to life when she showed us a picture of her family her mother her father and a cutout that perfectly matched the body of the prose she had just read to us that took form of an unknown form she went on to explain that it is common for people to cut themselves out of photographs before committing suicide i’m sorry am i not supposed to say that anymore i’m sorry is un-aliving better for everyone is sanctioning suicide what’s going to make it better that’s what he did he ransacked the albums he took the frames off the walls he vandalized himself into disappearance and forgive me for forgetting her name and the name of the poem i am floating through my own life as it is and the crazy thing is he didn’t want to be here yet he is the only part of this i remember i don’t even know him and i think of him often and if i had a pair of scissors i think i’d do the same except i don’t have a pair i threw the last set away after a bad batch of manic pixie bangs that were way too short for my face shape and i don’t even think anyone has photos of me 

physically in their possession because as far as i can remember i never wanted to exist i never wanted to be remembered and i’ve always done my very best to feel like a ghost and the harder you try to disappear the harder it is to…

when i’m gone

i’ll remain

i exist 

in my demise

*

you feel like drowning 

the water is dark

you are the light 

the shore 

the unexplored 

beneath the surface 

i want you 

excavate 

my empire 

hidden treasure 

floating in the depths

of my despair 

there is a glimmer

a glitter

a fleck

only you can see 

yet

you close your eyes 

you wish to ignore

   me 

LULLABY

when you read this 

will it change you 

will your body contort 

to my whims

will you fit

in the box

i’ve built        for you 

dry wood   scaffold           

sandpaper like your hands

rough          i can take it 

will you fit

will it hurt 

me            or you

                       i can take it 

do you have room

for another            heart 

bleeding 

garnets     rubies 

does your blood

sparkle

like my eyes 

            or not at all

will i pale in comparison 

do you see 

                  the pink in my cheeks

am i changing in front of you 

do i have to wait 

                            until you come

customize the color

of my meaningless  

my room is dark

i can’t sleep 

but your bed is my favorite 

to pretend i belong in

*

you say i am the light

but i am dark

inside i am rotting 

you say 

i am hope

a beacon

your heaven

you say 

i am paradise

a parasite 

a paradox

pandora’s box 

you say

i am an angel

i tell you i am

nothing 

a monster 

a nightmare 

your lips 

purse

your crows

feet 

my wings 

clipped

leave me on the sidewalk 

i want to bleed out

it’s 

milky

cloudy

clarity 

you’d die in the face of reality 

forcing fog on your window

we exist

in the unknown 

you collect my tears 

i look at you 

and am jealous

of every girl who made their mark

how i’ll never get close

enough to leave a scar

someday a real storm will come 

i’ll scatter your ashes 

*

how i love to be rejected

by you 

give just enough

pull my rope

to make me feel

like i am nothing 

i am everything 

a thorn in your side 

a rose 

i am just another 

i prick

you bleed

i need

your attention 

i am matter 

you are dust 

*

i go

you would surely die

heaven or some shit the cure sang about 

every end is a beginning 

her sun / my moon

your screen time

is rising 

is she aware

counting the taps 

of your fingers

your hands 

dry as your love

for her

dry 

as my martini 

does she know

how wet you get me

a rock and a hard place

you give 

i take 

when you think about it

purgatory is heaven

for the those with eyes to see 

*

with death in my hands

hair perfectly done

girls at the bar ask

if i went to the salon 

girls never talk to me

that’s how i know it was good

i did not go to the salon

i do it all

myself 

my talents know no bounds 

i am full of talent 

i am full of shit 

i am beautiful

if i want to be

i don’t want to be 

at all

i don’t want to be

at all

i don’t sleep 

i feel my heart beating in my ears

peace is for people who deserve it 

i’m meant to suffer 

to stay up 

to wonder 

if i sleep

will i dream 

will i die

i drown

i float 

in hoping 

it’s the last time i say good morning 

*

i wish you would 

but please don’t 

FRANKIE BABY wrote DESOLATION (Long Day Press, 2024) and lives in Brooklyn, New York. 

OKAY BITCH

there are loopholes in my pants 

people get jelly 

shit’s corny

panties remain 

crotch-less 

did you know the g 

in g-string 

stands for 

groin always 

assumed g-spot

what else am i 

forgetting 

more poem 

more problems 

what keeps you 

up at night

shove some bacon and biscuit 

in your mouth someone needs to get paid  

scam the QR code 

open your cam and lick it

swipe the credit card 

between the ass cheeks 

ka-ching 

THINK ABOUT STEPHEN KING

most of his stories 

are about writers

coincidence 

yeah 

right

2.0

when i share a silly meme 

it means feel free to reply 

guess what by jesse lanza

reply say more than 

crying-with-laughter emoji 

think this is normal 

think again

i got news for you 

i wanna see sexy 

lookalike contests 

in my area 

for example 

gimme buddy holly 

your whole personality

shady and risky 

wrong and valid 

tired and 2.0 

ANA CARRETE’s latest poetry collection is Blush & Blink (Lang Books, 2023).

LIFE CYCLE OF A FLORIDA RESIDENT

I drive on I-75, the drag of nothing but billboards in 

Central Florida between Orlando and Gainesville:

Eighteen days after conception a fetus has a heartbeat. 

Cafe Risqué—a seedy sex shop that is not at all a cafe but serves as my personal mile marker that I’m almost home—boasts clean showers and not only bares all, but is inclusive of all, including truckers, though there’s always the heavy on binaries Adam & Eve or Jack & Jill.

A woman in knee high boots and a strappy top à la Lara Croft from Tomb Raider holding an assault rifle assures me that Machine Gun America isn’t far. I wonder if she’s ever been called a “pistol,” though one of those gets more rights here than women.

Pregnant and need help? You have options (the one you need is across four state lines).

On Top of the World promises luxury housing for those fifty-five and older—not to be confused with The Villages, sometimes called the STD capital of America, though some say the rumors are due to ageism and jealousy.

Looming just past the plastic scanners of a digitally manned tollbooth, an image of a heart monitor records a rhythmic pulse becoming a dash, the text below asks: 

Are YOU prepared to meet Jesus?

Where are you going: heaven or hell? 855-FOR-LIES.

Photo: Anthony Verdi

HEATHER HALAK ran a bookstore in Gainesville, Florida, for almost a decade and currently serves on the board of a zine library and sometimes works at a record store. She has more Scorpio placements than Björk.

YOU DON’T HAVE TO DO THIS

“…you can just walk away, call it a night. You’ll thank yourself.”

In a parallel world I wish Seth was offering me this advice before I arrived, but it’s too late—we’re already in the bar where we aren’t exactly safe under these red lights, where you fate your tempt, then tempt your fate when you leave; like you’re trapped in everything except the past, until you realize that’s what got you here. But for now, we’ve reached our destination, trading stories of what it took. 

Seth asks if I passed that nightclub on the corner, the one with all the gorgeous, well-dressed people outside. I know the one; when I walked by wearing my cheap black suit, I suddenly felt inferior to the way they dress like it’s the last night of their lives, and I recall taking an envious mental snapshot as I walked by a little more hunched over than before.

“Well, by the time I was passing it,” Seth says, “two enormous guys in pinstripes and elaborate gold chains were about to square off again. I’d seen them on the ground choking each other out in the distance before the crowd pulled them apart, and man…” He pauses, half-laughs. “I don’t know what came over me, but I put my hand on one guy’s shoulder, caught his eye, and said, ‘You don’t have to do this, man…’”

“Crazy. Then what happened?”

“Well, I guess he did have to do it… ’cause he looked at me like I was… like you just said—crazy—then broke free from the crowd holding him back and they went at it again.”

I look around the bar, a place that would’ve been packed any Saturday night before the plague, but tonight there’s maybe five desperate people we’ll be playing our desperate songs for, and through rose-colored glass this could mean there are “less desperate people.” But we are trapped in this world, where there are, in fact, more desperate people than before: they’ve just lost the will to leave the house or have migrated to other cities to be desperate. So here, tonight, at this bar, I continue telling myself Seth and I will be profiting off less desperate people, and I like the way that sounds until the bartender charges me $10 for my beer: malaise inflation. 

*

We play; they play. I’m telling the singer how much I enjoyed their set, how their tone felt narcotic. His bass player exits the boy’s room again, where all evening he won’t stop entering, and I sense him somewhere behind us before I hear him collapse. His eyes roll upwards. It’s almost encouraging the way the singer yells Nar-CANto each of us, but he’s not getting it, so he screams salt, salt, give him some salt! Like the bad taste just needs seasoning, even though he’s shriveling, a spirit threatening to leave. Instead of gawk, I tell myself, in this world: You don’t have to do this, man. You can just walk away, call it a night. 

When the paramedics arrive, I leave. I take a left, then a right, reversing my path, testing my luck. I approach the other club where Seth thought he’d save the night; an even larger crowd this time, where no one is taking sides—instead, they’re forming a circle around their own collapsed figure; a foaming mouth, elevated eyes, like it’s all synched up with our scene behind me. They’re calling the EMT, unaware they’re right around the corner, so they’ll be with you shortly, maybe sooner than you think, convenience by proximity and the same bad batch as the bass player. Their brother, our brother; finally, we’re all brothers now, drinking from the same tainted reservoir. 

GABRIEL HART wrote Fallout from Our Asphalt Hell, among other books. He lives in California and contributes to The Last Estate and LitReactor.

FIFTEEN (15) NUBBINS

Wrinkled white by rain,

a MISSING PERSON poster

becomes its own ghost.

*

Pairs & pairs of legs

walking through the grievances 

of manhole covers.

*

Snowflakes battering 

a photo of Kim Jong Un 

in someone’s window.

*

Bowed towards the altar

of a urine-filled bottle, 

two wilting tulips.

*

A small miracle haiku:

While taking a leak,

a bunch of my piss bubbles 

form The Bat Signal.

*

A little blonde girl 

dissects a flock of pigeons

with surgical joy.

*

Getting crushed by night,

a red horizon bleeds out

over Central Park.

*

A “cry for help” haiku:

I knew things were bad

when I was contemplating 

growing a mustache.

*

Hunchbacked & grimy,

he picks cans from the garbage 

like they’re fresh flowers.

*

No help is coming—

ten tulips facing the sun

as I hold back tears.

*

A shriveled old man

in a chair he brought from home

watching construction.

*

A McDonald’s haiku:

Flocks of the homeless 

drawn to these Golden Arches 

like forsaken moths.

*

Saggy, sweaty tits

panini pressed by the heat 

of early summer.

*

A couple hurries

to pick up the strawberries 

they spilled on the ground.

*

Soggy morning wood

rooting around my boxers,

lost, looking for her.

HOMELESS wrote My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor (Clash Books, 2024) and The Death of the Party (Gob Pile Press, 2023), among other books. He lives in New York.

AN EXCERPT FROM BETTER TO BEG (SWEET TRASH PRESS, 2025)

Hux

Las Cruces, NM

After blocks of believing we could lick stoplights, we pull up into a neighborhood full of sagging houses. Crumbling exteriors, windows broken and boarded like knocked out teeth—nightmare fuel. I stop licking the windshield long enough to see jagged bits of shrapnel wink from lawns. Handlebars, probably from bikes or broken mowers. Desert mountains loom over the houses. Soon they will crash down on us like the crest of some great tsunami, claiming me like the valueless goat that I am. Behind the house, a howling dog strains against a chain.

Amber-Lynn leads us inside to find a woman in nursing scrubs watching a TV show with a bleating laugh track. Cigarette smoke obscures her face. An egregiously furry cat obscures her lap. My stomach hurts and the cat shimmies in my vision like a burst of static. For some reason, I expect Florence Nightingale, but the woman bears closer resemblance to a linebacker. The flickering TV light makes her appear in flashes, like a stop-motion cartoon.

“Yer late,” she says.

Amber-Lynn is incensed. “What the fuck are you doing here? Nobody asked you to come.”

The woman sighs, setting her great fleshy body in motion. The cat tumbles off her lap with an indignant meow, crackling and fizzing and popping. I hold my breath, waiting for a shock as it bolts under our feet. “You all fucked up again?”

“No,” lies Amber-Lynn.

“My Mason’s overseas fighting terrorists in Eye-Rack,” the woman snorts, “and you abandon his son—my grandbaby—to get all fucked up with a couple skids?”

I shrink under her gaze, but Vivy sets her jaw and offers her hand. “Can you stitch this up? If not, I need to go to the hospital.”

“I ain’t a nurse.”

“But your scrubs,” I croak.

“Where’s momma?” Amber-Lynn huffs.

“Got called in,” says the woman evenly. “Somebody’s gotta provide, I s’ppose. Can’t nobody just live off welfare and whorin’.”

“You need to leave now.” Amber-Lynn’s words carry halfway across the living room and explode, which makes me gasp. No one else sees. The flickery woman stares us down as Amber-Lynn hoofs her cowboy boots against a scuffed wall. They land with a thump next to a pile of other shoes. Many of them are tiny. Tiny runners, tiny sandals, tiny dress shoes that look like the finishing touch on a church outfit.

“He went down an hour ago,” the woman yells after her. “Cryin’ and hollerin’ for his mother, poor child. Buddy’s still out back. Dumb bastard won’t stop barking.”

Ignoring her, Al marches barefoot toward the back of the house. Hustling past us in a heady trail of cheap perfume and smoke, the woman forces her swollen feet into a pair of cork wedges and turns to Viv. “Go back the way you came and hang a right on East Lohman. Follow it all the way down. Can’t miss it.”

Vivy nods her thanks.

“Keep an eye on ’er,” the woman says to me, hauling the broken screen door open. “She don’t use protection. Mason Junior’s proof of that.”

“Al gave birth to a jar?” I squeak.

Her door slam sends shock waves rippling through my vision. Between the perfume and laugh track the air feels intolerable. I drop to a crouch and begin to hyperventilate amidst the baby shoes. Surely Mason will shatter once the shock waves reach him.

Vivy crouches to eye level. “Don’t go anywhere. I’ll try to be back by morning.”

Time stretches before me like taffy. I’m not sure how much time passes before Amber-Lynn returns. When she does, she has a saucepan on her head. She brandishes both a broom and spidery mop. Plunking a spaghetti strainer onto my head, she pushes the mop into my hands. “Follow me,” she whispers. “We’re going to war.”

*

For all the unruly grass out front, Amber-Lynn’s backyard is so barren it might as well be the moon. I crane my neck to search for the real thing, relieved to find it pulsing above the mountains like a UFO. It casts light over our battlefield, a small patch of desert hewn in by chain-link fence and cacti.

Buddy is a giant, slobbering hound tethered to a pole on the other end of the moonscape. His tail thumps the dirt at the sight of Amber-Lynn. Between us, the yard is littered with holes, presumably Buddy’s quest to escape his frigid moon prison and tunnel to Mother Earth’s melty womb. Amber-Lynn closes the back door behind us and stops at my side, rattling with red hot shakes. She places her free hand on her head to steady the sauce pot.

“On your signal, Sarge,” I say, touching two fingers to my brow.

“Not yet,” she whispers. “We’ll lose the element of surprise.”

She drops to her belly and army-crawls to the shadow of a scraggly tree. I follow suit. Steadying the broom handle against her shoulder like a rifle, she squints one eye shut and cocks it at a winking satellite. I hold my breath, waiting for her to fire. Somewhere across the moon her boyfriend, Jarhead Senior, is also on his belly in a desert with a rifle on his shoulder.

“I have a confession, Al,” I whisper, willing my spidery mop to stop shimmying like a Medusa, or else turn me to stone. “I’ve never taken mushrooms before.”

“That’s okay, Schucksy,” she whispers back, her eye still trained on her winking target. Across the battlefield, Buddy cocks his head at us. “I forgive you.”

“Why did you want to take them?”

“I’m sad all the time. My friend told me they’d make me less sad.”

“Because you gave birth to a jar?”

She gives a slight nod.

“Do you feel less sad?”

“No. Do you?”

“No,” I answer, truthfully.

“I’m not a whore.”

“Even if you were, I wouldn’t—"

“I should be studying psychology right now. Full ride to UNM and I gave it up to raise Mason. Her son goes halfway across the world to hunt Saddam instead of staying to raise his kid and he’s the hero? Some fuckin’ nerve she’s got. So I dance a couple times a week, so what?”

There, babies! I knew Al and I were cosmically connected! I lay my hand on her shoulder, careful not to disturb the broom rifle. Moonlight filters through the strainer holes and obscures my view. “We’re goats—devalued, losing our currency.”

“Speak for yourself,” she spits. “I did Britney’s snake routine at the club last week. Five hundred dollars in three minutes. Dancing makes bank. Enough for a couple of years of college here in town. And a damn sight more than Mason pulls shootin’ Iraqis.”

Buddy snorts and lowers his head to the dirt. Desert wind screams across the battlefield, pulling our skin from our bones. I would do anything not to be on the moon—to not be reminded I have a skeleton. We gotta break for the mountains! How can l make her understand that we’re the same?

“Did you know that a flamingo’s knee is actually its ankle?” I breathe.

“Yes,” she replies, narrowing her eye at the satellite. There is green eyeshadow on the one she pinched shut. When her lid moves it looks like the oily back of a housefly. “Why did you take the mushrooms?”

“To make great art,” I whisper, my glass bones quaking under mop-Medusa’s scornful gaze. She knows, babies—all my filthy secrets waving amongst her filthy locks!

“Bullshit, Shucksy,” she hisses. “What art?”

The wind peppers my face with moon dust. Buddy growls at the wind because he does not wish to have a skeleton either. “You know—songs. To make you feel something.”

“People don’t want anything that makes them feel.” She drops the broom rifle and cuts a sideways glance under the sauce pot. “We’re in the middle of a fucking war.”

“Okay, I am trying. I need drugs to be a good rock star. People want rapture and sin, darling. I am cultivating myth—”

“One day they’re gonna be able to see all the weird embarrassing shit you googled about whether your dick is normal and how compound interest works and whether or not we actually landed on the moon,” Al says. “Myth doesn’t really exist anymore, but if there is, you’re not in control of it.”

If there was ever a time to relegate myself to the mountains, now was surely it, babies. Seems I shall go alone, for I underestimated Amber-Lynn. She birthed a glass jar and made five hundred dollars in three minutes and survived knowing about the flamingo’s bloody ankle. I’m the only worthless goat on this battlefield—not cut out for war. My rifle will turn me to stone because it knows I have more in common with Jar Senior than with Al. My aura is leaky cornflower blue, and I can’t contain it any longer.

“I’m going to be twenty-eight next week and I haven’t done anything,” I whisper. “I’m scared it’s too late, like I’ll get left behind.”

“Look around, Shucksy,” Al says, lifting her broom rifle to the sky again. “They’re already gone.”

KRISTI MACKENZIE’s debut novel, Better to Beg, is forthcoming from Sweet Trash Press. 

WIZARD PHASE

I hear whispers through the bathroom wall. The plan was to get a vasectomy, maybe two just to be safe, because I had a 22-year-old kid and there were white tufts in my beard that looked like rabbit fur, and I fell asleep at 10 p.m. watching reality TV after two and a half glasses of wine and woke up at 6:30 a.m. and looked out the window and watched crows fly across the October sky. I felt content, or something close to it. I was 48 years old. I was single. I had enough life ahead of me not to be completely depressed. Enough behind me to know how to avoid repeating certain glaring errors, namely two bad marriages and a third thing that may as well have been a marriage that was actually pretty good, but which I fucked up. My bad.

Then I met Randi. My God. Just saying her name, I feel weepy. Remember when you were young and you had an idea of what love was, but then you actually fell in love, and it was the opposite? One minute you were listening to Pearl Jam with your girlfriend’s brassiere wrapped around your neck, the next she was chastising you for not ringing out the sponge properly. 

Randi’s the real deal. She doesn’t criticize me or stab me with sharp objects while I sleep. One time, I forgot to cut my toenails and stabbed her calf during sex. Instead of getting mad, she told me about the time she accidentally pooped in somebody’s shower, except halfway through the story she confessed it wasn’t an accident, and actually it happened on a boat. It was part of a revenge plot. As she told the story, I realized I was sucking on one of her toes because I was so turned on, but it wasn’t enough, so I put her whole foot in my mouth.

Did I mention that Randi is often naked when we’re together? Things happen in these encounters. I keep saying, “Condoms, condoms, condoms,” but that’s just a mantra I repeat in my head while I move around inside of her, not wearing one. 

Speaking of which, I never got that vasectomy. The first one or the second. The day of my procedure, Randi FaceTimed me while leaving her waxing appointment. 

“I decided to switch things up and went with a postage stamp,” she said. “Marsha did an incredible job. Wanna come over, and see?”

I meant to swing by for just a minute, but when I got there, Randi was lounging on the couch in her underwear, vaping. She pulled her panties to the side and said, “What do you think?” 

I leaned in close. 

There were lines and stars in the corner like a tiny American flag. It was a Forever stamp. 

Randi was right. Marsha was a genius. 

My Apple Watch vibrated. It was my third reminder about the vasectomy appointment. 

Randi said, “You’re leaving? No, no, that’s cool. You should definitely go do that thing where they cut your wiener with a scalpel.”

A second later I was down on all fours, licking Randi’s stamp, and then she was draped over the ottoman, and I was on top of her singing an acapella rendition of “Please Mr. Postman” by the Marvelettes.

“Oh fuck, this feels so good,” said Randi. “You may as well just cum inside me.”

I wanted to. Jesus, I did. But I was only a few years clear of my last child support payment. The last time, it happened just like this: things feeling good, going for it, not thinking about what came next.

When my most recent wife and I separated, I kept telling people I was in my Wizard Phase.

They said, “What’s a Wizard Phase?”

I said, “It’s where I live alone and have a lot of plants and tarot cards and herbs hanging from the ceiling in bundles of twine. Probably I’ll start pickling vegetables and get a pet rat. I’m definitely never having sex again.”

Then one night I was in a bar, waiting in line for the bathroom. The woman in front of me turned around and told me a dirty joke. A second later she disappeared into the loo, but not before I got her Instagram handle.

You know how those things go. I slid into her DMs, and she invited me on a date. 

“Something something country music,” she said.

“Perfect,” I said, “I’ll meet you at 7.” 

I barely read what she typed. She could have invited me to a shit-eating contest in hell.

Suddenly, she was teaching me how to two-step. Quick quick slow slow. I spun her around and spun her back, and she was in my arms. This is why country music fans have so many kids. All you want to do is fill your partner with seed and raise children to stand in wonder before a poster of Dolly Parton on the wall.

“You’re a quick learner,” said Randi. 

She was right. 

After a lifetime of being a slow learner, here I was holding her waist, marching her backwards in a clockwise circle, making eye contact as though we already had two little ones at home, and tonight’s only purpose was to work ourselves into an erotic fervor so we could sire a third.

During a slow song, we attempted a waltz. Compared to the horny acrobatics of two-step, the waltz was like a Sunday promenade.

Randi took advantage of the casual atmosphere to whisper a question in my ear: “Do you have any kinks?”

My eyes fell out of my head, and I put them back in.

“Like handcuffs?” I asked. “Like butt stuff?”

“Those are two examples,” said Randi. “I like Daddies.”

Something in me died. It was my Wizard Phase. 

I waltzed her into a corner and whispered back, “Did you say… Daddies? Because that is a thing that interests me.”

After that, I followed her around like a dog from one of those country songs. We got tangled up together. We got matching tattoos. I stabbed her in the calf with an over-long toenail, and she jumped in my lap, nude, and our birth control method was just her sending me a photo of her pregnancy test every month, saying, “Is that one line or two? It’s hard to tell.” 

We aren’t pregnant yet, but there are signs. The other day, Randi cracked an egg and got a double yolk. I bought a security camera, which upon closer inspection turned out to be a baby monitor.

For Easter, I bought Randi a poster of Dolly Parton. I got it framed and hung it on our living room wall. Once a month, our shared Google alarm sends us a reminder: TEST FOR LIL DOLLY / HANK JR.

I put a chair next to the toilet, so we can sit together. She pees on the stick. I look down and tremble. The Forever stamp has grown into a patch of wild thyme. It’s like all those crows flying across the morning sky—a thing of wonder.

KEVIN MALONEY wrote Horse Girl Fever (Clash Books, 2025), The Red-Headed Pilgrim (Two Dollar Radio, 2023), and Cult of Loretta (Lazy Fascist Press, 2015), and lives in Porland, Oregon.

BRIAN ALAN ELLIS, owner and founder of House of Vlad Press and Vlad Mag, wrote several books, including Sad Laugh­ter (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2018) and Some­thing to Do with Self-Hate (House of Vlad/Talking Book, 2017). His writ­ing has appeared at Juked, Hobart, Monkey­bicycle, Fanzine, Electric Liter­ature, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, X-R-A-Y, Heavy Feather Review, BULL, and Forever Magazine, among many oth­er places. He lives in Florida.

Artwork: Rachel Wise