The girl can swim far, which scares her father. She likes the immersion, her limbs easing through. While floating and watching tips of pines, it’s possible to imagine she’s not human at all. The water in her ears is how she hears things. Buoyancy is all she’s permitted to feel. She can envision a different kind of existence, one where swimming is required to survive.

At school there’s a boy who believes the girl is responsible for Jesus’ death. He boasts about his father’s anti-Semitic tattoo and, when he’s captain, he picks her last for teams. She’s interested in this boy because of his serious eyes and because he runs faster than anyone else in gym.

The girl knows she’s responsible for the shifts in volume and temperature in her parents’ house and assumes it’s the same on the lake. It’s not always unpleasant. She’s an experiment, a source of interest. The spotlight beams down, microscopic cells smooshed between glass slides. No one knows what she is or how she’ll turn out.

The girl’s father yells from the dock. He’s not kidding this time.

She’ll have to explain again—the survival gene in her DNA—she won’t go under. She can live where others can’t, because of her adaptation.

It’s only after she returns, heaving herself onto the dock without the use of the ladder, that she feels human again. The drips from her limbs spread out into wetness, the boards changing color because of her efforts. Her lungs are working, her shoulders ache. It’s the best sensation she knows so far, this after-swim tiredness. Her body used on its own accord.

Her father holds out a brown towel in his good shoes. “You don’t have to swim so far. Where’s your mother?”

The girl doesn’t answer because they both know she’s at the office still.

“Did you hear me from out there? Is it cold?” Her father likes to swim too but he hasn’t brought his suit and won’t borrow someone else’s Speedos.

She wants to say, The chill of the water—it doesn’t last. Most grown ups can only think about the smack of it, the dread. This is what it means to get older.

The Mission Bell

 “Any time of year, you can find it here.”—The Eagles

On a dark desert highway, there’s Lucy, walking. Just off the highway, there’s a motel sign, pulsing red like a lighthouse. Lucy has no plan except to get there. She’ll say, “My phone is dead. My Volvo is stuck three miles behind.” She says this out loud, to practice.

There’s wind from somewhere, light and persistent, though seconds ago it was still, just the shht, shht of Lucy’s Birkenstocks scraping along the shoulder. She lost her elastic hair band or it’s slid up her wrist to make an angry circle on her forearm. She lets the strands blow into her eyes and wishes for Joe, though they’re supposed to be done. Are they done? He’s in Fresno. He speaks over her—crashes into her sentences. Once he gripped her bicep and finger dots appeared the next day, a ring of proof, thrilling.

The wind dies. Her watch glows in the dark. Who wears a watch anymore? She slips it off, hears it smack against the roadside for someone else to find.

She thinks, There are movies that start this way. None of them end well.

• • • •

In the motel doorway stands a woman smoking, the ember like a  firefly. She doesn’t seem surprised to see Lucy. You’re a harmless granola and your car broke down, says her once-over.

“My car broke down,” says Lucy. “I need some gas.” Her voice sounds far from her mouth.

“Already closed up shop,” says the woman. “But let’s see what we can do.” This woman can save her, Lucy decides. Her nametag says Tiffany; her voice is southern. She wears her hair in a high ponytail, reddish shade. She could be 40 or 25.

The light inside is murky, like being underwater. Tiffany presses a finger against the front desk buzzer, calling whoever is in charge. She stubs out the half-burned cigarette on the sole of her high-heeled boot, clips off her nametag, slides it into her purse. A little ballet. Do it again.

“1H is empty and unlocked. Lazy Ass might not bother coming down.”

“Oh,” says Lucy. “Let me—”

“I have to get back to my boy.”

Tiffany glides out again. She unlocks her truck, reverses and plows ahead, a guitar solo leaping from her speakers. Lucy sees a flash of a glittering bumper sticker: My Other Car Is a Mercedes. Then it’s just the drone of the muffler, receding.

The post Amphibians by Lara Tupper appeared first on The Talking Book.

Enjoy this reading of FLAMINGOS by the author Grant Maierhofer.

You can get a copy here: 1111press.bigcartel.com/product/works…nt-maierhoferworks11runbearsreading

The post Flamingos w/ Grant Maierhofer appeared first on The Talking Book.

Reading by JP Vallières, with music by Lucas Carroll

After the parade was finished, Benji went home. When he walked into his apartment, he found his squirrel sleeping on the cat’s head.

“That’s new,” he said. 

The cat was asleep, too. That cat was always asleep. 

Benji bent down and with his finger gave the squirrel one gentle pet on its fluffy tail. And then he petted the cat, to make things even. 

B2 rubbed his side against Benji’s leg, and whimpered, wagging his tail. 

“You’ve been a good boy? Huh, B2, no trouble today?”

B2 licked Benji’s shin. 

Benji filled the pets’ bowls with water and food. He sat on the couch and thought about Michelle Warner. Now known as Michelle LaFeuvre. She looked great, he thought. She looked like a million bucks. But she never liked me as much as I liked her. That’s how it goes with me and the ladies. 

The notepad on the coffee table was open. The pencil beside it was still sharp. He decided to take some time and write a letter.

Dear Michelle,

I was fortunate enough to catch you on the boobtube. You were riding on the ketchup factory’s float. It’s a wonderful float. A float that’s worth painting, that’s for dang sure! Anyway, your name’s LaFeuvre now. That’s new. I prefer Warner. I miss you, actually. I miss talking to you. 

I have this recurring dream where we find ourselves back at the spring fling, slow dancing to the music. Everyone’s there and we’re all smiling at each other like idiots. We don’t know how dumb we are, and I’d like to think, if we did, we wouldn’t care. Why not be young again, in the gymnasium, slow dancing and smiling?

In the dream I ask you if it’s okay for me to lift you up. I always had this weird thing about wanting to lift you up so everyone could see you. People didn’t know you. You were like a shadow in the halls racing to the art room. I could see you, but no one else could. If they could see you, they would have known what it all meant. How other kids think and dream and paint. They wouldn’t have been so into football and potato chips. Or maybe they would, but in a different more deep way? Of course, I was never deep or anything, but I loved to catch you out of the corner of my eye. The way you held the paint brush reminded me of the way a warrior in a book holds its sword. Like you were going to save us all with that brush, and if the enemy got in your way, you’d use the sharp end to bludgeon of the torment and terror.

I’d like to shake LaFeuvre’s hand and see what he’s made of. Maybe give him a ride on the conveyor belt at the ketchup factory and watch him get squeezed into a bottle. 

I like to kid!

Back to the dream. You agreed to allow me to lift you. They say, lift with your legs. I have always had pretty strong legs, but in my dreams they’re like super powerful. I squatted, placed my hands under your ribcage, and began to lift. The problem in each recurring dream is that I am too strong, or you are too light. Hard to tell. 

As soon as I lift you off the gym floor you begin to float high. Instead of me trying to lift you all the way to my full extension, I have to cling to YOU. Some other unseen force takes you, giving you powers of flight. At first, I cling to your hips, trying the best I could to hug you tight. 

Soon my feet are off the gym floor, and everyone was looking at us. The more people who notice you the faster the upward acceleration lifts us. You are laughing, having a blast. You pat my head and say, ‘Benji, Isn’t this what you wanted? Didn’t you want everyone to see me?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘The world needs to see you.’

‘But I don’t need them.’

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘I guess I’m stupid.’

‘No,’ you say. ‘But you are sweet’

Somehow we break through into the night’s starry sky. By this point I am barely hanging onto your ankle. You had strong ankles, too.

‘Don’t let go,’ you say.

‘Never,’ I say. 

But my arms were tired. And when we land on the North Star (there was a welcoming sign: Congratulations! You’ve Made it to the North Star!), we stand staring at the gaseous flames whirling around our feet.

‘I have to go now,’ you say.

‘I can’t come with you?’

‘No, not this time. Maybe we’ll meet again.’

‘Where are you off to from here?’ I ask.

‘Wherever the people take me.’

‘I don’t see anyone, but us.’

‘They saw me, now I have to go where I belong. The universe is infinite.’

After the word “infinite” I wake up in a cold cold sweat. 

Love,

Benji

xxooxxoo

Benji read over his letter for revisions, folded it four times, and then placed it in his underwear drawer on top of the ever-growing stack of letters to Michelle Warner (now LeFeuvre). He thought they were all pretty stupid. What the heck kind of guy wrote letters to a person who most likely had forgotten he existed? Benji walked over to the sleeping cat. The squirrel must have woken and was probably somewhere in the walls nibbling on a walnut. She kept her stash in the walls. It was okay with Benji. He liked hearing the little rodent scurry up and down and all over, zipping through the walls like some spazzy thing. 

B2 got in front of Benji blocking his way to the kitchen.

“What do you want, B2? You want me to pet you?”

B2 barked and wagged his tail nervously.

“Yeah, you got something to say?”

B2 went up on his hind legs and propped his front paws on the edge of the counter. And with his snout nudged the pencil box, and nudged it some more until all the pencils fell onto the floor. Then B2 picked up a pencil with his teeth and held it out to Benji, his tail still wagging.

Benji took the pencil.

“Boy,” said Benji. “I’m all out of words. My letters to Michelle LeFeuvre are pathetic and useless.”

B2 barked, the pencil dropping on Benji’s shoe.

“If I write one more letter will you leave me alone?”

B2 barked twice more, his tail now thumping the carpet.

“Fine,” he said. “But this one’s going to be short.”

Benji sat back down on the couch and put a clean sheet of paper on the coffee table. He began to write. Another letter to Michelle Warner LeFeuvre. 

“Actually, this one’s going to be a note. A simple note. Maybe this will be my last note.”

Dear Michelle,

You’re married. I’m not. Does that mean you won? Not sure what the competition is, exactly, but I have a feeling your life is something special. An artist. Living in the city. A French last name. I’m still me. I can’t imagine I’ll ever be anything BUT me.

Love,

Benji

He folded the letter, put it in an envelope, and sealed it shut.

What was there to do now? Would it matter one way or the other if he simply slotted it in the mail and walked away? Why not?

Benji wrote his return address in the upper left-hand corner. Just like his mother taught him. In the middle he wrote in a shaky hand:

To: Michelle “LeFeuvre”
The Painter
The City

Get the book here!

The post The Ketchup Factory appeared first on The Talking Book.

A tough old crawler
leaking prison ink –

full of blown apart babies’
dolls and muttering bricks.

Pulls mountain and moon
out of the opiate ditch

of the past, re-stacks them
for the re-ribbon cutting.

As ugly as the world is full
of specters and trash. Here to help

you move out of hell and back
in with your parents.

Wise old birds, should’ve
listened to them the first time.

When it pulls up next to you
in the diamond dark,

your tongue lolls
and you climb in.

When you put your hand
on the wheel, you can see

the back of your head
with the backs of your eyes.

REAL TEARS

Oh my god, it was
a good painting.

The man and the woman and the cat and the barn and the lightning.

I stood in front of it for a long time,
let it consume me – heart
to heart, face to foot.

Lost in the air there,
I was sure I would never
ever go back to my own man
woman cat barn or lightning.

But when the feeling began to fade,
when the lift lifted,
I saw my man,

his eyes deader than pebbles.

Saw my woman, her face some rotten pancake batter.
Saw my cat, the infinite hellscape of his tongue.
Saw my barn sinking, O irrevocably sinking.
Saw my lightning, making the sky darker.

When I saw them, I turned to no one and said

I am so far from home and these are real tears.


MEDICATION

The pilot takes some interesting and expensive medication to help him be a better pilot,
soaring through the air blood vessels exploding cockpit rattling sun dropping
its odorless tasteless petals into the winter oceans above and below.
Something sticky in his memory, the winding mountain path
of his memory covered in evil goo. Look at him,
this wrung-out pathetic failure doesn’t
even fantasize about killing
the same person
every night.

Image: Burnt Canvas I, 1973, Joan Miro

The post Three Poems by Kevin Chesser appeared first on The Talking Book.

Uncle Errol throws a funeral for himself. Bootsie spies on her own husband. Joe’s band dresses in costumes and plays instruments from elementary school music class. Marco is tired of people shouting “Polo!” over his shoulder. Mallory unlocks the doors between hotel suites in case the person beside her is also searching and alone. Denise eats crayons and goes missing. Gary tries to legally change his name to get back at his sworn enemy. Tell Me How You Really Feel is the only novella set in the municipality of Murrysville, Pennsylvania.

You can listen to the show on Soundcloud above, as well as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher Radio and Google Podcasts.

The post Tell Me How You Really Feel w/ Claire Hopple appeared first on The Talking Book.

Listen to the episode below on Soundcloud or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Sticher Radio, Google Play, etc. 

The post The Secret History Of The History Channel #3 appeared first on The Talking Book.

Sweet red wine in the morning on hard concrete steps with a shot girl and her sick soul and her hands clenching; and a French guy on long vacation so handsome he’d turn his girlfriend’s mother into a betrayer; and a middle-aged guy who sculpts animals out of gnarled driftwood he hauls from the Mississippi River and who looks himself as if he is sculpted from driftwood and hauled from the Mississippi River; and a young woman from Vermont who is wearing purple tights and carrying a fresh-picked orange in the pocket of her sweatshirt. She offers me the orange, I politely decline, and she returns it to her pocket. A few minutes later she retrieves the orange, cocks her hip, and says, “Come on. You want this orange.” “I’ll take the orange,” I admit. I catch her toss and hold the orange. “Share it,” she says. The new room Isabella and I share at the weekly rental place is empty except for the bed. The walls and ceiling are white. When the sun rises the room remains dark except for a white patch where the one small window is, vine leaves crawling like spiders across its surface. 

The song “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for” comes on the radio and the driftwood guy remembers: “This is last song I heard before they come and got me. It was playing on the radio when they come.”

Purple tights says, “Who came and got you – Bono?”

“No. They come and got me. Took two years of my life.”

I ask, “Were you able to listen to music while you were inside?”

“Nada. No sir.”

To the French guy, who’s having difficulty following us, I say, “Je suis un grande pamplemouse.”

“Qu’elle q’uon fois?” he replies, charmingly taken aback.

We pass around the wine. The girl with the fluish spirit tells a story about dumpster diving at a gas station, eating the food she’d found, realizing the clerk at the gas station had poured gasoline on it. Purple tights wide-eyed remembers a story she’d heard about a kitten in Vermont who wandered into a meth house and the people there had doused the kitten with gasoline. I imagine the poor thing tweaking off the fumes and trying to shake the gas from its little body and I laugh really hard, saying, “Oh my god.” Purple tights watches me with curious delight. I squeeze the orange and feel shy.

  My first vision of my friend Pongo: bellowing out his poetry at a place downtown that served “legal highs” – kava kava and teas made with kratom, a man in carpenter jeans and wife-beater, strong arms trembling as they flung page after page to the carpet – lines about digging graves with shovels made of blood for a handful of kava-dazy teenagers leaning against their backpacks. He wore a fitted Atlanta Braves cap, which he always wore, I would learn – he had several fitted caps, but they were all Atlanta Braves, exact same design. “Gotta keep the ace on top,” he told me later. A huge muddy red beard, freckles on his thick shoulders. This guy is a maniac, I thought. I caught eyes with my companion, an astrophysicist who was visiting me. She barely nodded; she was thinking the same thing. 

The astrophysicist: lithe, shattered smile, espresso curls, whispers of silver, expensive jeans, lacy mouth. She had tried to shoot herself through the temples once but her hand jerked and the bullet soared in front of her eyes and now gunpowder was permanently pleated into her wrist and, it seemed to me, fire-dust and horror still glittered in her eyes. 

After the reading, on the sidewalk, I sipped chilly kava kava from a wooden shell, a sliver of pineapple floating in the earthy puddle. Pongo stood alone so I approached and offered him an American Spirit which he declined – he was asthmatic. But he joined us awhile later at the Yacht Club for Sailor Jerry and pineapples with splashes of ginger and Pongo grinned the whole time like a guy who’d just gotten out of jail and was on his way home to see his sister. We listened with chilly enthrallment while the astrophysicist spoke about the theory of heat death.

The astrophysicist and I went on to share a romance brief and sad and gorgeous as redness draining from a blood moon or grenadine sinking down a small glass of tequila; and Pongo and I would become great friends until the icy March morning when he placed a six-hundred dollar black-market Glock to his heart and splashed himself across the back of his silly green polyester armchair.

Jerry in the doorway was shirtless with fat-rolls burbling like toad throats over his waist and his bald head sweating, the color of canned salmon. He returned to the bed in the center of the motel room, lowered himself onto it, found his flyswatter and scratched his back. All his possessions were falling out of distressed lawn and leaf bags and the fluorescent overhead was flickering and dull and his pit bull Daisy wheezed in the corner, saliva streaming from her black gums. Jerry smoked and scratched and told me about the drive from Philadelphia. The heroin was apparent in his eyes. The astrophysicist knelt and patted Daisy. Pongo stood by the door, smiling all around. I bought fourteen grams of heroin and a prescription bottle filled with Oxycontin, thirty milligrams apiece, at a very good price, and I hurried up and got us out of there. The stars were visible in the crisp, clear night and the astrophysicist took my hand. She laughed and exclaimed – “My god, what was that?… I feel like you just led us to Hell!”

Isabella suggests I take a walk so I walk around the new neighborhood in Treme, turning at random corners, hands stuffed in the pockets of my hoodie, my right hand curled around the fresh orange, hair falling over my eyelids, looking sideways. Faded limes and peaches of the paint on the house-fronts, Mardi Gras beads dripping from the bare branches and the wrought iron and the mailboxes, black girls in their school uniforms – khakis and bright yellow collared shirts – skipping along the cracked and jagged sidewalks, the community center, the Catholic church, the liquor, beer, and cigarette shop, the abandoned buildings, plyboard over shattered windows, messages scrawled in paint over the plyboard – R.I.P. Wimpy J; End Poverty; home is a fleeting feeling – the setting sun like rouge smeared over a tired face. Isabella was right: I do feel a bit better. It had been a night of suffering. A dream in which an evil version of my father swiped at my eyeballs with a boxcutter and gouged his fingers into the terrifying wounds; a dream in which Isabella, over a misunderstanding, drenched me with a glass of wine then pulled down her pants and peed on my legs and feet.

There is a small tower of cinder blocks outside a building whose eyes are blacked out with garbage bags. It’s a nice perch. I sit, crack my neck, peel the orange. 

My brother Alex and I didn’t have any money – but he had a quarter ounce of dried psilocybin mushrooms and I had a quarter tank of gas in my car and seven dollars on my EBT card. We went to Ingles grocery store and bought two blood oranges and a pack of frozen edamame, and drove slowly the backroads to the Blue Ridge Parkway, the bag of edamame on the dashboard, warming in the late summer sun. North, winding through the trees, to Graveyard Fields. We sat in the grass and ate the drugs, stems and caps pinched to snaps of the thawed soybeans, dirt and chewy membranes and salty bursts of juices. We started up the trail. The come-up was nauseous. Alex had to veer off and puke on some rocks. But I held my bile down and after awhile we were both yawning and cartoony and ascending the mountain as if on an escalator. Alex and I had tripped together on occasions before this one. They had been long trips, happy and frustrating. He is a quiet person, folded into himself like a paper plane; like a paper plane, when he’s tossed on drugs, he opens and soars… but then he lands on his side, and folds in again, and over-talk can be abrasive for him. I tend to talk too much in these times. Our journeys have gotten strange and semi-hostile. This time, though I was peaking neon and wanted to tell jokes, I remembered to stay quiet and let Alex commune with the nature along the trail; in this mood, I found myself plugged in in a major way to what was going on around me – wet knots of leaves, squirming soil, spiraling grooves pitted into two-stepping pines, schmoozing water and stones in pale slow streams; everywhere around me I saw roiling vaginas. Roiling vaginas, roiling vaginas. We continued on in silence. At the crest of the trail there is a crawl-tunnel of petrified wood which leads to a clearing carpeted with the softest pale spongey moss. There are blueberry brambles; the berries are ripe and blink like rubies. The sky softens and there is a sepia feeling to it; the sun is flames and clay and a woman peacefully glistening like the Origin of nature and unspooling her hips and her vulva and she is wet, life wet, and ever-opening and with two thumbs I peel apart the blood orange and she is dripping sweetly onto my face as I hold her above me and slowly bring her to my mouth.

Isabella and I are at a place called Kajun’s, empty, cigarette machine, stately old gay bartender. There’s a bottomless mimosa deal and we’re determined to drink until they’re out of champagne. Mimosas, poinsettias, whatever it’s called with cranberry. We have all the colors in front of us. There’s nothing on the jukebox and Judge Judy on mute on the TV.

“We got away with it,” Isabella says.

(We got away with what, them dying instead of us?) “We got away with what?”

She points at the TV, Judge Judy, she points at her champagne glass, smudged with her lipstick, she points at her tits one by one, at my cock, at my face.   

“This is a hell of a deal,” Bella says.

____________________________

art by Karel Thole

The post Bottomless Mimosa appeared first on The Talking Book.

The Talking Book Podcast · Imaginary Museums w/ Nicolette Polek

Imaginary Museums is Nicolette Polek’s debut collection and you should get it here: softskull.com/dd-product/imaginary-museums/

As always thanks to Keegan Grandbois, Holler Boys, and Alec Sturgis for the fantastic music.

The post Imaginary Museums w/ Nicolette Polek appeared first on The Talking Book.

A writer walks New York City searching for a story, inspiration, anything to give him some direction. While navigating the busier blocks of Times Square, he stumbles upon a restaurant opening and an enigmatic man named Jiro protesting the grand opening. Believing it’s the only way to maintain Jiro’s interest, he claims to be a director, someone interested in developing a project that reveals to the world Jiro’s unseen culinary talent. Eventually, the truth comes out, and he comes face-to-face with what it means to be creative in a passionless world.

Here’s the episode below. You can listen to it on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Sticher Radio, Spotify, Google Play, and everywhere else.

The post Dreams of Being w/ Michael J Seidlinger appeared first on The Talking Book.

Jack Buck recorded a story from his collection Deer Michigan. It’s called Georgia. Listen to the excerpt and get the book.

Georgia

My friend was playing his part up in the driver’s seat by not settling for a mediocre song on the radio. He would never settle for that. He was a madman who could be trusted with everything and nothing.

Where was I going? Why Georgia? May as well been anywhere. I wanted to be away from the comfort and known of home. My friend said let’s go, so I go. 

With my body contorted in the backseat, I watched the warm black Kentucky countryside pass the window in a continuous frame with an ever so often distant barnyard light indicating whoever was in charge to change the reel because someone out there was watching. I felt directionless, yet moving towards something, beyond my knowing. I felt without God and with God more than ever. 

It must’ve been two or three in the morning by now and we were the only people on the road. Perhaps we had fallen asleep at some hour in there and had already died from driving off the road but we just didn’t know it. Either way, we hadn’t seen traffic for what seemed like 200 miles. I didn’t want more coffee. I didn’t want to sleep, I had done enough of that for a lifetime. 

What else was there to do in early March with the Michigan wind blowing snow into everyone’s house? Long ride to go. I bet it will be nice country down there, but I sure couldn’t see it, not yet, not then. I was idly hauling across America, half asleep, half awake, with very little idea of what I was doing and where I was going, putting my trust into something.  

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