Author: Horror Sleaze Trash

Francesca Miele

Fuck Haikus II

My hunger is rare
Pearl divers plunge in the sea
Thick cum on my tongue

How big is too big?
The waves rush into a cave
Your cock pushes deep

Kneeling is pure joy
Hot wind bends the tallest reeds
My mouth is open. 

The bull mounts the cow
Dragon flies over the pond
Your cock makes me moo.

I finger my cunt
My dog’s vulva has swollen
Two bitches in heat.

Your palm filled with cum
Dew is heavy on the grass
I lick it all up

Cum blesses my face
Showers drip down the windows 
Your cock is my God.

J.J. Campbell

like she had done this before

had me one of those nights out 
drinking gin and i ran into a stripper 
with a cast on her right hand

i told her i’m sure the other bitch 
looks worse

she laughed, we went into a bar 
and had a few drinks

since i was drinking gin, the dirty 
part of my imagination was running 
the show

i asked her if she was a squirter?
she smiled and said yeah

i said i’ll give you $100 if you let me 
watch you get your clit excited and squirt
all over my face, $50 extra if you get it 
in my mouth

like a clown? she asked

yes, like a clown

we went to the bathroom and she hovered 
over the toilet like she had done this before

she got it going rather quickly and told me
to squat like a catcher

ooh, she knows sports, i might have to marry 
her

she exploded, first getting it on my eyebrows
before getting a really good stream into my mouth

i handed her $150 as she gave me some toilet 
paper to wipe my face with

i refused it

i have this long goatee for a reason

we’ve been together for a few months now

Alex S. Johnson

Deep Time with Caitlin R. Kiernan: An Interview

Photograph by Kathryn A, Pollnack

Caitlín Rebekah Kiernan (born 26 May 1964) is an Irish-born American paleontologist and writer of science fiction and dark fantasy works, including 10 novels, series of comic books, and more than 250 published short stories, novellas, and vignettes. Kiernan is a two-time recipient of both the World Fantasy and Bram Stoker awards.

Alex S. Johnson: Social media controversies play a disproportionate part in the way the public and readers and authors perceive other authors. It feels to me mostly unnecessary in the respect that it dilutes the discourse about literature and makes it more about people’s subjective opinions and knee jerk reactions to false binaries. What are your thoughts on this? 

Caitlín R. Kiernan: Yes, you’re absolutely right. Social media, and especially social media “activism,” is largely responsible for giving us this world where half of us are always at the throats of the other half. A world where it seems almost no one takes the time to read what has been written by anyone attempting a serious analysis, because outrage and dogma are threatened by reason. A world without nuance, where intellectual and political discourse has been reduced to something more akin to rooting for a sports team. I loathe social media. Sure, on the one hand it has brought me readers. But on the other hand, it has brought me almost endless grief and even lost me close friends. I fucking hate it, and I am trying hard to find the resolve to walk away from that idiot tempest once and for all. Leave Facebook and Twitter and LiveJournal, put it all behind me. I never would have imagined that the greatest threat to human civilization would not be the nuclear bomb. 

ASJ: Neil Gaiman famously said that you have a “gift for language that borders on the scary.” To what do you attribute that gift? 

CRK: Well, I am one of those writers who does believe in talent. Some of us know this trick, and some of us don’t, and those who do can get better at it, but those who lack talent will never master it, no matter how hard they try, no matter how many workshops they pay too much to attend. But that’s not really what you’re asking. Since I was a very small child I have been fascinated by language. Using the funny pages and a dictionary, I taught myself to read well before kindergarten. I was reading at a ninth-grade level in third grade. And I think reading has really been key to the development of my abilities, studying how all these other writers do what they do. In my twenties, I devised an exercise where I would write in the voice of other authors – Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, James Joyce, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Angela Carter, William Faulkner – and I got really good at it. I once included a counterfeit Yeats poem in a story and had to go to a lot of trouble to prove I’d written it. I still don’t know that I’m answering the question. Frankly, I’ve never been entirely sure what Neil meant. But I’d say that it didn’t hurt that my mother is a lover of books, and she read to me constantly. When I was a child, books mattered as much as air. They still do.

ASJ You are equally a scientist as well as an author of dark fiction. What influence does paleontology play in your work? Is writing ever like a dig to uncover bones and identify them? 

CRK: Well, sure. You can look at it that way. A story is this thing that exists in bits and pieces in your unconscious mind, and writing is the process of gathering all that up and filling in the blanks, and that’s a little like putting a fossil skeleton back together. For me, writing is a process of discovery, and paleontology is a process of discovery. On some level I’m doing the same thing with both – except, and it’s a big exception – beyond that superficial similarity my brain is doing something very different when I’m writing fiction than when I’m doing science. In paleontology, and especially in writing up my findings, it’s all economy, saying as much as you can with the fewest words, as clearly as possible. In my fiction, I’m sorta doing the opposite. Objective meaning isn’t high on my list of priorities. In fact, it’s near the bottom. And writing I have this wonderful freedom to use fifty words where ten might do, but would be vastly less satisfying. And in fiction I don’t have to worry about rigor, about multivariate analysis and writing constraint algorithms for phylogenetic analyses and…all that. So, I go to these two very different places and use very different parts of my brain, and they are different enterprises, even though I might be led there by similar initial states. That said, paleontology has played a significant role in my fiction, yes. The sense of deep time, for example. I really let myself start mixing those two interests in Threshold, my second novel, and it’s been there ever since, especially in my short fiction. Getting the chocolate in the peanut butter and vice versa. 

ASJ. You are known for your hard science based yet controversial opinions. Why do you think people argue with scientific facts?

CRK: Am I known for that? I thought I was known for that time in Burbank with the penguins, the hookers, and all that blow. Just goes to show you. Shit, I don’t know. Yes, whenever possible, as a rationalist, as an atheist, as a humanist, as a scientist, whatever opinions – no, whatever views – I may hold are based not on emotion and not on dogma. It seems far more important that I have thought something through, studied a problem, walked around it to see all the angles, before I start mouthing off. Which is alien to the internet, I know. It might be alien to the twenty-first century. Politically, I’m not on anyone’s side, not really, unless a cogent argument can be made for this or that position. And people seem to hate that, which I guess does make my opinions controversial. A thing is not true because someone desires it to be true. There is too much of the Enlightenment in me to buy into that. But as to why people argue with scientific facts, Jesus, look at the sad state of scientific literacy in America, an ignorance of facts and an ignorance of the scientific method. And not just an ignorance, but actual hostility, because science might prove you wrong. So if what matters to you is religion or this or that crusade, obviously science and reason are a potential threat. And that’s why people argue with science, whether we’re talking about climate change or evolutionary theory or – whatever. 

ASJ. Science in horror and speculative fiction have coexisted since Shelley. How do you see new sciences, knowledge and theories being used in contemporary horror?

CRK: Well…new technologies, more often than not, frankly scare the piss out of me. I’ve already talked about the dangers of social media, a Frankenstein’s monster if ever man has unleashed one upon itself. Add to that AI. Those two things alone are enough, more than enough, to topple millennia of civilization. We dehumanize ourselves through shit like ChatGPT and pretend we’re democratizing the written word. We take these goddamn AI graphics programs where we seek to replace skill and inspiration with prompts, all but removing human beings from the process of creating art. Look! Anyone can do it! And they are. Like the plastics fouling the seas, AI generated imagery is fouling…okay, I’m off on a rant. To put it all more succinctly, to sum it the fuck up, here’s one of those places science fucks us over, hard – no, one of those places we do not use science wisely and with foresight. There’s too much, “Ooh, let’s see what happens.” There’s too much, “Yeah, but it’s fun, and I have no actual talent, so…” There are too many lazy students who don’t want to write their own papers and too many internet “content providers” who don’t want to pay a human artist when they can have Midjourney spit out some piece of shit for them virtually free. Now, have I seen these technologies used in contemporary horror fiction? No, not really, because I don’t much read contemporary horror fiction. I don’t read all that much new fiction, truthfully. But if it’s not being used, it should be. Myself, I tend to shy away from it. My nightmares are bad enough already. But, yes, you could not find a better comparison than Mary Shelley.

ASJ. You’ve spoken of the concept of “deep time” in relationship to the work of HP Lovecraft. Could you elaborate on how deep time is implicated in cosmic horror?

CRK: Everyone is familiar with, and probably comfortable with, the idea of historical time, and so they might casually talk of things they consider to have happened long ago. The building of the Egyptian pyramids, the Peloponnesian War, Columbus’ arrival in the Americas, World War I. Events that occurred a hundred or hundreds or even thousands of years before the present. Human life spans are short, and it seems to most people like those things happened a very long time ago. But ever since the great antiquity of the earth was recognized in the mid-eighteenth century, science has become increasingly aware that human history is nothing more than a thin film floating atop the abyss of geologic time. Scientists, and especially geologists, paleontologists, astronomers, physicists – those who routinely deal with objects and events of tremendous antiquity – very quickly learn to think this way. Not in mere centuries and millennia, but in millions or billions of years. It becomes second nature. But to most people this concept of the abyss of time remains unfamiliar, alien, even deeply unsettling. Considering it, many of them experience a sort of existential shock. And it is against this abyss of time that Lovecraft was writing his tales. Lovecraft’s god things, for example, his Great Old Ones and Elder Things, Cthulhu and that bunch, creatures that had “filtered down from the stars when earth was young.” In At the Mountains of Madness, practically a treatise on the power of deep time to unsettle, it is suggested that these beings “concocted earth-life as a joke or mistake.” Or look at “The Shadow Out of Time” or “Dagon.” Lovecraft wasn’t the first to use deep time to unsettle readers, but I think he was the first to do it with such skill. Here we have a sort of Gothic literature where the phantoms do not haunt castles merely ancient by human standards, but by the standards of the cosmos. Ergo, cosmic fiction, using the vastness of time – and space, and spacetime – to convey the weird.

ASJ. Tell me about the relationship and intersections between your work and that of Lovecraft and William S. Burroughs. It seems as though there are profound connections there.

CRK: Well, I’ve already gone on at length about Lovecraft, so I’ll focus here on Burroughs. He’s a later influence. I found Lovecraft, as I have written elsewhere, in high school, and I didn’t find Burroughs until college. And I think it’s a little harder to explain, the influence he’s had on me. Lovecraft was about looking outward. Burroughs, reading his work, taking it to heart, that was looking inward. It was also – as with authors like Joyce and Faulkner – something that allowed me to broaden my techniques as a writer. Burroughs had audacity. He was irreverent in a way I’m not sure I’d encountered before, an irreverence that violated not only the strictures of the English language but of society. I was raised in rural and semi-rural Appalachia, and while I’d certainly been broadening my horizons long before I found Burroughs, it was still heady stuff. And his writing led me off into this world of junkies and – well, by then I’d begun using drugs, so nothing will cure you more quickly of romanticizing dope that Junky. In fact, I think maybe that’s the most profound connection I have to Burroughs. He taught me not to romanticize. Anything. Ever. Novels like Silk and stories like “Ballad of a Catamite Revolver,” that’s me taking what I learned from Burroughs, the squalor and depravity that rules life for so many of us, and using that as my canvas, but never permitting myself to romanticize it. This is not a place you want to be. This is a place where life is cheap and ugly and dirty. Too little science fiction is written from that place.

ASJ. I’m republishing your story “Ballad of a Catamite Revolver” from your Sirenia newsletter in my upcoming William S. Burroughs tribute anthology, The Junk Merchants Volume 2. Can you tell me about the genesis of that story? 

CRK: Well, the story was written about seven years ago now, which means I don’t have a lot of specifics on hand. Those are lost to old notes books and undependable memory.But I can say, there are a number of my science-fiction stories, such as “Hydrarguros” and “Cherry Street Tango, Sweatbox Waltz” and “Ballad of a Catamite Revolver,” I think of them as a sort of cybernoir. In a lot of ways I suppose they’re very retro, harking back not only the cyberpunks in the late seventies and early eighties but to film noir in the forties and fifties. I’m trying to capture both those aesthetics and blend them. And…it’s not like I can claim this is original. Surely Ridley Scott did this in Blade Runner in 1982 (with its title courtesy Bill Burroughs). No, he might not have crawled as deeply beneath the underbelly of a future society as I’m doing in “Ballad of a Catamite Revolver,” but he’s in the neighborhood, and that film was a great influence on me. Like I said about Burroughs’ Junky, this is a place where life is cheap and ugly and dirty. This isn’t the sort of SF that wonders at the stars. It’s the sort of considers it very likely that technology will only lodge us more deeply in the gutter. And it’s also violence as a sort of pornography, and decay and violence as art, and even art as crime. See, for example, my story “A Season of Broken Dolls.” Oh, another huge influence on these stories, the tales like “Ballad of a Catamite Revolver,” is David Bowie’s album Outside. The story’s antagonist – if it actually has one, which I doubt – Belev Andler, is a nod to Bowie’s Nathan Adler.

ASJ. What do you love about the Gothic and Deathrock musical genres, literature and culture? 

CRK: This isn’t an easy question. I almost decided to not even try and answer it. I didn’t become involved in goth, in even the most tenuous way, until I started doing drag in 1990, and by then I was twenty-six years old. So I was a very fucking slow bloomer as for as goth was concerned, to say the least, and I was in the South – Birmingham, Athens, Atlanta – not really a part of the world renowned for having a thriving goth scene. Okay, New Orleans, but I didn’t get down that way much until later on. But, yes, my drag persona, it started there, and then I was writing Silk, which was mostly a book about the tiny punk-goth scene in Birmingham at the end of the 1980s disguised as a horror novel. And while I was writing it I met Billy Martin, who was at the time, a bit to his chagrin, a goth icon, and Christa Faust, who had even less interest in goth, but she was also somehow seen as part of the thing. And it spiraled from there. And it was great for a while, especially getting to know musicians. Forgive the name dropping, but, you know, the night I got wasted on ouzo at the Milk Bar with Voltaire and Lisa Feurer (who was still with Black Tape back then). I became close friends with the members of The Crüxshadows, Faith and the Muse, the Changelings (who were a brilliant Atlanta band), and on and on. I think the climax of my involvement with the scene was when I mc’d Convergence 5 in New Orleans in April ’99. And, kids, if you don’t know what Convergence is, use Wikipedia. I was a music reviewer at the late, much-lamented Carpe Noctem. You know, this has become an absurdly long answer, which I don’t think has even really addressed the question. I was leading up to how I drifted out of the scene in the early 2000s, but that’s not an answer, either. I don’t even know what the scene is these days. I just turned sixty, and I’m just shy of a recluse. Is there still a goth scene? Didn’t emo eat it alive? Okay, sorry, what did I love about the whole thing? I don’t know how to explain that, not really, not in a way that won’t seem precious and pretentious. I loved dressing up, the theatricality, obviously the music, and…you know, I’m gonna leave this one at that. Four hundred words and I still haven’t answered the question, which I’m beginning to think I misunderstood.

ASJ. Whatever happened to your goth-folk blues band, Death’s Little Sister?

CRK: I lived in Athens, Georgia in the nineties, and if you lived in Athens, Georgia – at least back then – and you had anything remotely resembling artistic inclinations, sooner or later you’d likely wind up at least sorta in someone’s band. And I met a lot of musicians as soon as I moved there, and they knew I’d done drag in Birmingham so I had that background in performance. Plus, almost as an afterthought, I could sing, play keyboard, and read music. And write songs. And people in bands, even shitty bands, got invited to the best parties with the best drugs. So, it was almost inevitable. In 1996, I was waiting for Silk, the first novel to sell, and – I honestly do not remember how I fell in with the people who became the band. Someone introduced me to a friend of a friend. And Death’s Little Sister grew out of the ashes of this other band that was imploding. For a while it was fun, but it quickly turned into very hard work, very time consuming work. We’d rehearse almost every night in a converted attic in a house at the edge of town. And then it started costing me money. I was the only person in the band with anything like a remotely steady source of income (that’s a joke; I was selling short fiction), so I kept getting handed the bills for sound equipment and studio time and such. We played a lot of shows in Athens and Atlanta. Our recording of “House of the Rising Sun” got a little airplay on local college radio. People like Michael Stipe and Matthew Sweet came to our shows and said we should keep at it. But. I was bleeding cash. I was drunk or high half the time. I wasn’t getting anything written. I mean nothing. My agent actually finally questioned whether it was worth it. And I saw, no it wasn’t. So, there was a February 1997 show at the 40 Watt Club, our best show yet, and the next day I called the guitarist and quit. And it was a fucking ugly breakup. I tried to find the guys another vocalist, but after a couple more months everyone had walked away. And that is what happened to Death’s Little Sister. The end.

ASJ. What are your current writing projects, if you’re at liberty to discuss them?

CRK: Sure, I can discuss them. But I’ve been having greater and greater trouble writing as the years go by, which is terrifying. So, I can discuss them, but keep in mind when I say “my next novel,” well, I’ve been working on my next novel since about 2015. I’m writing a book called The Night Watchers for Subterranean Press, and I’m about halfway through, so maybe this one is actually going to happen. It better. In a lot of ways, it is the nearest thing to a genre horror novel that I’ve ever tried to do. But it is coming along very slowly, and I’m not going to try and give a synopsis or anything. Bright Dead Star, my next short story collection – my nineteenth, I think – will be out early in 2025. The title could be a description of the way I’ve felt the last few years, but it’s actually stolen from a Current 93 song, from their 2018 album The Light Is Leaving Us All. What I am trying to finish at this very moment – and all this stuff is with SubPress, by the way – is a sci-fi novella, The Sun Always Shines on TV –  a sequel to Living a Boy’s Adventure Tale – and yes, both titles stolen from A-ha songs. Show me a writer who claims they aren’t a thief, and I’ll show you someone who’s either a shitty writer or a liar.

ASJ. Final question: What reading recommendations do you have for my readers?

CRK: Oh, I hate this question. I always hate this question. I have always hated this question. But I will say that Jeff VanderMeer is hands down the best weird writer going these days. Read Area X and Borne and all the rest. Brilliant stuff. And we’ve talked so much about music, so if you haven’t heard Heilung, hear them. There a fucking incredible Germanic-Viking experimental folk thing. And my two favorite film directors these days are Denis Villeneuve and Christopher Nolan, so…there. Recommendations.

Damon Hubbs

Love Gang 

All the Teddy Boys say Florence is the squeeze 
     and I see Ronnie reading a book of poems
at the hot dog stand on Rockaway Beach.
The men, gunning fast trucks
and all the sad captains pulled thro’ the pier.
Let’s sing switchblade operas and keep outrageous diaries.
Let’s walk mean streets with weighted leather belts 
drink rum and Cola in a Dixie Cup
suffer on and on and on 
     like a whip of red cake faltering in the sun.  

O, Ronnie —did you book a rocket to Russia
     pill heaven with the angels in chains? 
Our love was fast and simple. 
Now my drainpipe trousers pool 
with blood and you’re still on the move. 
I wanna smash cheap crockery. 
I wanna drink at the Bird and Brat, cry oof 
like a gun dropped, watch suicides from the Tappan Zee.
What happens next 
     is everything and mist.  

Scott C. Holstad

when you wake up

nocturnal goings on
like thunder dreams of
a dark, dank hunger,
like when the sperm
hits the back of your 
throat, you blink &
swallow, like bitter
tendrils of ghostly hands
forcing you apart, like
the boogeyman hiding
in the eternal closet,
waiting & wanting  
you & me too,
   us,
         i,
   me,
knowing he’ll wait
& strike, tearing
& gnashing in a
horrorland violence
of murderscene, 
& flimsy, going
too hard & fast
nomore
life
like a giant
jagged hole
art dreams
in the head,
       your head,
until it hurts
    & you wake
        you wake
        you wake
to sweatsoaked
vision of cum
dried gash, having
black bush in the
hand worth two
birds at least,
panting & heaving
               &
vowing and knowing

***

Originally published in Driver’s Side Airbag

Nate Mancuso

Picklesmack

“ASS TO ASS, HARRIET!” Murray Silverman shouts to his wife over the crowd of screaming pickleballers packed into the Fontainebleau Las Vegas luxury suite.

Harriet Silverman is stark naked, kneeling with her palms placed down on a large folding metal table set up in the middle of the suite. Drugged up and stony-eyed, her pupils are dilated while her face is covered in a thin film of cold junk sweat. The inside of her right forearm is rife with track marks, and a large area of flesh around the inside of her elbow has turned a bluish-brownish-green color, swollen and infected with thick yellowish puss oozing out. Her amputated left arm ends in a sewn-off stump above the elbow. A trail of fresh semen runs down her chin from her bottom lip.

Beatrice Goldfarb kneels on all fours on the table beside Harriet, facing the opposite direction. She’s wearing no shirt, just a black lace bra with one shoulder strap ripped and hanging down over her bruised arm. Her pink Lululemon pickleball skirt is hiked up above her waist and she’s wearing no panties. Her ass cheeks are dotted with cigar burns while blood trickles down her right cheek from a set of human teeth marks that punctured her skin. A pickleball paddle lies next to her on the table, its broken-off handle smeared with blood, feces, vaseline and buffalo wing sauce. 

Sidney Goldfarb, Beatrice’s husband and pickleball mixed doubles partner, is standing behind the table between the two women, holding a thick black double-headed silicone dildo above his head and shaking it wildly for the crowd of pickleballers who are thrusting their fists into the air and chanting “ass to ass!” in perfect synchronized harmony.

Sidney looks down at Harriet and Beatrice, and says, “OK, ladies, time for the grand finale – now let’s bring it on home for these hungry ballers!”

“But Sidney, it’s huuurting me,” Beatrice slurs as a fresh stream of pinkish blood-infused piss runs down the inside of her thigh. She gulps, hiccups then vomits up a combination of vodka, semen, stale cheetos and moldy lasagna onto the table in front of her.

“Jesus fucking Christ, Beatrice!” Sidney bellows out and then looks back at Murray, waving his arm forward furiously.

Shaking his head and cursing loudly, Murray storms his way forward, pushing his way through the crowd of cheering pickleballers until he reaches the table where Harriet now lies on her stomach, face down in her own puke. He grabs the back of Harriet’s long filthy disheveled gray hair and wraps it tightly around his fist. With a quick strong snap of his wrist, he violently yanks and twists Harriet’s head up and around so that her sweat-drenched face is just inches from his own.  

“Listen to me, goddamnit!” Murray screams at Harriet. “The national senior pickleball tournament starts in two fucking days and we need – I repeat need – this money to pay the entry fees!” Murray clenches and twists his fist harder around Harriet’s hair while his face contorts into a psychotic scowl. “So you’re going ass to ass with Beatrice or you’re getting tossed off that fucking balcony onto the Las Vegas fucking Strip! Now pick it the fuck up and get back on your goddamn knees, Harriet!” 

With a quick hard downward shoulder pivot and forearm thrust, Murray slams Harriet’s face into the metal table, crushing her cheekbone and breaking three of her front teeth, then jerks her head back up just as quickly. With his free hand, he grabs an open plastic bottle of cold water from the table and raises it to Harriet’s dried cracked lips – allowing her to take a long pull – then splashes the rest of the water into her face. “Hopefully that’ll wake your ass up,” he mutters as he throws the bottle to the floor.

Refreshed by the cold water, Harriet rises back up to her knees and nods slowly at Murray while spitting a tooth out. “OK, peaches,” she mumbles through her broken teeth. “You know I want that pickleball title just as bad as you do, and I’ll do whatever it takes. But I need my fix first, Murray, I need it now! Please please please go get Roach!”

Murray nods his head to Harriet then looks over to a large muscle-bound black man standing at the end of the table five feet away and watching them closely. The man is wearing red leather pants, a pair of Air Jordan 4 “Cactus Jack” Retros, and an open red leather vest over a six-pack stomach and chiseled pecs, with bulging tattooed biceps crossed over his chest. He wears a wide-brim black fedora on his head with a black mink scarf wrapped around his neck.

“Yo, Roach!” Murray shouts to the man over the crowd noise and waves him over.

Roach walks over to Murray with raised eyebrows while Sidney joins them with the black dildo still in his hand. “What the fuck’s goin’ on here, Silverman?” Roach asks. “I got me some high-payin’ clients gettin’ impatient here, dog! So you better jump start that skanky-ass ho and get her ass back to work, mothafucka!”

“Don’t sweat it, homeboy,” Murray says to Roach. “My girl’s all good, she just needs some more of the he-ro. Know what I’m sayin’?”

“What the fuck, Murray!” Roach exclaims, shaking his head and then nodding toward Harriett, who’s staring at them from the table through vacant zoned-out eyes and hooded eyelids. “That nasty-ass bitch already shot up so much of my junk she nearly put my black ass outta business! An’ you pickleballin’ niggas already owe me big, man! So how the fuck am I gonna get paid for givin’ her flaccid white ass mo’ my junk. Murray?”

“We got you, brotha’,” Murray says. “We ballin’ hard this week at the senior natties, bringin’ home some fat stacks, yo. We payin’ you back plus interest, a’ight?”

Roach turns his head and looks at his cousin, Poptart, who now stands next to Roach after walking over from the back of the suite. “What you think, Pops? Should I trust these pickleballin’ fools with mo’ my skag?”

Poptart studies Murray closely and then glances over at Harriet. He looks back to Roach, shrugs his shoulders and says, “These niggas can ball, cuz. My brotha’ Curtis saw ’em play up in Pepper Pike back when he was hustlin’ up around that way. Said they f’real. I say give that pickleballin’ ho some mo’ smack, then her’n the other bitch can go ass to ass, then they make us some green at the senior natties.”

Roach nods his head in agreement, then looks over to Murray and Sidney. “A’ight boys. We’ll tune yo’ bitches up with the H, but then we better be gettin’ some ass to ass. No mo’ ’scuses, dig?”

Murray nods to Roach and extends his closed fist. “We good, dog. Just hit ’em between the toes, those stems can’t take any more of the beast.”

Roach bumps Murray’s fist and then leans over and whispers something into Poptart’s ear. Poptart nods and walks over to the bedroom door, opens it and walks through, then closes it behind him. About a minute later, Poptart emerges from the bedroom, walks over and hands a plastic zip-lock bag to Roach.

Roach turns to Harriet, then leans down to the table and whispers gently into her ear. “Shhh, just lay down and relax, baby girl, papa bear got just what you need.” 

“Thank you, daddy,” Harriet whimpers in a soft voice as she turns over onto her stomach. She bends her right knee and raises her foot to where Roach can hold it with one hand. Using his free hand, Roach places a hypodermic needle between two of Harriet’s toes. After looking closely for a usable vein, Roach drives the sharp needle through the web of her toes and presses his thumb down on the plunger, slowly injecting a clear fluid into her foot. Almost immediately, Harriet turns over and rolls her head back while closing her eyes. She opens her mouth halfway and smiles up at the ceiling in pure dope euphoria.

Roach gently pets Harriet’s damp matted hair back while planting a soft kiss on her forehead. “Now that’s my baby girl,” he whispers as he checks her pulse and gazes into her cold empty eyes.

After injecting Beatrice the same way as Harriet, Roach looks over to Murray and Sidney with Poptart at his side. “OK, fellas, we got your pickle-bitches nice and warmed up, now let’s get ‘em back to–”

“Oh fuck!” Poptart shouts, cutting off Roach while looking back at the table.

Roach, Murray and Sidney all look over and follow Poptart’s startled gaze.

Harriet and Beatrice are both convulsing violently on the table while scratching furiously at their faces with their mouths foaming. Behind them, the “ass to ass” crowd chant stops and the room goes completely silent.

Sidney looks at the two women curiously and asks, “Why are they doing that?”

“Bitches be codin’!” screams Poptart.

“Coding?” asks Sidney.

“OD’ing!” shouts Roach. “They’re overdosing, man!” 

Roach scowls at Poptart and asks, “Which fuckin’ needle you give me, nigga?”

Poptart grabs the needle out of Roach’s hand and looks closely at a marking on the barrel. He opens his mouth and raises his eyebrows. “Oh snap!” he says. “We gave those bitches the fetty by accident!”

“Fetty?” Murray and Sidney ask in unison.

“Fentanyl,” Roach answers while shaking his head at Poptart. “Pure grade A fuckin’ fentanyl.” 

“Well don’t you have one of those adrenaline needles, like in Pulp Fiction?” asks Sidney.

Roach and Poptart look at each other and laugh. “No, dumbass!” Roach exclaims between laughs. “They only got that shit in the movies.” 

After reading from his smartphone, Murray looks up and says, “It says here that you can use something called Narcan. You guys got any of that?”

Poptart nods his head and replies, “Yeah but we only got like two spray bottles left, an’ that shit expensive as fuck now with inflation an’ all.”

Murray nods back to Poptart and says, “No worries, we understand. Goddamn inflation is killing us all. Fuckin’ Bidenomics!”

Roach nods and says, “Tell me about it, yo. Fuckin’ loaf of bread at WinCo cost me like $5.99 now. I used to pay $2 tops for that shit!”

Poptart chimes in, “Costed me $65 to fill up my gas tank yes’day! I mean what the fuck!”

Sidney nods and says, “I hear you, man. What the hell did they think was gonna happen with the feds printing money as fast as they could cut down trees the past four years!”

Roach and Poptart both nod their heads. “Amen to that, brotha’,” Roach mutters.

Back on the table, Harriet has gone completely still while Beatrice is choking on her tongue with her eyes bulging out and hands desperately throttling her throat as her mouth continues to foam.

“Y’all think Trump’ll be any better, though?” Poptart asks.

“He ain’t Biden!” Roach pipes up with a quick chuckle.

“True ’dat,” Sidney says, fist-bumping Roach while Murray nods in agreement.

“I’m worried about those 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico he be talkin’ ’bout though,” Poptart says, shaking his head.

“He just tryna’ protect American industry, yo,” Murray replies.

“Yeah, I hear ya’,” Roach says thoughtfully, stroking his chin. “But the macro effects could be catastrophic in the long term, know what I’m sayin’?”

“I guess we’ll just have to see,” Sidney replies, shrugging his shoulders.

“Still can’t believe a convicted felon got elected president, yo,” Poptart quips.

“Wasn’t for nothin’ bad – just payin’ off a ho,” Roach replies.

They all look at each other, nodding in agreement.

Roach and Poptart glance back at the table, where Beatrice has just gasped her last breath after choking on her vomit. She and Harriet both lie on their backs, gape-mouthed with their dead eyes staring up at the ceiling.

Roach shakes his head and then looks out to the crowd of pickleballers, shouting, “Sorry folks, bitches croaked, party’s over. Y’all gotta bounce so we can clean up the mess over here.” He adds, “An’ y’all ain’t gettin’ yo’ money back, neitha’, so don’t even ask. Not our fault these pickleballin’ hos flaked on us.”

“What about ass to ass?” a voice shouts out from the crowd.

“Sorry, not tonight, boys,” Roach replies. 

“At least not with these stiff-ass bitches!” Poptart adds with a laugh.

Roach and Poptart both laugh while Murray and Sidney shake their heads with a chuckle. 

“You guys are baaad!” Murray says with a sly grin.

“All kidding aside, guys,” Sidney says, nodding his head back to the table. “This Harriet and Beatrice situation poses a real logistical problem for us.”

“How so?” Poptart asks with a puzzled expression.

“Yeah, Sid, do tell,” Murray chimes in.

Sidney looks at them sternly and says, “We have a mixed doubles pickleball tournament in two days, but now we have no mixed doubles. Harriet and Beatrice may’ve turned themselves into hopeless junkies over the past few months to raise money to feed their pickleball habits, but they were damn good doubles partners. Even playing with only one arm after Roach was forced to amputate the other one, Harriet could pickleball circles around every other woman on the court.” He shakes his head and sighs. “And now we have no one.”

“Sorry for your loss, man,” Poptart says, putting his hand on Sidney’s shoulder and giving it a sympathetic squeeze.

“Damnit!” screams Murray, turning to Poptart. “What the fuck is wrong with you, Poptart! How the hell could you confuse the two needles? They could not have been more clearly marked! I mean did they seriously not teach your dope smokin’ grape koolaid sippin’ ass how to read in whatever inner city metal detectin’ free lunch voucherin’ teen pregnancyin’ gangsta rappin’ straightouttacomptonin’ motherfuckin’ public school—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down, Murray!” Roach interjects. “Don’t blame Poptart for what happened. And besides, I got an idea.”

Everyone looks at Roach and, after a pause, Sidney speaks up. “Well? Enlighten us, Einstein.”

Roach smiles, then walks back to the bedroom and returns about thirty seconds later holding a small bag in his hand. He pulls out two blond wigs and throws one to Poptart. Roach puts his wig on and motions for Poptart to do the same.

Roach looks over at Sidney and Murray with a wide grin. “Looks like you two mothafuckas just found your new mixed doubles partners!”

Sidney, Murray, Roach and Poptart all clench their fists, raise their arms and extend their hands in unison for a group fist-bump. Sidney looks to each of them with a smile while nodding his head and says, “Let’s go ballin’, boys.”

Julian Thumm

Everything’s happening just as it should 

Everything’s happening just as it should 
with hateful lucidity
& cringing coherence
& perpetual moments
of vile clarity

everything that falls apart
must face its own collapse 
every being that brings destruction 
must witness what it’s wrought 
the sublime arousal
the culmination 
of every booming vision 

the gripping hand
the stacked odds
the dubious dyslexia 
& maddening myopia
that needfully bends 
to conservative pegs

We slough ourselves down
& slime ourselves open
knowing no better
’cause better is beyond
the frittered 
& fruitless ken 
of our decimated soil 

All we are 
is all we can possibly do
& doing is deaf & dumb 
a dead-end death drive
up an endless slope
but still we flail
fellating the cock of fate 
licking Sisyphus’ calloused sole
maybe a mosquito on Achilles’ balls
in final measure 
a laughing stock 
in our masters’ cannibal soup

George Gad Economou

memories of a shooting gallery

you know we’re surrounded, right? look at it this way. famine, plagues, diseases, natural disasters. they’ve all been explained in theories, in books, by smart people. they don’t exist because they’ve been explained. we live in a trouble-free society, up until a smart dude from the future writes about the problems that plague us and we learn about them if we’re not dead and the whole things starts all over again, more problems eradicated because we know what causes them and fuck them, man. starvation is caused by hungry multinational corporations taking advantage of people living in poor countries that were harvested and abused by imperialistic colonizing nations that needed cheap labor force. it’s been fucking explained, we don’t need to bother, we have the explanation and the solution. theoretically. who gives a fuck about reality. it doesn’t matter, does it?

Stephan had entered one of his oh so many motherfucking soliloquies and all we could do was listen because we were too damn high on something to punch him out. he blabbered on and on about the evils of explaining, like it was something he could control, or something we were responsible for. none of us cared. in our high, he was highly amusing.

when the tanks fired the first shots, no one moved. missiles razed down buildings and thousands of corpses littered the streets, praying for someone to bury them before the unholy monsters violated their righteousness. no one moved, because the flames leaped high, burning god’s throne and god didn’t stir a muscle; why would he, after all, like he gives a damn. we stared at corpses being raped by hungry mongrels and we knew we were next and we refused to act. 

Aphrodite brought some sanity in the beginning. the med student, the one that tried to save us from the purge of the drug. I remember she came to me with a practiced speech about junk and its consequences. I listened, because her breasts were two magnificent, firm melons begging to be eaten and her legs long and thin, just the way I like them, yet I’d never quit dope because I needed the numbness. life sucked enough the way it was, I couldn’t go back to sobriety, I tried it for a few weeks and it fucking sucked hairy horse balls. the med student with the good intentions became an addict and we shot from the same needle. we fucked too; we didn’t care about prolonging our lives, we had absolutely nothing to live for.

Stephan had grown up in the suburbs, loving family, many friends. prom king too, if I recall correctly, and had been accepted to the ivy leagues. he never went. he wanted to visit other places, see other people, feel other things. he did. in africa, somewhere in the jungles, he tasted some drugs, then he found opium. finally, meth, the baddest bitch alive, got a hold of him; never let go. I cook his ice, so he won’t slice my throat in the dead of the night, like he did to Nick and Piper. I’m safe, because I’m not an agent of the invading aliens that want to turn earth into an amusement park.

from where we sat we couldn’t see the flesh-eating bugs, but they were there, or so we were told by the screaming deadmen shambling around with their noses or ears or eyes missing and they trotted away; we stayed. it was the flesh that kept our souls trapped, perhaps losing our skin would liberate us. nothing happened, the homicidal bugs never came for us. we were too rotten, they said, we had nothing nutritious to offer. we made peace with them and helped them find more victims.

it was easy to find more people; in every church, in every school, in every 7/11, there was one, or twenty, longing for salvation. we offered it, abundantly. we were there, all the fucking time, hidden in a needle, at the tip of a dirty glass pipe. we couldn’t hide but we were tough to find. here it was, the moment of truth, when the priest had a taste. a man of the cloth converted in seconds. ever since, only three-headed demons visited his dreams and the screams, oh the wails breaking the dead of the night were ghoulish. he’d work up a sweat, shoot, then go back to sleep. till one night I grew tired of his shrieks and cut his tongue. next morning, he preached to us using sign language. he lost his hands the same afternoon. finally, he lost his cock. he was still alive, but would gawk into nothingness with his gouged eyes and would smile his toothless smile every five damn minutes. till someone got tired of him, I can’t remember who, and shot him in the head. even the remnants of his brain decorating the dirty wall smiled and preached. we had to clean up the mess and we did because we couldn’t live near anything that reminded us of the greener field we had rejected when the first angel abandoned heaven, thus commencing the story of the world.

we wrote the books too, the stories retold countless of times, in countless of versions. we were the first, the ones who said let there be light, and we never thought of the consequences. how can gods be so reckless? it’s easy, power comes with responsibilities but our minds were numb and we didn’t know. 

Stephan blathered on again, another nonsensical monologue until someone finally shot him in the head. his destroyed cranium kept on talking and we stomped it until there was nothing but splatter on the floor and on the walls. we never cleaned it up. the bugs got it for us. we just stayed, idle. 

the needle was hot when it entered the vein and cold when it came out. the mind was always numb. the dragons dancing in the living room were real but could not breathe fire ‘cause they were too tired to do so. all they wanted was to dance and they did, they performed the charleston for us and we laughed and applauded. then they died, on the spot, when snipers took them out. 

we were once again spared. we begged for death, quick or slow didn’t matter, but nothing happened. we saw it all, the destruction of everything, the explosion of the universe, and what else have you, yet we remained. Stephan couldn’t preach, the dragons weren’t there to dance for our amusement, and when Aphrodite took her clothes off and posed as the ancient goddess she was, we all raped her, and she enjoyed it more than she should and we lost our hardons because her moans were of ecstasy.

the bullets came through the window and the door and the men in black barged in. PARTY’S OVER MOTHERFUCKERS!!!! they bawled and started shooting blindly. we sat still, hoping for the bullet that would spell salvation. never came for me. the others were dead, I was alive. Aphrodite lay on the floor, naked, covered in cum, begging for more. the men in black did her a favor and fucked her in front of me.

I wasn’t naked. I never raped. I just shot. they were done. and dead. the men in black became nothing more than shadows with no substance. she guffawed. she got up, got dressed, kissed me. it was just us…it felt right.

we shot again. what happened? we asked each other, then cackled.

it wasn’t over. it’s never over. 

another needle heated.

nothing else made sense. only the returning dragons that did a waltz for us, then we killed them, cooked them, ate them. 

finally, we danced the tango, with needles hanging from our arms.

Brian Rosenberger

Pussy Flambé

Stand back, for real,
she warns
You might get your 
eyebrows singed.
I’d heard the rumor.
Some miracles need to be
witnessed firsthand
A woman scorned sure but 
a pussy that could scorch?
Granted, I’d been burned 
in past relationships but this…
this transcended love, transcended sex
this was magic. 
Primitive, tribal, no fucking CGI.
As the music played, we held our drinks high in tribute.
Let there be Light, motherfucker.
And there was – an orgasm of flame.
I felt changed, improved, better
still I pitied and applauded
her lovers, easy to spot
by their 3rd degree burns.

William Taylor Jr.

The Only Path

Don’t beat yourself up
too much about it, kid.

Sure, you’re not everything 
you thought you’d be 

but that’s how it is 
for most of us.

All those people 
you’ve  disappointed 

they probably had it coming.    

Give yourself some days of silence,
forget to hustle for a while.

Understand the universe 
will forget you and everything 
you have and haven’t done.

Find some peace in this
and sleep, guiltlessly,

and then get up 
whenever it is 

you feel like 
getting up

and do something beautiful
and useless

because that’s the only 
path to grace.