Francisco Molina

I adore every single freckle of his existence, especially this one

a Javier, una zorra

It has a mole in the iris but it was also an eclipse and the dormant possibility of me losing every light if it closes its eyelids. I could cross the whole anomaly with just one arm, wrapped it with the other one to hug myself too. It was a sad skinny boy, I was an ape with long arms and hair behind the ears. Actually I was an ape who claimed to a person why he has part of the universe while we fuck. So I was making apish sounds, not the uh uh uuuh ones, they were the ukikii kii type, like saying Please don’t lose the eye contact while I’m riding you.

I was at the highest point of the cosmos, as it exists a top and a bottom in these dimension, pulling down a sidereal banana to put in my mouth, but it wasn’t those large threes, neither a pale fruit rich in potassium, it was instead an anomaly with legs, arms, an amount of extremities that I could hold with my tongue. If it keeps the eyes wide open I would be able to find a little sense in this plane of the existence. Outside of this I was an ape who scratches in public, not ashamed of shitting in the streets.

I felt all its exposed ribs with each of my fingers. I wanted to leave my fangs pierced in thecosmos’ bones. I’m chewing a part of the cosmos. The cosmos turns the lights on and off, it is creating new laws for the order by displacing moons between its sun and me while it blinks. There is a third entity that watches everything and it has a cellphone in its hands.

More simian, more simian, I want you to move the bed till it bounces, he said.

I’m oscillating while ukikii kiii. A deeper ukiiiikiiiiiiii is uttered, like accelerating. The cosmos says I’m about to cum. Ukikii kiii until the limit. The cosmos opens the eyelids severely, squirting light, a liquid one, for about four seconds. I came too, dripping the wall, dripping part of its non-face but a galaxies cumulus. The cosmos complains I get cum inside my eyes.

The third entity is a subject, a man with a proper name, he’s almost thirty and he likes to record people fucking with his cellphone. Ha has the bad habit of interrupting everyone asking weird things. More simian, he said. I think that I cannot accelerate the number of revolutions in my hips because I reached the max capacity.

The cosmos went to the bathroom to get cleaned. He should leave things as they are, cum dries quickly so I could get enlighted forever. Actually to achieve this we need to fuck for eternity. That sounds really nice jeje.

It’s been a while, he said. I’m an ape trapped in the cosmos, don’t talk to me: uh uh uuuh. We should do this often, he said. I snarl at him.

When things get kinky, a little scar opens in the cosmos’s foreskin. It is dangerous having a long term relationship with a circumcised guy if you have more sharpness than the usual inside your mouth. We are aware of this danger, it happened the first time that we met while I sucked his dick in an emergency stairs, it was a warning that the flood would occur over and over. The cosmos is pressing a cotton piece against his foreskin, waiting for the end of the stream.

If he’s not besides me I’m just a hairy guy, with a pervy friend. Having a real communication with this guy is impossible.

Uh uh uuuh
Uh uh uuuh
Uh uh uuuh

(I cannot stop the snarl)

he’s taking his time, he said. I’m going to check, he said.

When I rented this room I never realize how poorly it’s lighted. The window is too small, or it’senough for the place and the place is too small. It’s overpriced, but I’m next to the subway. Now both of them are taking too long, but I’m lazy af. I let myself to rest, I just came, blame it on the eternity lol. Maybe my friend is holding on the cotton piece. Maybe the cosmos got another boner (this is the reason of my affliction). Maybe I can make those two fall in love and after throw myself out of the window (but it’s too small).

Francisco Molina (Santiago de Chile, 1992), editor in Los Libros de la Mujer Rota Press. Currently is running a bilingual rewrite project with the poet and translator Matías Fleischmann, you can see it at: unpezconmicara.tumblr.com. This year he is publishing his first short-story book called “El amor de los salmones” (Love of salmons).

Bailey D. McInturff

He’s a Natural Man


“There goes Joseph again,” Maureen mused, rolling her eyes. A loud thud sounded as a rock hit the side of the car in front of them. Up ahead on the side of the road, a naked man hurled miscellaneous objects at the cars that passed him while he shouted obscenities, his sagging, pale flesh jiggling with each movement.

“Maybe they’ll arrest him this time. I’m tired of his stunts. Do you realize this is the seventh time this month he’s done this?” I asked my friend in the passenger seat.

“Yup.” We drove past Joseph, averting our eyes from his stark lack of self-consciousness. Driving forward, I glimpsed the front of Joseph’s nude body, and the sight sent a disgusted shiver through my body. The heat of mid-July only accentuated his poor physique, making him look like a peeled potato, complete with lumps of uneven fat covered in a layer of sweat that reflected to sun. God, I hope I never look like that, I thought. Now that we were closer, I could see what he was doing. He pointed at each car, calling them out one by one for their materialistic ways and distributing his punishment as the passersby completely ignored his existence. Clumps of moss rebounded off of cars; I tried to look at those instead.

“Hey, where do you think all of that crap comes from? You know, all of the crap that he throws at the cars.” I paused for an answer; when I didn’t get one, I continued, “I mean, where does all of it come from?”

Considering this, Maureen replied, “Yeah, you know, it comes from somewhere. Yeah,somewhere.”

“Somewhere, huh?”

A strident screech as shrill as a banshee erupted in front of the car, followed by a gut-wrenching crunch of metal. I slammed on the brakes as Maureen, looking frantic, cried out, “What wasthat?” We ran up the street, leaving our car on the shoulder of the road, hazard lights flashing, as we sought the source of the disturbance. The traffic had ceased in both directions, creating a sea of fuming, filthy cars and incensed commuters. Weaving in and out of cars and crowds, Maureen and I craned our necks as we fought to see over the group of nosey interlopers who inspected the scene. As we grew closer to the intersection, Maureen’s frenzied footsteps abated to a slow walk.“Hey, I think we should just turn around and go home. Let’s get out of here.” Her voice quivered behind me, but I kept going.

Joseph’s rotund body sprawled across the intersection, surrounded by a gang of men who pummeled his exposed flesh to a mass of cascading blood. Indistinguishable from a distance, the men mercilessly pounded Joseph as each punch sent spatters of blood onto the pavement, painting a Jackson Pollock right in the middle of town. Seeing the spectacle before them, the drivers braked, and cars piled up on either side of the intersection, their bodies distorted and scarred from the accident. The drivers who had escaped injury gawked at the spectacle in the intersection; some cried, some jeered, but none helped. “Stop!” I cried. “Stop! I’ll call the police on you! Stop!”

As I ran to Joseph, Maureen yelled, “What are you doing? Are you crazy?” Amongst the catcalls and insults of spectators, I hurried out to Joseph in the intersection, sending his attackers scurrying away like ants fleeing from a kid with a magnifying glass. When I got closer to Joseph, I could see his eyes flickering open, revealing such severe forest green eyes that I stumbled the last few steps I took towards him. He glared at me with the wilderness in his eyes and I knelt beside him, slowly reaching a shaking hand toward his own limp one.

He croaked, “You all call me a heathen, but look at what you did to me.”

It was then that I realized that he wasn’t really bleeding; he certainly didn’t bleed blood. Instead, thousands of minute maroon, scarlet, and burgundy flowers gushed out of his skull and back. Fascinated, I plucked on with tender fingers from behind his ear, desiring to examine the wonder before me. Just as my fingers grazed the flower, it melted in my hands, staining them with the blood of beautiful flowers.

I gazed at my hand in awe and the world around me fell silent even though I knew sirens screamed like teenage girls and spectators howled and Joseph’s paper breath heaved and rattled beside me. In this silence I heard a reticent melody, so hushed I could barely hear it. I tilted my head towards the flowers as they sobbed at my feet, flooding my head with their sorrowful song.

Behind me a gruff voice cut through the aria, chuckling, “It’s about time someone taught that freak a lesson.” The police had arrived, and he brushed past me to approach Joseph. He jabbed Joseph with his foot and shouted to the other officers behind him, “All right, let’s load him up. Time to book him.” The police rushed over me as if I was nothing more than a pebble in a stream, swarming around Joseph ravenously. They hoisted him to uncertain feet and shoved him into a cruiser like a child. All the while their boots crushed the flowers that mourned around the natural man’s head.

Bailey McInturff wants to change the world. Hailing from a small town in southern West Virginia, she decided from a young age that this world really needs her, even more than it realizes yet. She also decided there are infinite ways to change the world, and maybe this will do the trick.

Jeff Wilbur

The 11 O’clock Blues — Lefty’s Lament


The neon from the Your Host sign sheens on the wet pavement; at least the letters that work do. If you look at it real quick you’d think it says ‘You Lost?’ And most of those that wander into this grease fire in waiting on Main Street are, especially after dark.

The inside isn’t much better. The backsplash stained from ten thousand-onion rings worth of fat splatter. The driven-into-the-floor stools drip ripped vinyl. Battered and berated early editions of the Courier Express plague the counter. The smell of burned eggs and bad coffee inhabit every pore of the drop ceiling. And the fluorescent lights flicker like a strobe light with a hangover. Not much happens in here until after midnight. During the day the boys from the windshield wiper factory would bog down on burgers, fries and fried baloney before heading back to the line. Those of them that still had a job, that is. The folks from the offices, well, they find nicer places – as they tend to do.

But at night! At night this place would transform. Refuge. A refuge for the many with nowhere else to go. But, tonight, those many are few.

In a cracked turquoise booth with a dented Formica table is Lefty; stringy hair, shabby beard, pleather. His pack of Old Gold’s and his feeble cup of coffee splayed out before him – just under the Seeburg Wall-O-Matic jukebox. Across sits another man, soused. An untouched cup of coffee and dry toast remains lonely and deserted in front of him. He’s dead drunk. But thatwon’t stop Lefty from talking to him. Nothing stops Lefty from talking – even picking a song as he flips through the thingy on the wall.

“I’m alright with it. Really, man. Always have been. You know, it’s been with me since I was a kid. Can’t remember who started it. “

“Can’t me-member,” the drunk friend parrots.“Yeah. Can’t remember. But that don’t matter. It’s the way it’s always been. “

He stops flipping the Wall-O-Matic, finds something. He drops in a nickel. And, after a couple of buttons pushed, the theme from “Shaft” plays. Yeah. That’s right.

“It’s been with me. Since I was a kid. Think it was Uncle Donny. Maybe it was. Never mind. I know a lot of folks with ‘em. Probably don’t know where they got theirs. But they stick. Oh yes, they do! They stick. Especially the good ones. I remember, in school. There was always a guytryin’ to mess with mine. Never took. Whatever they came up with, never took. That was good. That was alright.”

Lefty looks down at his empty coffee, then up for assistance. Their ain’t none to be had.

“Damn waitress. But, you know, it took some gettin’ used to, it did. I remember. Back in kindergarten. I was the only one. All the other kids, they didn’t have one. Kind’a made me feel special, you know. Even the teacher, even she called me ‘Lefty’.”

The waitress makes a cameo across the room. Lefty motions.“Coffee!”She ignores him. So he takes up one of the Old Gold’s and lights it.

“Lefty. That’s not so bad. I know guys that got lot worse. Chubby, who ain’t. Slim, that’schubby. That’s funny, you know. Chubby and Slim. Yeah. Then there’s Twitch and Hairball and Snow White. Yous know those guys, right?”

Lefty’s drunken friend farts his response. So Lefty plows on.

“Yeah. Right. They got lot a’ worse names. Over at the Sunoco, there’s Jimmy Andrus. They call him Jimmy Anus. Jesus! Polka Pete. Two-Ton Tony. Martha The Muffin. Half-Wit Willy. The Count Me Out of Crisco, over on Sixteenth. Gasbag Jimmy. Larry Loses A Lot. Johnny The Queer. Johnny The Thief. Johnny Whatchamacallit.”

Lefty takes a drag, then says, “Bill.”

The drunken friend actually looks up at this.

“Bill?”

“Real name is Aloysius.”

The drunken friend goes back to pondering the specks on the Formica as the ash on Lefty’ssmoke is at the point of defying gravity. He motions to the waitress.

“Ashtray!”

She ignores him – again.

“I should expect this, here. Yeah, I should.”

Lefty deliberates for a moment, then dumps his ash in his coffee cup. It’s not serving any other useful purpose at the moment. He takes another long drag of the Old Gold, thinking.

“You know, it had to be Lefty. There was no other choice. It’s like it was chosen by God.”Just as he’s stubbing out the smoke it dawns on him.

“That’s right! It was my pop who gave it to me! I was three or four. Now I remember! Lefty, Lefty, Lefty. But, when I was turning six, and going to first grade we had a talk. You know, I was a sensitive kid and all. And, for a while there, I didn’t want to be called Lefty. But one day he sat me down on the davenport. God, it was hot. I remember. I stuck to the plastic furniture cover like a pancake. But he was serious. He only called me ‘son’ when he was serious. He said,‘Son, the kids might make fun of you. But that’s okay. If they do, just remember, you were born special. That’s why we gave you a special name.’ That’s what he said, alright.”

Lefty lights another, exhaling unnervingly. “Then he told me, if they kept it up, makin’ fun of me, to kick some ass!”

Lefty thinks this is the funniest thing ever uttered! He starts gaggling until the gaggle becomes a cough and cough becomes a hack. After a moment, and a brawl for breath, he’s able to talk –again.

“So, I’m Lefty. That’s okay. Yeah. That’s fine.”

He takes one last drag, douses it in the mud at the bottom of the coffee cup with its lifeless companion. He looks up at the drop ceiling and the fluorescent lights. It could be the cosmos, given the mystified and beatific look on his face. Then a thought jaywalks through his mind.

“One thing. One thing though. I wonder if they would’a called me Righty if that’s the nut I wasmissin’.”

Jeff Wilbur writes, occasionally. Drinks copious amounts of coffee. Smokes some cigarettes now and then and rides his vintage Honda 750 religiously. After 20 years in Hollywood, 15 of which he worked as a TV writer, he moved back to Buffalo where he currently works in a drug and alcohol detox – a step up in terms of the quality of folks he encounters on a daily basis from his former place of residence.

Robert S. King

Summer Cold Front


The two moons of our headlights focus ahead on the warm summer highway, one we've never traveled. In an unmarked curve, beams of the full eye above hang like icicles as we come to the only house where snow is falling, the lawn is white, and the roof is buried nearly to the chimney top. Nothing but shadows drift across this freezing place.

An optical illusion, I say. The chimney breathes not a smoke signal or spark to show that someone is tending fire.

We slow down but keep idling homeward where ours is the only sweating house, where our porch light burns darkness and cold away, where windows are closed to heat waves and freezes, yet even conditioned air is always near the boiling point, and there is a draft with fingers of ice.

Here in our car slowed by a sudden freeze in an alien neighborhood, a single puff rises from the snowcapped chimney as if someone has given up the ghost. We look at one another and get homesick.

You who have never been cold turn your head and shiver, turn off the air conditioner, glance back at the snow light drifting further behind us, and sigh: Who chooses to live and die in bitter cold? Maybe they can't take the heat.

I break out in cold sweat, see white flakes of light coming down in the direction of home. Even ice can burn, I recall, stepping on the gas, changing the weather.

An Idle Heart


Ex-Captain Solo, a simple man, wakes up with a complicated problem. He passed out at the bottom of the bottle last night, but this problem is a pain he has never felt before. It aches from a motion that seems to be coming in like the tide──strange, because he knows all about headaches, hangovers, and even the pain from stupor sleep on the deck in his underwear beneath the sun for hours.

He’s always controlled pain by ignoring whoever caused it. Somehow he cannot turn his back on this one like all the heartaches that he either slept off or drank to sleep, anonymous like the way he preferred to talk through doors or give the silent treatment to his friendless life. No, this is a hard knot that hurts in all directions and everywhere at once, a knot no sailor can untie. It is tight as a rope that seems to be pulling him somewhere and holding him back at the same time, though he hasn’t moved from his bunk today. He hasn’t checked to see if he’s gone off course, but itwouldn’t matter since the boat engine died months ago and left him to the will of the currents in a ghost ship crewless and all alone—but not lonely, he says, the way he’s always wanted it. His first mate went overboard, walked the plank long ago into faceless memory.

This new nagging problem makes a sound, sometimes like a botswain’s whistle, sometimes like a ship’s mast creaking. If only it had a shadow, so he could see what shape it’s in without touching what made it. It can’t be changes he’s made: Nothing is different in his little cabin; hehasn’t cleaned or moved anything. There is so much trash and leftover plates and bottles lying around that nothing could move if it wanted to. It’s not a stowaway rat rustling around this undergrowth either. He hates rats and is pretty sure he’s clubbed them all.

He’s hoping this problem will go away, so he won’t have to get up, because he’s seen enough ups and downs of the sea and sun for a lifetime. There comes a point where sunrise and sunset look the same. But in these dead waters, it’s looking now like only another hurricane could wash his troubles away, or maybe just pour saltwater on his wounds. If only he had the youth and skills of a young boatswain now, he’d outsail all troubles of the world, keeping the sun at high noon, using his own arms as oars if he had to, instead of knotting them up around his chest. If only he could win back his navy stripes and win the battles at sea again. If only he were that young man whose looks could always kill. Now all he has is this problem and the whistle of wind in empty rum bottles.

Silence isn’t supposed to be loud and feel tighter and tighter, almost at his throat. Something is guilty of disturbing the peace: His heart makes a cracking noise; his back moans like a shipwreck, but these are not the sounds he cannot abide. The one that bothers him is seductress, silence that is painful and long lost at sea, yet whispers now like a distant wave beneath where the North Star should be. Maybe it’s just frayed nerves, not the frayed rope I’m at the end of, he jokes to the helm tied too tight to turn. And then the sound of crashing waves washing in-out, in- out, leaving behind a deafening silence that finally drops its cold anchor.

The sound of a heart that’s stopped beating. The sound of the ocean in its shell.

The Death of Stuporman


I dream in black and white newspaper columns of a citizen who has no known influence but dies under lots of it in the shade of two staggering pines while sleeping in his flea-market hammock with 11 empty bottles and a 12th one still dripping.

Civil authorities say it wasn’t an overdose of Budweiser. They suspect suffocation caused by sticker shock from the surgeon’s bill balled up in his fist.

Before Undertaker slinks in to drain his blood―because in this dream embalming takes place onsite―the wind has wrung out the deceased, twisting and sewing the hammock around him like a thrift store burial gown.

Inside this wrapper, the beer-soaked Sunday newspaper still hugs his face, prints today’sheadline on his forehead. His wallet is missing but that’s because it’s probably empty instead of stolen. The cat sleeping in the dead man’s lap is a suspect in the crime, as are some early birds scalping his hair to build nests.

Ignoring cops, cats, birds, neighbors, and undertakers, the dead man seems to be somewhere else. This upsets the late-arriving mail carrier who is always agitated when someone moves without leaving a forwarding address. So Mailman goes postal, pulls out his stamp gun, drags the cat off and shoots him nine times. He tells Undertaker a dirty joke that makes him die laughing. He somehow tars and feathers the thieving birds. He burns like witches the two trees that hold the citizen up. He scares the cops and all other creatures into stupor.

Only the wind gets away.

Only the hammock lets go, and the debtor dead man rolls downhill like a log, while squeaky wheels from Rood Electric fill up his answering machine with threats to cut off his power.

Robert S. King, a Georgia native, now lives in Lexington, Kentucky. His poems and flash fiction have appeared in hundreds of magazines, including California Quarterly, Chariton Review, Kenyon Review, Main Street Rag, Midwest Quarterly, and Southern Poetry Review. He has published eight poetry collections, most recently Diary of the Last Person on Earth, Sybaritic Press, 2014) and Developing a Photograph of God (Glass Lyre Press, 2014). His work has received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of Net award.

J. Tim Raymond

City Hands


The ground had cracked with the bitter cold of late January in the farm fields of Missouri. Clutching my shiny new burp gun from Christmas only weeks ago, alone, I played Korea...notbut two years since the stalemate in Panmunjom. Even in a slight breeze the air stung, made it hard to keep my eyes open, but the will to play Korea with my new gun was stronger than the weather. The resident farm implements became wrecked Russian T-4s. I rolled into a ditch at the imaginary burst of a Chi-Com machinegun. I leveled my weapon, released the lever, pulled the trigger, and heard a resounding tak, tak, tak! as I heaved a clump of dirt, grenade-like, into the yawning bin of a rusting combine.

Bare whisps of snowflakes urged me to rise and move up and past the barn, all the while training my sights on the second-floor windows, remembering how my uncle had shot crows perched on the roof line with his M-1 carbine, standing in his tractor, the spent cartridges rattling off the fender skirts. The snow was gradually developing a muted presence. Breaking character, I set my burp gun on a milk can, clapped my mittened hands together, and debated, as a 10-year-old boy debates, whether to continue my war play or beat it back to the house. My too large helmet liner whistled around my ears...the wind whispered in the creak of barn timbers now some yards behinds me. A prickling sensation caused me to look directly in front of me. Just ahead a 1941 Ford pickup stood on blocks rusting in a stand of bracken. In past summers my younger brother and I would have played aircraft games in the truck cab, ignoring the huge steering wheel, inspired to pretend we were Terry and the Pirates flying “over the hump” in a C-47.

Somehow in the snow the truck was different. The roof of the cab, coated like white frosting, seemed to grow. Only the rear window gave certainty to its form. My view into the cab from behind the truck bed, with its errant corn cobs frozen in place, showed a dark mass on thedriver’s side. I stared, my toy gunplay forgotten. The shape didn’t move. Another gust of wind brought me to an immediate dread as it caught the pickup’s remaining rust-sprung door, swinging it gaping open. I stepped through the crackling bracken stalks and in a wide arc moved to the driver’s side of the cab. There incredibly a young man sat upright staring straight ahead. Like a magnet he pulled me closer until his unreal deadness pulsed in my ears. Unconsciously I dropped my burp gun and mimicked his pose, my hands stuck in my armpits as his were stuck in the armpits of his field jacket. His lank hair was frozen in a Brill Cream wave. An empty vodka bottle lay on the running board.

In a moment of witness before I dropped my gun and ran heedless back to the house, I realized I recognized him: one of the number of hired men my Dad Em gave work during haying season. More than once I had sat next to him among other war vets that last August. I remembered he had such clean hands—what Dad Em had called “city hands.”

Raymond 1.png

J. Tim Raymond has shared his poetry and prose in local literary readings. A painting and collage artist, his work has frequently been shown in local exhibitions and he is a member of the art collective on view at Queen City Gallery. Additionally, Raymond seeks out opportunities to play harmonica in jam sessions with local musicians. His art and book reviews have appeared in Artvoice and The Public. He also performs in and painted sets for productions with Subversive Theatre Collective where he also serves on the board. Most recently, he is working on One Flew Over theCuckoo’s Nest.

Benjamin DeVos

Get Well Soon, Tim


When I was a child, I would often see things called ‘floaters,’ which were really microscopic organisms living on the surface of my retinas. I consistently saw them when I was anxious, or focused my eyes in a particular manner while staring out the window. I thought that I’ddeveloped the vision necessary to see astronauts in outer space, and became worried whenever they drifted too close to the sun.

The floaters appeared whenever I was in school due to my anxiety conflicting with feelings of existential boredom, which coincided with extreme loneliness, which coincided with my desire to be left alone. I was shy, and social interactions caused these contradictory emotions on a daily basis. For example, I wanted to cry and laugh at the same time when Scott McDonald told me that he did not want to sleep over my house on Saturday, because, according to Scott McDonald, anything was better than the idea of sleeping over my house. Eventually, these emotional disagreements became a familiar paradox and a reminder that life was not fair or congruent.

I figured this out one day after watching a series of floaters spin across the sky. My teacher had begun to notice what a distraction the window was and moved me to the front of the class so that I would pay closer attention. The student sitting next to me was named Jonathan, a child who also had varying dispositions that ranged from rabidly social to completely awkward. I remember the shock while staring at the teacher in a zoned-out state of melancholy, when Jonathan, in one swift motion, stabbed me in my forearm with his ballpoint pen.

The attack was completely unprovoked, and sort of felt like a dream. Then the excruciating pain registered. As a result, I open-hand slapped Jonathan in the face and scream-cried in front of the entire class. It felt awful, but this unfortunate turn of events was actually a tremendous relief. Pain consumed my brain so that it could not produce any negative or anxiety-inducing thoughts. I didn’t see any floaters for the rest of the day, and Christine, the school nurse who I had developed a crush, even signed my arm ‘Get well soon Tim,’ right above the stab mark.

I didn’t care that she wrote ‘Tim’ instead of ‘Ben.’ I didn’t wash my arm for a month, and every time I felt anxiety creeping up, I would look at Christine’s signature, and remember what it felt like to be endeared. I would think about how humans are like lost dust motes floating across an eyelid, caught in a beam of light, hoping to be seen, and being seen when hope vanishes. None of it made sense; it’s just the way that things were.

A Blanket Made of Moving Colors


Growing up, I was often mentally abused by my cousin Levi, who was much bigger and smarter than me. Levi wanted to be a therapist when he was older and made me take personality tests to reveal my psychological makeup. He always diagnosed me as intellectually disabled, and would announce to our entire family that my brain was dead. When this happened, it would make me feel a jolt of anxiety.

Anxiety to me felt similar to looking out of the corner of my eye when something I expected to see was not there. In those instances, I would imagine floating out of my body to watch what was happening below without a care. I felt like a ghost, holding my breath as I shivered, waiting for the moment to pass. It was unbeknownst to me at the time, but this tactic of escape would eventually cause a seizure.

It happened after I mistook the expression “Let’s have a round of applause” for, “Let’s have a round of a pause,” and stood motionless while everyone around me clapped his and her hands furiously for Levi, who was recently accepted into the gifted program at school. As a child, this was very confusing to me. I felt sorry for Levi because the kids in the gifted program had much more homework.

I felt anxious, mostly due to my perplexity, and imagined floating out of my body. Then suddenly, before anyone knew what had happened, I was struck by a minor epileptic attack. It felt like a blanket of moving colors washing over me, warming my head. What I’d actually experienced was called auras, which were perceptual disturbances that could lead to bigger seizures, and were a serious warning sign.

After this diagnosis, my family treated me like royalty, but I could have cared less. I knew that they were only acting kind toward me because I was sick. So instead of embracing their compassion, I anxiously tried to relive my seizure: the odd smell, the taste of pennies, weightlessly floating up then down, up then down. I always remembered that first fit because it was the only time that Levi was ever jealous of me. That alone made it one of the best moments of my life.

The Discrepancy Between Life and Death


I tried to be a photographer after receiving a point and shoot camera for my birthday. First, I sought to take pictures of strangers, but most people had problems with a random child photographing them. So I tried to take snapshots of wildlife instead but found that it took far too long for me to set up the camera, and often the animals would scamper away, causing my photos to come out blurry and distorted.

Eventually, I decided to take pictures of nature because nature was beautiful and didn’t move. One day while walking through the woods, looking for something that might be worth capturing, I came upon a dead buck. A bear trap had the deer by its leg, and no one had found it yet. I took pictures of its open eyes staring up at the lens as if it were still alive. Then I lifted it by the antlers and rested its body against a tree in a pose that looked totally unnatural, but made for a good picture.

After that it seemed wherever I went, death followed. Walking down the road on my way home from school, I saw a squirrel get caught in the headlight of a truck going sixty miles per hour before being partially smashed by a pair of oversized tires. I took a few snapshots of the squirrel, trying to lift the curves of its mouth with a twig so that it looked like it was smiling. The next day I was in the park, taking pictures of a dandelion when a dog approached me and began to hump my leg. I stared for a while, watching and wondering what the dog was trying to do before it suddenly just fell off, dead.

At first, I thought that maybe the dog was just playing, but when its mouth started frothing, and the owner ran over yelling, “What the hell did you do,” I knew it was dead for real. I took out my camera and began taking pictures of the dog. I tried to wipe its mouth with my sleeve and got a few good pictures that made it look semi-alive. The owner was beside himself. He accused me of casual cruelty, and of trying to play God.

Soon the entire neighborhood had been warned and told to keep their pets at a safe distance from me. The animal care & control unit was sent out to investigate whether or not I had been torturing my own dog, Yoda, but they could not prove that any abuse occurred. I felt embarrassed and ashamed.

The word ‘snapshot’ was originally a hunting term, but my intention was never to kill. All I wanted was to take striking pictures. Losing the community’s trust made me feel as if I too were dead, or as if my relationship with the outside world had died. I tried to dissect the universe to find something on the inside that mattered or made life worth living. After coming up empty, I committed to never giving up, no matter how hard or lonely life got. I would keep trying to find something that mattered, even if it took the rest of my life to do so.

Benjamin DeVos is the author of 'Madness Has a Moment and Then Vanishes Before Returning Again', a book of short stories forthcoming with Dostoyevsky Wannabe. His work is published or forthcoming in Word Riot, decomP, and Alien Mouth, among other places.