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11/22/2025 0 Comments Town Hall by Mario Senzale The town hall had donuts. Two dozen. Glazed, chocolate, Boston cream. Mayor Bain stood at the podium with architectural renderings behind him. Clean lines. Modern facade. Job projections in sans-serif. No microphone.
"This facility represents significant economic opportunity," he said. "Hundreds of union jobs. Property tax revenue that could fully fund road repairs for the next decade." Mrs. Brickley raised her hand. "What about the park? My grandchildren play there." "The rezoning is necessary," the developer said. Suit. "We need the space for loading. But we're proposing a memorial garden on the east side with native plantings." "What kind of facility will it be, exactly?" Mr. Walsh asked. "At the moment, there’s no confirmed industry that will use it. We handle design and construction. It will be a 572,000 square foot secure building designed to convert organic matter into adhesives, fertilizers, cosmetic ingredients. Things of everyday use. Very clean. Closed-loop cooling. We will work with the electric company to upgrade the power grid. We've developed a strategy that shows no negative impact on existing customer rates.” Someone from the back yelled, “And the smell?” "Modern filtration systems," the developer said. "You won't notice a thing. A similar facility in Ohio has been operational for three years. Zero complaints." "What about traffic?" Mrs. Hutchinson asked. "Deliveries will be at night," Mayor Bain said. "Between midnight and five AM. Very few peak-hour trips. Won't interfere with school buses or commuters." Mr. Walsh stood up. "I'm just saying, we need to think about property values. An industrial facility right off Main Street -" "Or we raise property taxes, Mr. Walsh," Mayor Bain interrupted. "Those are the options. The state grant for road repair fell through. We've got three bridges rated structurally deficient. The water main on Oakwood is from 1952. Look, these people want to work with us. They want to grow their company here. If we’re not welcoming, is that the message we want to send to big business?" Mrs. Brickley looked at the floor. "Highland Estates has negotiated an exemption from the service requirements," the developer added. "Given their existing contributions." "What does that mean?" someone in the back asked. "Just zoning things," Mayor Bain said quickly. " Standard stuff. Some districts participate in supply logistics, others don't." The renderings showed loading bays. Conveyor systems. A smokestack designed to minimize visual impact. The numbers made sense. Hundreds of union jobs. Eight million in tax revenue over ten years. The roads were shot. The bridges, worse. "I move to approve," Mr. Walsh said. "Second," said Mrs. Hutchinson. The vote passed 7-3. I got hired in April. Maintenance, third shift. The pay is decent - better than the warehouse, better than anything else around here. The factory got tax exemptions. Roads are still busted. But they did create jobs for twenty of us. We’re a right-to-work state, so there are no unions. I don’t even know why they said that. Most nights it's just me and Dave, the security guard. The machinery is German, highly automated. My job is keeping it running. Sometimes things jam. Jewelry. Pacemakers. Dental work. I use the eight-foot hook. You don't reach in. You don’t turn it off. That's rule one. Rule two: always check for pulse before the conveyor. Nobody wants a lawsuit. Mario Senzale is a South American writer and mathematician currently living in Indianapolis, Indiana. Check out his work at mariosenzale.neocities.org, or follow him on BlueSky at @mariosenzale.bsky.social.
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11/20/2025 0 Comments The God Sham by Tilden Culver In the rust-drunk cesspit of West Virginia, there sits a thousand acre stretch of burn scars. Trees do not grow there, and the ground is cluttered with such ruin that animals will not run across it. Occasionally, you may find a brick unmarred enough to still bear its skin; painted eyes, a spattering of letters that had once been cohesive. The sleepy city of Morllane, they used to call it.
It wasn’t much to look at, even before the burning. Even when all those bricks were still grouted in place, their buildings were arthritic shells of dead industry, creaking in winds too strong or when doors slammed too harshly. Any homes not in a trailer park were little more than boxes, strong enough to withstand the Appalachian rain while still taking dents from kids’ misthrown baseballs (and being there wasn’t much else to do, there were quite a few of those). Among these rows of battered shacks and half-homes was one indistinguishable from the rest—unremarkable, another amalgam of metal siding and shutters drawn tight. Just as unremarkable was the man who lived there. His name was Lester Lemmings. Nobody liked Lester Lemmings. No, that’s not right—nobody really knew Lester at all. It was Lester himself that found his existence so loathsome. It was Lester that hid behind a phone for money because he could not stomach being seen. He hated the acne that scarred his face and the height his cheekbones sat at. He hated how his eyes scrunched together, and how their icy blues gave his pupils the look of poorly drawn cartoons. He hated his voice; it sounded like screeching, the dying noise a goose makes when caught by the throat. He was doing the world a favor, staying quiet. And so when he turned into a cocoon, nobody cared. He strung himself from a rafter in his house. A fleshy sack held up by webs of tendon, hanging between darkness and squalor while the world outside churned on. And he stayed there for weeks. His house was just another spot of disinterest; any form of neglect on his part blended right in with the town’s decay. It was only found by happenstance, by the miscreant Merrick Cowl. Merrick—nobody'd ever known what to do with Merrick. He was the middle child of five, not particularly good at sports or in studies; most of his seventeen years were spent dreadfully invisible. This wasn’t all that uncommon for the people of Morllane, their city itself an afterthought; kids knew from the time they were twelve they’d never amount to much, considered “lucky” if they came to be line cooks like their parents. But Merrick was different. Merrick loved himself. Merrick was destined for more. And he wanted desperately for someone to notice. So naturally, he’d picked up vandalism. Stores, diners, school windows—nothing was sacred to Merrick. He was running from the cops that particular night, having sprayed lewd portraits on each wall of the police station. He’d taken to weaving through neighborhoods, between houses and whatever detritus he could fit under. Lester’s house was just one of the many he tried that night, and it was also the last—it turned out he’d forgotten to lock his door before undergoing metamorphosis. Classic Lester. Merrick only realized the cocoon was there at all when he backed up against it. He’d been so overwhelmed by the clutter that its odor—sweat and grime—wasn’t enough to faze him; feeling it pulse, though—that did the job. The longer he held his hand up to its spider-webbing veins the more he grew assured of his finding: this was the fetus of God. His salvation. *** Merrick traded his spray paint for posters. Find salvation, they read. Revel in the coming of God. He and his friends put them up all over town, all over their high school and the police station he’d just vandalized. Their first congregation was in Lester’s front yard (it was hardly a yard at all, just sparse grass and a sidewalk), with Merrick dressed in his best impression of a bishop. He’d thrown on some bedsheets, tied a loose napkin around his neck, and took to preaching from the porch steps. A modest few had turned up, mostly those disenfranchised kids who’d sit with him in the back of class—that was, of course, before he got suspended for defacing a bus. “We have been blessed,” he began, “by a seed. The inklings of change have taken root in this shitwipe of a city, and it is us who’ve been tasked with its watering. This is the fetus of God. It is among us. It is gestating.” The congregation took turns feeling it. One girl ran her hand along its veins and remarked how the pulse felt anxious. Another, perhaps unnerved by its resemblance to her own flesh, asked what exactly they were supposed to do. This started a murmur through the five or six gathered there, the bulk of them delinquents who’d never had much taste for conformity. Merrick thought about this for a moment; he didn’t have an answer. He hadn’t actually thought about that, about what it was they were “supposed” to do, or why they were supposed to do it. Eventually, he came back with a simple proclamation. “We’ll spread the word. Tell everyone we know. We’ll have the whole town—no, whole state, whole world clamoring here like some pilgrimage. That will—that’ll make it happy. I’m sure.” So that’s what they did. The posters multiplied, crawling between passerby as hushed whispers and punctuating their gossip with the ever-subtle “so, have you heard about that cocoon?” One rather well-networked kid (well-networked, at least, in that their father did the news) got themselves a commercial on local airways, tuning into retirees’ morning slumps and the late night channel hopping of stoners. By the time their next congregation rolled around, Lester’s yard was quintupled in occupancy, to the point some were left straining their necks from the street. Merrick had never spoken in front of so many eyes—before now, he’d only dreamed of it. “Good people,” he began, “it is an honor to have you here today. I am sure our god is just as pleased to see so many newcomers. “What does it want?” a watcher asked. “It wants what any god wants. “World peace? Like, ending pain and stuff?” Someone else laughed. “Might as well ask for ascension while you’re at it. Gods are for accountability, not action.” Someone else spoke up and told that guy he was going to Hell. Merrick raised his hands for silence before more could join in, and a weightless sense bubbled up inside him when they listened. “It wants to spread. A few dozen faithfuls aren’t good enough. It needs an army. A kingdom of its own.” He looked around at the crowd and breathed in their attention. “And an army needs a leader. A kingdom needs a king. Unless any of you have someone in mind,” he said, “I would happily be that.” To Merrick’s ears, there were no objections. And so over the coming weeks, he ordered Lester’s house to be converted to a chapel, its walls carved and furniture rearranged, so that the cocoon may be visible from anywhere. When all was done, Merrick had a seat up front, blessing those who came to pray to the flesh-thing while staying far enough to save his nose the suffering. Some would ask it for guidance, some for clarity, some for favors not even delusion could grant. Merrick tried talking to it sometimes, too, when the chapel was empty and he was sure no one would see. He never did hear it answer—it shuttered when he touched it, retracting as if his hands alone had the static to jolt it awake. When the silence grew frustrating, he made up his own answers: “You are my vector,” he imagined it saying. “My will and yours are inseparable, and you shall see it carried out.” He called himself Father of the Pupites. The Pupites themselves devoured the city, Morllane turned Mecca of the Western world, and as their ideology crossed county lines, more people flocked right back across to see the god cocoon themselves. Lester’s house (they were calling it the Temple now) could not contain them all. Merrick had his throne moved up to the roof, a spot that gave him viewing rights to his whole dominion—and extended that dominion to everything in view. He did not redirect people when they’d look up and cheer for him instead of the cocoon; rather, he took donations by the drove, buying robes and leathers to drape himself in. A prophet should look good, he figured, and imagined the cocoon would agree. “I think we should have more events,” he divulged to it one evening. “Like a potluck or something. Something to build community. I like looking around and seeing my impact, you know? All the lives I’ve touched. Makes me feel…” he took pause, rummaging for the right word. He did find it--important—but opted for one less egotistical. “It makes me feel good.” “And you should feel good. You are good. You’re great. Nobody can do what you do.” This is what he imagined the cocoon to say. Then one night, as he divulged dreams of a reformed world, he heard it talk back. It was a whisper, just barely distinguishable from the voice in his head. His heart leapt. He insisted it repeat itself, and it did: “Am I…beautiful…yet?” Merrick lost his words. It seemed the cocoon did too, going silent after its momentary lapse. He stood. In his eyes burned contempt, funnelled down at the fleshy mass like it had slighted him personally. He held that glare for some time, and in that time he said nothing; his brow alone spoke for him, bunched up with such animosity that the cocoon, blind as it was, blushed. Merrick proposed they move their headquarters elsewhere. Somewhere larger, he argued, with space enough for new converts and (though he didn’t emphasize it quite as much) a room to call his personal sanctuary. To his followers, though, there was the glaring matter of the cocoon; they could not move it, and this caused quite the divide among them. What was a temple, they asked, without the object of its devotion? Merrick tried his best to placate them; “It remains in our hearts, even if we are physically distant. As long as we spread the word, our purpose is fulfilled. The core of Pupism is inside us.” When that didn’t work, he tried something more tangible. “It needs space to hatch. Some privacy. It will come to us when it’s ready.” Unfortunately for Merrick, that was the day it began twitching. Someone noticed while praying, swinging to and fro from its tendon like a quickened womb. Word spread quickly through the encampment that their god was on its way. Within the hour, the Temple was swarmed with Pupites, crushing and climbing over each other to catch a glimpse for themselves. Merrick tried calling for silence atop his perch, but was lost to the chaos of it all. Not even the added gruffness of frustration reached them. He mandated that any self-respecting Pupite would make a final tithe before the hatching—just to make sure they’d earned their spot on God’s good side, of course. He sat himself in the main parlor and welcomed them in by the droves. Merrick was a kind Father. Should anyone feel anxious about the coming of God, he was there to listen—provided they could pay. “Ten bucks for salvation,” the sign out front read. These consultations were largely unremarkable. Offering reassurance, telling them their god had a plan and to have faith in whatever it was. It became almost a script for Merrick, recycling those same few generic phrases until each asker went away. There was one child, though, who came and dropped nine dollars in his fee jar. He rattled off a question before Merrick could count his fare. “Do you believe God is coming?” Merrick tipped his head with a puzzled sort of gaze. “That’s an awfully odd question. Do you not believe he’s coming?” “Oh, I do. I know he is,” he said. “I’ve talked to him myself. But I’ve never seen you down there, talking to him. If I were a god, and you were my priest, I wouldn’t be very happy.” “It’s a good thing you’re not a god, then, isn’t it?” He had finally sorted through the change. “You’re a buck short, kid. Cough it up.” The boy stuffed his hands into his pockets and Merrick waited for a dollar. But his arms stayed glued. “I don’t like you very much, mister,” he said. “I think you’re a fraud. And I think, once he hatches, God’ll feel the same way.” “A fraud?” He stopped himself short of lunging. “I am the realest thing you have. How do you know your god down there isn’t a fraud? You’ve never seen what’s inside. Maybe all this time you’ve been worshipping some loser kid who lost himself in the attention.” Merrick watched him leave. He sunk back in his chair as he did, face growing from mild annoyance to something vaguely of concern. *** He took a matchbook with him that night. People had been orbiting the cocoon all day in lieu of its hatching, and now, with the sun sinking lower by the second, they’d set up camp. Merrick threw up a tent of his own and waited, sheets just thin enough to see their outlines stagger into sleep. He stepped out when the encampment was still; the cocoon the only witness that concerned him, he set fire to its flesh. It shone bright as a sun of its own. The flames engulfed it in a matter of seconds as if spurred by the fat underneath. Those who’d fallen asleep around it awoke to the smell of burning skin. Merrick said nothing to their screams; he just stood and watched the fire climb. “Is this it? Is it hatching?” he heard a little boy ask—the same little boy, incidentally, that had brought the match into his hand. Merrick looked at him with pity and a thread of amusement stitched in. “I would rather say it’s ascending,” he said. “Off to some place better than this.” People were spilling out of the Temple now, crowd growing both in size and understanding of its helplessness. Merrick was, of course, emboldened by this. “Perhaps we didn’t pray hard enough. Scared it off with our lack of faith. We don’t deserve something so perfect. So profound.” It took five minutes for it to burn to a crisp. Left behind was a pile of char, like the flaky black hull sloughed off by firewood at the end of its life. The people behind Merrick went quiet, heads down in mourning or shock or something in between, while Merrick used their silence to keep his own voice loud. “Now,” he started, “that’s not to say our job is done. We have found community here, a culmination of great minds joined by a commitment to truth. We must persist. With more members, more faith, and just a bit more money, we can win God back.” A murmur started. Merrick squared his chest and soaked it in like any self-respecting leader, preparing to pull a longer speech from his ass. But the murmuring turned to “Look!” and fingers from the crowd craned towards the ash. It was breathing. It was squirming, too. An arm shot up, and out crawled a man. He was nothing special to look at. He had a jagged precipice for cheekbones, flecked with acne and oilspots that, in the night, looked like freckled constellations. His body was wiry, fragile, although peeking through his shirt were the makings of a beer gut. He was crooked in his posture, too, as if the budding weight was too much for his back to carry. He eyed the gathering around him—a stare made glassy by the darting blues inside. He looked ready to run at the first sign of conflict—conflict, in this case, being questions. And that soon came with someone asking if he was God. “I’m Lester,” he said. “Lester Lemmings. I live here.” A woman approached him, tracing his skin against hers as if some divine spark would give away his breeding. Judging from her face, it was not what she’d hoped. “You’re sweating,” she said. “I didn’t imagine a god could sweat.” Merrick was the only one not staring. All this attention seemed ready to break the poor man, feet staggering back as far as they could without tripping over each other. “Well,” he said, sweating now tenfold, “that may be because I’m not a god.” More murmuring. Merrick stuck his hands out to gather their eyes back on him, shouting with tempered lungs. “People, people. Do not be taken for a ride. This man didn’t come from the cocoon; he was beneath it when the ash fell.” He gazed back at the cowering Lester. “There is nothing godlike about him.” “What would you like us to do, sir?” someone asked. Merrick beamed. “Go back to sleep,” he said. “We have mass in the morning.” But they made no effort to climb back in their tents. “Not you,” one said. “We were asking God.” Lester’s eyes grew fat. Merrick almost choked on the spit in his throat, cheeks sucked in like he’d tasted something sour. “God?” he echoed. “God? You’ve known him no more than five minutes, and you’re already calling him God? You people would worship roadkill if it had a third eye!” He was red at this point, words frothing from his mouth. “Look at him; shaking, a damn nervous wreck—that is not a man equipped to lead. He is hardly less fool than any of you. I should be your god! And I might as well be: you grovel at my feet. You’d throw me your firstborn if I asked for it. Yet here you are, distracting yourself with novelties when you should be praising me for all I’ve done!” He stopped yelling long enough to bend over, cupping spare ash in his hands. He poured it over himself, coating his blonde hair black and streaking char down his robes. He laughed with his arms spread. “Call me rightfully as I am,” he said. “God of gods. Father of a new world!” No one called him either. Lester’s Craven—they spraypainted all the signs in town to read its new name. Merrick could no longer watch from atop the Temple, it having been torn down and fashioned back into Lester’s home, now far less modest than it’d once been. Instead, he watched from the streets, where his old graffiti was vandalized into multicolored amalgamations of Lester’s face. His grizzled brow—there was not a wall it left untouched, and now, to Merrick, it felt like those painted stares were watching no matter what he did or where he went. They were the only things that looked at him anymore; those who’d once been his followers were drowning Lester in praise and in gifts. Praise and gifts that were his. He simply couldn’t bear it. Dressed in all the luxury he’d salvaged, matchbook in hand, he took to the streets. Papers, fabrics, gasoline spills—everything flammable turned to blazes in his wake. Metal roofs melted, windows burst from the heat. People poured from their houses with water pots and foam, but their attempts to sate it came too late. Lester’s Craven was consumed, as was Morllane in its belly. When rain downed the flames days later, all that remained were brick crumbs bathed in char and paint chips. It was anybody’s guess what came of Lester. It was likely he burned up in the fire, right along with the people feeding him grapes. His body was never found, though, nor the unmistakable sharpness of his skull. For those few still clinging onto hope, it wouldn’t be entirely unreasonable to think he escaped; perhaps he found a new hovel to hide in, a new telemarketing script to read, and lived out the rest of his days behind blackout curtains. Perhaps, stowed away in that cell of his own making, those scraps of burnt graffiti were the last parts of him to ever see the sun. And perhaps, for Lester, that was all he wanted. All a god could ever want: to be something beautiful, at last. Tilden Culver is an emerging writer from Richmond, Virginia. His work focuses primarily on issues of queerness, spirituality, and human nature---often the darker side, and often deeply absurd---but will write about anything if it speaks to his imagination.  As I walked by a department store, I saw a little kid on the sidewalk making faces
at the people shopping inside. As I passed, I looked in the window, and to my surprise, there were easily thirty or forty kids in there, all holding a parent’s hand, all making faces back at the kid on the sidewalk. Then I saw some parents rushing their kids across the street into the store, to the window, so their kids could try making faces at the sidewalk kid. Sticking tongues out, pushing up noses, using fingers to distort eyes, the whole thing. Within a few seconds, the entire street was pushing and shoving and funneling into the store to get a spot in the window and make their own funny faces at the kid outside. Even parents. As I neared the bar, the sun began to set, but it was warm out. I went in and sat down. “Why do the dead seem to have a forever larger claim to life than we do?” I said. “Who’s we?” said the bartender. Derek Thomas Dew (he/she/they) is a neurodivergent, non-binary poet currently living and teaching in New York City. Derek’s debut poetry collection “Riddle Field” received the 2019 Test Site Poetry Prize from the Black Mountain Institute/University of Nevada. Derek’s poems have appeared in a number of anthologies, and have been published widely, including Interim, ONE ART, Allium, The Maynard, Azarão Lit Journal, Two Hawks Quarterly, Ocean State Review, and Overgrowth Press. 11/9/2025 1 Comment Weather Balloon by Nicole Lynn The butane fumes make me want to move to Kansas. High and bored, we stream YouTube reaction videos of paranormal experts. They talk-talk-talk about why the lights in the sky are UFOs, not lens flare. To be an expert, we need a podcast, a job as a primatologist, or a book deal. We have a trailer, too many beer cans scattered on the side tables, and a dented sedan, but you were pulled up into a spaceship. Aliens stabbed an incision behind your ear that electrocutes your thoughts. It buzzes in strange rhythms, like an injured katydid. You seize when the spaceship is close. All the electronics do.
“I felt time leave my body,” you say. “I should be an expert.” I should be an expert for putting up with you. I guide you home when you sleepwalk into open space, hands up in worship. Snap your pills to make them last. Jam the wallet in your mouth so you don’t crack your teeth screaming. I’m keeping you on Earth, and I buckle under that gravity. That’s why I’m high and you’re sober. It’s my turn to touch the sky. Again, I hold the canister to my nose. It’s a wet burn. “It’s bullshit,” I agree. “You’re the only conspiracy I believe in.” You find a documentary breaking down the last tape of a hobbyist storm chaser. They found his camera thirty miles away from his body. The high kills my ego. I become one with everything on the screen. Fizzle into the pixels. Westward is an ugly direction. Flat land seems boring until the butane fumes change it. The sky on TV is huge, and nothing cages the horizon but the pulsing red hearts of cellphone towers. The storm presses from one horizon to the next. Red lights against black vapor. Blown transformers. Sparks, like Fourth of July. The downdraft forms and takes houses away from people with more than us. I’m giddy. Laughing. Their houses fall to make way for my trailer. I could live out there if storms are this ferocious: frayed timber and wind-caught cars. Teddy bears and photo albums caught under the rubble. All we lose is piles of mildewed laundry and empty cans. Easier to rebuild our lives. “We could move there,” I say. “It’s not like we would lose much in a storm. Let’s leave. Tomorrow! Make a new life.” “Kansas is too flat. The Greys would find me.” “They always find you,” I say. My tone is defeated. There’s no point in arguing. I’m high like a weather balloon. You shiver. Are you afraid or cold? I wrap my arms around your body for warmth, even though you don’t ask for it. You never do ask for help, do you? Maybe I’m the cold one who needs your warmth. Your skin tastes like salt and smells like sweat and old shirts, and I’ve grown to love it. I love you. You’re the reason I get to feel this way—if it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be floating. Or powerful. I would be alone. Head on your shoulder, I stare at your puncture scar. If I glare hard enough, it might break the chip underneath your skin, freeing us both. I can hear the static coming off it. It smells like rubbing alcohol, or is it the butane huff still stinging my nose? Ones and zeroes stream through my skull, and they say Kansas is our destiny. On screen, the storm eats the world. I confuse lightning for tractor beams. I need an expert, a meteorologist, to tell me thunderheads are cloaking devices made of water condensation, to hide flying saucers in plain view. I need to tear this trailer off its cinderblocks. Outside, a tethered dog barks at the sky or the wind. It’s sick of living in this dump. Trust me, I’m an expert at trading one dump for another. The floodlights flicker. I cut the power. Nicole Lynn writes strange fiction from Maine and has been published by Nonbinary Review, Flash Fiction Online, and Orca, a Literary Journal. She lives with her pet rats and two dogs, who are too frequently mistaken for wolves. Deer gravitate to her; invasive fish fear her. |
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