Our parade of Short Story Competition finalists continues with a high intensity gem from Jennifer Kitses. Between this and that book you can't escape, Brooklyn just might be back.

-ROL

IT'S HARD TO BE LAST

They’d just stepped into the street when a sound exploded into life, cancelling out everything else around them. It was a scooter, its engine screaming. Caroline looked to the left, her heart rising into her throat, cutting off her breath. She was saturated with fear, a paralyzing fear that locked her legs in place.

At the last possible moment, she leaped out of the way, back onto the sidewalk. The danger was so close that exhaling would have put her right in its path.

Instead, the scooter struck Danica.

The sounds that followed were terrifying: the skidding of tires against pavement, the twisting and crumpling of metal, the shrieks of her coworkers.

Just minutes ago, they’d been celebrating. They were the marketing team of a healthcare startup that had recently received $165 million in investor funding, and the founders had taken them out to dinner at an upscale pizzeria in Brooklyn. The restaurant was the kind of trendy, raucous place that Caroline felt she’d somehow aged out of, though she was only thirty-four, the same age as Danica. Yet it was Danica, in her ivory and taupe business separates, who seemed to belong there—in fact, everyone on the team seemed to belong there, which left Caroline wondering why she didn’t. She chose her clothes carefully and tried her best with her hair. Was it just that she was a little wider, more unwieldy? At the table, she’d wound up next to one of the founders, who clearly wished he’d been seated next to one of her younger coworkers, like Tillie or Marlon, whose likely trajectories seemed so much more promising than hers.

After all the pizza and wine and beer, they’d funneled out of the restaurant and onto a semi-industrial Brooklyn avenue. Most of the others were gathered in a clump five or six paces away. Danica had separated herself from the group and was waiting for the Uber that would take her home to her husband and young daughter. That was when Caroline went over to her, moving fast to catch her before anyone else did. She never got a chance to talk to Danica anymore—not alone, at least. Back when they’d both started at the company, they were the type of office friends who always took lunch together and chatted all day long. Just a year ago, Caroline could still make Danica laugh until she cried with her impressions of the top managers. It was hard to believe how much fun they’d had and how close they’d been, considering how they’d diverged: Danica rising to team leader while Caroline remained exactly where she’d started, as if time had flowed around her, eroding her potential rather than carrying her forward.

But now Danica was facedown on the asphalt, her blood seeping across its oily, glass-strewn surface. Caroline stared at her until she couldn’t bear to look any longer. Forty feet away, on its side, lay the scooter that had plowed her down. The driver was sprawled on the ground beside it, yelling out in pain.

Then there were sirens, and EMTs were carrying off the driver on a stretcher. When they took away Danica, a cloth covered her entire body, even her face.

No one would confirm it; no one would say anything at all. But they all knew that she was dead.

An EMT came over to Caroline. In response to his questions, which she could only half-understand, a voice—it belonged to Patrick, next in line to Danica—said: “She isn’t hurt. She’s fine.”

Later, long after the EMTs had gone and everyone had talked to the police, they all stood together on the street, staring at the spot where it had happened. Everyone kept saying how awful it was, how they just couldn’t believe it.

Every few minutes, someone would look at Caroline. They kept doing it, all of them. Looking at her like they were thinking…something.

Caroline shifted on her feet. She couldn’t find a way to position her arms, her hands. Even the bones of her face felt uncomfortable.

Why were they all looking at her?

#

After the funeral, and the on- and off-site meetings with grief counselors and various other therapists and coaches, they were still looking at her. And Caroline knew why. At first, she’d caught only whispered phrases, conversations that stopped when she appeared. But she heard enough to fill in the rest.

Was there maybe, just maybe, a chance that she could have pulled Danica out of the way?

That was what they were saying. After all, she’d seen the scooter coming. She’d saved herself.

And then one day she was walking down the hall in the direction of Danica’s office, which Patrick now occupied—Patrick, with his streaky blond hair and wildly patterned shirts, had been named acting team leader—and overheard his conversation with Tillie.

“You can’t blame her,” Tillie was saying. “It’s not her fault she didn’t move faster. Not everyone is capable of reacting quickly.”

Caroline stopped a few feet outside his open door. A painful heat spread over her face. Even after all the whispers, it shocked her. They thought it was her fault. They thought she’d failed to save Danica.

Also, had Tillie just called her slow? Slow, and maybe fat? Tillie had delicate little bird bones and wore flowing clothes that emphasized her thinness. That little bitch. A thought for which Caroline immediately castigated herself. She didn’t like calling women bitches.

“You know what?” Patrick said to Tillie. “I don’t think we’re giving her enough credit.” He paused; Caroline held back the wave of nausea that was surging inside her. “She could have saved her. But I think she was jealous of Danica. And I think that on some subconscious level, she made the split-second decision not to. But who knows? I’m just speculating.”

Tillie actually gasped. “You’re saying she did it on purpose?”

“She might not even be aware of it. But yes. Yes.”

Caroline couldn’t breathe. Sweat trickled under her frizzing hair. She was sweating from shame, she realized, as if what they were saying was true.

“You’re terrible!” Tillie said, and laughed. “Honestly, that’s one of the worst things I’ve ever heard anyone say about anyone.”

“But you think I’m right,” Patrick said. He sounded pleased. “You do.”

Caroline felt something crumble inside her, even though she’d known how Tillie and Patrick and the others saw her.

It wasn’t all of them, and it wasn’t all the time. Still, they made it hard not to see herself in the same way.

She didn’t want to. But they made it so hard.

#

On the Sunday three weeks after the accident, the team visited Danica’s husband and daughter.

Danica’s husband, now her widower, was named Nathan, and he was pale and slight, and had light brown hair that was just starting to thin. It seemed that every relative he had, not just his parents but every great aunt and cousin, was squeezed into the two-and-a-half bedroom apartment in Murray Hill. Patrick had arranged the visit and passed along the message that the family didn’t need any food—people had already given so much—but Caroline was the only one who’d taken them at their word and shown up empty-handed. Everyone else brought either a casserole or flowers or a gift for Jane, Danica’s five-year-old daughter. At first it seemed that Tillie hadn’t brought anything, but at the apartment door, Nathan went up to Tillie, grasped her hands, and said, “I can’t thank you enough for that meal-delivery service.”

“It’s the least I could do,” Tillie said.

Caroline realized her mouth had fallen open, and she looked away, hoping no one had caught her staring. They hadn’t even wanted her to come, she was sure of that. Not that anyone had been brave enough to approach her directly and explain their reasons. Too bad, Caroline thought. She deserved to be there as much as anyone.

But it wasn’t long before she wished she’d stayed home. Sitting on Danica’s off-white yet spotless sofa, she wondered what had happened to the Crate and Barrel sofa that Danica had picked out years ago, with Caroline, on a lunchtime shopping trip. At the time, Caroline had been stunned by the idea that people their age were buying grownup furniture. But of course Danica was already married and had just gotten her first promotion.

As Caroline perched on the edge of the sofa, eating the pieces of fruit she’d selected from the buffet table—Patrick had loaded his plate with sandwiches and cookies, and how was Tillie managing to spear bites of pasta salad while also holding a glass of sparking water?—Nathan sat down beside Caroline, bumping her arm in a way that caused the grapes to roll off her plate and fall to the floor. She scooped up the grapes, wrapped them in a napkin, and was searching for a place to put them when Nathan said, his voice trembling, “You were next to her? Right? When she got….”

“Yes,” she said. “I was.”

Caroline saw that the people standing closest to them were listening. She wished Patrick and Tillie were farther away.

“I can’t stop wondering what happened in those seconds right before,” Nathan said. “Do you remember what she was doing?”

Caroline spoke as softly as she could. “She wasn’t really doing anything. We were both standing in the street, right next to the curb. She’d just checked her phone.”

A look of horror came to Nathan’s face. “Did my text distract her?” His voice rose with panic. “Was she looking at it, when it… when the scooter…?”

Had Danica been looking at her phone? For the tiniest possible moment, Caroline let herself hope that here, at last, was her exoneration. The missing piece of information that would prove that Danica’s death wasn’t her fault. Maybe Danica had been watching the progress of her car on Uber! But Caroline wasn’t going to say anything that would make it seem like Danica herself was to blame.

“No,” she said. “I mean, I didn’t hear a text.” Even if she’d heard a ping or buzz, she wouldn’t have told Nathan. She would have said the exact same thing.

He seemed relieved, but that only went so far. “But where was she looking? Was she looking at you?”

The great aunts had closed in protectively behind Nathan. Had they heard his question? If so, they wanted to hear her answer. “No,” Caroline said. “I was just about to talk to her. She was looking straight ahead, I think.”

“What were you going to talk to her about?”

Caroline was too embarrassed to tell the truth: she’d been about to ask Danica why they never talked anymore. She hadn’t even gotten the words out, because she’d been too worried that her coworkers would overhear her—or, worse, that Danica would brush her off, politely indicating that she’d rather not get into a personal conversation.

“I’m really sorry,” she said. “I can’t remember.”

For a long moment, Nathan looked at her. And it seemed like he could really see her. Caroline thought he was about to acknowledge that she, too, had been traumatized by the accident. She was mortified when he glanced at his daughter, who was bracketed between aunts at the end of the sofa, and said, “Jane is regressing. She’s wetting her bed.”

Caroline looked at the little girl, whose stringy white-blonde hair was pasted to her face with tears. “I’m so sorry to hear that.”

He got up, leaving her alone on the couch, alone to battle her own inner questions, which assaulted her for the remainder of the visit. Why was she the one who’d been spared? If either she or Danica had to get hit by the scooter, why had it been Danica, the one with the loving husband? The one who had this sweet little daughter, who so desperately needed her?

Caroline studied the faces around her. Was anyone else wondering the same things? Of course not. She was being crazy! But near the end of the visit, she saw Patrick standing in a tight circle with Tillie and Marlon. He lowered his head to say something, and they all looked over at her. When they saw her staring back at them, their eyes widened, and they quickly turned away.

But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part happened when they were all at the door, once again expressing their condolences to Nathan, promising to help out in any way they could. “Maybe I could come over and babysit Jane sometime,” Tillie said. “When she’s ready.”

They all looked over at Jane. She was across the room, her body pressed against an aunt, and she was staring at them. At Caroline specifically, it seemed. Out of nowhere, she started to cry. She cried inconsolably, continuing to stare at Caroline through her tears. Why was this happening? Had the girl heard some comment about her?

Caroline saw the looks on her coworkers’ faces, their meaningful, knowing glances. She herself was left with nowhere to look as the girl cried and cried.

#

They were in the conference room, giving their weekly updates, a meeting that Patrick was leading. Caroline had taken a middle seat, a generally safe spot that would keep her from having to speak too close to the beginning or the end. But Patrick had called on Tillie first and then gone counterclockwise, which meant that he got to Caroline last.

She was only about two minutes into her proposal for how they could improve their client outreach when she realized that several of the youngest team members were using this as an opportunity to study her. To scrutinize her. Particularly this one girl, Beth, who was right out of college. She was staring at Caroline with undisguised fascination.

Caroline stopped speaking. She stared back at Beth, who immediately looked down at the table, her face flushed.

The energy of the room changed. An excitement lit up the faces of nearly everyone around her, while Beth’s eyes filled with tears. Caroline kept staring at her, daring her to look back.

Patrick seemed to be enjoying this more than anyone, Caroline noticed. His eyes were actually twinkling; one corner of his mouth curved up into a smile. He was expecting her to have a meltdown.

It was the bald anticipation on his face that made her decide to resume her presentation as if she’d never left off. As if everyone—everyone except Beth, whose eyes were still fixed on the table—wasn’t either cringing or watching her with childlike glee.

When she finished, there was a long silence. Then everyone straightened in their seats and collected their papers and phones. Caroline was struck—too late; everyone was streaming toward the door—by the realization that no one had offered any opinions or feedback about her ideas. Normally at least two or three people responded to each presentation. Patrick had already gotten up from his seat, as eager to escape as everyone else.

And she knew why: they were running off to talk about her. They would gather in the breakroom, huddle in their shared offices. Some of them were whispering to each other as they filed out the door, as if she weren’t standing right there.

She wasn’t the only one who’d observed this. Tillie had hung back a half-step. With a cheerful shrug, Tillie turned to her and said, “It’s hard to be last.” As Caroline stared at her, speechless, Tillie smiled in a way that balanced the line between genuinely sympathetic and pityingly amused—balanced it so perfectly that Caroline knew it would haunt her for months, years.

Tillie then strode out the door to join the others, leaving her words hanging after her in the stagnant air.

#

Caroline was almost back at her cubicle when she veered down the hall and headed to Danica’s—she was not yet ready to think of it as Patrick’s—office, knocked once on the partly open door, and went in.

Patrick looked up from his screen. “I thought I’d closed that.”

It was awful to see him in Danica’s office, surrounded by what remained of her things: an economy-sized bottle of hand sanitizer, a water bottle on an otherwise bare bookshelf, a candy dish that Danica had filled with gray pebbles. It was so plain, like Danica.

But Danica had been her friend. Her friend. And Caroline missed her. She’d missed her even before she’d died. Now she missed her so much more.

There was a pressure behind her eyes, but she wasn’t going to let herself cry. Not here, in front of Patrick.

“I want you to stop talking about me,” she said. “I want you to stop saying it was my fault.”

Patrick raised one eyebrow and leaned back in his chair. “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to be more specific.”

“You’ve been telling people that I could have saved her. That I could have pulled her out of the way of the scooter in time.” Caroline couldn’t bring herself to admit she’d heard him say that she was jealous of Danica. “And now everyone’s talking about me.”

“I can’t help what other people are saying. Or the conclusions they might reach.”

“I want you to stop. You have to stop.”

Patrick cocked his head. “Do you want me to put you on some better assignments?” he said, gazing at her from this new angle. “Is that what this is really about?”

Caroline felt her hands ball into fists, her nails pressing into her palms. “It isn’t a joke, what you’re saying about me.”

“Why don’t you start working on the proposal you discussed at the meeting?” he said. “Would that make you happy?”

She left, colliding with a chair on the way out, ignoring his call to close the door, please!

#

Hours later, alone in her tiny apartment—on a sofa that couldn’t dream of being mistaken as having been purchased from Crate and Barrel, let alone anywhere pricier—the glow of her fury had faded. She hadn’t gotten anything she’d wanted. He hadn’t agreed to stop talking about her or expressed regret for anything he’d said.

And now she was spending her whole night wondering, as she had so many times before, if Patrick was right.

Maybe she could have saved Danica, if she’d thought quickly enough. If she’d been brave enough. Selfless enough.

And maybe she hadn’t because she hadn’t wanted to. Because she was jealous. Jealous of her friend.

Could that possibly be true? Was she really such a horrible person?

Or maybe all of this was unfair. Maybe they’d all just decided that she was a horrible person, a monster. When the truth was, she just didn’t fit in.

She knew it shouldn’t hurt so much. So what if she didn’t fit in? It wasn’t like this was the first time. It hadn’t happened in every job, or in every grade of school or year of college, but it had certainly happened before. She was one of those people who sometimes just didn’t fit in.

Her tears were flowing freely now. She was crying about Danica, but she was also crying about herself.

So maybe loathsome Patrick was right. For one reason or another, maybe it all really was her fault.

#

It was six on Friday, and her coworkers were leaving the office, two at a time, then three, a small group gathering in the hall, which Caroline could see through the glass doors from her cubicle. Were they all going somewhere together? She was as much a part of this team as they were; she was tired of being shut out and reduced to a target of speculation. When Patrick breezed by with Tillie, Caroline called out, “Where is everyone going?”

“Out for drinks,” Patrick said. “Margaritas. It’s been a stressful week. A stressful month.”

If they were going to spend the night talking about her, they’d have to do it to her face, she decided. She grabbed her bag and locked her computer and caught up with them by the elevators.

They went to a cheesy bar in Midtown, filled with office workers in suits and blasting ’80s music, that Caroline assumed Patrick had chosen ironically but which everyone seemed to sincerely love, and not just because he bought the first pitchers. They filled two large booths in the back, with others milling beside them. Someone suggested nachos, and Tillie said, “Oh, yes!” and soon they were polishing off a heaping plate and ordering another.

Caroline was at the main table—it was obvious that it was the main table—squeezed in between Marlon and Tillie and across from Patrick. She was on alert, ready to pounce on any opportunity to defend herself. To vindicate herself! But by her third margarita, she was letting her guard down. She was possibly even having a little fun. When the people around her mentioned previous nights out, crazy adventures and outrageous things that one or another of them had said, she didn’t feel her usual pang of exclusion. She was with them now, applauding with the others as Patrick ordered another round and shouted, “I think we can call this an important night out for team building and our collective mental health!”

They left the bar and went to another that seemed almost the same, and when that bar closed they staggered into a dive bar that had a karaoke machine in the back. Caroline no longer knew what time it was. Everyone’s voices were high and thin, and they couldn’t stop laughing, even when they were almost falling over. Was this appropriate, so soon after the death of their colleague, their team leader? It was not, but an understanding flowed between them: this was exactly what they needed. One by one, they took their turns on the little stage. They were all surprised, but not, that Tillie could sing in Portuguese, and under the circumstances her choice of song seemed endearing rather than obnoxious. Patrick sang a Rolling Stones song, and to their delight he strutted around the stage, swiveling his hips in Tillie’s direction, his mouth shaped into a Mick Jagger snarl. Who knew he could be so funny? He was hitting on Tillie to the point where it would have been embarrassing, as well as a major HR crisis, but on this night even that came off as charming. At one point he threw his arm around Caroline’s neck and offered her a cigarette. She didn’t even mind that he’d dislodged the ponytail she’d just managed to secure.

When it was her turn, which came last, when some of them were looking for their coats and checking their phones with bleary eyes, she chose a ballad. It was about being loved and the danger of enjoying that feeling too much because, inevitably, you would lose it, and how would you ever find it again? It was a sad song, a little maudlin, and you had to go all out if you wanted to do it right, but Caroline wasn’t afraid of that, because when she sang, she felt beautiful. It didn’t matter that her hair was frizzy or that her thighs were wide, or that her upper arms were thick and squashable. She’d never had thin arms like Tillie’s; she’d always been soft. It also didn’t matter that her blouse was creeping out of the waistband of her pants, or that the gap that always appeared between the second and third buttons of her shirt, no matter how carefully she’d safety-pinned it at home, was definitely giving a sideview of her bra. None of that mattered. She knew, and not because she’d been told, that she had a beautiful voice, one of those clear, melodic voices that cut through the din of bars and made people turn on the street, and when she sang, she felt just as beautiful.

Ten minutes later, they were on the subway platform. No one minded; their wait for the train was a continuation of their crazy night. Marlon was goofing around, and so was Patrick, singing and whirling on the platform, still hamming it up, his limbs moving so wildly that it took Caroline a minute to understand what he was up to. But then she knew: he was imitating her. He was mocking the way she’d flung up her arms, the earnest look she’d had on her face, and, yes, even the way her shirt had come out of her pants—and he was doing all of that while singing in a warbly voice that was nothing like her own. He was performing as if she weren’t watching with all the others. He knew she was watching. But he didn’t stop.

Most of the others were laughing. Tillie, who was just a few feet away from Patrick, was swaying with her eyes closed, smiling in a private way. But she kept sneaking glances at Patrick, and each time she did, her smile would get brighter, and she’d laugh. And then she’d go back to pretending that she wasn’t paying attention.

Patrick knew, of course, that Tillie was paying attention. He was performing mostly for her. His dance moves got even wilder. As he launched into the chorus of Caroline’s song, he backed closer to the platform’s edge.

Caroline was too disgusted even to shake her head. Couldn’t he feel the warning bumps of the yellow line beneath his shoes? Couldn’t Tillie, who’d backed up with him and was nearly as close to the edge? Just as Patrick reached the song’s climax, he lifted his arms again and mussed up his hair. He was making his hair look crazy, making it look like her hair, Caroline realized, some nightmarish version of it. Tillie didn’t even try to hide her laughter.

At that moment Caroline hated them both so much that if she could go back in time to the instant when Danica was killed—if she had a magic wand and could do it all over again, as she’d wished so many times—she wouldn’t use that chance to save Danica. She would push Patrick in front of the scooter. Or Tillie. Pushing Tillie would feel even more satisfying, Caroline decided, although Patrick deserved it more. And maybe that said something terrible about her—that she was, in fact, a petty and jealous person—but she didn’t care.

Why should she? Danica had died in a horrible accident, and Patrick and Tillie were risking their lives, acting like bad things didn’t happen to people like them. Surely someone would save them if they were in danger.

But she was the only one who’d noticed. Everyone else was too drunk, blind to anything but the fun they were having. Caroline wished she was still that drunk, that her haze hadn’t been shattered. As she watched Patrick and Tillie, she felt her heart accelerate. He was going to fall. Or maybe both of them would.

It was completely unfair that it had been left to her to do something. Yet she couldn’t wait a second longer. She leaped up from her bench against the wall. But she tripped over her own feet and went flying forward, landing facedown with a loud splat on the filthy platform. Her bag slipped off her shoulder and fell open, its contents spilling out in front of her: phone and wallet and her little makeup pouch with tampons. Her hands throbbed and her knees hurt but she couldn’t even cry out in pain, because she’d knocked the wind out of herself.

Did anyone rush to her side? Help her get up, gather her belongings?

No. They were laughing, their voices explosive around her. Patrick was laughing the hardest of them all. He was doubled over, his heels at the platform’s edge. Tillie put a hand over her mouth as she looked down at Caroline. Caroline took her chance. Still on her stomach, she raised one arm and waved wildly toward Patrick. “He’s too close,” she said. Tillie didn’t seem to understand. Caroline tried again, shouting as loud as she could. “He’s too close!”

Tillie blinked, confused, maybe even startled by the extreme ungainliness of Caroline’s gesture. But then she turned to look at Patrick, and at the drop to the tracks behind him.

“Oh my god, be careful!” Tillie cried out. She put her hand on Patrick’s arm and steered him, and herself, to safety.

Caroline got to her feet. She smoothed down her clothes, which only made things worse. Some of her coworkers, witnessing this attempt, fell silent. Others kept laughing. And now that Tillie had recovered from her scare, she was about to start laughing, too. She had that look: like she knew it was wrong, but she just couldn’t help herself.

Caroline knew that more laughter was coming her way. But she also knew that she’d saved those awful people. Those absolute fuckers. She’d saved them.

And she felt really good about that. She felt good about herself, actually. And when the train finally screeched into view, blowing her sweaty, matted hair back from her forehead, she knew they could see it, too—just how good she felt. It showed right on her face.

Jennifer Kitses is the author of a novel, Small Hours. Her writing has also appeared in Short Edition, Newtown Literary, The Brooklyn Rail, and other publications. She lives in Jackson Heights, NY, and works as an editor for the Graduate Center, CUNY.

The worst is not when you remember someone else has it worse than you do. Let the “Dark Times” world tour continue.

-ROL

A NIGERIAN NIGHTMARE

The cab driver’s facility with navigating the Old City neighbourhood showed a certain familiarity. The alleys were unclogged, which I thought boded well. With hindsight, it was a giveaway. In that downtown part of the city, carts and urchins and vagrants and regular folk would be normally angling for rights of way. From the back seat, I flipped the warrens of street blocks with bloated columns and beams – handiwork of natural architects. Then, suddenly, the cab came to a stop. It was by a clearing where the relentless alleys breathed. I quickly took in the unfolding scene – boys wielding cudgels, machetes, iron rods and cut tree branches. It was a disorganised scene like the brewing of something more full scale and sinister; a seasonal communal angst. They disembarked us – the driver and me. In a fleeting moment, I wondered whether it was all a set-up with the driver virtually surrendering his hunted quarry to his patrons. But a double take showed the driver was also being marched away with me to I know not where.

I was mortified. I was the ‘other’ in that crowd. Merely from looks, my captors already knew it. I picked up the staccato of ‘Nyamiri, ne!’ ‘Nyamiri, ne!!’ identifying me by the pejorative of my ethnic group, the Igbo. My people have been led like sheep to the slaughter ever since the pogrom of 1966 in Northern Nigeria. But in recent years, the killings have become more inclusive, incorporating minorities from Nigeria’s Middle Belt. I could see the glistening machetes, daggers, improvised sticks and rods. Their wielders were a motley of urchins with rheum in eyes and unwashed bodies. I was being poked randomly as they walked me along. The gang on the cab driver had stopped on the way and he was being interrogated. He wasn’t Igbo and, in the pecking order of slaughter candidates, the Igbo occupied the topmost rung. As I saw my gruesome murder in the glistening blades of iron, I tried to remember what could be the origin of the extant mayhem. I was fully self-conscious. My real life persona would not be in the dark concerning any security alert and would not knowingly breach the jackals’ pack. But I could not recall any latest national or local provocation to have warranted what surrounded me.

I prepared for the worst and steeled my nerves against the steel around me. I couldn’t run for it. This was the middle of enemy territory. A dash would finally give them the excuse – like the times I have had to brave it past a host’s growling dogs. We walked along to where must be their leader’s court all the while being rudely poked here with a stick and there with the tip of a machete. The bystanders gawked me like some circus animal. The pathological dread inside of me was unspeakable. As I walked my final moments on God’s earth, I remembered my young last born. The others would mourn my unfound corpse for a while and move on but Ifechi would not be able to bear it. It was the thought of him that brought my weeping. And then I woke up.

It wasn’t gratitude that immediately gripped me. It was the sorrow I felt for my own near death. The tear drops on both cheeks were evidence enough that the nightmare was ‘real’; it wasn’t made up. Then I flicked on the rechargeable lamp by my bedside and with it I made my way to the switch by the wall to have the room fully lit. I was lucky, electricity had returned while I slept and I was immediately bathed in familiarity – my wardrobe, desk littered the way I know it, the mirror picking up my distraught image. I felt welcomed back to life and grateful.

Nigeria’s Christian genocide figures have recently grabbed global attention thanks to President Donald Trump. Most killing fields of developing countries are not so much state-sponsored as state-tolerated. How does one explain that in the long bloody history of Nigeria’s continual slaughters, nothing near a commensurate number of convicts exists for the slain? In fact, one would be hard pressed to find any convict from Nigeria’s seasonal slaughters going back to independence in 1960.

Letting killers go scot-free is like a second death for the hapless dead and their relatives. The victim’s tribal, religious, or ideological constituency is being told that they are the inconsequential other. Since the dead were killed just for belonging to a particular faith or tribe or holding on to a certain ideology, their perceived offense is corporate. It could very well have been any other member of the group. Needless to say, one set of unprosecuted killers which melds back into its community and boasts of its exploits incentivises a successor set which would be out to earn its own bragging rights at ‘the fire next time.’ And if the next pretext for mayhem is too long in coming, one is instigated. All this because the chances of the killer ever being prosecuted and convicted simply do not exist. Over time, kill-and-go-free becomes endemic in these regions – Northern Nigeria; Darfur, Sudan; Gaza, Palestine. We are not talking here of full-blown war zones. We are talking of low intensity but continual massacres with body counts that rival many full-blown wars. At least with a war you know to avoid the war zone.

Many a national government’s claim to sovereignty consists in securing her borders from external aggression. This they ought to do without neglecting internal insecurity, which is the bane of many a developing country. Every government becomes complicit in the killings within its territory when the killer is not brought to justice. When one now has to talk about serial killings or ethnic cleansing, it goes from tolerance to instigation by default.

In Nigeria, one of the usual suspects for the seasonal carnage loomed large on the national psyche at the time of my dream. Political campaigns had been flagged off with politicians poking the nation’s fault lines with brinkmanship’s rods. During every such election period, settlers leave their abodes in droves for the safety of their ancestral homelands. Even The Nativity doesn’t come close. While the primary costs of such a huge internal migration would be felt in road accidents, burglaries of un-manned shops, and homes and disruption to children’s schooling, the intangible costs are more deep-rooted in the psyche. They include nightmares like the one from which I woke.

is the author of the story collection, Soul Lounge, and won the inaugural Harambee Literary Prize. He also won fiction category in the 2025 Native Voices Award of Kinsman Quarterly. He is published in The Republic, The Brussels Review, The First Line, Mysterion, Bridge Eight, Rigorous, Kinsman Quarterly and other places. Mike works as a freelance book editor.

To be honest, it’s been “Dark Times” week for quite a few weeks, but at the moment it feels particularly appropriate to run our “Dark Times” pieces — starting with ’s sobering and invigorating reflection on living in Trump’s America.

-ROL

HOW BIG A DEAL IS THIS?

One afternoon last spring, we were driving toward the Monongahela River, planning to walk with our baby son, when I slammed on the brakes. Military vehicles filled half the rail trail’s parking lot, and uniformed men milled along the riverbanks. My chest went solid. We were, I sensed, in danger.

“Rosa,” I said to my wife. “Do you have your green card?”

“I don’t know.” She was in the back seat, as always. She preferred to be close to baby Roberto.

“You don’t know? Jesus, Rosa — find it!” I heard her rummaging around in the diaper bag. Worried the car’s sudden stop looked suspicious, I started drifting slowly towards the lot. A distant soldier seemed to glance our way.

We were four months into Trump’s second term, and videos had just started emerging of the so-called mass deportation campaign. Rümeysa Öztürk had been whisked off the streets of Boston. Mahmoud Khalil was in jail. ICE’s “smash the car window” approach had recently gone viral. Through all of this, a message had been delivered: The new administration was violent in its xenophobia, and it wouldn’t tolerate dissent.

“I’ve got it,” Rosa said.

Thank God. But would having the green card matter?

Rumors had been swirling that on that day, April 20th, Trump would enact the Insurrection Act, effectively instituting martial law. I’d determined it was sourceless bunk, a sensational rumour peddled by online engagement-hounds. But there they were — a veritable platoon of camo-wearing men, inexplicably deployed along the river.

“Should we turn around?” I asked Rosa.

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

Everything inside of me rebelled against the idea. I’d already determined that I wouldn’t let the bastards dictate how I lived my life.

“We do have your green card. I’m sure it’ll be fine. Let’s just see what happens.”

I felt my grip tighten on the steering wheel. We drove past the rail trail crossing, then down the little hill that led to the parking lot. The uniformed men were close.

And then I started laughing.

The nearest group of soldiers was bent over a tackle box they’d lain on a pickup truck’s tailgate. They were tying lures onto their leaders. The others, the ones spread along the river, were placidly casting away.

The guys by the pickup truck looked up from their knot-tying as we passed, each one giving a friendly wave.

I felt relieved — and also a little ridiculous.

The question I asked myself that day, when deciding whether to drive past those uniformed men or turn around, was a distillation of the same question I’ve been asking since January 2025: How big a deal is this?

That question has many variations, all stemming from the same underlying uncertainty. Should we be planning for a long-term future in the United States? Is it safe to travel back and forth to Rosa’s hometown in Guatemala? Will there be future elections? How scared — and how prepared — should we be?

I’ve known, since the Apprentice star came down that goddamn escalator, that Trumpism is an authoritarian movement operating with an utter lack of moral restraint. I’ve studied political history. I’ve lived in former dictatorships — in Argentina, Guatemala, and Peru. When someone shows a complete disregard for democratic norms, when they scapegoat, when they lie, when they display the ceaseless power-amassing instinct, I know how to define them.

But knowing, on an intellectual level, that you’re living in a fascist regime, or under authoritarian rule, or in a police state (choose your grim characterization — they all fit), is different from determining the extent to which the political situation impacts the texture of your daily life. My wife is a legal immigrant with no criminal record. I’m a relatively obscure writer whose political activism registers only in localized digital and geographic spheres. Our cotidian patterns — aside from Rosa’s refusal to go anywhere alone — remain unchanged. Common sense, the part of me that doesn’t analyze geopolitical schemas but knows, by instinct, when it’s time to flip my eggs, tells me we have nothing to fear.

Besides, there are plenty of grounds for political hope. The opposition could sweep the 2026 midterms. An aging Trump could relinquish power with surprising grace. A Democrat could waltz into the White House in 2028, and the country could move forward with renewed small-d-democratic vigor.

If that were to happen, people like Rosa and I would look back and, as we did while watching the soldiers preparing to fish, laugh at the fact we’d ever worried. There’s a part of us, I sense, that wants to avoid the ridicule of our future selves. Nobody likes to realize they’ve overreacted. Everyone wants to identify as someone who keeps their cool.

But this desire to say, “It’ll be okay,” is dangerous. Yes, it allows us to more easily live our lives — to go to the grocery store, to drop our kids off at school, to take our families to walk along the river. But it also produces a false sense of security, a sense that could blind us from several urgent needs: the need to organize, the need to resist, and the need to avoid taking unnecessary risks.

Julio Cortázar has a story called “Second Time Round,” set in Buenos Aires at a time of brutal dictatorship, in which a woman, Maria Elena, has been directed to attend a mysterious appointment. After arriving at the specified address, a nondescript office that appears to be residential from the outside, she sits in the waiting room and chats with the other people, all of whom have been similarly ordered to appear. Like her, the others are there for the first time — except for one man who’s been summoned for the titular “second time round,” three days after his first visit.

One by one, the people in the waiting room are called into the back office, then leave with a friendly nod. Eventually, only Maria Elena and the “second-timer” are left. He’s called in, and a few moments later, she’s called in, too. She’s confused, surprised she’s been summoned before the other man has left. In the back room, she finds workers, chairs, and desks — but not the man who entered before her. And there’s no other door, no other way he could have left.

After filling out a form and answering some banal questions, Maria Elena is told to return for another appointment in three days. With that, she leaves the office and heads back into the city, wondering what happened to the missing man.

“Second Time Round” is, for me, one of literature’s most haunting illustrations of life under a dictatorship. The violence is invisible. A sense of normalcy prevails. Until the very last moment, the regime’s victim is left wondering, just like us by the banks of the Monongahela, “How serious is this? How nervous should I be?”

Much of the story’s horror stems from what we can presume about Maria Elena’s psychology, what we can imagine she’ll be thinking in the weeks before her next appointment. There will be moments when she’ll step out of herself to analyze the situation, when she’ll remember stories of state repression and accept the impossibility of that man, the one on his “second time round,” disappearing by any but violent means. Then she’ll shake her head and laugh, perhaps while washing dishes or walking her dog. She’ll imagine her future self being ashamed of how ridiculously she’d fretted. She’ll walk, head-up, into that second appointment. Given what we know of Argentina’s dictatorship, we’d do well not to imagine too graphically the precise nature of her fate.

I’d like to think that, were I in the same situation as Maria Elena, I’d recognize the danger. I’d skip that second appointment. I’d avoid taking needless risks.

Of course, it’s impossible to live risk-free under authoritarian rule, especially if you’re a dissident, if you’re inspired to fight back. If ICE appears in my hometown, I will document their activities. That is a necessary risk. And if the midterms are interfered with, I will protest, no matter the potential for violent repression. This, too, is a necessary risk.

But if I find myself again with men in military uniforms concentrated in a civilian area, will I casually drive past them, just to avoid canceling a plan? After nine more months living under this administration — after the killings of Silverio Villegas González and Isaias Sanchez Barboza and Renee Good and Alex Pretti — no, I will not. I won’t risk it. I will turn the car around, and we’ll do something else instead.

When I tell people about Rosa’s and my situation, describing how nervous she is, how we worry that future changes in immigration policy could make it impossible for us to keep living in the States, people’s reactions often overwhelm me. Their faces get almost teary. They say they’re sorry, that they can’t imagine what we’re going through. They ask if there’s anything they can do. I often feel uneasy, fearing they’re being too sympathetic. After all, we’re not dying. Everything in life still seems basically okay.

But then, I step back and realize my wife being afraid to leave the house alone is not basically okay. Neither is having to doubt whether you’ll be able to raise your children in your home country.

Recognizing the extremity of this moment is essential. It’s what encourages us to stay safe. More importantly, it’s what compels us to resist.

The Trump administration is a terrorist regime. I mean that in a literal sense. Its purpose is often not to enforce the law, to enact justice, to promote a sensible policy agenda, but to expand its sphere of power and achieve its illiberal aims by instilling fear. Why do federal agents wear masks? Why are they allowed — and quite likely encouraged — to engage in wanton acts of violence? So that immigrants will be fearful and leave, and so that protestors will be fearful and fall silent.

In this environment, to be afraid, especially if you’re part of an immigrant family, is inevitable. The state says clearly, See this violence, and know it could happen to you. It’s a message you can’t help receiving.

But while the fear is inevitable, our response to it, at least to some extent, is under our control. One option is denial — to insist the danger isn’t real, or that it’s been exaggerated. That’s the mental mechanism explored in detail above. It can be fatal.

The alternative is better: A commitment to determined resistance.

I was never an activist before this second Trump administration. The standing on the side of a street with a sign, the chanting of reductive slogans — it just didn’t feel like “my kind of thing.” I preferred the space for nuance and subtlety that a blank page provided. But once it became clear just how fascistic Trump’s second term was becoming, I realized I had to do something to combat my deepening fear and despair. I started participating in protests, even traveling four hours to the “Hands Off” rally in D.C. I attended meetings to discuss supporting immigrants, distributed flyers around Morgantown, West Virginia, and told Rosa’s story at a town hall assembly. Now, I’m organizing an ICE Watch group in my new hometown of Lake Placid, Florida, drawing inspiration from Minnesota’s heroes.

All of this makes me feel a hell of a lot better. Certain news stories still fill me with rage — they’re literally starving detainees! — but that rage transforms instantly into purpose and determination. We have a problem, yes. Now let’s work to solve it — and quickly.

There’s no guarantee that the option to resist will be available to us forever. Power gets consolidated. Societies are silenced. The space available for dissent is systematically penetrated and squeezed. Readers can sense that, for Cortazár’s Maria Elena, it was already too late. If she’d told her story to the press, nobody would have dared to print it. If she’d gone to her friends with her fears, they’d have pushed her away, lest they get punished for their involvement. There comes a point when acts of resistance are all but futile, when the regime has succeeded in turning the public square into an informational black hole, when stories of state violence are suffocated and when would-be martyrs are only sacrificial lambs.

Thankfully, that hasn’t happened here — not yet, anyway. People have been persecuted and even killed for their protest, for their speech. But I can stand with a sign on the side of nearby Rt. 27 and be fairly sure I won’t be arrested. If I’m beaten or disappeared, the press will report the news. That reporting could enflame the passions of my political fellow travelers, inspire them to resist with even more vigor, perhaps help sway the results of the midterm elections that, for now, look like they’ll still be happening. Resistance is far from futile. And, as long as information remains widely accessible, even persecution could prove politically useful.

The best way to ensure this space for resistance continues to exist is by filling it — both with our bodies and with our speech. This isn’t a risk-free endeavor, and it seems likely the regime will act to make it riskier still. That’s what federal agents were conveying when they taunted, after the shooting of Renee Good, that protesters should have “learned their lesson” from “what happened.”

We all know, now, that recording agents can get you shot. We also know that protesting can get you pepper-sprayed, that journalism can get you arrested, and that speaking out can get you investigated by the DOJ. In the months ahead, we’ll likely learn that more democracy-affirming actions can plausibly get you killed, injured, or disappeared. Even as we learn these things, we can’t back down — not as long as it remains possible that resistance could work, not as long as hope remains. Even as we’re reminded that our determination could kill us, we have to hold the line.

This will require an age-old virtue: bravery. I, for one, am willing to die in this fight. It sounds bombastic, maybe even ridiculous, like it belongs to another, less comfortable era. We have air conditioning. We watch Netflix. We’re sarcastic and ironic, sardonic and cool. “I’m willing to die for this” is something from a movie — and a bad one. But it’s also a stance that more of us need to take. It’s the stance I’ve taken.

I imagine, sometimes, a situation in which the regime’s authoritarianism reaches escape velocity, when they pass some threshold that promises to end our democratic project once and for all. Maybe it would be the canceling of an election. Maybe the suspension of habeas corpus and a widespread crackdown on political foes. Whatever it is, the response would have to be a demonstration of public outrage unlike anything the country has seen, with tens of millions in the streets and, ideally millions gathered in the nation’s capital. Let’s say the state responds with violence. Let’s say armed agents confront the masses. Let’s say they’re ordered to shoot.

I picture myself in that crowd, standing in one of the first rows, as the agents lower their barrels. Would I turn and run? I don’t know. But I’d like to hope that I wouldn’t.

That would be the moment in which it would all come together — the logical analyses of the political situation and the tangible impact on me as an organism, as a consciousness, as a being. How big a deal is this? The biggest. With a flash, it would come to be everything and nothing at all.

Benjamin Clabault is a writer and teacher from Cape Cod, Massachusetts. He lives with his wife and son in Lake Placid, Florida, and his work appears in After Dinner Conversation, Fiction on the Web, Literary Traveler, and elsewhere.

Painting of Monongahela River by Aaron Harry Gorson.

Just in case yesterday’s excellent piece was a little bit of a bummer, we remind you that some people, as they drift off at night, think of surfing — and then, as one does, of Schrödinger’s undulating mechanics of quanta.

-ROL

WAVES

After I’ve spent a day out in the ocean surfing, I see waves when I close my eyes at night. The images are a bit shadowy and nebulous, but they are certainly waves. They appear clearest when I first close my eyes, and then become less so if I try to focus on them. There is some sort of uncertainty principle at play, in which nothing can be observed without being altered. These closed-eye hallucinations are the result of the day’s visuals on the water searing themselves into my brain, the interplay of light, eyeballs, and neurons.

There is a concept in surfing that you should appreciate every wave you paddle into and ride, no matter how short, weak, or un-surfable it feels. The idea is that the wave has likely traveled a long distance to get to the beach and finally break for you, and to dismiss it as poor or lame is to be ungrateful and oblivious. A wave crashing on the sands of California may have originated somewhere around New Zealand, 10,000 kilometers away. The journey must be respected, even if you don’t care so much for the shape or feel of the end product. The wave is a kind of sacred energy moving through the ocean that finally, when coming up against a physical barrier at a certain depth, such as sand, coral, or stone, will gather all the water molecules at that location and pitch them over themselves. A show of force sometimes small and sometimes mighty, it is always to be honored.

But what’s in a wave? These waves dancing behind my closed eyes. More waves, it turns out. The blue and green and turquoise light glistening off the rising and falling water is delivered to our eyes through electromagnetic waves, photons moving within a spectrum that we are able to visually process. Violet light travels in shorter wavelengths, red light in longer ones, and green-yellow light somewhere in between. The light waves roll through our corneas, pupils, lenses, and into our retinas, where cones and rods turn them into electrical signals for our brains to process. The countless photons per second entering our eyes give color and shape to the world around us, traveling in waves at the speed of 299,792,458 meters per second, approximately 1 billion kilometers per hour. Light waves from the sun take 8.3 minutes to reach our eyes. Those from the Andromeda Galaxy take 2.5 million years, sweeping steadily across the universe until they wash up onto our planet.

I like a noise machine at night. Our brains didn’t evolve to fall asleep in total silence, and the hushed roar of a noise machine can be quite analogous to the ancient sounds of the lapping sea, rolling whitewash, frothing foam. When an ocean wave finally reaches its destination, it curls and crashes, transforming from silent radiant energy into a symphony of stirring water. It’s the chorus of millions of densely packed bubbles bursting, compressed air exploding, and water and air molecules colliding. This noise is also traveling in waves. When water and air molecules vibrate against one another, a chain reaction occurs, making pressure waves. These waves travel into our outer ear, down the ear canal, and against the eardrum, which transmits them into the cochlea. This seashell-shaped cavity is filled with fluid that begins to ripple, creating a traveling wave along the cochlea membrane. Sensory hair cells ride this membrane wave, and in turn send electrical signals to your brain.

Indeed, in order to process any of this — the feeling, sight, and sound of a wave — our brains have to be working. Our neurons have to be oscillating, rhythmically fluctuating. We’ve got to be making brainwaves, tiny electrical charges measuring just a few millionths of a volt. There are five main frequencies of brainwaves, each associated with different brain states: Gamma — concentration; Beta — anxiety dominant, active external attention, relaxed; Alpha — very relaxed; Theta — Deeply relaxed, inward focused; Delta — sleep. Neurons wiggling at one another, or just wiggling to themselves, create little waves that resonate through our entire central nervous systems, and bring the external world into the world of our mind, our being. When we are concentrating, Gamma waves are pumping like Pipeline in winter, at high frequency, processing as much information as possible. When we are sleeping, Delta waves are rolling gently through the seascape of our dreams.

Peculiar that two very different frequencies might provide me with similar visuals: honed-in Gamma waves when concentrating out in the ocean, and lethargic Theta waves while deeply relaxed, reimagining the day on the water as I lie in bed. It calls into question the nature of reality, conscious experience. Uncertainty not just a principle but a universal constant, much like the speed of light. How do we know that the light of our dreams is any less real than the light of day, when all we have is our own mind to know either with? How does a brain consult with itself? A dog chasing its tail, a neuron surfing its own wave.

As I drift deeper into sleep things are less and less as they appear. The three dimensions of space and the single one of time begin to fuse into one continuum and then radiate out in gravitational waves at one billion kilometers per hour. Spacetime ripples, black holes yawn, the universe bends and forms. My neuronal oscillations slow to a frequency of one hertz, half a hertz, from inward focus to sleep. I understand none of this and cannot fathom what is happening. I’m an elementary unit of being, a wandering neutrino. What I’m seeing looks like the universe just after the Big Bang.

I’m bobbing along on an undulating sea, my destination eight hours hence. The behavior of matter cannot be fully described by particles alone. We need waves. Photons are particles and waves, electrons are waves and particles. I’m riding on one of de Broglie’s wave packets full of particles. I’m surfing Schrödinger’s undulating mechanics of quanta. Everything is composed of waves, from the stars in heaven to the stones at the bottom of the sea. From the cones in our eyes to the drums in our ears to the electric pulses in our heads. The seemingly taught sinews of our hearts. Every aspect of the universe exists in rolling frequencies, from the electron of an oxygen atom to an 86 foot Atlantic Ocean swell ridden at Nazaré, Portugal by Sebastian Steudtner. From the Big Bang to Gabriel’s horn. I’m adrift on a wave that was born with the universe and will die with it. When it finally breaks upon the shores of eternity it will have traveled the length of all time at the speed of light and I will look down at the whitewash dissipating at my feet and say: Thank you, that was a good ride.

Judson Vail is a carpenter and writer who focuses on conservation, ecology, and the ways in which the natural world lends itself to storytelling. He writes Catfish Caviar.

Image by Elisabeth Olver.

We asked what you think about when you fall asleep/wake up, and some of you really told us. Thank you to for this bracingly honest piece.

-ROL

I FEEL IT IN MY CHEST

My heart is beating too fast. I haven’t opened my eyes yet, but I can see the morning light spilling in through the thin window of my eyelids. I roll over to face the wall and avoid the sun. My heart is beating too fast. I try to slow my breathing, to trick my heart into a sense of calm.

Every morning is like this recently. I’ve had depression and anxiety my whole life, but my MS diagnosis several years ago has only made things worse. There are times when my mind becomes particularly violent towards me, and every waking hour is met with a tightness in my chest. My doctor has run blood tests, done an EKG, ordered a Holter monitor, and now an echocardiogram. So far everything is normal. Anxiety is the likely culprit for the drum line playing in double time beneath my ribcage. This knowledge does not help. My heart is still beating too fast.

I don’t want to get out of bed. I also don’t want to stay here. I don’t want to do anything. It seems cruel that the words for what I’m feeling—apathy and anhedonia—are so lovely. They sound like twin sisters cursed with a beauty no one can appreciate, Greek in both their origin and their tragedy. I roll the words over in my mind, thinking also of pensive, somber, and melancholy. I revel in the words as they are the only thing to rouse any kind of contentment within me. My heart is beating too fast.

I’ve wasted my entire day before I manage to throw off the covers. I woke up late, so I will eat breakfast late. I will waste time on my phone because the process of getting out of bed, brushing my teeth, and preparing breakfast will have exhausted me. I will then shower (later than planned), which will also exhaust me. Along with fatigue, my MS causes heat sensitivity, so even though the hot water calms my spasming muscles, it will deplete any energy I stored up from sitting on the couch doing nothing. After my shower, I will have to do some more nothing to regain a small semblance of vitality. Hours will have passed. I will have done little besides eat and groom myself. Then it will be time to eat again, but I will not be hungry. I am never hungry. I can’t believe how much time I’ve wasted. I can’t believe I am still in bed and haven’t actually done any of this yet. I’m so tired, yet still my heart is beating too fast.

Everything scares me these days. I am afraid my meds will stop working and my MS will progress. I am afraid I will never climb out of this pit of despair. I am afraid I will be lonely my whole life. I am afraid I will meet someone, and by the time they realize what a mess I am it will be too late. They will be stuck with me, and I will have ruined their life. I am afraid I will never feel joy again. I am afraid I will find joy only for it to be ripped away like it has been so many times before. I am afraid my dad will die, and I will have no one left in the world to care for me. I am afraid I won’t be able to afford my healthcare. I am afraid I won’t be able to afford my home insurance and maintenance. I am afraid I won’t be able to afford my car insurance and maintenance. I am afraid I won’t be able to afford my utilities and groceries. I am afraid I won’t be able to afford the streaming services which are my only escape from the hellhole that is my life. I am afraid that my lack of exercise and my poor diet will make me even unhealthier than I already am. I am afraid that my restless sleep is increasing my stress and my inability to sleep. I am afraid I am a terrible writer. I am afraid that my life will never get better and will only continue to get worse. I am afraid that this paragraph is becoming untenably long, but I cannot stop thinking about all the things that terrify me. My heart is beating too fast.

I have lived a whole life in my head, but in reality I am still in bed. I have done nothing. I have not even opened my eyes yet. I can feel my cat curled up against my stomach. I crave her warmth and companionship, and, with my eyes still closed, I stroke her tortoiseshell fur. The gentle vibrations of her purring stand in contrast with my heart, which is beating too fast.

At every stage of my life I’ve thought, if I can just make it to the next thing, I will get better. If I can make it to middle school, I will get better. If I can make it to high school, I will get better. If I can make it to college, I will get better. If I can make it to the real world, I will get better. But now there’s nowhere left to go. I am thirty-three, and I have nothing. Due to both my MS and my ever-worsening mental health, I cannot work. I have never been in a relationship. I don’t know how to be anything other than alone. I can count my friends on one hand, and they all have better things to worry about than me. I don’t know what to do. Therapy hasn’t worked. Meds haven’t worked. TMS hasn’t worked. They say it gets better, but for me it has only gotten worse. I feel selfish and self-absorbed. I don’t know how to talk about any of this with the people I love without sounding manipulative. So I don’t talk to them at all. I lie in bed and cry. My heart is beating too fast.

I am lying here in the morning light thinking about all the ways my life has gone wrong. I am thinking about this essay, thinking about writing about how I’m thinking about all the ways my life has gone wrong. This essay will probably be rejected the way the rest of my writing has been rejected. I can hear how whiny this all sounds, and I hate it. I hate that I can’t get my shit together. I hate that the harder I try, the worse I feel. Most of all, I hate that I still have hope. I have hope even as my heart is beating too fast.

Eventually, I’ll get out of bed. I’ll waste another day doing chores and reading emails. I’ll waste another day doing nothing of substance, being of no use to anyone. I’ll get out of bed and spend the whole day wishing I was back in it. Eventually, I’ll return to the softness of memory foam and linen. For a brief moment in the dark, when the world is asleep and nothing feels real, I will convince myself that tomorrow will be a better day. But before I drift off, one more thought crosses my mind—a worry that when I wake up my heart will be beating too fast.

is a writer from Florida's Gulf Coast. She writes the Substack Letters on Being, a newsletter about finding hope in the darkness. Her poetry has appeared in Paper Brigade Daily. She often writes on her back porch, where her cat, Nyx, brings her lizard gifts.

Image by Gustav Klimt

Gen Z seems to always top everybody’s list as the worst generation. The Boomers get a lot of attention too. But we opened up the floor for what the worst generation is, and Diyora Kabilova elegantly reminds us that Gen X — so easily overlooked in so many ways— hasn’t come in for nearly its fair share of loathing.

-ROL

*Editors’ Note: It has been brought to our attention that this article appears to be AI-generated. The Republic of Letters’ policy is to not accept AI work.

GEN X — THE WORST GENERATION

The house is still.

Not quiet—still. The kind of stillness that happens when something has already slipped out the door long before anyone noticed it was leaving. There’s a half-rewound VHS on the carpet, a sun-bleached poster of Reality Bites curling at the corners, and a lawn chair half-buried in last year’s leaves. No one here staged a dramatic exit; no one slammed a door. But the light has a way of falling differently across abandoned scenes, and in this one the shadows feel like fingerprints.

Generation X didn’t crash.

It evaporated.

And in the outline they left behind—those faint, vanishing silhouettes—you can almost see the shape of the future collapsing inward.

They inherited the last soft decade. The final slow breath before wages flatlined and interest rates sharpened. Jobs were still stable enough to be taken for granted, houses still attainable without mortgaging one’s future children. It was a strange, lucky threshold to stand on. They were handed a world still warm from the long post-war boom and told, almost casually, “Take care of it.”

They didn’t.

Not maliciously; not intentionally.

They simply wandered off.

Boomers built a world that groaned under its own contradictions. Millennials and Gen Z screamed as the floor gave way beneath them. But Gen X—the hinge between them—stood in the doorway, shrugged, and said they “weren’t political.” As if history would politely proceed without them. As if silence were a shield rather than an invitation.

There is a particular kind of negligence that feels almost gentle.

This was theirs.

The 1980s and 90s demanded vigilance, but Gen X, exhausted before they were old, mistook precarity for personality. They accepted deregulation like it was a cool new moodboard: less structure, more “freedom.” Corporations whispered flexibility, and they nodded, not noticing that pensions were evaporating one signature at a time.

They were the first to live inside the blooming architecture of credit-card culture. Swipe now, regret later—later being someone else’s problem entirely.

Outsourcing wasn’t a crisis; it was convenience. Gig work wasn’t exploitation; it was“lifestyle.” Their cynicism was fashionable, their detachment a shield they polished daily.

They kept their hands clean by not touching anything at all.

While Boomers white-knuckled power and Millennials scrambled for scraps, Gen X turned their apathy into a kind of minimalist art form.

A generation of spectators who didn’t mean to let the world burn—they simply forgot to blow out the candle.

Culturally, they began as rebels—the last analog romantics—but rebellion became something else under their watch. Punk, grunge, zines, underground scenes pulsing with ferocity: they were supposed to resist the machine.

Gen X turned them into merchandise.

It wasn’t hypocrisy. It was a kind of innocence—believing that authenticity could survive being printed on mass-produced cotton. Nirvana became a Target t-shirt before the amplifiers cooled. “Anti-capitalism” became a tagline. “I don’t care” became an aesthetic, then a posture, then a lifelong position.

They sold their rebellion before they ever used it.

They perfected the shrug that would later become the world’s default reaction to crisis.

Not anger. Not action.

Just the soft, exhausted exhale of people who had stopped expecting anything to change.

Politically, they were a miracle of absence.

Boomers legislated ruthlessly.

Millennials tried to organize the ruins.

Gen Z tweets from the trench.

But Gen X—the generation placed at the narrowing throat of history—looked out over the coming storms and said, “Both sides are bad,” with a fatalistic elegance that might’ve been admirable if it weren’t catastrophic.

They were the last ones who could have intervened before the climate deadlines hardened, before inequality ossified, before corporations rewrote the conditions of human work. They had time, they had numbers, and for a brief moment they had the attention of the world.

They refused the stage.

To be fair, they were tired. Raised by televisions, sandwiched between louder cohorts, burdened with the disillusionment of watching the promises of their childhood dissolve. But history doesn’t grade on a curve. And silence, repeated long enough, becomes its own labyrinth.

Gen X didn’t sabotage the future.

They just let the timer run out.

On the personal front, their legacy is quieter, but no less intimate. Latchkey childhoods produced a generation fluent in absence—mothers commuting, fathers dissolving into separate apartments, the soft hum of microwaves replacing dinner tables. The emotional architecture they built for their children had gaps in the walls; wind slipped through.

They weren’t unloving. They were simply… unreachable.

A generation that learned early how to endure alone, then taught everyone after them the same lesson without meaning to.

Their children inherited a world where tuition inflated like a trick balloon, where rent demanded blood, where ecosystems collapsed on schedule. Systems kept functioning but never nurturing. Homes stood, but something essential had already slipped out the back door.

Patterns replicate themselves if no one stops to name them.

No one in Gen X wanted to name anything.

But perhaps their worst sin isn’t apathy, or commodified rebellion, or political absence.

Perhaps it is the erasure itself.

Every generation leaves a trace.

Boomers left monuments to themselves.

Millennials left scorch marks and student debt.

Gen Z leaves digital fossils, multiplying hourly.

Gen X left silence—an entire generation that ghosted its own century.

They vanished into the background of history like extras in a film where they were meant to be the protagonists. They did not seize the world or save it or radically redirect it. They simply slid into the shadows, hands in pockets, humming along while everything tilted.

The great disappearing act.

An entire demographic pressing gently against the edges of society until they blurred into wallpaper.

And perhaps that is why they are, quietly, devastatingly,

the worst generation.

Not because they inflicted the greatest damage—

but because they allowed the damage to grow unchallenged.

Because at the moment history needed someone to stand up,

they slipped away instead,

as soft and imperceptible as dust leaving a windowsill.

Every failing future begins with someone who chose not to imagine one.

And Gen X imagined so little, so faintly, that the world filled in the silence without them.

They did not burn the world.

They simply left the gas on

and wandered out—

already half-vanished—

into the dark.

Our Blue Christmas series continues with more holiday melancholy … as well as the love of one’s life.

-ROL

ALONE AT CHRISTMAS

Merry Christmas! And if you’re not celebrating, Happy Holidays! And if you’re not happy, just remember that at the end of the day, 25th December is just another day. This is what I told myself when I spent a very unhappy Christmas alone and depressed a few years ago.

Fear not—this story has a happy ending.

Nowadays, more people than ever are spending Christmas Day alone. For some, this can be a relief as things tend to get heated at forced family gatherings.

If you happen to be one of them, either by choice or by circumstance, a few ideas for you to do (or not): go for a walk, go to the movies, get a massage, take a bath, listen to music or a podcast, call or Facetime people, read, write, work (if you must), work out, eat whatever you like, watch whatever you like, watch—or rewatch—Baby Reindeer, which in case you didn’t know, has nothing to do with Christmas.

Above all, try to relax and enjoy yourself. It’s your day. If you are having a hard time, be kind to yourself, and remember, it’s just another day.

Right then, moving on to a true story about Christmas in New York by my lonesome… and… crabs.

It’s just another day. I repeated the mantra as I scoured endless shelves of jars, cartons, cans and bottles, scanning the labels for something ‘special’ to cook. It’ll be over before you know it. No biggie.

So why are you shopping at Whole Foods if it’s not a big deal?

My thoughts were conflicted. There was no avoiding or escaping the fact that the next day was Christmas. Of course it was a big deal. Therefore, Whole Foods was the appropriate place to buy food.

Lost in rumination, I meandered the aisles to the tune of Jingle Bell Rock. I had no idea what I was looking for. I wanted to treat myself, try and lift my spirits—if that was even possible—but I didn’t know how to cook anything particularly special. I wasn’t up for making something from scratch. There was no fun in that. Not when you’re cooking for one.

I wondered if anyone else was shopping for Christmas Day alone. Most of the rosy-cheeked patrons were either coupled up or with kids, and a few solo stragglers I spotted had that rushed look of dashing out for last-minute forgotten ingredients so they could hurry back to finish preparing the family feast.

I focused on the task at hand to swerve the swamp of bad feelings, noting the song change. “Have a holly jolly Christmas! It’s the best time of the year!”

Not for you, and definitely not this year. Eyeing the rows of pasta sauces, I considered the failsafe option. But that was too easy; if all I could rustle up was boiled pasta and ready-made sauce, I might as well have gone to Morton Williams, that grim supermarket around the corner.

I thought of all the traditional Christmas Day meals I’d enjoyed in England, where I grew up: roast turkey and stuffing, crispy potatoes, lashings of gravy and cranberry sauce, flaming plum pudding with mounds of brandy butter. My mouth watered with longing. Not this Christmas. You’ll eat nothing of the sort.

Damn that horrible voice in my head. Whose voice was it anyway? I preferred the kind and gentle one, “the still small voice.” I needed that one to chime in more, but I could barely hear anything beyond the mean critic.

My Christmas Day food shop was turning into a pathetic endeavor. Surely I could come up with something. I gazed at the glistening cuts of raw flesh at the meat counter, inviting me to make myself a steak. That was special—and easy enough—a sprinkle of salt, a dollop of oil, a few minutes each side…

She can’t even boil an egg! My mother’s voice now. Of course I could boil an egg. She often used that line with a derisive smirk and snide tone to illustrate my ineptitude—for a laugh. I never found it funny, but the joke wasn’t meant for me.

Aimlessly circling the supermarket, I landed in the one aisle I did not want to be in. I should have paid more attention instead of being sucked down the plughole of negative thinking. Facing giant bags of puppy chow, I balked at the brutal reminder that my beautiful dog Humphrey was now buried in the dirt, beside my ex’s lake house. It felt like my ribs had been cracked open, my heart scooped out with a shovel—like the one my ex had used to dig the grave.

I couldn’t breathe. Agonizing images flashed across the screen of my mind like a grisly crime scene. Now I was spiraling into the trenches. Within weeks of that hideous day of unimaginable heartbreak, my life had descended, leading me here: my first Christmas alone.

The person I felt closest to—my younger sister, who I grew up with—refused to speak to me, my former champion and literary agent had been giving me the silent treatment for months after sending the novel I had worked on for five years out to publishers, my long-term relationship was over, and as a result, I had lost my adored surrogate son, I was stuck in a soul-destroying office job that didn’t even pay me enough to rent a studio of my own, renting a room in someone else’s apartment while staring 40 in the face. All of this would have been bearable if Humphrey was still alive. But he was gone. Forever.

Blinking, I took a deep breath and investigated my basket: blue corn chips, hummus, and a container of spring mix. You’ve been wandering around for God knows how long and all you’ve managed to find are lettuce leaves and chickpeas. This is going to be some Christmas.

It’s just another day. The tone of the mantra shifted from soothing to stoic. Chewing the insides of my cheeks to squeeze back tears, I marched towards the freezer section, yanked open the door, and flipped a cardboard box around with a picture of two succulent crab cakes: Bake in the oven at 400°F for 15 minutes.

Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. Grabbing a lemon from the produce aisle, I headed for the checkout like I was late for the Last Supper.

I silently prayed that I would never have to shop for a Christmas Day meal for one ever again.

My roommate’s cozy décor embraced me as I entered her home, softening the blow of Humphrey’s absence. I wished she was there too, but she had left for London the week before to spend Christmas with her family. Of course she did, that’s what families do at Christmas time.

Six months earlier, I had moved in with her and watched my brave soldier, my fifteen-year-old beloved boy, deteriorate until he and I could bear it no more. I glanced at the sofa where the vet had euthanized him, the permanent ceasing of his heartbeat against my palm. It was still so shocking to me that I would never look into his soulful eyes or touch his fur again. He had been a constant presence by my side since he was a puppy.

My roommate had sweetly left me a gift under the warm glow of the living room tree, which we had bundled up against the cold to pick out, carry inside, and decorate together. Next to her perfectly wrapped gift, I had placed another gift my old nanny had sent me from England. Christmas morning won’t be so bad. You have two presents to open. I realized I was thinking—talking to myself—as if I were a child, but Christmas was so intertwined with childhood, how could I not?

The strong smell of pine reminded me of the Christmas tree at Olympic Tower, the apartment building on the other side of the park where I had spent joyful, childhood Christmases a long time ago. My “first” father, my mother’s ex-husband and father of my five older siblings, the man who gave me his name and raised me like I was his, had once owned a magnificent home there. All of my best holidays had been with him, the loving, generous patriarch of our sprawling family of twelve children from various fathers and three mothers. He was inclusive and kind, making every day a happy day for everyone, especially at Christmas time.

The year before, he had died in the saddest of circumstances, and without him, the ‘family’ no longer existed. He was the glue that held the many disjointed parts of a flawed but sturdy structure together, all of us united by our love for him and buoyed by his love for life. He thrived in gathering everyone around to celebrate special occasions with an abundance of food, music, and laughter. Now we were simply a scattering of disparate and complex pieces, some of whom stuck together in cliques, and some that splintered off to form new units, leaving others behind. Others… like me.

Last Christmas, six months after our patriarch died, my ex had allowed me to invite and host seven family members to stay at his empty townhouse for four nights over the holiday. The whole experience was exhausting, but in the spirit of “Baba” and his benevolence, I wanted to bring the family together to uplift us through the shared grief of our enormous loss.

After such a gesture, I had hoped that this year, I might have been invited to one of their Christmases, especially the family members who lived on the East Coast, some even in New York. They all knew my relationship had ended and my dog had just died, but as I was soon to find out, they made exclusive plans that did not include me.

I missed my younger sister the most. We had always supported each other through the heaviness of later Christmases spent with our mother and all the difficult feelings that time of year evoked. Even as adults, she and I had a cherished tradition of spending Christmas Eve together so that we could wake up and start Christmas Day with each other.

My overwhelming despair after Humphrey’s death provoked an allergic reaction in her, as depression so often does. She decided to move on to our much older sister, who had even less patience for other people’s pain.

Oh shit. It’s here. Christmas Day. Waking up alone that morning, these were my first thoughts. Every morning without Humphrey was horrific, but I missed him more than ever on that day of all days. It’s just another day.

I sprang out of bed to make a cup of tea and whiled away the early hours of my yuletide solitude by watching mindless television. My day revolved around one event: cooking the crab cakes. At the stirrings of hunger, I turned on the oven, lined a dish with parchment paper and popped it in the oven.

From the sofa, a burning smell summoned me to the kitchen where I was met with black smoke. Through the oven window—to my absolute horror—Fire! Panicking that this would set off the alarms, I chucked the burning pan onto the floor with an oven mitt, blowing madly at the furious flames while stamping them out with my feet.

She can’t even boil an egg! Scraping the splattered, pitiful mess off the floor, I half-laughed at my self-created tragicomedy. Only I could screw up something as simple as crab cakes, but what on earth was the point of parchment paper if it does that?

It could have been worse; if I had not acted so quickly, the whole apartment might have caught fire. The whole building. My ineptitude could have killed people, burning everyone to death in a Christmas Day Disaster.

Walking away from the blackened parchment paper, I turned to a different sort of paper—the pages of my journal. That was where I found the still small voice that helped me feel less alone and restored my faith that it wouldn’t always be like this. At some point, life would get better. (It had to get much worse first, but that’s another story.)

Sure enough, just a few Christmases’ later, I was given the best crab cake I could have dreamed of—my very own forever crab—a gorgeous Cancer husband, Danny.

is a British-American Spinderella-Storyteller. Formerly of the glitterati, fledgling of the literati. NYC-based wordsmith.

Painting by Edward Hopper

Merry Christmas, go fuck yourself. My worst holiday memory is happening right now forever.

First, back up. You know what a Cuccidati is? It’s a Sicilian, because all Italians in St. Louis, Misery, are Sicilian, wedding cookie. A fancy old world fig newton with icing and sprinkled, but so much better. And no, I don’t know why we made them for Xmas.

My best friend Evelyn and her mom made them every year, along with a bunch of other exotic cookies, and we’d go over and have Christmas Eve at her house. My best friend only ever called it Crimbus and it was cute because she was beautiful and brilliant, or Xmas, because fuck Christmas. Then in May 2023, she hanged herself from her bedroom door.

I’m writing this on the day they took her little brother off life support because he overdosed in the bathroom of the same house she took one final severely Catholic drop to her knees from a coat rack hung over her bedroom door, three days shy of his 26^th birthday, nine years ago. We’d been going over to her house for Crimbus eve dinner, which was delicious, horrible, artery clogging lasagna, for a fucking decade.

You know. She was deep in alcohol addiction and had been on a downward spiral for a while, but was trying. And all I can think about is that I know she hadn’t had a solid bowel movement in years from all the White Claw and Vodka. So my mental image of her before her in a box about to get burned, cold as thawing steak, is her in what I know she was wearing, with piss and shit running down her leg.

Note, I’d known her 21 years, this was my sister. I can say these things. She’d have laughed at them. Anyone else says anything close and I will hunt them for sport.

That year when she died? No lasagna at Evelyn’s house. Her mother decided we were persona non grata because, as her closest and oldest friend, I had the receipts on what a narcissistic bitch she was, how she parentified and enslaved her daughter. Raised her to be bold and independent and a raging feminist, until mom needed a ride to the pain clinic.

Don’t worry. Both of her children committed suicide in the house she still lives in, but I assure you, she’s living her best life.

But the point is, Evelyn offed herself and one of our longest running holiday traditions in one voidlong trustfall; Cuccidatis, and Lasagna at her house, with a cheeseball, cookies, board games, video games, Cards Against Humanity, and ketamine. Free to all the wayward souls. With my moms talking to her mother while all us overgrown adult children were belligerent and happy. Until we weren’t and she was ashes.

Hold on, Wait. So in 2024, the next year: My moms is a dog groomer, and she’s getting older, Christmas is always hell. Grandma died on New Years Eve. I’m trying to retire mom but I’m not up to snuff. So to bring up the spirits Operation Holiday Cheer was born. I lit up the house, put tiny Xmas trees with all our favorite ornaments from forever ago everywhere, organized everything, and fuck, it worked. We achieved holiday cheer. Spirits were as high as we could keep them considering Evelyn was dead. Mom goes to see her sister in Arizona for Xmas. Comes back right after New Years. Driving her home it starts to flurry. I’d just put out the first of my Invitations to the Autopsy on Substack, I was playing Nina Simone and feelin’ fuckin’ good. It snowed heavy overnight and all the next day.

January 7^th: wake up to mom yelling the apocalypse is happening in the kitchen. It was. What I estimate at 55 tons or so of snow and ice pack from 30 hours of snow and icefall was coming in through the ceiling in our kitchen like don’t go chasing waterfalls, they’ll come the fuck to you. Ceiling sagging turning to mush. The water left marks on everything looked like dried blood.

This was the first time Substack helped me from being homeless in winter. New guy, been around a bit, leaves long notes, tiny essays all over, editor/refugee from indie publishing, and Substack came out in force. I almost killed myself with discount editing, but we made it. And then Fiction is Culture went on to help other people, all year long. A true fucking success story. Bless you .

When we got a spot, the move still maxed out every credit card and burned every nerve any of us had so raw they’re still bloody. We got unpacked like, two weeks ago. Getting moved and getting stable are two vastly different things. One of the two got done.

Guess which.

New lease says “report any maintenance, safety, or building issues to management through the tenant portal.”

Now, I’m not saying this was THE ONE time in my life I tried to do the right thing. I’m saying violence gets shit done way, way quicker if you’re good at what you do and you know where to apply the right pressure. I’m saying as soon as water came through a light fixture for 24 hours in October and they tried to cover it up with a cosmetic fuck you, and I said: fix this right or I’m escalating to code enforcement. Oh, they were so quiet. Gave them four notices over what was it, a week maybe? Long enough to be more than legally reasonable. Hold on, I forgot the ceiling collapse in July. Whatever. The point is, IMPCC building codes and NEC codes say water cannot get into your electrical or else you’re about to have a real bad time. And I know this. I quoted the codes. I was so polite. Fuck I was polite.

But I’d crossed the Rubicon. See, any tenant knows, and by now they’re thinking, “this is a problem tenant, they know all two rights they have in this state!” But any tenant knows once you threaten to call down code on your landlord, it’s like saying you’re bringing in GOD. If you let them call your bluff, you get nothing but hard dick and Cheerios the rest of your tenancy. They know you’re a pushover. They know you’re weak, and scared, and in a precarious position, and fuck, you should be thankful to them, never mind the fact that with 6 short tons of books and papers, you should enjoy living in a potential tinderbox of a proven fire hazard. After all, they were gracious enough to give you housing in the first place. You fucking peasant.

This is the part where I tell you I may have non-standard ethics, but they’re mine, and if you ever think I’m bluffing and decide to call it, oh God have mercy on your soul because I don’t bluff. Calling in safety code violations is a protected activity in the State of Misery, and the city of St. Louis.

To a point.

Once you call for a safety inspection on a code violation, you’re protected from landlord retaliation! Except not really. We used to have strong tenant rights, shocking; I know. You wanna know why? Google the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects, then come back and continue. OK. So, they took the strong tenant protections we had out back and shot them behind the shed in 1999.

My landlord commits retaliation on its face in his second email after being notified how we don’t bluff around here, among other things and suggestions he’s not contractually or legally able to offer that fall under intimidation, but not enough for anyone to give a fuck because we’re not getting evicted.

“As far as you and your family moving out, it has come to our attention that you don’t appreciate our team and our property. Therefore we will not be renewing your lease in March.”

If he’d evicted us, among many other infringements, it would be clear retaliation. Unfortunately, they’ve left this loophole in Missouri state law where there are two kinds of landlord retaliation, and this is the soft kind, the kind that’s peachy fuckin’ keen.

Tenant rights are low value cases for attorneys, and we don’t have a warchest. Landlords are good repeat customers. I’ve got too much evidence of malfeasance at too many levels. This is complex. Our case is nuclear waste. The city is acting borderline hostile.

We get our second emergency move in exactly 12 months.

I’m dreading the idea of writing a GoFundMe. I’ve written, campaigned, and filled six. The last one was for the beautiful dead girl to take care of her cunt mother. I don’t want to weigh my small living family against the stunning dead girl with a dual PhD who everyone loved with the picture I picked for maximum impact above the fold on the GoFundMe for a mother who tortured and helped drive her to suicide. If my seventh GFM is the one that doesn’t fill, and it’s to save MY family? Evelyn, may as well see you soon.

I am a writer and editor, yes, but I’m also a community organizer. We’d leaned heavy on Substack already, to the point I was called a beggar by at least one old bastard who I then promptly said if he ever tried to hand me so much as a penny I’d cut his hand off and shove it down his throat wrist first until he fucking choked to death. I never said I was nice, I said I was kind, and compassionate, and I help people how I can.

So having gotten us squarely in this situation I came up with a halfassed idea. Me and some other authors are starting a publishing house. Small press, big guns, good idea.

Know what a holiday letter is? They’re a genre of letter. Started off when the middle class in the US came up and houses fragmented. Tell family neighbors and friends Timmy got good grades, stupid shit. Now they’re a way the wealthy perform social theater by telling you how many trips they went on, the great and amazing and whatever other superlatives they can think of, not many that I’ve read, to tell you how great their year was. And I got one. And it made me so mad I thought, let’s invert this completely. Write one that’s all bad. Or worse, all true. Or better, all lies. So I buy 40 NYE cards and come up with a header for a letter.

Did the math for moving, for potential profit, didn’t hit the floor of the move.

Still announced it the next day.

$15 gets you a Television Sky Press 2025 Holiday letter and New Year’s card, with a page from a novella.

$35 gets you all that and a gift bag in a bubble mailer from my personal archives.

$50 and up gets you a gift box of even more shit from my truly strange and large archive of shit. (Guess I’m downsizing this year.)

Sell through all the cards, which could be 150 or a total of 171, and I’ll print the most bootleg short run “you can only get it if you donated novella” you’ve ever seen. No UPC, No ISBN--bless you Chinese Printers--and you can buy it for one dollar over cost to print+shipping to you if you donated.

That’s it. Hand numbered, signed by the family. Signed by other authors? Who knows what else. This won’t be POD, it will be ONE very small offset printing. Never reprinted.

We sold almost 60 cards the first day. 7 days in on the 17^th, we’ve sold 92.

But yeah, this is THE miserable fucking holiday foreverafter. We’re either going to be homeless or not in March. But at least I guess I’m not just begging this time.

Link to original post:

Burnt Tongue

Television Sky New Year Letters (Emergency Edition)

Television Sky New Year Letters…

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4 months ago · 65 likes · 2 comments · Emil Ottoman

Link to update:

Burnt Tongue

Television Sky HELP WE'RE GOING TO BE HOMELESS, NO REALLY

TERROR/MISERY/TRAUMA CIRCUS UPDATE…

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4 months ago · 46 likes · Emil Ottoman

Direct Link to Google Sign-up Form https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdxQcHOv2VNZpZQawygJXDbJHRrPH1CAORnqp3gVaDPNlguWw/viewform?usp=sharing&ouid=107756526998514215559

is a writer, author, editor, publisher, artist, criminal, & unrepentant.

Photograph by William Eggleston

I wrote a list of what the holiday cost me:
half a sweater, a postcard from a place
I won’t return to, receipts
for things that never brightened anyone.

You were a telephone that rang
only for itself.
You were the sweater I lacked
the courage to wear.

On Christmas Eve I went to the church lot
because its lights looked like a city
forgiving itself.
Three cars. A woman crying
into a thermos, her hands folded
over a headline that read her back.

I stayed in my car and practiced
being a passerby.
I tried the name of someone
who might miss me:
it sounded like a bell. It sounded like need.

At midnight a siren crossed town
and the stars arranged themselves
as if rehearsed for loneliness.
I drove home and opened the tin
my mother sent: the biscuits stale,
and therefore perfect.

I left one on the sill
for whatever ghost still walked the street.
It drew a moth, then another,
then a small furious congregation.

I thought of the animal in me
that wanted to be loved,
and the animal that refused repair.

I slept with the light on
and dreamed of roadside diners
where strangers ate each other’s words.

By morning the biscuits were gone,
the moths gone, and whatever plans I’d made
had been eaten slowly, without malice.
I made coffee and set the kettle on again,
as if repeated heat could still
pass for hope.

ORNAMENT OF ONE

The lights are skilled at pretending
they belong to a city.
I plug one cord into the wall
and the room claims belonging for me.

A plastic angel leans; her head
a small, resigned moon.
I hang a single bulb on the mantel
and watch it wobble like a thought
that won’t decide.

Downstairs, laughter slices
the night into warm, exact quarters.
I chew cold ham, thinking
of the phone I will not lift.

Snow stitches the window shut.
In the glass, my face is a borrowed coin:
recognizable, passed hand to hand,
tired of making change.

I whisper my wish. It answers politely
and gives itself to the neighbors.
When the angel tilts, I steady her,
as if small public mercies
might issue a visa.

Outside, trees trade light
for a deeper dark.
Inside, I set the bulb in a bowl of water
to make the room appear full.

I go to bed like someone
who has rehearsed grief.
By morning the bulb is cold as currency,
the angel on her side,
perfectly human.

David Anson Lee is a physician, philosopher, and poet whose work explores solitude, memory, and the ethical weather of ordinary life. His poems have appeared in Ink Sweat & Tears, Silver Birch Press, Eunoia Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Texas.

Painting by Geertgen tot Sint Jans

kicks off our Christmas Blues series. The prompt is “My Worst Holiday Memory.”

-ROL

CHRISTMAS APPROACHING

Icicles hang from the fir trees, and new-fallen snow dusts the sidewalks. Everyone’s busy shopping for gifts. I’ve been working as a cashier at a drug store. It’s not much of a job, after finishing a degree in English, but I didn’t know what else to do with myself. I’d already been hospitalized, for a mental disorder I barely understood. And I wonder about my own judgment. I wonder about people who seem “okay,” but turn out not to be...is it me, or them? I’m trying to feel festive, but instead I’m sad.

One day not long ago a young man wandered into the drugstore asking for condoms. I found a pack behind the counter and sold them to him. Then — to my shock, after he’d just bought condoms! — he asked me out.

“You’re pretty. Busy tonight?”

“Yes,” I answered, “Already have a date…,” which wasn’t true, I just had zero interest in the guy after his purchase.

But the next day he showed up again — with a girl in tow. She had shoulder-length blonde hair and was wearing a sweater that looked handknit.

“This is my girlfriend, Mary,” the guy said. “You might remember me from yesterday.”

“I do,” I answered. “Nice to meet you, Mary.”

Mary smiled. She seemed shy. I felt sorry for her, being with this man. He selected some spearmint gum and Mary giggled. Maybe she seemed a little silly, but I rang up the pack of gum and took his change. Then they left.

I forgot about this for a while. I’m trying to overlook small annoyances. I’m only 38, and it’s holiday-time. But I keep remembering the hospital... Once, last year, I’d been dozing on the haystack-filled grounds of Westchester State. They’d let me out for a walk after a four-week stay. I’d had a bad love affair and a terrible, stress-filled job…..I guess my hospitalization was because of depression and anxiety. My grandfather suffered from the same thing.

I felt lonely, but it was a sunny day with a few fluffy clouds above in the sky, and I was relatively happy in my solitude — but still feeling embarrassed about having ended up on a psych ward. Suddenly a man about my age approached me. He looked like a farmer from one of the neighboring fields. He grinned at me. He wore a straw hat and faded, patched jeans.

“Patient in the hospital?” he asked.

“Yes,” I answered, even though it was really none of his business.

He sat down next to me, though, and started telling me about growing up on his family’s farm next door, all about milking cows in the morning and heaving bales of hay at the end of summer onto a tractor his father owned.

“I’m Mike,” he said, rambling on about how beautiful the day was. “Care to go to a movie?” he finally asked. “Can you get permission from the hospital staff?”

“Actually, I’m being discharged Friday,” I answered. “I have a studio apartment lined up in Orville, that little town nearby.”

“I’ll pick you up Saturday night, then. What’s your new address?”

I gave it to him, then rose from my resting spot in the field, and returned to the hospital ward.

On Friday I was discharged and took a bus to Orville, armed only with a knapsack for my clothes and my 6-string guitar. I unpacked when I arrived, and went to a nearby homewares store to order a twin mattress and bed sheets, to be delivered the same day. I had a bit of money saved from my previous crummy job as a bank teller.

Then, on Saturday night, Mike picked me up in his Datsun and we drove to the movie theatre. The film was Casablanca, the 1942 war tale that I’d first seen in a retro festival in college.

When the movie was over, Mike turned to me and said, “Here’s looking at you, kid!”, and he smiled at me. I was charmed — I guess I’m naive, but he seemed romantic. We went back to my studio and I played folksinger Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” on my guitar for him. And I fed him some baked chicken I’d cooked earlier.

But then, to my shock, he rolled me around on the floor and tried to pull my khaki pants down over my hips.

“Ow — you’re hurting me!” I cried.

He got up off the rug and said, “What’s the problem?”

“You have a lot of nerve!” I shouted.

He scoffed.

“I know what it is,” he said. “You were hospitalized. A psycho. I don’t know why I asked you out. See ya then.” He left.

Why had I even agreed to go out with him? He didn’t even thank me for dinner. He’d forced himself on a woman who’d only agreed to go to a movie with him. Christmas is approaching and I feel glum. Why are some men such creeps? I’m remembering the loser in the drugstore recently who bought spearmint gum, how the girl who was with him knew so little about him. Am I still as naive as she was? Like I possibly have been about my acquaintance Lewis...

Lewis is pushy. I’ve known him since college. Recently I mentioned to him when he dropped in that I had a lunch date that afternoon with an old friend of my dead mother’s — a nostalgic Girl’s Day Out, one we’d set up a couple of months earlier. I hadn’t seen her in ages. Autumn was approaching, with leaves changing color. It looked like a Rembrandt painting outdoors. I told Lewis I was meeting Sue Ellen at The Golden Goose.

“Oh, I’ll come, too,” he announced, as if he’d actually been invited. He knew Sue Ellen slightly.

So in the end I didn’t have lunch with this woman after all. I didn’t want Lewis tagging along like an annoying fly, and when he left my apartment to meet Sue Ellen, I sent her my regrets through him that I couldn’t make it that afternoon. After all, why would I have wanted Lewis horning in on my special day? And he doesn’t let anyone get close. He’s told me he doesn’t like people knowing details about his life because “they’ll put two-and-two together.” I wonder what harm he thinks other people intend.

Last month, I introduced him to a kind friend from college who majored in American history. I thought possibly they’d have something in common. I’d invited them both to meet me at a cafe.

But Lewis monopolized the entire conversation, leaving me out and quizzing Joyce about her academic studies as if they were something in which he had a great and particular interest. He was clearly trying to make me feel competitive with a friend.

Two weeks later, I ran into Joyce at my hair salon and she said she’d had a date with Lewis — he’d phoned and invited her to a movie.

“But it was odd,” she said. “He told me our date was a secret and I shouldn’t tell you about it. Why not? He’s strange. How do you know him, anyway?”

“We used to work together,” I said, annoyed.

The next day I called him and told him off.

“What business of yours is my date with Joyce?” he asked stiffly.

“Well, why is everything in your life such a secret?” I replied. “After all, I introduced you! I always tell you who I’m going out with.” But he was resentful.

“Fuck you,” he answered, “and I won’t wish you a Merry Christmas.” We haven’t spoken since.

The thing is, I like my new studio in Orville, and the job at the drugstore is okay. I only stock supplies and man the cash register, and hope oddball customers don’t bother me. Like the guy who bought the condoms…or Mike, who imposed himself on me.

And outside it’s a winter wonderland. I should feel happy, right? I ought to buy a miniature Christmas tree with which to decorate my apartment. …I’m trying to overlook slights from the past — small things that shouldn’t matter. But I don’t feel so young anymore. I just wish Lewis had apologized.

Martha Patterson's 27-story collection Small Acts of Magic was published by Finishing Line Press in 2021, and her poetry collection Luna at Dawn — 23 poems — was published by Bottlecap Press in 2025. Her work has also been published in more than 35 anthologies and journals, and her plays have been produced in 21 states and eight countries. She has two degrees in Theatre, from Mount Holyoke College and Emerson College, and lives in Boston, Massachusetts. She loves being surrounded by her books, radio, and laptop.

We continue with our tales of failure.

-ROL

AN ORACLE

I hear that college students are busy interrogating gender and dismantling white supremacy, but the school where I teach is behind the times, so each semester I’m assigned Western Civilization or Introduction to Philosophy instead. Adjuncting is a miserable business but at least I’m transmitting timeless wisdom, like what happens when you disrespect magic instructions. God says, see that specific tree? Don’t even try it. The blind priest tells Oedipus, please my guy, stop with the questions. The soothsayer tells Julius Caesar, mark your calendar. Luckily for my syllabus, no one heeds the warnings. We love watching other people get it all wrong.

Advanced literary analysis in my classroom means working out what every jackass we encounter ought to have done instead. The problem with Caesar, for example, is that he didn’t heed Calphurnia’s warning, as one of my older students is eager to explain. “His wife dreams that he’s a statue running with blood,” says Peter. “She knows. She begs him. On her knees she says, do not go out. If Julius listens, he lives. But no, he has to be the big man. You see? William is telling us, listen to your wife, because a woman will know.”

I like Peter’s sentiments too much to remind him about Eve. In fact, it’s so reassuring to think that the right path is available upon request that my students are inclined to invent warnings that never happened. “Noah tried to tell them—repent, repent, the flood is coming!” announces Jessica, who may have spent time in church but is a little behind on her Genesis reading. I explain that the text does not report Noah’s being nearly so community-minded. Perhaps he was too busy with his construction project? My students don’t agree, and suspect I’ve got hold of the wrong Bible somehow. Their moral intuition is that you ought to get a fair shot to do the right thing, so if you don’t, no one has to feel bad about what happens next.

But according to the latest clever philosophers, no one could have ever done anything else. Embedded in our present circumstances and being unfortunately exactly who we are, we were never capable of making different choices. “It’s not fate,” I explain to my philosophy class. “It’s determinism.” Which, coincidentally, is also how I console myself for not having gotten a better job years ago.

My students politely tolerate the argument against free will and don’t believe a word of it. Later in the course, they are bemused by moral philosophy cliffhangers, and do their best to improve on them. Kant’s man in need of money—did he ever ask for that dishonest “loan,” or did his wife have a dream about the categorical imperative? As for the trolley, don’t leave us hanging—did it run over those hapless track workers, or not? My students are ready to supply whatever supernatural guidance may be missing. Adenna says, “My opinion? If I’m at the switch, God put me there for a reason. He will give me the strength to pull. I save five people, I am a hero! But I give the glory to God.”

As far as I can tell from teaching Dante’s Inferno, though, God actually has more fun if we make the wrong choices. What’s Hell for, if not to allow the Almighty an eternal I told you so? Maybe divine hints exist to be ignored, so that something more interesting will happen. Outside of books, we are eager to identify the right portents (having to do with one’s status as a Capricorn, perhaps, or the data on carbon emissions) and pay appropriate attention. One looks back on life, and catalogs the omens missed that produced the current catastrophe. When did Brutus look at me funny? When ought I to have pursued a different line of work?

Certainly there were signs I should have been doing things differently: poor online reviews, classes cancelled unexpectedly, low status, insufficient paychecks. But it’s hard, in life, to tell the reliable oracles from the false prophets, especially without a wife to help sort them out. Once I made a fatal choice or three, teaching became the thing I was already doing. Then, like a Dantean sinner replaying her sin, it felt impossible to stop. So feel free to read this essay with Aristotelian pity and fear. Of course you’re stuck grading papers, you can say in delighted horror. That’s what you get for going to grad school.

Miriam Fried’s writing has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Vita Poetica, Scoundrel Time, Alaska Quarterly Review, Crab Creek Review, Ambit, and The Baltimore Review, among others. Her essay “Losers Keepers,” published in The Rumpus, was selected as a Longreads Editors’ Pick.

Painting, “The Assassination of Caesar,” by Heinrich Friedrich Füger.

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It’s Failure Week at The Republic of Letters! Chinmay Khare leads off our contest on tales of miserable, unremitting failure.

Unrelatedly, ROL editor-in-chief will be appearing on the salon “The American Literary World of Today” this Saturday at 12pm EST in conversation with the polymathic and discussing the philosophy behind The Republic of Letters. Tickets/RSVP here!

-ROL

HOW I BECAME AN ABJECT FAILURE

It began with the ride in the elevator. I recall that day much better than the so-called big moments in my life: birthdays, graduations, and even the day I signed my lease. The lift was outdated, growling with every descent. It reflected my image in its metal doors: a shabby suit, an optimistic stance, the expression of a man who was yet trying on success. I was twenty-six years old and was recently promoted as Project Lead. The plastic badge on my shirt was all that was required of me —more meetings and a little extra cash and I was anticipated to drive outcomes. It felt like oxygen. That day I had stepped in the glass doors with the belief that I had achieved it, that I was turning into the person I was, the one I had always wanted to be.

The undertaking which would ruin me came like a blessing. It was named Helix, smooth type, decked out, unrealistic aspiration. The slogan was the following: Reimagining Data Infrastructure in the Next Decade. It was the kind of empty ideological rubbish that drives investors into a frenzy.

During the initial stages, I was pleased to be participating in the meetings. The senior VP said, ‘we will break the ecosystem,’ and everybody nodded their heads implying they knew what ecosystem we were in. I nodded too. I was taught at an early age that passion was more important than understanding.

I did not volunteer at Helix; I threw myself at it. My itchy hand rose up when they looked for someone to be hungry and malleable. It was instinct, ambition in disguise of valour.

The early days were euphoric. I survived on caffeine and adrenaline. I would arrive at home late at night, my clothes all messy, and my laptop still shining in my bag, but the frantic beating of my heart made me feel important. The odor of my apartment was grounded in burnt coffee and printer ink since I had begun working on weekends at home. Friends ceased to ask me out. I stopped noticing. I said to myself: I was making something, but I did not know what.

It was after two months that I realized the presence of the cracks.

The initial indication was made by Tariq, who was among the senior engineers, the only one to dare tell the truth to me. As he apologized about how he killed us by arriving late at work, he dragged me into his cubicle where he was staring at me, his eyes swarming because of sleep deprivation, and said, “The model does not scale. When we stretch it, we are going to tear.”

I nodded slightly and half-wrote an email in my mind.

“We’ll fix it later,” I said. “Just keep moving.”

He looked at me a full second and walked away. This was that look of disappointment and inevitability, and I still see it from time to time.

We didn’t fix it later. We didn’t fix anything. New mistakes were wallpaper on a mistake.

People stopped having fun in meetings. Deadlines were missed and no one noticed them. The smell of anxiety, old carpet, and the citrus hand sanitizer that everyone used compulsively were present in the office that summer.

The day had come and everything came apart.

It was late Thursday on an afternoon when office light is sickly and flat. I was on a half-cup of vending-machine coffee, my phone buzzing nonstop. Client messages, tech team, VP messages were all titled urgent: corrupt data, system failure.

There was no yelling in the conference room, only silence was present, a hum. All looked at screens, faces worn-out, as we understood what has gone on: months of client data has been lost during the migration. Backups were incomplete. Millions of dollars were gone as air.

As they inquired as to whoever had signed the schedule, the whole matter was directed to me.

I didn’t feel anger. I experienced a heat, a flushing which began at the back of my neck and spread down my arms. I was a long way away when I said I did.

No one said anything cruel. The silence was efficient.

They never laid me off, a thing which, after all, would have been kind. Rather, they retained me, relegated me in silence. My projects were reassigned. My emails met polite delays. I would still use my badge but not be there meaningfully anymore.

I began to arrive late and leave early. My office was turned into a tomb, piles of misplaced papers, old fashioned computer cups, a plant that was desperately unwell and I kept pouring water over it to keep it alive. By the time that I managed to quit three months later, no one even bothered to inquire why.

It was a long time before I was able to see the failure as part of a long-chaptered sickness. I woke up at 3 am and my heart was racing revisiting all the choices — all our decisions — that we would ‘fix later.’ I began to hear this term in everyday situations: at the intersection of roads, in supermarket aisles, during a lull in between text messaging.

People love redemption arcs. They desire that the failure should not be nothing, that it be pivotal, represent a moral, a sweet upsurge. But that was not the case. The reality is more monotonous and lonelier. Certain failures do not make you; they merely call you.

I did not fail unconsciously, but deliberately — because I knew better and disregarded it. Failure of that kind is the worst. The one that you see approaching and still hurry towards even more because you want so badly not to lose your impetus.

And occasionally when I pass an office at night, I will see the lights on and a lone figure bent over some glowing screen, I will think, ‘there I am.’ I am still trying to get approval, still confusing the movement with the meaning, still finding out too late how easy it is to mess up something because you tried to make it seem that it should perfectly work the way it is.

The following morning, I got up at 10.37 a.m. after quitting. The alarm, the calendar ping were absent. The light of the sun cut thin harsh strokes through the blinds and hit the unmade bed and the empty glass on the night-stand. I stayed for a long time trying to describe what I felt. It wasn’t relief. It wasn’t even grief. It was dead — not dead, but dull, the murmur of nothing going on.

It is not being free when you get depersonalized and depersonalize overnight. It is as though one is no more connected to gravity.

For a few weeks I made pretence that I was simply on leave. I was so obsessively cleaning the apartment. So, I made fancy meals for nobody. I put my books in alphabetical order, now in color and then by mood — any way to escape the reality of having based my whole value on a job that was silently erasing me.

Emails stopped coming. Then the texts slowed. My phone which was a heartbeat before turned into a heartbeat that was an object that was not moving anymore. I would power it up every now and then to check whether the screen was still functional.

One day as I was walking one afternoon (as is my habit) I found myself heading towards the old office building. I said to myself that I was passing by, and feet were feet. I was on the other side of the street, and as I stood I saw the glass doors flying open and shut, and saw people walking in and out, with their sharp, short-heeled clothes and their great haste — people in the story I had lost. I didn’t go in. I stood and gazed a moment, then went home in a drizzle that seemed perfectly stage managed.

Days turned into weeks. I began to submit applications to new places with limited desire to get them. All the applications were like acting out a role that is no longer there. One of the forms required one to describe a moment when he or she overcame a challenge. Twenty minutes were spent gazing at the blinking cursor before I typed, ‘I didn’t.’ Then I deleted it.

As everyone knows, failure has got its own sort of silence, it is not voluble, not melodramatic. The silence is there where your own certitude is gone. I attempted to cram it with books, walks, playing late night movies, and with people I did not really like but could not do without. However, whatever I said, the quietness was long-suffering and tolerant.

Then one morning a few months later I received a call by Tariq the engineer who had warned me. I had not heard back with him since the burst. Simple as that, ‘Coffee,’ he asked.

We both sat down in a little cafe where we smelled of roasted beans. He was less young, weary, yet not emaciated. We chatted a while, about naught. New projects, weather, traffic. And a few minutes before the end he told me, ‘you know, you are not the only one who observed it coming. You were merely the only one who thought we could get away with it.’

I have had that sentence in my head for weeks. Neither was it forgiveness as such, but it was recognition, a slight concession to cease punishing myself.

After this, I began working as a freelancer. Small, unglamorous projects. No mottos of reimagining or disrupting. Nothing but honest toil, quiet and slow. There were other occasions where, when a client requested something that was not achievable, I found myself almost ready to say, ‘we will fix it later,’ and I stopped. Instead, I would roll out a sigh and shake my head and tell the truth. Every time it was a little redemption.

Failure didn’t make me wiser. It just made me real. It poked the pompousness right out of me, leaving something more sensible, less poetic, more mundane in its place — the one who realizes that the art of being good at something does not involve the art of being right.

Every once in a while, I do remember Helix — the pyrotechnic nightmare of a project. Part of what I did may still exist somewhere on a neglected server, lines of code, documents bearing my name in the corner, some semblance of ambition trapped in the computer amber.

The failure is not exactly something to regret. Remorse is a bruise that you keep pressing to make you remember that you are healing.

I would say, even, that I miss the fact that it took me so long to realize that being a failure is not the opposite of becoming, but an aspect of it. You make a fall, you break open, and what does not survive was never intended to.

And perhaps that is what is left, not victory or redemption, simply bewilderment. A silent life made of lessons. A desk by a window. A cup of coffee on the side of a half-complete project. No grand visions this time. No shiny promises. The mere dull, half-staggering merits of starting all over, and signing it.

Chinmay Khare is a dedicated economist and researcher currently pursuing his doctoral studies. He enjoys reading and expressing his thoughts on a wide range of topics across various genres and writing formats. Always eager to learn, he seeks to explore new avenues and expand his skills in both fiction and non-fiction writing.

Image by Lars Tunbjörk

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We round out our contest winners for the Enthusiasm prompt (we may run additional pieces later on) with ’ demonstration that, whatever else we may be in despair over, the arc of history does indeed bend towards better game design.

-ROL

BOARD GAMES ARE IN A GOLDEN AGE!

There is a wooden shelf in a wood-paneled room older than every living person. A fishbowl-shaped light fixture hangs from a Gothic stem, supplying dim orange light. The height of a grandfather clock lurks at a murky hall’s end. You see a crusty tan futon some cat probably died on, a desk stacked with cigar boxes, and you smell a stale musk in the air. Welcome to Grandma’s basement! Come, see what’s on these shelves:

There is Trivial Pursuit on top of Scruples on top of Life on top of Clue on top of some brown thing called “Clever Endeavor.” The other shelf contains jigsaw puzzles. On top of them is the overturned corpse of a house spider, its legs crisp and brittle as a ring of dried sauce around a bottle’s mouth. No one’s touched these things in years.

The novel Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett has a quip about a copy of Queen’s Greatest Hits showing up in every car even though no one remembers ever buying it. I think this stack of “classic” games, with their faded Milton Bradley logos aligned, is of similar provenance. What kind of scumbag would buy Scruples? Don’t they know how dangerous that is? Someone who’s not careful might take it out and play it!

Now, I almost understand buying Monopoly. It’s a worthy rite of passage, for its gameplay is society in miniature: it’s all interconnected, frustrating, corrupt, and no one can fully explain how it works.

But Trivial Pursuit is instantly dated. Clue suffers from unbalanced gameplay; likewise Risk and Axis & Allies, which you’ve also long disowned for philosophical reasons which you have forgotten. Life, Trouble, Sorry… those words together don’t bode well, and they don’t conjure great memories either: you remember being a kid and realizing “board” sounded like “bored,” and that solidified your annoyance into a talking point, and you realized Chutes & Ladders and Hi-Ho Cherry-O denied human free will, and it was indoor recess, and life was miserable. That’s what board games were all about.

Then, in January 2015, it was announced that the Green Bay Packers’ offensive line and several other players were “completely addicted” to the board game Catan. I know people who heard about Catan for the first time from that story, which surprised me; Catan was a mainstay in my family for over a decade by then. My dad had a friend living in Germany who brought back a copy. He played it for the first time in German. (Luckily it’s not a text-heavy game.) This was the late nineties, I think. Catan was big over there. It won a board game design award called the Spiel des Jahres. Countless imitators soon followed and the “eurogame” genre was born, but I had no idea. I was a little kid. Carcassonne and Catan and Ticket to Ride had maps and wooden pieces and bright colors and an appealing chessy elegance. I didn’t know those games were much newer than Clue and Risk and Monopoly. I just knew they were better.

When I play a game like Monopoly today I find it grossly imbalanced. This experience is common, and only becoming more so; read a few reviews of it or of Risk on BoardGameGeek sometime to find legions of millennials and zoomers wondering “did they even play test this thing? The mechanics are totally broken!” Someone will bring up hotels being strategically anathema; the nerds have run their calculations and declared hotels unworthy, so now players in the know avoid them and a core game mechanic sits abandoned, like the mid-range jumper, like the sacrifice bunt.

I sense, in hindsight, a Moneyball-style revolution in game design efficiency. Play-testing got more rigorous. Layers of complexity were added to preserve balance in some games (nerdy adults, the target audience, will gladly handle an extra set of dice or pieces). Still, in “eurogames,” in true German design tradition, elegance remained key. Take Catan’s robber: it’s a catchup mechanism that can be explained in ten seconds and remembered forever. Roll a seven, move the robber, block a spot, steal a card. Seven, like craps.

Parks is a brilliant game from 2019 that I play with my college friends and recently taught to my other grandparents. Its board is linear; about a dozen randomized spaces. Pieces (little wooden hikers) move forward, never backward, like pawns. Move too slow, you’ll get left behind and miss goodies. Too fast, the other players will mop up goodies after you. Every mechanic is perfectly balanced. There’s a camera for taking pictures and canteens and gear, and the goal is to visit beautiful national parks. Did I mention that many of the best new games sport pastoral themes while slyly acknowledging that they will be fiercely competitive in practice? They are not shy about trying to be art.

And it’s not just strategy games. Most new party games, I’ve found (e.g. Wavelength, Snake Oil, Articulate!), run circles around the old ones. To me this hints at a virtuous cycle of prestige, perhaps initiated by those newly-unified ‘90s Germans who, in deciding to start handing out game design awards, may have accidentally sparked a golden age. (If anyone reading this has an inside industry scoop, please comment!)

It’s dangerously easy, of course, to assume newer things are always better. This belief is called “Whig history,” and it will get you yelled at on Twitter. But games are, I think, one of the strongest cases of clear and dramatic improvement in a near-universal part of the human experience.

King Tut was buried with some of his favorite board games, which we still have a good idea of how to play today. Medieval India gave us the greatest strategy game of all time. Enlightenment-era card games like cribbage augmented deep strategy with addictive doses of luck. Those are the Bible and Homer of games, and still many people’s favorites, but if you poll a few avid board game players on their personal Mt. Rushmore, the past few decades will dominate. (The consensus favorite board game among my friends and family would be Catan, first published in 1995; and the consensus favorite card game among the same would be Wizard, first published in 1986.)

My grandma is a soft-spoken Midwestern widow who has been retired for many years. She likes to read and bake. I used to see her on holidays and, other than that, didn’t see or speak with her all that often. My brother and I used to say sometimes, half-jokingly: “What does Grandma do all day?”

And she had Trivial Pursuit, Scruples, Life, Clue, and some brown thing called Clever Endeavor on a shelf in her rarely-seen basement.

I forget who came up with the idea of a Tuesday game night. We’d usually have five or six people available since my aunt and cousins live in the area. We could take turns bringing games of our choice. We could bring food and wine from time to time. It was something to do.

Two years later, fifty-eight different games have now been played by our group. Almost all are new — designed in 1990 or later. Clever Endeavor wasn’t awful, but lacked replay value. It’s no Codenames, or Chameleon, or Carcassonne. Or Telestrations After Dark. Or Fluxx. It’s certainly no Catan. And great new ones debut every few weeks! You can follow game publishers like record labels to discover fresh releases.

I first met my cousin’s fiancé, now my friend, at Game Night. Most of us did. Like most men, I’m bad at making friends, so this is a big win. One more friend group, one more fantasy football league… and not an uncommon story! Dungeons & Dragons is a world-class social glue. Magic: The Gathering is still huge in game stores I walk into. I saw people make friends playing Yu-Gi-Oh in the band room during lunch hour in high school. These kinds of games were unheard of when my Grandma was my age — though I bet I could’ve taught a bunch of kids in the ‘60s to play them just as easily. There’s nothing preventing their minds from grasping such a thing. It’s just chronological injustice. I bet if I brought Catan or Dominion onto the Titanic I’d make at least a dozen new acquaintances before the ship began to sink.

It’s not always easy to appreciate bright spots in our modern malaise. Techno-optimism was common when I was a kid, but today it is like Scientology — a fringe luxury belief scarcely seen outside California. When I read RoL’s essay contest prompt, I took it as a challenge: in what areas have I seen clear, uncontroversial improvement within my own lifetime? Sports are in HD, but that means all the schlocky DraftKings logos are in HD too. Music discovery is easier than ever, but at the expense of aspiring musicians who Spotify is ripping off and crowding out with AI slop. All tech breakthroughs have downsides!

Okay, I asked myself — so what about non-tech improvements?

And then I remembered where I was driving on this Tuesday night.

is a Ned Flanders-like entity who lives in the Upper Midwest and posts occasionally on Substack at The Ark of History.

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In this dark, difficult time, what can there possibly be to be Enthusiastic about? How about the street cats of New Orleans?

-ROL

ODE TO THE CATS OF NEW ORLEANS

I met at least one new cat every day in New Orleans. All of them were beautiful and insane. This was October, the humidity recently broken, as locals informed me, and the cats I mention were all streets cats, not indoor cats. Indoor cats tend to madness, which I associate with confinement. Outdoor cats have adapted to the reigning insanity, which is madness liberated, or perhaps they’ve brought it with them and spread it around. Several of these street cats screamed at me, likely for food, definitely for attention. One of them sat humped on top of a mound of dirt next to a tree, in serene and enlightened satisfaction, centered perfectly on a dried-up palm frond that had fallen or was placed there. She looked like an offering. Since I love cats and believe they have an alien but divine nature and are, above all, not to be trifled with, I complied on every occasion when I was begged for attention. I offered it when it wasn’t wanted, too.

At a party in a well-appointed carport in Uptown, a small white and orange cat appeared out of the dark down the driveway. He maniacally rubbed himself against the planters, the fence, and the driveway itself, sensuous about textures and his own scent. Shy of being touched, he clearly wanted attention, food, whatever chance he’d be afforded. He was intrigued but slightly intimidated, like any partygoer.

The host of the party frankly declared she wanted this cat to die, along with the seven other cats that all live together, she said, under the neighbor’s house, being dirty as hell and running all over the place shrieking and committing, I assume, acts of hysterical evil. Not entirely my words, but for all I know true. I read with sympathy a couple years ago Jonathan Franzen’s persuasive account of the ruin outdoor cats bring to those places where they form dense, predatory, and disease-ridden colonies, e.g. Los Angeles. A non-native species invading an ecology in which they have no niche, Felis catus in North America threatens other animals, particularly native birds, and is in turn threatened by its fellow creatures. These murderers of birds are sometimes murdered by raccoons or miserably hurt by each other.

The white and orange cat in the carport emitted tiny meows that pulled me from the crowd. I crouched and held out my hand. Cats, like gods, like for you to lower yourself. After a few tentative scratches on his head, the cat began to rub against my leg and soon, in repayment for my bowing to him, he scraped his head violently on my shoes. If the ashen streak on my foot hadn’t told me already, I would have known from my hands: This cat was absurdly filthy. It could have been dirt, urine, and chicken fat, for all I know. When I went inside to wash my hands, I saw a comically large cockroach scuttling under the porch light, and the cat ran away.

The infernal roach made me reconsider the cats of New Orleans. What if they’re alien vermin? I imagined myself petting not cats on the street but creatures I’d never willingly touch: squirrels, raccoons, and the two bunnies in my neighborhood back home that have sprouted horn-like warts from their heads. Rats scamper from sewer grates to my outstretched hand. I imagined petting the flea-infested coyotes we’d see at my friend’s farm growing up. I imagined petting irritable geese, with their vicious secret teeth.

A journalist once went to interview the writer and environmental advocate Edward Abbey. Abbey drove the journalist down a desert road to look at some randomly selected marvel of the natural world, probably a butte or a gulch. Maybe even a wash. As he drove, Abbey drank. When he finished a can of beer, Abbey tossed the empty out the window of the moving car, much to the journalist’s surprise. Startled that an avowed defender of natural spaces in the American West would litter like this, the journalist asked for an explanation. Abbey said he littered the public highways whenever he could; it’s not the beer cans that are a travesty, he said, it’s the highway.

Something appeals to me about Abbey’s unreasonable and impious attitude. He’s supposed to, what, keep a forever dirty thing clean? We’re here, after all. The place is already unredeemed. The cats are dirty and numerous. I think of this when I think of Franzen. The great and wonderful act of rationalism that whisks the detrimental outdoor cat off our streets strikes me as wishful, even unsuitable for the gratuitous existence of all creatures great and small. Consider the black cat with a nice collar that strode confidently through a crowded bar where I sat with people I had just met. Maybe the cat lived there, lapping up spills and killing mice. Its slinking looked professional. For all I know outdoor cats truly are a chaos that cries out to be undone. I can believe it. But the tumult of life, the noisy alarm of the creatures here on earth—that you see and that you are—strangely thrills me. Their sheer gratuitous presence thrills me. Their accidental or incidental design and the bizarre fact that they live in one place and not another, this thrills me. The idea of an “invasive species” seems accurate to a degree but also an alibi to deny the uncontrolled spread of everything.

Something lives here on this planet, defiantly. It roves, sometimes on its own two or four feet, sometimes through trickery, like being cute or a useful predator. It’s us; it’s everything. If I knew why I loved cats so much, it wouldn’t be love.

All this is not to say that I’m an enemy of whatever responsible thing ought to be done about the dirty murder cats. Caring for animals requires us to address difficult questions of life and death. Certainly neither cats nor birds should suffer. But there’s the great and unpromising glory of life. It takes over. It’s dirty, and it will rule you and all your controls. It will make you happy.

My final night in New Orleans, I saw another black cat. He was enormous and, on top of his enormousness, overweight. He met me coming home to the place I was renting, or, to be more accurate, I interrupted him in the middle of vomiting on the sidewalk. Still, he was quite happy to see me. He asked for and received head scratches, then stood leaning with his full weight against my legs, like a barge at anchor. Same as the white and orange cat, he was dirty, a street cat through and through, though clearly well fed. Not a scrounger, he scrounged anyway. The greed of a friendly cat for your time always charms me. I did the only thing I could think to do and named him, just for a moment, thinking of all the names these cats must get, from people like me. You have to name a cat. It’s like crossing yourself before you sit down in church. “Herman,” I said, “goodnight.” Herman’s just one of the cats of New Orleans.

’s stories and essays have appeared in places like Barrelhouse, Missouri Review, and Florida Review, as well as The Hinternet and Full Stop. He also writes the Substack newsletter . Find him online at mh-rowe.com.

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When we launched our Enthusiasm prompt, we kind of thought people might write about, like, Mamdani or the beauty of the autumn leaves changing, but these are dark times and The Republic of Letters is a dark humor-ish kind of publication, and it turns out that the kinds of things people actually have enthusiasm about are discovering the joys of deli store-style gummy candies while dealing with the hospitalization of one’s mother, as in ’s beautiful, heartbreaking piece, one of the winners of our Enthusiasm contest.

-ROL

WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU LEMONS, EAT LOTS OF DISGUSTING LITTLE GUMMY CANDIES

I am not entirely sure when the obsession began. I can’t remember if I bought the first bag myself or if it came as part of a care package. All I know is that at some point after my parents’ car accident, I became slightly fanatical about gummies. Not the fun kind. Just the pedestrian ones sold in checkout aisles. Sour Patches, Watermelon Slices, Real Fruit, cola bottles, gummy bears or fish — I didn’t really discriminate. Sweet or sour, heck, I’d even indulged in Chili Milis — the hot pepper-shaped gummies with a dash of spice (yes, South Asians add zing to everything).

The gummies came in all shapes, colors and sizes. Some were harder and chewier. Others had the tactile delight of a marshmallow. If held up to sunlight, you may as well be looking at rare gems. Rubies, emeralds, amethysts, citrines. Pop them whole into your mouth for an explosion of almost-fruit flavor or relish them by tenderly biting off each limb (in the case of bears). Of all the varieties, my favourite were the worms. I totally get what being a bird is all about.

It was December last year. The skies were slate and the ground was iced. A car accident had ended my father’s life and critically injured my mother. She was now in a coma in Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital. Office buildings in downtown Toronto were lit up with Christmas merriness. Tiny windows gleamed with tiny Christmas trees at night. But for those sitting by their loved ones in the 9^th floor trauma ICU, the days were long and as slate as the skies.

A friend who had lived through considerable personal loss had given me a piece of advice early on: find a moment of joy each day. It could be a really good cup of coffee. Or a piece of chocolate. Or a good conversation with a stranger. Or your favorite show at the end of the day. Cultivate a tiny moment of delight every single day or grief will swallow you whole. And never feel ashamed about harvesting this joy because you earned every bit of it. So I began mentally logging these glimmers.

Every morning, I bought a good, strong cup of coffee from a new coffee place each day. Some days, I sat in the park across the hospital and watched throngs of pigeons flutter around. One day, I took a gorgeous shot of steam rising from vents, lit up like a ghost by the winter sun. Another day, it was the gingerbread cookies handed out by a patient’s family in the ICU. Most days it was the homemade meals delivered by friends and family that I relished after a long day at the hospital. And on days when my mother was deteriorating or struggling immensely, and cultivating joy felt like carving a mountain, I had the gummies.

I always kept a bag in my jacket pocket. Having a critically ill or injured loved one has a similar impact on your body as an extreme adventure sport. The highs and lows of ever-changing situations — brain bleed in the morning, liquid in lungs in the evening, positive neurological tests tomorrow, not-so-positive blood work the day after — wreck your physical and emotional health. I developed some kind of emotional dependence on gummies — a security-blanket of sorts. It was as if, as long as I had a pocket of artificially flavored joy in my pocket, I could throw myself a line out of whatever calamity I was drowning in that day. While today I can see the thin line of insanity in throwing back a couple of Fuzzy Peaches like anti-anxiety medication after watching my mother go through a particularly tortuous procedure, at the time it felt perfectly normal.

My enthusiasm for gummies was contagious. Soon family members were buying their own stashes. The result was that as a family, we were now sitting on a sizable investment in gummies that we could readily pass onto future generations as inheritance. Gummies were in my pockets, in my pantry, in bedside drawers and eventually I began squirreling some away in my mother’s closet in the rehabilitation facility where she would spend months recovering.

At some point, conscious of the presumably constant gelatinous state of my intestines, filled with ingredients I could not pronounce, I decided to learn how to make healthier versions at home. After investing in molds and experimenting with natural fruit juices and endeavoring to juice ginger root (yes, I went that far on the wellness spectrum), several ill-fated attempts at floppy-headed bears dissolved my resolve. I decided I couldn’t compromise on the one consistent joy in my life and that to die from complications of eating too many gummy worms was still, probably, a very good way to exit stage left.

A year on, I still haven’t made sense of the gummy-addiction. Perhaps when the world around you shatters, the tiny harmless joys of childhood become a comfort and a reminder that life is still good or can be good again. Perhaps gummies were my drug of choice because my father and I, both owning a sweet tooth, were fond of sharing desserts. When I was a child, his way of showing love (much to my mother’s dismay) was to buy me éclairs from a local bakery. Even now that I am a full-fledged adult, he always showed up with a box of gulab jamuns every visit. It would make sense that the acrid void that had opened in me after his passing, the hole that threatened to inhale me if I looked inwards could only be filled by the viscosity of something sweet. All I know is that there could have been more destructive ways to cope with the staggering loss. Even though gummies have likely had a detrimental effect on my life expectancy (I am assuming, I haven’t researched this), I learned that small joys can be an antidote to big heartaches.

In a world that seems to be falling apart a bit more every day, to consciously cultivate joy is an act of rebellion. It is a way to say: I am human and I have a need for light when darkness swells. It is a way to uphold a basic human yearning — the same joy that emanates from songbirds and in the play of dolphins. It is the reason why weddings still take place in war zones. In not losing sight of joy, in finding it, framing it or farming it, we inject it into our combined consciousness. It begins to show up in our interactions with each other, in how we try to mend what’s broken in the world and in us, and how we get through times that should otherwise crumble us.

is an emerging writer and poet from Ottawa, Canada. Her writing has appeared in Rattle and Thimble and is forthcoming in others.

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We have kind of a rolling series on whether money makes you a better or worse person — or what money does to you exactly. In case you’re feeling insecure about your bank balance, Kit Noussis is here to helpfully remind us that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

-ROL

MO’ MONEY MO’ PROBLEMS

Andrew Wilkinson is a demi-billionaire who hangs out with multi-billionaires. According to him, ‘most successful people are a walking anxiety disorder.’ They are people who have harnessed their neuroses towards accumulation. I like this maxim because it makes me feel better about being unsuccessful, even though, logically speaking, it does not imply that being a loser makes you well-adjusted. For my part, my scars and ghosts have made it difficult for me to hold down a job. Often, I wish I could swap them for the type of mental problems that would make me hustle and grind like mad. Yet there is one aspect of crazy rich people that I don’t envy. To paraphrase Marx, the wealthy have a lot more to lose than their chains. The stacks of cash they have riding the markets give them a massive material incentive to keep those markets healthy. If preventing climate change or containing a deadly virus would require letting the stock market fall off a cliff, then you will have a dilemma. Their personal incentives have diverged from the best interests of humanity, and we should pity them for the devilish temptations they fall for.

Recently, The New York Times ran an ethics column prompted by a disaster prepper who asked, “do I have to share what’s in my shelter with people who didn’t bother to buy one?” Kwame Anthony Appiah cites an apt fable from Aesop: The ant stores grain for the winter while the grasshopper only sings his hours away. Come winter, the grasshopper begs from the ant, who says “dance for me.” The moral is to always try to be the guy with the granary and not the layabout without one. In his column, Appiah sort of dodges the question and recommends the prepper pursue a political solution on his small island to make sure all his neighbors are insured against disaster, preventing beggars in the first place. But does a person who is seeking advance absolution for hoarding seem like the type to become a community organizer? Appiah adds that if the federal government can be persuaded to perform their obligations and create backup plans, “then the odd grasshopper truly in need won’t starve, and the ants won’t have to choose between compassion and survival.” It’s a neat answer that balances respect for individual autonomy with the wisdom of public insurance. But did The New York Times review any of their recent articles about how FEMA is doing before publishing this advice? I worry that there will be more than a few odd grasshoppers swept away if we are hit with another Hurricane Katrina. When you read the ethics column side-by-side with the ones about gutting FEMA, you start to worry if you are ant enough for this cruel world; better get to work.

Everyone knows how money soothes anxiety. Still, people, especially wealthy people, used to say “money won’t solve all your problems” or “mo’ money mo’ problems,” which are true in a banal way. Later I recall people rebutting “you’re wrong—money would solve literally all of my problems.” Onerous medical bills, student debts, childcare expenses, grocery prices: these are the things ordinary people in rich countries face as daily challenges, and of course, enough money will easily dissolve them. Yet the fundamental sources of anxiety for human beings will remain untouched no matter how rich one gets. Aesop has fables that seem to have the opposite moral of The Ant and The Grasshopper, like the miserly man whose orchard is ransacked by monkeys. It’s been common sense since ancient times that wealth is overrated.

Roberto M. Unger defines the essential sorrows of human beings as death, groundlessness, instability, and belittlement. Money can treat the symptoms here, but not the diseases. Death is simply human mortality; groundlessness is the futility of finding ultimate answers; instability is our helplessness against the wheel of fortune; and belittlement is the gap that opens in every person’s life between who they are and who they could be. These four big baddies are the facts that every religion contends with, and they all come up with different solutions. Some will say there is reincarnation, or that Truth flows only from God, and so on. Harold Bloom said that the American religion was ‘freedom from other selves,’ and if such a religion has a god, it is surely Money. What else could be the meaning of the aspirational phrase ‘fuck-you money?’ It’s the dream of having enough cash to say no to your boss, your neighbors and even the government. [Apropos of nothing, I need to get something off my chest: I’ve never seen Citizen Kane. Does it have a happy ending?]1

Once a person is materially secure enough to stop worrying about their next meal or the cost of a doctor’s note, he is free to start fattening up for the dreaded winter and worrying about these deeper issues. Some of the world’s wealthiest people are earnestly convinced they will be able to technologically conquer death, either through miraculous medical breakthroughs or by uploading our souls onto computer chips. They would be better off if they immediately gave up on their quixotic dreams and faced the truth—but they won’t. Ordinary people have an easier time facing the facts because they know that they have zero influence on medical science and space travel. That wisdom is a consolation prize for us plebes. Yet some people continue to identify with the uber-wealthy and their values, especially in the USA. The pick-me’s are forfeiting the bullshit-detector that a life of humble struggles is supposed to grant you, convinced that they are only temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

Unger says that some religions compromise with the four baddies by promising juicy consolations: you will die, but you will be a part of the heroic generation that secured the glorious future of humanity, for example. In addition to infinitely stacking cash, that’s what Elon Musk is doing when he tries to get us to Mars, and what Sam Altman is doing when he tries to usher in the Singularity. Fantasies of that scale are only for billionaires, but there is a run-of-the-mill version of this idea in every philanthropist.

Upper middle-class people have smaller fortunes and smaller fantasies, but I pity them the same. I encourage the uninitiated to look at /r/FIRE and /r/personalfinance, two major subreddits devoted to financial planning. There you will find some of the most secure demographics in the world, people with six-figure salaries, paid-off homes, and millions of dollars in the bank. Even comparing them only to other US citizens, these people have the best safety nets, but one can still read a plaintive, insecure tone in their posts. You are the most secure people on the planet, and you are still making posts fishing for reassurances that it’s enough! It will never be enough.

Of course, I can’t dispute the subreddits that espouse financial wisdom on their own terms. Indeed, it would be better for everyone, individually speaking, if they made more money, saved more money, and secured pretty nest-eggs for retirement. Many working class people would be well-served by some of the advice there, although much of it applies only to people with big incomes and deep pockets. The freedom from care and crises that comes from being rich and retired is surely sweet. Yet what positive freedoms do you get? Who and what are you free to become once you have ‘succeeded’ in the rat race? There is one post there, a man who has retired early to a life of smoking weed and playing video games all day. He says “I’ve made enough money for my wife and I to live on our whole lives, so why is she calling me a loser still?”

Under this competitive definition of success, we can’t all be successful. People who fail to pack their own parachutes will face the consequences. Conservatives will say that a mooching grasshopper always gets what’s coming to him. But what good are the fat piles of the ant-men when true calamity arrives? In the worst recessions in history, like Germany in 1923, prices doubled every few days. Such a rate can shred any fortune overnight.

Call me blackpilled, but I don’t expect another five decades of peace and security are coming to us, even for the countries that have long felt themselves to be on impervious high ground, like my country of Canada. I want bonds in my life that can be relied on after the banks and the states have abandoned me. Some people say it is utopian to think that there ever could be social bonds stronger than that. Since I don’t have a big bank account or a place in the Canadian elite, I am motivated to believe in such utopian dreams. Comfy, secure, upper-middle class people can smugly dismiss me as a doe-eyed dreamer, because they have ‘grown up’ and become conservative.

JD Vance insists that the Bible teaches us to rank our commitments to others in an expanding circle: America and Family come first. The further you are from that core, the less important it is to be charitable to you. The Pope, bless him, disagrees. Yet we mustn’t let ourselves be crippled by grief for every single soul who is martyred somewhere on the other side of the planet. There need to be more third places, more groups that can accommodate people who are neither intimate friends nor total strangers. In practice, the internet complex militates against us having unmediated social experiences, but that’s a topic for another time.

The angels at the edge are not small, just far away

Alain Badiou says that one of the biggest barriers to the arrival of revolutionary courage in the world is what he calls the “mandatory and meticulous calculation of risk.” He cites the example of teachers:

Nothing is more striking in this regard than the fact that teaching, for example, is organized in such a way that the necessary prioritization of the calculation of professional security and its adjustment to the dispositions of the job market is increasingly important. And thus, in a certain way, it is very early taught that the figure of the risky decision must be revoked and suspended, to the profit of an evermore premature calculation of a security, which, moreover, proves itself uncertain in reality. Our world delivers life over to the meticulous and mandatory calculation of this doubtful security, and orders successive sequences of existence according to this calculation. But who doesn’t know that real happiness is incalculable?

The dentists and billionaires are tragically cursed with the narrow, venal incentives that prevent them from joining hands with their fellows and taking a chance at real happiness. It falls to us normies to do the brave things. Despite their reputation for being risk-taking job-creators, being a rich person makes you cowardly, and we should pity them for that. They simply have too much to lose to do the right thing when it counts. It does not follow that being humble gives you courage or makes you righteous, though. Sometimes, belittlement can warp you. Yet I want everyone else who feels downtrodden in this world to remember to feel a bit of pity for our bosses. They know not what they do. The nicest thing we can do for them would be to take their money away.

Kit Noussis is a Canadian malingerer who hides out in southern China. He graduated from now-defunct Quest University in Squamish B.C. His interests include translation, sonic environments, and the philosophy of mental illness.

We asked for “Vents” and thank you to those who vented. writes — with characteristic honesty — on one such vent-worthy experience.

-ROL

HOW MY BOOK COST ME A JOB

In April of 2023, I got my first and so far only book published, a memoir—ten years in the making. I’d been writing and trying to publish for over thirty years. Such is life if you’re a creative writer of literary work and not a genius or really lucky. I knew that getting my book published by a small press in Chicago, which did wonderful editorial work, but almost no publicity for their authors, still made me fortunate. Better writers than I, who have worked harder, have less to show for their talent and efforts. I knew to be grateful, but still had high hopes. I thought everybody would love my book.

I live in Seville, Spain, and My Half Orange: A Story of Love and Language in Seville recounts my adventures and misadventures as I tried to assimilate in my adoptive country and city, first while learning Spanish, then after marrying a local, and then as a stay-at-home dad, spending my days with my two Spanish-born, bilingual, and bi-cultural sons. The ten years between moving to Spain and finally putting my boys in school made up the most transformative period of my adult life, exposing me to myself, hence the memoir.

When a version of the book got published in Spain in 2014, the Spanish director of an American study abroad program told me that once the book got published in English, he’d have me build a course around it. At the time, I taught a travel writing course for him, offered through UNC Chapel Hill, and another on Sevillian culture, offered through the University of Toronto. After My Half Orange got published, I did as the director said and built a course around it. He approved it for that summer, four months after the book’s publication.

I sold twenty copies—no small thing for a small press book—to students of a one-credit summer course called SEVI 101, An Introduction to Sevillian Culture, with UNC as the academic provider. My students would be upper class science majors, who would read my book, discuss it, take some light quizzes on it, and join me on tours around the city. I’ve always loved teaching, but that summer I especially looked forward to it.

The first class went awkwardly. The students met my natural effusiveness with aloofness, even when I tried to draw them out. When that happens, it’s usually owing to one or two charismatic individuals who bristle against authority. Such rebels often turn out to be my favorites, so I wasn’t concerned. A few members of the class had yet to buy the book. I told them no problem, that I could get them a copy at the selling price and deliver it to the study center the next day. One student, who’d sat impassively throughout class while occasionally looking askance at anyone who showed enthusiasm, asked to borrow a copy, claiming that her copy had been lost with her luggage. Without hesitation, I agreed.

The next class took place in the Patio de Banderas, a gorgeous Sevillian plaza. The students had been assigned to read the first twenty-five pages. They sat on the curb under a row of orange trees, while I stood with a turreted wall behind me and the Cathedral rising impressively over it. Across the dusty expanse of the plaza beckoned la calle Judería, the tunnelled passageway that I would soon lead us through, into the old Jewish quarter, now the city’s quaint high-rent district.

Before we set off, I asked for their impressions of the reading.

Silence.

“C’mon, be honest,” I said, laughing. “I can take it.”

I’ll never forget what emerged from the mouth of a young lady who meekly raised her hand. She certainly didn’t speak meekly. The words “colonialist,” “chauvinist,” and “racist” still ring in my head.

I looked around. A couple of nods. No voices of dissent.

I let the strained silence stew in the summer heat before finally asking her and those who agreed with her to substantiate their claims. My accuser had come prepared, pointing to a passage in which I describe the first time I approached my future wife, at her office cubicle, after giving an English class to a group of her colleagues:

I headed for her department and walked boldly up to her desk.

“I hear you’re looking for a speaking partner in English,” I said.

She calmly looked up from her work. Seeing her big Berber eyes and straight dark hair, parted in the middle, I thought of Pocahontas (the Disney version), with me in the role of hunky Captain John Smith. She didn’t have to know what I was thinking to put me right in my place.

“Yes, someone with a British accent,” she said. “Do you know anyone?”

I could hear guffaws being suppressed in nearby cubicles.

“But I have an American accent,” I said, as though guilty of something.

“Estadounidense,” she said, correcting me.

Fair enough. In Spain, America did not only mean the United States.

I pressed on.

“Want to meet this weekend?”

She shook her head. “Maybe next weekend.”

She returned to her work, and I walked away praying that in the next ten days she didn’t find some posh, lock-jawed Limey to practice English and drink gin and tonics with.

The third paragraph gave me away, my accuser said. The “Berber eyes” made me racist; comparing myself to Captain John Smith revealed the “exoticizing” tendencies of a colonialist; and describing my wife’s physical attributes exposed my objectifying male gaze, marking me as a chauvinist.

“But I’m making fun of myself,” I said.

No one cracked a smile.

I tried again. “I’m the butt of the joke.”

No nods of recognition.

“Okay,” I said, forging on. “Let’s say I’m all of the things you say. Read the rest of the scene. I’m calling myself to task. That’s the point of self-mockery.”

“It’s not right that you make us buy this book,” said the student who’d borrowed a copy from me. “You’re exercising your power over us.”

“Power? What power?” I was starting to get annoyed.

“You force us to read a racist text.”

A young black woman said this. I am a middle-aged white man.

“If what you categorize as racist is really racist,” I said, “then perhaps all of us are a bit racist, whether we realize it or not.”

Then I led the group into la judería.

When, a day later, a group of students complained to the administration about me, they would claim that I had called them racist.

The program director and the UNC liaison, a professor of science, met with me. The director had walked me to the meeting, apologizing for what he suspected were exaggerated and even malicious claims, but asked me to just do what the UNC liaison suggested and be done with it. I empathized with his situation. He made his living thanks to contracts with UNC; he couldn’t throw it all away by standing up for me. When the UNC liaison asked that I write a letter of apology to the students, I refused. I told her that the accusations made against me had been pulled out of context. She implied that it was my word against my accusers’ word, all of whom were black, so something had to be done.

To do my part, I came up with an alternate reading list, more serious and scholarly than My Half Orange, and assigned essays that the disgruntled students could write without attending class. Neither the director nor the liaison considered my concession sufficient, especially when my accusers stalled and asked for a different solution. I didn’t offer one. Eventually they chose to drop the course. The ringleader promptly returned the borrowed book in perfect condition, although it naturally fell open to the damning page.

I finished the summer semester, but the director never hired me again. Was I cancelled? That sounds dramatic. Perhaps problematized, as once put it. Because of my book? Because of how I defended my book? Would I still defend it the same way? With less vitriol, for sure. I took my accusers’ comments too personally. I expressed myself too intensely. I might have apologized for that, although I doubt it would have appeased anyone.

I still teach U.S. university students abroad, although through a different program. As always, I love and trust my students. In almost twenty years of teaching at the college level, I’ve never had a similar experience. But the academic environment has changed, at least behind the scenes. University administrations loom over professors like never before. We are offered courses in sensitivity training. We are advised not to use certain language, and to put students’ emotional comfort before their learning. As a writing teacher, I balk at such advice. Language should clarify rather than simplify, challenge rather than concede, investigate rather than assume.

According to Daum, “being problematized is something to aspire to rather than avoid.” I did neither, although these days I wear my problematization like a badge of courage, just like I do my one- and two-star reviews on Amazon, which color me as “shockingly chauvinistic” and “homophobic.” Yes, in my memoir, I ridicule myself for sometimes having such tendencies (which most men my age have to fight against), although that’s not the point of my book at all. Perhaps having such tendencies is no laughing matter, although I think that depends on the reader.

John Julius Reel’s memoir My Half Orange: A Story of Love and Language in Seville was published by Tortoise Books in 2023. On Substack, he writes in English and Spanish at Rants from a Foreign Land. He reviews books on his YouTube channel Book Rants.

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I am unaware of any writer who as is impassioned or who believes in the power of art and literature as deeply as does Tony Christini. It’s a privilege to run his piece introducing us to André Vltchek.

-ROL

THE REVOLUTIONARY NOVELS OF ANDRÉ VLTCHEK

André Vltchek may be the most historically underestimated novelist — as he is not estimated at all. At least not by legacy media. Known in activist and intellectual circles for his injustice-exposing documentary films, journalism, and books of exposé articles, André should be known worldwide for his two great novels, Point of No Return and Aurora. Not to mention his plays.

André died nearly five years ago at the untimely age of 56 after a dedicated and hard, dangerous and world-traveling life of war reporting and activism. Czech, Russian, Chinese, and naturalized American, speaker of more languages than fingers, André Vltchek was a sophisticated hands-in-the-dirt warrior for justice — a revolutionary.

Born and raised in Europe (western Russia and Czechoslovakia), André subsequently lived and worked mainly throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and a bit in Europe, North America, and Australia. He studied film in his twenties at Columbia University and worked as an interpreter in New York City (after working as a translator of business correspondence of German and Russian to Czech, in what is now the Czech Republic, while also working as a tourist guide) before going on to report and work for social justice in over 160 counties. His books of journalism and social analysis have been translated into several dozen languages. He loved many cities, places, and peoples on every continent, including various parts of New York City, which he was eager to share with friends and colleagues, including on one occasion Noam Chomsky, with whom he was a co-author.

Much could be written about André’s biography, also about the biographies of his parents and grandparents. Much could be written about his documentary films, journalism, and plays, but I focus here only on his two political literary novels — the revolutionary, gut-wrenching, war-ripped, and romantic autobiographical novel of war journalism, Point of No Return, and his equally gut-wrenching and visionary brief final novel, Aurora. These are liberatory lit, literary populist, global anti-empire novels set vibrantly on all continents except Australia and Antarctica. They are peak literature, and they have been entirely neglected outside of a brief moment in time in France.

To the best of my recollection, in 2004 André contacted me after having read or read of my anti-Iraq-war novel, Homefront. He later said that he was “embarrassed” by my novel, given that his own anti-Empire novel — and perhaps his preferred sense of imaginative literature — was more risqué. After I read his draft of Point of No Return, we immediately decided to form a print-on-demand press, Mainstay, and publish our two novels in paperback — having been rejected everywhere by the literary establishment. I would go on to edit André’s novels and plays and some essays because of his ESL difficulties — English as a Seventh Language, so to speak, in his case. As it happened, I mistook some ESL issues for purposeful style — issues that were addressed years later apparently when the novel was translated by a publisher in France — where the book eventually received limited and rare institutional recognition.

Read Point of No Return (2005) and Aurora (2016) and you will get to know a fair bit of André and his life in this world, and you’ll know what a strong revolutionary populist, anti-Empire stance, understanding, and commitment looks like — to him — inspiring and literary, wrenching and visceral, intellectual and blood-letting, civilized, uncivilized, and dangerous.

As André notes in a 2018 interview with Binu Mathew, “How I Became A Revolutionary and Internationalist: André Vltchek”:

My story is my life; and my journey is my story. Revolution is called ‘the process’, in many countries of Latin America. It is one continuous journey: it can never end. If one is tired of this journey, he or she is tired of this world, and of life itself.

André adds:

Imperialists want us to forget about the stories. They want us to live on pre-fabricated junk stories of Hollywood and Disney. It is our duty to tell the real stories, because they are much more beautiful than computer-generated ones, and they are true. That’s why I create, write, and film. No stories, no revolution! And [the] more I hear and see and create, the happier I get.

For years, André mentioned that he was working on a major subsequent novel titled Winter Journey that he was tight-lipped about, even secretive. A draft of this novel is apparently on a device in the possession of authorities, and it may or may not ever be retrieved or returned. Some hints of Winter Journey may or may not be found in a tense scene in Point of No Return in which the protagonist Karel negotiates with an “anti-terrorist” Peruvian Colonel. André’s two published revolutionary novels push the literary bounds regardless.

When we first discussed publishing our novels, André mentioned that he was bad at coming up with titles and asked if I had a better idea than Point of No Return, and though I knew the title was cliché, I felt the title should be the author’s decision. In any case, nothing sprang quickly to mind. My title Homefront was also cliché. Two very to-the-point titles but less evocative than they could have been. If we had given it more thought, we might have gone with something like Death Front for my novel, and War in a Time of Love for André’s novel — which is the title I gave to the feature film script that I adapted from Point of No Return.

André prefaces Point of No Return with a poem by Octavio Paz in Spanish and a single line by Samuel Beckett in English: “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.” The novel then opens during an Israeli bombing of Rafah refugee camp in Gaza, Palestine, decades ago, while of course Gaza today is currently bombed to rubble and continues to be bombed to ever more gruesome rubble at great loss of life and “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians by Israeli forces using largely American weapons and funds and authority. The first words of Point of No Return:

A Palestinian man stood in the middle of a dusty road in Rafah refugee camp. Next to him stood his donkey. The man was old and so was the donkey.

Israelis fired air-to-ground missiles from helicopters. The earth shook while the old man stood in the middle of the road, blissfully indifferent to what was happening around him.

I liked his face. It was a good face, covered by wrinkles, not very expressive but good nevertheless. I took photographs of him and then we stood there, looking at each other. I greeted him in English and in Arabic and he answered though we knew there could be no serious conversation between us. We belonged to different worlds. I had come to learn and to see and to write, while he was here to stay.

He was a gentle man — it was obvious from the way he treated his donkey…stroking its mane, resting the palm of his hand on the animal’s neck. Donkeys in Gaza pulled old overloaded two-wheel carts and they looked exhausted, overworked and hungry. The old man did not use his donkey for anything in particular, it was simply his companion. It was easy to sell donkeys in Gaza — even old animals were put to work. But these two were used to each other: an old man and his beast.

André went where missiles explode, as do the stories of his novels — straight into your mind and heart.

It’s hard to say what else to excerpt from the novels — the scenes that seem all-too raw, gory, and obscene for print — too war-torn? Could you bear it, here, reader? Could you bear it even in reading the novels? Maybe I should lead with those scenes. Or with the inspirational? The emotional? The intellectual? The eventful? The romantic? The comedic?

As I noted twenty years ago upon the novel’s original publication: Point of No Return is one of the great novels of the 21st century. It deserves a wide readership and serious critical appraisal. Over a half century ago, in his important book American Moderns — From Rebellion to Conformity the great literary critic Maxwell Geismar noted that “Our best literary work has come from writers who are outside [the dominant] intellectual orbit, where [capitalist] panic has slowly subsided into inertia.” Geismar anticipates Vltchek. Point of No Return explodes from that vital realm far beyond hegemonic control.

Aurora, André’s final novel (so far), leaps outside of history while focusing intensely on a particular telling point in time. Aurora raises both prominent and unknown historical figures from the dead to help tell the story. It opens:

At dusk, Bertolt Brecht and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart entered an ancient tango bar in the old Chilean port city of Valparaiso. At that hour, Cafe Cinzano remained nearly empty. A shy if ardent middle-age couple held hands at a distant table and whispered sweet words over tall glasses of foamy pisco sour. An enormous, fat orange cat stretched comfortably on the floor, certain that, as happened every day, it would feast before long on copious leftovers of fish and seafood.

Brecht and Mozart banter about the global cultural and political scene, mentioning their timeless colleagues “Comrades Shostakovich and Victor Hugo” — and then Mozart tells Brecht his “strange, complex and dark story” about a trip to Indonesia and “what took place in that faraway and unfortunate country”:

Nauseatingly sweet smoke from clove cigarettes swirled into fantastic forms. Ghostlike, the smoke filtered through the dimly visible tropical vegetation and levitated into the starless night sky. The outdoor café in one of the country’s former capitals once again overflowed with local artists, all uniformly dressed in dark-colored T-shirts, jeans and plastic sandals, their grimy feet resting on old chair frames and worn-out cushions. Their faces, detached and mildly cynical. The few women wore clothes identical to their male companions, and they too smoked clove cigarettes. In the semi-darkness, the women were difficult to distinguish from the men. All seemed desperate to blend into the obscurity of the night.

This nation of thousands of islands and languages once proud of its diversity had descended into gray uniformity — its cities and villages increasingly indistinguishable one from another. People were worn down. So many dressed in the same untidy and unattractive fashion, behaving the same way, believing in the same things, thinking alike, submitting to the same religions, to capitalism and to repressive family structures. Differences had not been tolerated for many decades. Independence was broken at an early age, considered dangerous and evil.

Mozart: Like in my old Vienna.
Brecht: Like in all parts of the world where oppressive cultures reign.

Hans G, a European cultural envoy in this “far away land,” sat at one of the rough and robust wooden tables in the center of the café, his disciples surrounding him, something truly ancient and biblical in the gathering.

And from there in Aurora we get transcontinental revolution, revenge, horror, and a historical reckoning of Empire — in that opposite order. André knew Indonesia inside out (as with many other places). In Indonesia, he filmed his documentary Terlena: Breaking of a Nation about the American assisted 1965 massacres and imposition of military dictatorship. He was married to Rossie Indira Vltchek, an Indonesian woman with active social and historical ties in the country and with whom he closely partnered — dying in his sleep of natural causes by her side as they were being driven in a car overnight from the Black Sea to Istanbul.

Over the course of his life at various harrowing points of life-or-death, imprisonment, or conscription, André was forced to fight and flee more than a few countries — including countries in Europe, South America, Asia, and Africa. To most of these countries, though not to all, he dared return, whether to continue his life or work, or both. Not for nothing has Noam Chomsky often characterized nation states as institutions of violence. As in Aurora as in Point of No Return, both novels culminate in battle and revolution, very much in the vein of realism in Point of No Return, differently in Aurora, while gritty in both. Meanwhile these astounding two stories are overlain with and underwritten by romance — in every sense of the word. And humor.

Is there anything more dreadful than a review that gets in the way of the spectacular object of its attention? The artist has gone to all that work — making the art — and the tag-along reviewer too often emphasizes, and excessively, their fly-by-night notions. If you’ve never had the opportunity to travel the world in wildly adventurous and meaningful ways — and who does? — both on and off the beaten path, then Point of No Return is the novel for you. If you want to jump into an all-out revolution — then Point of No Return is also the novel for you. That is, if you have the guts, heart, and mind for an exposé of brutal Empire and a thirst and outrage for revolution against the Empire and for better worlds. If so, then both novels are for you. Intellectual and horror stories — and popular triumphs. Plenty of comedy too, amazingly enough — a testament to what is called the human spirit. Inspirational, revealing characters, places, events — liberatory experience.

As Tamara Pearson’s recent liberatory revolutionary novel The Eyes of the Earth reveals the world from the Earth’s floor looking upward and from a revolutionary vantage looking around, André Vltchek’s two partisan novels of literary populism reveal the world from both pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary vantages — amid the blood and terror bombings of Empire and amid the victorious resistance — the personal and social transformations, the revolts of people and the world. It takes a kind of infinite and eternal eye, mind, and heart — to perceive and envision, to know and feel the greater, more expansive phenomena.

André Vltchek’s novels are cutting-edge literature. The cliché is that vaunted work pulls no punches, which is too easy, too vague. The reality is that the novels deliver punches that the various establishments of Empire can neither stand nor — taken to their logical and moral extensions — withstand. The writing it too literary and, more, too liberatory to be anything less than revolutionary.

Of course such work is underestimated by the establishment, because it is unestimated — dismissed out of hand. There in the Empire’s literary dustbin of history may be found some of the most vital present and future of experience, art, and consciousness, the public and the private, the real, the revolutionary, transfigured and full. Lit writ large.

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From Point of No Return, in which our hero war journalist Karel tries and fails to calm his boss, Green, editor of the international section of The Weekly Globe magazine:

Green was sweating, getting excited, messed up. Cathy sat at the bar, her legs crossed. She looked in our direction. I smiled at her, to relax the atmosphere, and she let one of her shoes slide from her heel to dangle from her toes. Good move, I thought. A pity that Green had lost all interest in the surrounding world. He ordered more drinks. He was getting into it. Analyzing and drinking.

“I respect your opinions. That’s why I invited you all here. And I’m going to meet you, one by one, and I am not going to let you go before you explain to me what is really happening.”

“I don’t know more than what you do,” I said.

“You do know more,” said Green. “Something is happening. Something scary. Something that justifies your total indifference to our readers. Something I still don’t understand.”

“Things have become more complex,” I tried.

“I am not an asshole,” Green informed me. “I know that the situation is confusing. We don’t have many enemies, anymore. We have mostly friends. Friends that don’t like us. Friends we cannot trust. We have Saudi friends, for instance — that’s extremely confusing. Simple Joe doesn’t like many of our friends, either. He despises the French and Japanese, partly because he knows that the French and Japanese despise him — simple Joe. He thinks it takes five Poles to screw in a light bulb, but Poland is now in NATO. Many Americans look down at Latinos, they are afraid of Asians, and absolutely refuse to note the existence of Africa. They think that Saudis ride camels and put bed sheets over the heads of their women. Moretti tried to explain everything in one of his editorials. From Moscow. Eventually he just hit the bottle. He is falling apart from all that friendship. Our Moscow office is turning into a bordello, our Russian secretaries becoming single mothers. Moretti hired two new typists he doesn’t need, from his own salary. He has his ‘zapois,’ whatever that means. Still, he manages to write well. The only problem is that nobody wants to read his dispatches.”

“You didn’t tell him any of this today,” I said.

“And what the hell should I tell him? That he writes well, maybe too well for this magazine?”

From Aurora:

Then Hans G noticed the tall, commanding figure of a man sitting at a nearby table. He knew instantly, almost intuitively, who that man was, and his feeling of invincibility shrunk ever further. In fact it was almost smashed to pieces. He felt dizzy. His feeling of unease kept mounting. A sticky sweat now covered his entire body, leaving large dark spots on his shirt and trousers.

How could this be happening? Why hadn’t he, Hans G, a man ‘in charge of culture,’ been alerted beforehand? How was it possible that this dangerous foreigner had not been stopped at the airport, the seaport, wherever he had entered the country?

Hans recognized Pablo Orozco, one of the living symbols of the Venezuelan Revolution.

A ‘dangerous foreigner,’ Pablo Orozco, was now sitting comfortably on a cracked and stained chair, in this damned filthy dive full of fucked-up, untalented, lazy and thoroughly prostituted local scribes and artistes. Why the hell had he come here, to this laboratory that had been, until now, so perfectly managed by Hans G? What terrible luck, what an insane coincidence! Why did it happen? No accomplished outsiders ever came here! No great artist, no great thinker bothered to visit this brain-dead archipelago, especially this motherfucking degenerate town. This country was for second-rate businessmen and aging sexual tourists. It had been cut off from the rest of the world, on purpose, for decades! It was supposed to be completely isolated and quarantined! That had been the plan, since the mid 1960s. So why this, why now? What was one of the greatest, and at the same time one of the most provocative artists on Earth, doing in this intellectual bordello?

When Hans spotted him, Orozco was not calling for rebellion in art and philosophy. He was not telling how, in his studio in Caracas, he was splashing red paint all over his massive canvases. Instead, his enormous hands were making simple origami for two street children that he had insisted be allowed to enter this café with him and Aurora. One child on each knee, Orozco fashioned tiny paper cranes and other fabulous creatures, talking to the children in Spanish, English and in broken local language.

For a grand figure of the Latin American Revolution, for a guru of engaged, combative art, for a symbol of everything that Hans was laboriously and tirelessly trying to disappear and keep disappeared in this part of the world, Orozco looked surprisingly simple, even timid. There was not a trace of arrogance or superiority engraved on his face. He was merely enjoying his quiet interaction with the children, talking and drinking beer.

‘And the most troubling thing is,’ thought Hans, ‘there is no trace of fear in Orozco’s face.’

And there is no fear in the novels, in the artistry, in the expression of André Vltchek, no authorial timidity — not in Aurora and not in Point of No Return and presumably not in Winter Journey, whatever it may be.

For the sake of his sense of justice and his journalistic endeavors, André put his life on the line repeatedly — one might even say constantly — transformed moments of which appear throughout Point of No Return in particular. And so it is that André’s life may be found laid on the line in his novels — and in our own lives too — that is, in the lives of revolutionaries and potential revolutionaries, among other manifestations — too often infestations — of human, or rather inhuman, ways to be. How to be inhuman? How not to be a revolutionary? How to be liberatory in literature and life? André wrestled mightily with all of it. How to be revolutionary. Dare an objective journalist drop his recording device and pick up a gun in the heat of battle alongside a drunk colleague who, anyway, assumed they were on a suicide mission? See one of the latter scenes of Point of No Return where the question and apocalyptic situation is confronted point-blank.

To write a biography of André would seem borderline impossible, as the stories of his life are endless and far-flung, many happening in remote or opposite corners of the globe, often simultaneously, somehow. You get some of the flavor and substance of this in Point of No Return especially, also in Aurora. Some of the chaos, some of the romance and humor, some of the danger, some of the warmth, some despair, some of the intentionally revolutionary. As the facts and truths of André’s life are astonishing, so are the revolutionary facts and truths of the imagined life of his novels no less astounding and inspired, moving and potentially life-changing.

A few years after his death, when I requested André’s file from the national political police, AKA the FBI, I received some heavily redacted electronic documents and a “release letter” noting that scarcely more than half the pages on file were being released. Something too bold about André’s life or too nefarious about the FBI for the public to be allowed to know, apparently. America’s greatest philosopher John Dewey, sort of America’s Marx, notes in passing in his incisive The Public and Its Problems that “politics is the shadow cast on society by big business” — and so the secrets hidden and guarded from the public by the nation state may be considered to be economic at their root. So much is made of this or that bloody political situation that what is often glossed over or disguised is how intensely economic the situations are at their core. So often, no one would suffer the “political” as victims in the first place or much care about the “political” as victimizers if the economics were different — more equitable, more just. André’s blood-soaked novels can be understood as revolutionary economics, and not only where explicitly stated. André’s novels are bold examples of what literature can be. Consequently, the novels, such novels, are made an example of by the establishments of Empire in being effectively disappeared, marginalized, unestimated, misestimated — or profoundly underestimated at best.

These novels are written to help usher in, to help power up the day, the new progressive populist age when the weaponized and deficient acts and evaluations of Empire might be resoundingly reversed. The novels of André Vltchek express revolutionary consciousness, a fertile literary populism. And the novels express lively ways forward through our too-often bitter and potentially terminal time in which many people seek, and long, and struggle daily, at their most conscious, to be ever more revolutionary — more human, healthy, and whole.

Tony Christini is the author of multiple novels: Empire All In, Homefront, Loop Day, Most Revolutionary, Ganoga, Canocanayesatetlo, Youthtopia; and criticism: Fiction Gutted: The Establishment and the Novel; and co-editor of the Liberation Lit anthology. Liberation Lit Substack.

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Our continue our Underestimated Writers series with yet another criminally underestimated great writer. How many of them are out there??

Get yer tickets to the inaugural ROL Book Club featuring ’s Unfixed! They’re going fast but there are still a few places left. Please e-mail republic.of.letters.substack@gmail.com with “Unfixed” in the subject line to reserve.

We’re also looking for pieces for the next round of the Writers’ Cup. If you’d like to write in favor of Emma Cline or Colson Whitehead — or against either of them — write in to republic.of.letters.substack@gmail.com with “Cline” or “Whitehead” in the subject line as appropriate and the piece attached. These pieces should be about 1000-1500 words. The deadline is October 19.

-ROL

THE CASE FOR JUAN RULFO

I don’t think I’ve read a single body of work with such an impact on its own country of birth — yet still remain seemingly a ghost to the world — than the written works of Juan Rulfo. I had never heard the name until two years ago and I can guarantee my typewriter (okay, maybe not that, how about a fountain pen?) that there are dozens of readers in the same place.

“But wait,” many will say on countless forums and comment sections. “Juan Rulfo is a household name, you fool. Every soul in Mexico knows of the writer — his stories are mandatory reading in school just like Crime and Punishment in Russia and Faust in Germany.”

To this I bid thee silence, dear contrarian! Take your fidgeting hands from the keyboard and read on. Juan Rulfo is a famous name in Mexico. I’ve spoken with those from the country who know the name well, even if they had not read his work. When asked, they would agree that he would be likened to popularity and notoriety similar to other writers in their own country of birth, ranging from Tolstoy to Shakespeare, Murakami to Hugo. But outside of Mexico, specifically north of the border and going all the way to Europe, the response to Rulfo’s name is mostly crickets.

I myself would never have heard the name if Cliff Sargent from Better Than Food had not reviewed Rulfo’s fantastic novel, Pedro Páramo. Since then, I’ve found little information of him on all platforms. I’ve been able to find worthwhile articles here and there, some videos, a podcast or two. It is a tragedy, in my mind. I believe Rulfo’s name should received the recognition it deserves and only by talking about it can we do so.

But why is he so impactful?

With a flick of his wrist to discard a finished cigarette, leaving it to sail across the vast landscape of golden hills, dry deserts and ripe rows of agave ripe for harvest, Juan Rulfo is without a doubt a massive influence, if not the cause of the literary Latin Boom. The Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez is often attributed with kickstarting this same generation. But the man himself had admitted that he was in a rut — having written books with only moderate sales, he just couldn’t get the gears turning. It was when he moved to Mexico City and a friend had leant him a copy of Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo that it all clicked. After reading it twice in one day, he said, every idea and solution for his next novel all fell into place — resulting in his writing what would become the monumental One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Much like One Hundred Years’ retelling of Colombian history through the story of a town in the jungle, Pedro Páramo is filled with thematic, allegorical allusions to the roots of Mexican culture, its history and spiritual beliefs, the political and cultural history of Mexico from the time of Porfirio Diaz, to the Mexican Revolution and the Cristero War, all through the lens of a gothic story about a ghost town in the middle of a desert.

So, just what all has he written? Surely, he must have dozens and dozens of short stories to his name similar to Jorge Luis Borges? Or perhaps a handful of novels like Marquez? All of it brimming with the Mexican identity he is so lauded with capturing.

How does one novel and two collection of short stories sound? Pedro Páramo, El Llano en IIamas (The Burning Plains), and The Golden Cockerel. That’s right — unless there is a vault or drawer in some small museum dedicated to this writer containing other hidden drafts, that’s all we have.

To be able to write such a small body of work and yet for his tremors to be felt across a nation is testament to his skill as well as to his understanding of the country he was writing in. The amazing thing, I am told, is once he had released the work stated above, the man simply stopped writing. He had said what he was compelled to say and that was that. He had, however, taken up photography. His dreamy, atmospheric work can be found online if you were to look for it.

Susan Sontag called Pedro Páramo a masterpiece. Jorge Luis Borges called the same book one of the greatest written texts in any language. So, why is Juan Rulfo so underestimated and downright overlooked by much of the globe outside of the Spanish speaking world? I would say it is partly because he is exactly that, a Spanish writer. In North America, I find most writers from other countries — especially those considered ‘third world’ — often overlooked save for one or two individuals from each region. Aided by a Nobel, it seems Marquez became the face of the Latin American Boom while Rulfo remained in the shadows.

I would claim it is also because Rulfo’s masterpiece, Pedro Páramo, can be a difficult book to piece together if one is not versed in reading books that demand you work for it. Set in the town of Comala, the story follows Juan Preciado, who promises his mother on her deathbed to track down the father who left them to fend for themselves, only to discover Comala is a ghost town in a literal sense, everyone having died off long ago still murmuring in the shadows. The novel is structured as fragments, with these ghostly figures of the town revealing more and more information for the reader to piece together into a complete story. The book, at least my translation by Douglas J. Weatherford, often veers off into the memories and ruminations of other characters midsentence. Most people, I unfortunately admit, don’t like reading books like these anymore, as rewarding as they can be.

There is hope, however. It seems that over the years Juan Rulfo has been steadily gaining recognition in North America as more and more people are led to reading his works. I see more and more videos speaking of Pedro Páramo and more articles. A recent Netflix adaptation, though given insultingly little advertisement, gives Rulfo further potential of being noticed by people who absolutely must read him.

It is my aim to do the same. While a work that is purely Mexican, Rulfo’s stories are, like most great literature, deeper than that. His stories are often grim, but they are further pieces making up the puzzle that is the human story archived through the written word. The atmosphere of his work is like wind hissing through the desert, his passages of prose — cut so pristinely with no fat whatsoever — are spellbinding. You will learn the worst of people through his stories, but you will also learn the best. It is what makes literature so powerful.

I have to go. Now that I have him in my thoughts again, I’ll have to take up Pedro Páramo and dive into Rulfo’s world once more. I’ll leave you with words from Gabriel Garcia Marquez highlighting the importance of Juan Rulfo:

Juan Rulfo didn’t write more than three hundred pages, but they are almost as many and, I believe, as durable as those we’re acquainted with from Sophocles.

Thank you.

Brandon Westlake is a writer from Ontario, Canada who regularly releases fiction, poetry and essays through his publication, .

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We return to the very origins of The Republic of Letters and to our Underestimated Writers series. Konstantin Asimonov, our wild Russian in residence, introduces us to Valeri Zalotukha and his Candle, which sounds, honestly, like it might be one of the best novels ever written.

-ROL

THIS WRITER IS NOT UNDERESTIMATED

I know, I know. Hear me out. The writer I’d like to tell you about is not underestimated—or overestimated for that matter—because he is not estimated at all, certainly not in English. This is an essay about Valeri Zalotukha (1954–2015) and his major work, a novel called Candle, which is possibly the best book that no one has ever read.

This novel is a definition of a “hidden gem,” and unlike many things that are called that, this one is a true jewel, but it is also truly hidden. First of all, it is written in Russian. This was a hurdle even before the current political climate, but by itself not an insurmountable one. (Wait, it gets worse.) Second, the novel is unknown even in Russia. Yes, it won second place in the “Big Book” national award in 2015, but it never saw countrywide success and remains an obscure entry in several “Best of the Century” lists. Third, the author, Valeri Zalotukha, tragically died six months after the release of Candle, and as far as I can tell, very little effort has been made to bring it to even the most eager readers. To my knowledge, it has not been translated to any language, and there are no plans to do so. To stumble upon this book by chance, you’d have to walk a very bizarre and specific path of reviewers and half-forgotten ten-year-old forum posts and then struggle to find the text, because, as you can imagine, googling the novel’s title leads you to a slew of AI-generated images of a candle and a bunch of Russian Orthodox/home decor retail websites.

But when you do find it, it’s marvelous.

Before we get into the deep end of the pool, a few words about the author. Valery Zalotukha, a Russian journalist, screenwriter, and author, is known for the scripts for movies like Makarov, 72 Meters, and A Muslim, which was selected as the Russian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 68th Academy Awards but was not accepted as a nominee. He has written several novellas, but for the last twelve years of his life he was working on his opus magnum, Candle, a novel about Russia in the 1990s, a time of great potential and change in Russian history, that ultimately led nowhere. A Russian poet and writer, Dmitry Bykov, said that “Zalotukha published a splendid novel, after which his screenplays risk being forever overshadowed by his terrifying and mocking prose.” Unfortunately, “Candle” also became Zalotukha’s last work.

This novel has a clear place in Russian literary tradition, reminding us of Tolstoy’s Resurrection, and another Tolstoy, The Road to Calvary, and Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, and even, in some episodes, Saltykov-Shchedrin’s The History of a Town. At the same time, it is a very modern, modernist novel that is not shying away from anything humanity has come up with in the last century. It has unreliable narrators, literary allusions, pastiches of many styles, from the Russian journalistic poison-spitting of the 90s to the hilariously dry bureaucratese of militia reports, satire and irony, real-life figures, fake real-life figures, poioumenic metafiction, and other tricks that would make even the most fastidious of literary critics soil whatever they were wearing at the time. It also—and that is especially rare—has a heart, living and beating, and it pulses through all the strangeness and cruelty of this book, and at the end of it you realize it resonates with your own. Oh yeah, and it also has a tome of War and Peace used as a blunt weapon, which I believe is the most “Russian” thing imaginable.

As a reviewer, I am in a unique situation of not being afraid of spoilers because, let’s be honest, the chances that any of you actually read this book are slim. In fact, I could be making it all up. (I’m not.) I could just tell you how it ends. However, Candle is a monumental novel, consisting of four parts and an epilogue, that occupy two volumes and are north of fifteen hundred pages. It would not be feasible to retell all of it—not to mention, a huge disservice to the author. So I will give you a summary of situations that the book’s dramatis personae (of which there are dozens), the author, and we, the readers, are plunged in.

Part one finds us in a holding cell, and that’s where we meet our protagonist, Eugene Zolotorotov, a timid and kind veterinarian, a loving husband and a father to a daughter. This part is written in the first person as Eugene’s structured but turbulent stream of consciousness. He spends three days and three nights in the holding cell, having as much understanding of why he is held there as the readers themselves. During that time he, along with all of us, tries to decipher what actually happened. Paradoxically, given that we see and hear everything with his eyes and ears, he and we come to different conclusions.

That is because Zolotorotov is an unusual protagonist. He is… frankly, he is very annoying. He is what one would call “the last scion of the Soviet intelligentsia”: a man at the same time educated, well-read, naive and deluded about the reality around him. It’s not that he sees the best in everyone, he sees the most romantic in everyone. His cellmate is not a police plant and a liar but a writer in search of inspiration. A prosecuting attorney is not a tired and cynical woman but a beautiful and lonely princess in a tower. And a corrupt detective working on his case, seen through this special hue of rose-tinted glasses, is Robin Hood, fighting for justice.

Of course, these illusions are shattered because the mysterious case that everyone is constructing around Zolotorotov has nothing to do with his mafia-adjacent best friend, as Eugene himself is confident of. We learn, with horror, that they are manufacturing a career-building case of a serial pedophile rapist, and you already know who the patsy is.

Part two is a polyphonic (verging on cacophonic) collection of newspaper articles, internal memos, militia protocols, private letters, and diary entries that combine into the reality that Zolotorotov was actually living in, and we only got a glimpse of through his eyes. It demonstrates without pause or mercy how, with the flow of time, his colleagues, friends, and family betray him, surrendering to the onslaught of media’s and society’s hate of the cold-blooded child molester. Moreover, we find out that there was no actual child molester, that it was a tabloid rumor picked up by the militia and prosecution for various reasons. The penultimate document is the record of Zolotorotov’s trial, where the judge reads out the blood-chilling verdict, and the defendant is laughing because there is nothing else he can do. The last piece of that wicked mosaic is an internal jailhouse message stating what happened to him in the holding cell the next night.

Parts three and four we spend in a correctional facility with the name “Little Breeze,” more suitable for a kindergarten. From the very beginning, we are lacking our protagonist: the author, like an experienced magician, has lost him in a deck of colorful but miserable and broken people, the inhabitants of the prison camp. We follow new characters: a convicted felon, a camp warden, his wife, and a monk whose task is to open a church on the camp territory and convert as many inhabitants as possible. The fate of these four is tied together in a strange knot, and in its center there are a weightlifting competition, the Book of Leviticus, and the lowest of the prison camp casts, the untouchables. These parts are written in the third person, with wit and even humor that cut through the misery of the prison existence. There are miracles at the end of these two chapters, but if we look more carefully, there are miracles also throughout, even in the deepest of hellpits that is the prison camp “Little Breeze.”

And in the epilogue, we meet the author, and he, in turn, serendipitously meets the protagonist, Zolotorotov. And Zolotorotov tells him his tale, parts of which we already knew, but other parts, some of the most important parts, we missed. Together with the author, we observe Zolotorotov’s new life, new home and new family, and in the end, we understand the most impressive trick of this book. You see, one would expect that through the toils and ordeals, the man would change. He would stop being the gullible and annoying romantic and would get a grip on reality. He would finish his character arc. This is what literature taught us should happen, anyway.

But the truth is, at the end of the novel, Zolotorotov doesn’t change. It is we, the readers, who undergo a transformation. What we saw as vulgar naiveté and infantile romanticism now seems like wisdom. What annoyed us inspires us. We finished our character arc.

I am painfully aware that the practical value of reviewing a book no one can read is nil. It would have been more prudent for me to review John Williams’s Stoner or Robertson Davies’s The Deptford Trilogy or one of many other unsung masterpieces. But they will get another chance, and Candle might not. Which is why I am writing about it now.

And it is really as good as I make it to be. Better, even. It is funny, and smart, and wordy, and heartbreaking, and uplifting. Somehow, it makes us more human. Because in the end, it tells us something new about this ephemeral substance called the human soul, which many people wiser than us have compared to the flame of a candle.

Konstantin Asimonov is an aspiring and yet unpublished Berlin-based writer. His blog, Tap Water Sommelier, features his thoughts on random culture topics, elaborate and unfunny jokes, and translations of the weirdest and the most haunting things Russian culture can provide.

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