I wake the same time I always do, the same time my son does; or rather, slightly afterward, at the speed of sound from his mewling to my ears. The morning is my shift, my wife will not wake to his crying once the sun comes through the blinds, and come through it does, the angle and velocity of the rays slightly different than the day before, notating the slow changing of the seasons and revealing the room anew every morning, even if we know it remains the same with each waking: half-painted, smelling of dog and scattered with spit-up stained clothes.

My boy smiles at me as I pick him up. This little scenester doesn’t know or care what I write about, whether I’m literary or not, whether writing should be didactic, whether I’m too earnest or cringe, whether thesis-forward fiction belongs on the Internet or whether my prose stylings only work under the umbrella of verisimilitude.

We go downstairs and I think about none of this, only glad to find I remembered to prep a bottle the night before. I warm it and feed him in the rocking chair our parents split the cost of and ordered from Amazon or Wayfair or someplace equally soulless. I have a technique of splaying my Kindle (also soulless) upon my lap as he drinks to get some reading in, but today he kicks it from my lap mid feed, and I can’t recover it as I hold the bottle to his mouth.

He houses the bottle then shits his diaper, with a smell that now comforts me in its regularity. I could change a diaper in my sleep and probably have, although it’s cliche to say so. I put him in his daytime clothes (I can never find the matching shirt-pants combos and so opt for something conveniently reachable instead) and with that he is contented in all matters, having slept, defecated, and eaten, and now only needs to be entertained or stimulated to retain his buoyant demeanor, an increasingly complex challenge.

Taking him outside is a sure bet, though. It’s nearly summer so we sit on the shaded cool of the front porch steps, him upright upon my lap, mouth parted, eyes agape, drool cresting on the preciousness of his pink bottom lip. I imagine the outdoors are still a Sistine Chapel to him, the sky painted with blue, white clouds and the green and brown of tree leaves and branches.

But few others would find my house or its landscape riveting. It’s a 1,500 square foot ranch, a rectangle of no architectural ambition of design, evocative of a storage container. The roof is stained with spots I assume mean it is no longer comprehensive in its defense against the elements. The driveway hasn’t been coated in so long its coloration matches the road. The car upon it is half my age, its paint peeling all over. The lawn is all tuffs of hostas and carpets of juniper and dandelions and all kinds of creeping ivies and other sorts of plants meant to hide the latent dirt, many of which are flowering now under the guise of ‘No-Mow May’, which is supposedly for the bees, but really for me to skip the first month of mowing. All of it, splotchiness derived from the priorities of an aspiring writer with a needful young family.

I converse with my son as we sit, a thing I’d heard was good for a baby’s development, parsed from the million other things you hear are good or bad for a baby. Together we survey the land of our little empire and I say:

“Moments of peace like this are what living is for. They seem insignificant, but that’s most of what life is, I guess: meaningless. If you try and chase life, imbue it with any more meaning than what it’s worth, well, you’re going to be missing out on the peace of it all. Sometimes life is gonna try and take the peace from you. But you gotta hang on to it. Once it’s in your brain, it’s yours to light your little flame with. You can’t let that flame go out. Let it burn forever, son.”

He babbles something appreciative and correct. Really, I have no idea what I’m talking about. Someday he will figure that out.

My wife relieves me with a kiss and grabs him from my arms. I shower, shit, drink my coffee, take the dog out, have some fruit in a bowl (whatever I was hustled out of at the expensive farmer’s market), brush my teeth, read the news on my phone. Will Trump and Iran keep flirting with peace, or will they finally fuck? I read a couple saved short stories on Substack and take some notes on them before my wife hands me the baby again. I forgot she’s gone to hot yoga this morning.

I put him in the crib and bring in my guitar. I’ve played guitar for him every day since he’s been born and I forget how competent I become as a guitarist when I play so often, but it’s a pleasant surprise, a gift to myself from a forgotten past. Songs are forming, chords are discovered, riffs unlocked. He alternates his stare from the fretboard to my picking hand, likes how the tuner heads shine, how the neck casts a shadow on the wall. I can’t tell for sure if he’s entranced by these visual stimulations or by my music, so I choose to believe the latter. Eventually he falls asleep.

It seems like maybe I could sit down to write at this point or at least read, but once at the computer I realize I need to empty the dishwasher; then load the washer; then take out the garbage; then clean the coffeemaker; then water the plants; then change the litterbox. I listen to the Comedy Bang Bang podcast as I hustle around and keep checking the monitor for the baby. By the time I’m done my son has awoken and my wife has returned.

She needs to shower, sweaty from hot yoga as she is, so I take the baby to the living room where thankfully we have a Liverpool game to watch together. We don’t let him look at screens much, but I make an exception for soccer. The constant motion and colors of soccer games enthrall him as much as the outdoors. We sit in front of the screen on the bouncy ball and bounce the whole time. I manage to eat a leftover burger from the previous night’s grilling with him in my lap and get some condiment on his onesie amongst all the bouncing. Liverpool loses because since my son was born they have been cursed, although he only needs feeding and changing at halftime, because somehow he knows this is optimal.

When it’s over my wife takes my son and I get changed to go running because it’s nice out and I know I should, so I do. If I don’t I will get fat and die earlier than needed because I have horrible metabolic syndrome and am at risk for all kinds of heart disease and diabetes. I never really used to be afraid of death. I feared the unknown, of course, but there was nothing the world could offer to make me feel like I was missing out until my son came along. The desperation I feel to stay alive, to see him grow and be there for him, terrifies me into taking care of my mortal body like never before.

I run without ear buds, without distraction, talking to myself. Oftentimes I have a story I try to tell myself as I run. I start from the beginning and tell it until I don’t know where it goes or I can’t remember where it goes, then I start over. A story is like an arrow, and I’m drawing the bow again and again, further and further back, and it’s not complete until it’s threaded well and true all the way from my fingers to the target.

When I get back I stretch (so important, since now I am old, apparently, and if I don’t my body will seize up entirely) and see my wife is watching reality TV with the baby on the floor playing in his little jungle gym, which means I am to make dinner. I shower quickly and put in headphones to listen to Cameron Winter while I start making a Tuscan pasta dish with chickpea pasta (inferior, but less complex carbohydrates), asparagus, tomatoes, some marinara and lemon zest, toasted panko and almonds. I’m not a great cook; my wife isn’t either, but at least when she follows a recipe she can come out of it with something. Recipes are hard for me to focus on. But when I can cook something I’ve cooked a million times and have the freedom and experience to judge by smell and taste and feel of my preparation, whatever I’m making usually comes out well, and the pasta is a small triumph.

My wife and I eat dinner and talk about the news and what funny things we saw or read today, how our parents are doing, marvel at our son who is watching us eat from his mother’s lap with interest we’ve never seen before. He was but a couple of cells one night after the Vampire Weekend concert and now he’s holding his head up on his own, drooling and smiling and cooing.

I’m reminded I am supposed to meet with my friend Caleb that night to go to the movies.

My friend Caleb and I don’t have much in common other than we went to school together and make each other laugh. We’ve known each other since we were 12 and for a couple summers in middle school I went to his house to swim in his pool almost every day. He likes anime and video games and is a talented artist, which are three things I am not into/am not. He doesn’t know I write, which is perfect. You could say, he is not a member of the scene.

He meets me at my house where we hop into my car and drive to the movie theater together, a 20 minute drive, long enough to catch up on life. He has a new job at the baby food factory which is a step up from his previous retail occupations, both in terms of hours and pay. He may even be able to move out of his parent’s house soon.

We see Project Hail Mary. It’s a movie for children, but it’s fine and I liked it. Later, when I sit down to write about it, I realize I have nothing to say which has not already been said. So it often goes. At least with fiction I can—like many do—hide my emptiness with a veneer of ambiguity to entertain the reader into believing in their own cleverness in interpretation. But saying Ryan Gosling is a decent actor helps no one. Besides, I’ve already discussed it at length with my friend in the car ride. My stomach hurts because I wasn’t supposed to get popcorn but I ate it anyway.

When I get home my wife and the baby have long gone to bed, so now it is my time, my only time. I want to begin writing the story I have been thinking of on my runs, but I don’t have it mapped out yet and I’m unsure where to start. Sometimes it helps to dive in and let things become clear as you write it; somehow, I know it won’t be the case this time. Instead I write about five white collar employees who are laid off to be replaced with A.I., who beat up their former C.E.O in his driveway. I hate my job and dread returning from paternity leave, I figure this is a release valve. It’s fun to write, but I choose to write it for the same reason I’d write pornographic sex scenes as a kid: vicarious gratification, which does not make for good fiction. It’s 900 words in only thirty minutes work, but it’s trash. CRTL + Alt + Delete.

I go to bed and my family is totally convened in our room, the dog on her special bed (the old futon from downstairs), the cat in the hovel of his scratching tower, the baby in the basinet, my wife on her side of the bed by the baby. The fan blankets us in cool nighttime air. We don’t have an air conditioner, but I ordered one and it should be in by June because I can’t stand to think my child might be too hot. I used to figure—why get an air conditioner if I can do without? But it’s no longer about me.

It’s late but I try to read my Kindle anyway. The soft light wakes up my wife, who asks how the movie was. We whisper about it and I tell her about Caleb’s new job. We kiss goodnight and I get back to reading (it’s the part of Moby Dick where Ishmael explains what a ‘gam’ is) but my eyes are heavy and after twenty minutes I put it down and fall asleep almost instantly. It used to be I had tremendous problems falling asleep, always, even when I read. But being a dad makes it easy.

Tomorrow I will play soccer with my weekly pickup group, and we will discuss the upcoming World Cup. On Sunday my wife and I will take my son to church and afterward I’ll meet up with the book club group. We’re reading and discussing my novel, but they don’t know I’m ‘Clancy Steadwell’. They are a group of former lawyers and engineers and professors and doctors, everyone seems to love it. Later this week I’ll send the new manuscript of my novella to my sister and get her edits.

And so on and so on.

Yes, the scene is alive and thriving at Clancy Steadwell’s house, this grand epicenter of literary culture.

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Of this identity, I have no part. Not once in the lifetime of years I have lived within the proximity of this event or its lesser occasions have I attended one of these races.

As someone proud of their regional heritage, I take part in disappointingly few of the major activities making the area worth living in. Horse racing is only the most preeminent of these. Over the years I’ve deflected various invitations from workplaces and friends and potential girlfriends alike, for reasons I am not quite sure of but outwardly present an immovable stance on, unsteady as they may be in their underpinnings.

There is the aspect of animal cruelty. Over the past few summers, dozens of horses have died at the track, either through injury, illness, or heat stroke. “These horses live better lives than some humans!” is the cry from the protectors of the local horse racing tradition, and as I drive past the barns and stables of these horses on the backroads of my area, it is hard to deny this might be the case.

Perhaps it has to do with the elitism of the event, the particular attending strata of society, although it’s not so much an activity exclusive to the elite; horse racing tracks are often also the dens of degenerate gamblers, drinkers, and other simple revelers without distinction, amongst whom I would feel at home. My track is a mix of both these types, blended together and indistinguishable from afar thanks to mutual acquiescence to a horrific dress code, as if everyone fell off a yacht: high socks and boat shoes and short shorts and polos for the men, sundresses and big hats for the women, the only distinguishing features between the classes of pretenders and legitimate high rollers being that the former look like their yacht is more of a pontoon boat.

Spurious reasons aside, my abstention from the track most likely has to do with the invasion of otherness to my quaint home and resultant simple resentment. Private jets rattle my windows as they land at the small airport by my house, suddenly a booming hub of the globetrotting elite. The line at my favorite local coffee shop becomes insurmountable. People from The City (and, indeed, The Cities of the World) roam the sidewalks and make it impossible to walk my dog without facing the constant distraction of their designer breeds and the stench of their inequity.

And yet.

Every year when the race rolls around, I find myself careening down a slick Wikipedia-hole of horse racing, clicking the hyperlinked sire and/or dame of each past winner of the race, the sires especially going almost a dozen links deep, all the way back to the 1700s, the records so immaculately kept in a sport in which heritage is the ultimate maker of talent. Almost all racehorses today can trace their lineage back to just three horses from the early 18th century, and the records of those horses, where they are from, the races they ran, are as well documented as an Napoleonic war campaign.

Inevitably, I land upon the story of the most famous horse of all: Secretariat. Secretariat was, to me, only a character in Bojack Horseman before I became fascinated this year with his real life achievements, mainly his running of the Belmont Stakes of 1973, in which he crushed the field by 31 lengths, breaking the record of 25 lengths held by the horse who sired him. This record still stands today, along with his record times in the other Triple Crown races. As a sports fan, that his records from the ‘70s still survive seem miraculous; every day, each human sport yields some new ridiculous breaking of some previously unbreakable record, the human body stretched and optimized to its greatest capacity and our methodologies evolving to meet our biological limits.

I watched this video of the race, containing sportscaster Chic Anderson’s excited pronouncement:

“Secretariat is widening now! He is moving like a tremendous machine!”

Like many of the faceless YouTube commenters, I found myself tearing up at this part of the video, his exclamation juxtaposed with the sight of Secretariat hauling ass around the corner of the track, leaving his nearest competitor, a horse (aptly?) called Sham in the literal dust, the climactic excitement from the crowd building to a frenzy.

What was it about this moment? There was something in it, I thought, worth investigating: Me who could never attend a horse race—who in fact sought excuses not to and could care less—was moved, nearly to tears, by one from 50 years prior.

It was the marvel in his voice, the roar of the crowd, how clear it was he was witnessing something he’d never seen before, and I had an empathetic response. Could it be so simple? Could I simply be so human as YouTube commentators as to enjoy something for so superficial a reason?

No. I am a writer, an astute interrogator of the way word choice moves us, or so I like to believe. There was something here, something deeper tickling my subconscious, something needing comprehension. “Tremendous” is a great adjective, especially for a sportscaster, unique at least, and the force with which Chic Anderson delivers it in the sort of strange non-accent accent (almost Mid-Atlantic?) makes him for a moment sound a bit like Charlie Chaplin in the speech from The Great Dictator.

More likely something within the larger simile spoke to me: like a tremendous machine. A machine. Secretariat, the result of hundreds of years of breeding, so genetically gifted his heart was of an inordinate size never again seen, compared favorably to the achievements...of a machine.

The tears, perhaps, were tugged by a nostalgia for a time—only a few years removed from the moon landing—in which the awe and wonder of technology could still be a standard for living things to aspire to. The 21st century’s capitalist corruption of humanism had yet to see its embrace of technology finally turn on its head with the encroachment of Artificial Intelligence, in an unexpected form beyond the physical.

We always imagined A.I. contained within bodies, manifestations far superior to ours, making us plucky little underdogs with weak biomass against untiring, formidable metals, with only our indomitable spirit to combat them. If only, we could rise to their level! If only, we could move like machines! To do so would be a miracle, the triumph of the vincible over the indefatigable, the human spirit lending itself to our bodies as whatever spirit drove Secretariat to greatness seemed to imitate the automobile, the steam engine, the rocket ship.

Instead, A.I. came about as a squib, an imposter of the human mind without a vehicle; fine for the drab and menial of mental executions, but by its nature unexciting, unable to pull ahead to anything close to 31 lengths, an approximation of the average person, the net denominator of the most inoffensive, mundane among us. Machines of both the physical and non-physical generally have a baseline competence; it is not their extra-capable capacities which make them remarkable, only their ability not to fail, to complete the task in the most rote and basic way. In some respects, they may seem competent, especially at first.

But it’s all a Sham. For all a machine without a body can do, the one thing it cannot be is you.

So should I go to the track, despite my misgivings? Am I there likely to experience the same rapture as so many did the day Secretariat smashed the field at the Belmont Stakes in 1973, to see organic mechanical triumph in the flesh? No, I don’t think so.

Fortunately, nowadays, to feel the same awe as Chic Anderson, all I need is to see human beings doing great things here in the final turn, the last great length of humanity’s courageous race, the products of all the things we do best within and without the confines of our bodies: watch great film, read great novels, hear great music, to recognize the result of thousands of years breeding, of sires and dames all the way back to the heart of Africa.

Secretariat is all alone! And so are you.

You are moving like a tremendous human-being!

He was dressed far too warmly for the da…

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Welcome to finding the literature!

So yeah, recently I was made The Happiest Man On Earth. While I have been overjoyed, it has brought about some lifestyle changes that so far have not been conducive to reading or writing in general:

And certainly not conducive to reading and discovering new fiction writers on Substack!

While this post might be indicative of a corner-turning in terms of my time management within the new lifestyle, it’s safe to say I may soon have to enter “Me Mode”.

By that I mean: Focused on reading and writing away from Substack fiction.

I entered “Me Mode” a couple summers ago, when I wrote the big T. All it really means is my default action when opening my laptop will no longer be to engage with Substack (unbelievable, I know!), but instead have a word processor open to an ongoing project, putting my nose to that grindstone, and forging ahead.

Yeah, I might still shitpost on Notes from time to time as my sleep-deprived brain seeks the Notes feed for solace in the wakeful blue light of my phone. Yeah, I might still comment on whatever discourse is dredged up from some traditional culturally relevant magazine. Yeah, I might still post a few of the essays or short stories I have in my backlog.

Anyways, what I’m trying to say is: I imagine this will be my last finding the literature for a bit.

I started doing this spotlight because I thought: If I want fiction to be read on Substack, I need to read it myself, and help others do so as well. Whatever I put into the Substack Fiction community is what I get back. That’s what this is all about.

I hope you’ll forgive me for not putting in so much in the coming months.

Without further ado—here’s vol. 12—

One of the cool things about Substack fiction is that you can format your story for unique storytelling structures that a lit mag would maybe need an extra bit of convincing on. This one simply applies a new header for each different first person voice, adding different characters’ perspectives of the same events and people.

Techniques like this (and more complex ones) are common in Substack fiction, and that’s a good thing.

hasn’t posted for a while, but checking out some of his other stories, I hope we can give him some subscribers so he’ll return to us and keep writing!

I really liked this from because I think it fits the niche I myself try to fill, somewhere in the masculinity lane that doesn’t adhere to the same set of values espoused by the “manosphere” but addresses the concerns of modern men through fictional but real depictions. It combines sport, male loneliness, and our hesitancy to be even slightly vulnerable.

It seems like Anthony hasn’t posted much since this one, but I hope they keep writing, because there is room for these sort of stories. Don’t know how I discovered them, but they have 7 subscribers at time of writing and haven’t posted yet this year, so I don’t know if they are around or not still. If you care about keeping this sort of writing around, please subscribe to them.

is really the absolute pinnacle of what I hope to achieve with finding the literature, the kind of writer I wish I could find week in and week out. They encapsulate so much of what I believe makes great Substack fiction: a profile picture of a cat; a knack for flash fiction; a self-published author; a grand total of 73 subscribers. Give this octopus story a read and tell me they don’t have talent.

Then read their most recent short story here, containing gems like this bit:

Rhonda smoked her cigarettes in the saber beam of an overhead light by the dumpsters, under stars that weep with open arms over aluminum roofs that pass in ones and twos, casting brittle beams of their own as they go. On clear nights the flat air from the fields comes into Rhonda’s nose thick like grass and she throws away half of a smoke just to breathe in the smell of her aloneness.

I don’t really know Kevin at all. In fact, I’ve forgotten how they got on my radar. But if you believe in fiction on Substack, believe in writers like Kevin.

I was first introduced to via her review of…ahem…the novel by The Least Good Male Significant Other Of All Time. I also enjoyed her emoji rating of the books she’s read in the past year, including chapter by chapter emoji reviews of one of my favorite classics, Ulysses.

I’ve tried doing a few book reviews and find myself terrible at them. It’s a whole other skill and muscle. I find myself empathizing too much with the writer I’m reviewing and also reflecting any ‘bad’ review back at myself. Can I ever escape writing in the footprints of criticism I’ve leveled at other artists? I.e. am I shackling myself to the tenets of writing propriety I establish in reviews?

I’ll figure it out someday.

My point is, Lillian is a reviewer who can also write, and I respect that enormously. Between this one and another piece in Futurist Letters, I’d be excited to read the novel she says she’s working on. She has an effortless style and unique perspective on American life. Is there something…Sedaris in her voice? I hope she doesn’t take offense or find that inaccurate.

is another Substacker who blends criticism and reviews with fiction. I haven’t read much of his non-fiction, but the stories combine humor and the gay experience in a way that reminds me a lot of , one of my Substack fiction favorites.

(Not sure if these two have read each other, but one of my favorite things is to link up Substack fiction writers.)

Is it too soon to write about COVID and quarantine? I thought I saw Andrew Martin’s new book is COVID-based.

Last year I plotted out an entire novel based in quarantine, but it seems like the embers of that whole experience are burning too hot for any literature to be set there without scalding itself on politics. Someday, maybe.

Rarely do I ever re-stack a story twice. This should tell you all you need to know about what I thought of ’s work here.

I returned to this short story as a shining example of what power the Internet commons might have over the selection process of lit mags. If it had gone to a lit mag (perhaps even a Substack one) would it have been accepted? I like to think yes—but would it have also had so many readers? I hope so, but again—maybe not.

Erichka is, like me, somewhat of a Hemingway disciple it seems, and it shows in this story. She had a viral Note that sparked some good discussion about Hemingway, in particular comparing him to Faulkner. If you’re one of those who came out to disparage Hemingway as part of that discourse, well, that’s fine by me! You might not like her writing, then, though.

But please check it out anyway because I think Erichka is one of the rising stars of literary Substack.

Continuing on with the lit-mag submission theme. has had bylines in XRAY, an online lit mag. But now he’s on Substack posting great little small town stories like this one. Slice of life stories away from the major metropolises that dominate our literature. Unglamorous stories that speak to beautiful mundanity. I mean, this excerpt in my re-stack begins with washing dishes.

(Another meet-cute to encourage if they are not already familiar with each other: paging !)

One of Michael’s stories was recent featured in the Substack Post—the primary vehicle for a fiction story posted on Substack to reach a wide audience.

In doing so, I am willing to bet it reached more eyes than any lit mag he’s likely to submit to again. And I think that’s beautiful.

For a story that would definitely be accepted at a lit mag (or should have been), check out this one from .

Pete is another writer with freelance bylines in big traditional publications. From what I gather, like Lillian, he is primarily a reviewer, and another who can also do the thing: write fiction.

Pete was very thankful for my praise, but he should know I meant it, no smoke blown. For someone (like me) who is sick of NYC popping up in every other short story, that he managed to beautifully incorporate the setting without explicitly naming and while simultaneously endearing me is a wonder. I hope he posts more fiction to Substack. Who needs bylines?

That’s a wrap on vol. 12! I’ll leave you with this:

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I know no one cares.

So I just did my taxes to report my earnings from my book publish/paid subscriber income from Substack and, uh…bad news. I didn’t quite make the money I …

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A vicarious embarrassment arises in me when reading about the so-called ‘New Romantic’ movement or the return of Romanticism as a whole on Substack, that feeling you get seeing naivete suddenly crushed by the weight of a theretofore unrealized discovery, like a group of kids way too old to not know Santa Claus isn’t real holding a meeting to try and determine where, if possible, the presents might actually come from.

Presented as a reversion, or a correction of the last twenty or so years, I think: Were we really optimistic when it came to the Internet circa the mid 2000s? High schooler Clancy Steadwell was not. He wore a Rolling Stone t-shirt with a performative copy of Emerson in his back pocket, harbored a strong hatred for the YouTube comments sections, and had a girlfriend begging them to please, please create a Facebook. ‘You’re all heading for ruin,’ said this unlikely prophet, shadow of hair on lip, shaking his head of free-flowing, shaggy hair.

And so, apparently, this ‘wisdom’ of mine—an indolent, naive teenager in 2006—is now the providence of the intellectuals of our time. Wow, social media is bad! Being online is bad! Big tech is bad! Do stuff in real life! Who would have thought!

Insolence aside, I’ve tried understanding the tenets of this supposed New Romanticism movement, especially as espoused in the vast spectrum of Substack posts they elicit, from listicle to erudite, florid prose. While I agree with nearly all of them, they seem to stop short of reaching their natural conclusion, and indeed, much of the New Romantic discourse seems to be centered upon: well, what do we do about it? In my view, the distillation of any online Romantic movement, if taken to its natural conclusion, would be the singular, simple action:

GET OFFLINE!!!

I’ve long wrestled with how such a counterculture rejecting tech modernity might spread and become a ‘movement’ as such without the powerful and ubiquitous Internet itself. This paradox of dissemination inspired my first edition Midnight Vault entry, a short story called The Halcyonium—in which a mysterious author places a book called The Halcyonium in a small town bookstore, triggering a mass exodus from the digital world by all who read it.

The real reason movements like this don’t yet manifest is because the final and complete commandment of ‘GET OFFLINE!!!’ is never truly uttered by its main prognosticators nor their followers, because being online and being read online are their primary modes of living. To actually espouse this would be hypocritical. And so this cognitive contradiction leads to a disharmonious enaction of the romantic counterculture in practice, kinetically passed through the same algorithmic feedback loops claimed to be so restrictive and degenerative, totemic signaling of romantic intent rather than enaction of its principals.

The Romanticism found on Substack (especially the social media aspect of Notes) has too often—but not always!—become not so much a movement, but the mining of an analog aesthetic so ubiquitously contrarian it now runs the risk of being a mere shibboleth.

A true Romantic movement would not entertain these shallow signifiers, so often simple recollections of the past in a yearning and wistful fashion, a nudging wink and rib to the reader like, ‘Hey, remember when? Aren’t we the smart ones for smelling the bullshit?’ It wouldn’t be such a reductive fetishization of the analog.

While I may also enjoy such invocations of feeling (and many of the people who post about them), any romance they have is lost when you convey them within the prism of the very modernity we should be fighting against.

I.e., true romance arises from the banal mundanity of everyday life—from immateriality eminently unfit for the internet, things which cannot be compressed to Likes or Views or Restacks. Because the material of life is not romantic, and it never has been.

People live, then they die. In between, the crux of life: moments—countless—in which you must do things you do not want to do. It is, to be reductive—forgive me, Buddha—about suffering, in which the only solace we find is in the momentary flow-state granted to us by divine collective experience, the plying of our individual crafts, or the love of other people and art.

These things are un-post-able. And since they are un-post-able, they don’t ‘exist’ to us so much as other things. They are the romantic notions we are missing, what we need to guard and withhold against the vapidity of modern life.

They are not on the Internet.

“Dost not thou find thyself on the Internet, Mr. Steadwell?” The New Romantics then ask. Indeed.

Herein lies the aforementioned contradiction. The question is, really—how do we live with ourselves?

Because posting curated pictures of your cocktail named after a 19th author is not a practice of a productive counterculture. Nor is simply living a life in which you are wholly removed from the main proxy of ideas. Maturing from the Luddite teenager I was meant finding a way into the world as it is; the bildungsroman we all live is the story of acceptance of ourselves into the wider culture.

I tried for a long time to understand the appeal of the Internet and what my place was within it. I failed until I came to Substack and began posting as ‘Clancy Steadwell’, my personal remedy to the Romantic problem:

Siphon your real self off from the Internet. Starve the algorithms of your personhood. Be online in a way that renders the negative, soul-sapping powers of the algorithms inert.

Because I finally found a way to reconcile the loss of vitality I felt with the good things the Internet can bring. ‘Clancy Steadwell’ enables me to be online without really being online. And Substack is—as the most ardent romanticists here have quite correctly espoused—a great place to enact these principals. It doesn’t have ads, promotes long form content (mostly), attempts—to varying degrees of success—to be an Internet of the commons.

If you want to be a Romantic and still be online, in my opinion you should be someplace like Substack—and you should be an insurgent. An iconoclast. Use an anonymous profile. Avoid clickbait. Avoid rage. Read fiction (inherently unpopular!). Promote unknown artists. Withhold your data. Be weird; exceedingly so.

Eschew every guiding principal of the Internet and social media as you know it.

It’s no coincidence some (not all!) of the people I enjoy most on here don’t post under their own names, or post as an entity rather than an identity.

The pseudonym—and at large, the reluctance to reveal myself as living, human being—is at the heart of this. I live, me myself, separate from the screens. I (the identity) reside outside its bounds, safe(r) from its murderous effects upon the romanticism of my life.

I don’t live these espousals so totally. My own crimes of naivete—feeding trolls, posting/falling prey to rage-bait—are mostly borne from inexperience, a forgetfulness from my time off the Internet, an unawareness of its trappings. Occasionally I post an idea so unpopular, so rage-inducing, it gets ‘ratioed’ and I have to admit to myself that it wasn’t actually calculated—I am just an idiot. My most popular ever Note was directly from my life, a picture of my dishwasher. When I first got here, I tried to stay engaged with the platform by posting a ‘A Note Every Day Until I Reached A Million Subscribers’. I didn’t realize it was uncouth (and certainly anti-Romantic) to post so often about how many subscribers you have.

My own writings, in the form of posts and short stories, have become more and more catered to Internet reader, even subconsciously so, through the feedback loops of the algorithm.

I am ashamed of these things. Perhaps this shame is key. Perhaps this is what we need more of. Perhaps only shame is the antidote to hypocrisy.

Which is why whenever I find myself caught up in it all, I try to take a week off. Shut it down. TOTAL offline.

Then return with the same mindset: be a part of it, but at a distance. Segregate the parts of ‘you’ that the Internet wants to see. Embrace the good parts. Embrace the good-er parts in your real life even more.

Make an effort to know what’s good about being online and connected, and reject the rest. Realize Romanticism is not lost in modern times, it only takes new forms. Modern Internet distribution channels and social media allow more subversive art, more voices, interesting folks from the margin you won’t get anywhere else. I met my wife on Tinder. Some of the best relationships I’ve ever had were exclusively online. The building of support networks, communities, and mutual aid online is important. The growth of online political movements can hopefully be real catalysts for change.

I realize and understand this thinking is not in vogue, and by the nature of the Internet, cannot be and never will be, it is anathema. This is not an attack on the New Romantic movement on Substack—I am behind everything it entails, in spirit; I only lament its false applications. And even in its false applications, I find great joy in both its purveyors and fellow appreciators.

If you feel like romance has been drained from the real world, specifically by the Internet, then maybe withdraw from it in the same way I have. It’s certainly the only way I have found anything resembling peace and happiness in my own life. I don’t mean to eviscerate anyone or prescribe for anyone; I understand people make their living online. If you feel like you can do so while un-sacrificing the romance in your life, please continue to.

Although, you might not be a true Romantic.

Clancy, if you want to make it online, you have to play by the rules! Play the game!

Perhaps so, but countercultures have never been about playing by the rules.

And I am a Romantic.

Welcome to finding the literature!

Today I recall a scene from the recently released movie Freakier Friday (which I half-watched as my wife fell prey to its nostalgia) that went something like this [approximate]:

[A fortune teller across from a barista.]

BARISTA: What about my writing career?

FORTUNE TELLER: You will have success in more…genre-type stuff.

BARISTA: Okay, but like…elevated genre?

FORTUNE TELLER: sad smile and shake of head

BARISTA (WRITER): crestfallen

A humorous, self-referential nod from the writers I suppose.

I never knew genre fiction needed defending until I came to Substack. Never mind that genre writers like in the thriving horror scene are some of the best fucking writers on Substack (looking at you ). Or those in sci-fi (, ).

Which brings me to:

The Midnight Vault

The Midnight Vault II | The Entire Vault

The Midnight Vault is a place that refuses to live in a single shape. If you’re new here, take a look at the history of the event and the stories that preceded it…

Read more

8 months ago · 186 likes · 26 comments · J. Curtis, Shane Bzdok, and Bryan Pirolli

After spending some time reading through these Midnight Vault stories late last year, you can reach your own conclusion about the state of Substack fiction in the genre space; but if you read some of the same ones I did, I can’t help but think you’ll be impressed.

I contributed to the first Midnight Vault edition with a story and I have to say, it’s one of the things I’m most proud of. If Substack deleted my account tomorrow, whenever I’d tell my kids about my time here, one of the first things I’d mention is this Midnight Vault thing and how I was in it. This second edition was brought to life by and and .

Midnight Vault is one of the best things on Substack. Not just Substack Fiction, but . Period. ( should be all fucking over this!!!)

(By the way, there were some editors active on Substack that helped polish these stories— was one of them. Considering helping him out of a tough situation, if only because he is a good editor and a good writer.)

Anyways, it got me thinking about the many genre writers I’ve always enjoyed on Substack.

I’ve already shared a lot of them in previous finding the literatures—but here are a few new ones I pulled from reading the recent Midnight Vault, mostly of the sci-fi persuasion.

My apologies to the many plethora of fantasy and mystery writers on here—it’s just not in my wheelhouse of taste, but I am making a commitment to reading more of it, perhaps starting with and his Shieldbreaker Saga, of which I have heard great things.

(And actually, there’s a lot of good sports stuff happening too — !)

I’ll be back with a whole host of more contemporary/lit folks next time. I’ve discovered so many in that realm it’s been hard to keep up! But I just gotta get this one out of the way first.

Without further ado—here’s vol. 11—

is an award-winning sci-fi author. So I shouldn’t have been surprised to find how good this short story was. The best science fiction has real-life parallels, and I think this one actually has a few besides the AI jobs/middle management thing—there’s also a people displacement theme that has only become unfortunately more pertinent in recent months.

Just re-reading this short excerpt, it’s apparent how skilled a writer Ian is, and it seems to be paired with good storytelling as well. So often I encounter writers with one and not the other, and I regard them as sort of separate skills (I’ll leave that alone for now). Of course, he’s a self-published author so I feel a certain kinship with him. I think I have a lot to learn from Ian!

As I said in this Note, while I took the opportunity to read some Midnight Vault stories of those I’d heard of but maybe never read, but I don’t think I’d ever even seen around before! Just goes to show—even someone like me who is on Substack way too much can have blind sports in their presenting algorithm. That’s really what finding the literature is all about—trying to beat that darned algorithm.

The great thing about genre fiction is you have such a wealth of established tropes to kind of play with and invert. As I note here, the ‘second chance’ tales are a kind of variation of ‘Groundhog Day’-type stories. The main character makes an interesting choice in the end, and I liked the Rod Sterling voice interlays in this one. I tried to do that directly within my prose in my own Midnight Vault entry, it’s a lot of fun.

It looks like EB has a serial of episodic speculative fiction which I haven’t read, but it’s something for you to try out if you like their vibe.

has one of the more unique styles I’ve read on the ‘stack in recent memory. I returned to this piece to find the prose even bouncier and more fun than I remembered. I like the character description here—it’s something I think I could get better at. As I alluded to in the Note, I think this piece about a muse would resonant with us Substack creative types, so I urge you to read it.

It seems others have already caught on to Evelyn and I’m slightly late to the party. I revisited their page and read some of their non-fiction stuff and was at the very least entertained, so venture there as well!

I read one of Emil’s autopsies of ’s work and so I was familiar with them and excited to see them in Midnight Vault. This story is representative of how you can level up with the help of a good editor. I remember being scared when I read this story, but more so feeling that sense of dread you get working a mundane job and looking at the clock again and again until your shift it up.

I checked out Zachary’s page and found his most recent post a lovely sort of autofiction (creative nonficiton? pure fiction?) about Christmas Eve, sweet and slice-of-life in a way you might find in a Clancy Steadwell piece, so you know what to do.

Another A.I. theme here—it’s interesting to think about all the sci-fi that has come to pass (Jules Verne’s submarine) and that hasn’t (ubiquitous hovercars), then consider how often A.I. has come up as theme in sci-fi of the past and how similar/different it has been compared to what was imagined. I thought did a wonderful job here of getting inside ‘the head’ of A.I. It definitely resembles what we know about their intelligence in that it’s actually a sort of ‘text completion’ rather than smarts, and it was interesting how Evan’s machines converse with question and answer style that is adjacent to prompting.

I’ve since read more from Evan, including this short story I called ‘Salinger-esque’—I think we are somewhat kindred spirits. Be sure to check them out if you like my whole thing (whatever it is).

I say here, back to the well again because there is always more. Gaby has such an abundance of great little sci-fi stories on her stack. She is great at writing those tight sort of Black Mirror type stories—but better. In a sort of vein.

I think Gaby is a really good example of someone proving that if you just keep posting quality fiction time after time in a consistent quality, the readers will come.

Obviously, this was not a Midnight Vault story. But I wanted to include her here because I think she fits their oeuvre very well. Maybe she’ll be a part of it next time!

Obligatory ‘I wrote a novel’ plug—you can either buy it here for straight-up $20 OR preferably become a paid annual subscriber for $30 here and I’ll send you a code to get it for free at checkout. Look at this beauty! The writing inside is okay too. Lots of people saying this. Thank you.

That’s a wrap on vol. 11! I’ll leave you with this:

Absent from social media, I am blissfully unaware of emerging adulthood consumption trends, particularly those relating to marriage. It frustrates me to find they are sometimes formalizations of marital phenomena that were previously latent, natural, and left up to your own discretion, instead transforming them into commodified signifiers of status and class, like what happened with engagement rings mid-century.

Take, for example, the ‘babymoon’—a term which formerly implied an unadorned period of rest before childbirth—which is now a honeymoon-equivalent trip you post pictures of yourself taking on Instagram, ostensibly to show something like: ‘Hey, look at how much disposable income we can afford to use in granting our wanderlusting (interesting) selves one last hurrah before we are strapped down by an infant!’

They—‘they’ being the immutable forces of consumerism, I presume?—have found many new ways to turn life milestones and experiences into credit card debt.

What I see when she turns the phone to me is perhaps not quite of this ilk, but of a more benign and cutesy sort, and certainly one of more recent invention: a series of vertical videos depicting something like a large circular tabletop atop a post or pole in someone’s front yard, usually conspicuously near the mailbox.

The machinery in my brain cranks pitifully to ascertain what this is.

“It’s called a ‘stork delivery pad’,” my wife explains as she shows me more. In some, people are assembling such landing pads as a family; in most, the dad does it. In all, they smile or gesture to the pad in a hopeful manner, and then—with varying levels of creativity and panache—cut to a young baby, usually just old enough to sit up on their own, at rest on the landing pad, with due smiles and happiness. I presume this is what the ‘stork’ has brought them, thus ‘delivered’ unto the pad.

Some of these ‘stork landing pads’ are outrageous in their scope: neon signs attached with arrows saying ‘DROP BABY HERE’; pads that are not hoisted but span entire yards along the ground, painted with clever taglines; pads that have targets on them, etc.

“No way,” I say. “No one really does this. Who do we know who did this?”

My wife shows me a picture of some good friends who this past year indeed posted a picture of them expectantly by the landing pad (an appropriately dull and uninteresting one), then another with the baby laughing and smiling upon it.

“Okay but for real? Why haven’t I seen this before? Like, around?”

She explains there is, in fact, one in our neighborhood on the route of our daily walks, which I had seen many times but figured to be some kind of modern art, an avant-garde sculpture.

In showing me these ‘stork landing pads’, my wife is hinting we should maybe buy one, or at least build one, or make it happen in some way as is my duty to do, or else face endless questions from my mother-in-law and sister-in-law for what they see as an egregious denial, and I’d rather placate their confusion than to explain to them the pointlessness of it all.

Understanding this, I arrive at the contrarian attitude I aspire to when confronting such an ask of me, a compromise between being the change I want to see (which would be not doing it at all) and not feeding the beast which created it: How can I spend as little money as possible on this?

There are sparse options on Amazon, or at least all the ‘stork landing pads’ for sale there are devoid of character or made by someone working in a sweatshop.

Based on the variety I find on Etsy, I find this trend must really be a psyops effort of the creative middle class, those who peddle homemade stuff in the plying of a secondary income, a way to feel their creative hobbies are not vacant time-passers but monetary contributions to a fantastical future without student loans. If they’re the ones coming for my money now, we are truly fucked. Too bad the ‘stork landing pads’ on Etsy all contain the same basic affectations inherent to the trend, cost an absurd amount of money and, for the most part, still need some assembly upon delivery.

For it sickens me, suddenly, to think I might have a ‘stork landing pad’ for my future child which is the exact same as someone else’s. This thing formerly unknown to me has rapidly become an important signifier for who I am; which is, of course, the most unique individual on Earth.

A solution presents itself: Earlier this winter, an enormous tree branch—nearly the size of a whole tree—came down in my yard, and it has sat there as the snow melted around it and stayed as a constant reminder of my own laziness and incompetence, but now seems a fortuitous deposit of raw materials.

I don’t have a chainsaw, but I have a hand saw, for some reason. Could I buy a chainsaw? Sure, but I don’t.

For now, all I need are my own muscles, which I take to the downed tree on a cool spring weekend morning, digging into the thickest part as well as I can until I get the blade stuck midway through and have to take a YouTube break to search “how to remove saw from tree trunk”, which—sparing the details—I succeed in doing, and apply the lesson to the next cut, eventually coming away with a foot-and-a-half diameter, several inch thick disc of pine wood, just big enough for a baby to sit on, fresh smelling and surprisingly un-sticky.

Next, I spend time hand-sanding both sides with some old sandpaper left in the garage from a half-completed project in the distant past, until the disc of wood is splinter-free, leaving the bark on the exterior as an ‘aesthetic choice’ (so I tell myself).

Then I find some black paint and a paintbrush from a similarly discarded project and in my distinct, upper-case, un-artisanal scrawl, write on it:

“MR. STORK! DEPOSIT CHILD OF ___ AND ___ HERE! GENTLY PLEASE.”

This feels imbued with an appropriate amount of my personality.

Should I mount it, or let it lie somewhere in the yard? Another solution is already present, a split, stone birdfeeder lying half-submerged in dirt, left there for years by the previous homeowners. I dredge up the base, turn it upright, and spray it down with the hose, affixing the wood ‘pad’ atop it in the middle of the yard, where it sits surprisingly steady.

My only regret is my wife is not home to see me struggle with all this from the window, to know the hours-long toil of cutting the wood, the genesis of my later complaints of shoulder pain and hand cramps, which of course pale in comparison to bearing a child, although I wish they were approximate.

“Look what daddy did!” My wife says to her belly. She ends up not posting it to social media, though, so I perceive it to be good enough, but not worth sharing. Questions from my mother-in-law and sister-in-law to abound, then, until they see it in person.

All the ‘real’ men build their own ‘stork landing pads’, of course, but I am not a real man, not really, anyway, despite doing so. I failed to record the whole process or post it anywhere, so who would ever know?

The next day I sit in my kitchen with a coffee, look out the window above the sink at my creation and think of a dumb joke, a play on Hemingway’s sad short story: For sale, stork delivery pad, zero landings.

A robin flits down and lands upon it. For a second, I envision a future in which my ‘stork landing pad’ has actual meaning and usage, a place for migratory birds to rest. Then for another second, I envision a universe in which the men of our species must build such things for the storks to literally deliver the baby upon, for it is how babies truly arrive, and the future of our stock depends on them.

The robin shits and flies away.

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Welcome to finding the literature!

It was only a few weeks ago I put one of these bad boys out. I told you I had more! The quickest turnaround on FTL ever.

(I’m gonna have to take a longer break before the next one though. I need to like…write my own shit.)

The great thing about having so many of these discoveries in the bank is I get to go back and see what these writers have been posting in the meantime, and the quality of their intervening posts confirms what I initially thought—these folks got it.

And by ‘it’ I mean innately human, heartfelt, and real writing.

There was a tiny (I see it as tiny because it was only a single comment and I am not on Discord) bit of ‘controversy’ with a fellow fiction curation team over at Ficstack in their debut a couple weeks ago. I have to say, I really like what they’re doing over there, it’s such a great idea to build a team of curators like that and such a fiction database. Doesn’t hurt that I got featured.

But apparently an account which explicitly used A.I. was also featured, and because I just had to weigh in I was asked by —a contributing member to the Substack fiction community for a while now and someone who will surely be featured on FTL someday—for my stance on A.I. in my own curation and my thoughts on it.

I do annoyingly feel the need to clarify my stance, since I am someone who does ‘curate’ Substack fiction (although, I prefer to use the word recommend), so here it is:

PNP will not knowingly feature A.I. authors or authors using A.I. to write their stories.

This is an aesthetic choice. On my Substack, it’s about highlighting human writers who put in the time and energy to make something great—and currently, A.I. generally doesn’t do that.

If someone in this FTL or FTLs in the past have managed to dupe me and it turns out you’re A.I., well, good for you, we are all doomed and I am not such a discerning eye as I thought, I guess.

Anyways…

Without further ado—here’s vol. 10—

is a find I’m proud of. I don’t know much about them other than apparently they survived cancer (woohoo!) And I’m glad they did, because they are posting some good stuff, short fiction at just the right Substack length.

I’m struck by how Carla teases out whole stories from innocuous moments: a note found in the park; a woman pouring concrete in her basement; a coast guard patrol by the Golden Gate bridge. Each one goes in a slightly different direction than you’d expect, always bluntly told and with a satisfying resolution.

is a big advocate for submitting stories to magazines rather than perhaps posting them to Substack, which is somewhat the antithesis of my whole thing here. But he’s got me coming around on maybe trying it someday. If you want to believe his bio, he’s had stories published in all sorts of cool places, so it’s at least working out for him. And you should believe the bio, because his stuff is really good.

I really hope we continue to see more lit-mag published writers like Colton enter the Substack fiction world, even if they are not always posting fiction. From what I’ve read of him, Colton is good for some slightly twisted fiction, which isn’t usually my thing, but it’s not quite horror either. There is definitely some Palahniuk in it, which isn’t to my usual taste, but I can’t deny Colton is a great writer and, as he’s said to me himself, a fellow child of Carver.

Full disclosure: he was nice enough to read and review my novel, the big T, and apparently came away not totally hating it.

is another who doesn’t frequently post fiction, who believes fiction belongs (mostly) somewhere other than Substack. Maybe it does, but it can be on Substack too, especially when writers like him are posting it. He recently posted some rare fiction that was a two-parter. I’m known to have issues sticking with stories greater than one post in length, but I made sure to put my eyes on the sequel of this one when it came out.

There’s something in the themes of Anthony’s work that make me feel like we’re cut from a similar cloth—or maybe cut into the same shape, but different fabric. I see a lot of myself in his character ‘Dev’ from this story; or, perhaps, my old self.

Anthony has also joined the sort of Lit Stack trend of establishing a lit mag, but this is one that will have a physical edition as well. Quite the undertaking! Please support; the success of this thing is a success for fiction Substack.

I found by way of recent featuree , whose opinion on writing I tend to very much trust (and not just because she sings my praises!!!). You’ll note she also likes the aforementioned Carla Miles’ work.

Much like in this Note, I can only think to describe Barbara’s writing as…weird. In the best way possible. In a sort of, maybe, sort of way. I recently read one in which she writes from the POV of a pair of shoes. No kidding.

Another New Yorker (among the many on Substack!), Barbara Jaye nonetheless provides a fresh perspective and posts a lot of interesting photographs of the city and other visual art on Notes as well, so worth a follow as well as a subscribe. They post very regularly so I haven’t had time to read all their strangeness, but here’s hoping it continues.

You can’t really get through reading fiction on Substack without stubbing your toe on some horror. I mean that in the best way. And is out here writing about confused old men whacking what they think is a pinata.

I feel like Judith’s sentences set the pace, which is so crucial for building tension in horror. It’s all about tempo, ramping up to a crescendo. She also does some sci-fi/horror mashup, like her serial which—as far as I can tell from the first chapter—is about a kidnapper who can smell emotions. Yoinks.

Judith, as I understand it, is out of a job as of recently and we are the happy benefactors of the time they now have to produce more of their fiction! If you can, become a paid subscriber.

Obligatory ‘I wrote a novel’ plug—you can either buy it here for straight-up $20 OR preferably become a paid annual subscriber for $30 here and I’ll send you a code to get it for free at checkout. Look at this beauty! The writing inside is okay too. Lots of people saying this. Thank you for your attention.

That’s a wrap on vol. 10! I’ll leave you with this:

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Welcome to finding the literature!

It’s been a while since I did one of these. The last was back in March, and a lot has changed since then, both on Substack and Persona Non Propria.

With PNP, I went through the process of creating and releasing a physical edition of my novel, an upmarket bildungsroman called the big T.

You can either buy it here for straight-up $20 OR preferably become a paid annual subscriber for $30 here and I’ll send you a code to get it for free at checkout. The latter obviously comes with the dumb little badge Substack gives you to show you make them money. It also comes with whatever paid stuff I put up on here in the near future.

Meanwhile, the Substack fiction space has seen a big shift—as the platform has grown, it seems there has been a relative boom in competitions, aggregation ‘stacks, and—most of all—lit mags.

(As I talked about here, here, here, and here.)

I sort of predicted this would happen. Which begs the question, at least in my mind: why not start my own Substack based lit mag? Why not just take all the work I do for these finding the literature posts and transpose it into running my own simple little lit mag with submissions and whatever?

It certainly seems like I’d maybe make more money that way, depending on how I structured it.

As with everything else I get hung up about, the work, accountability, and responsibility involved would paralyze me.1

The main reason I can do round-ups like this and dedicate myself to Substack fiction advocacy is because I genuinely enjoy doing so. It’s not a job, it’s a privilege. Instead of scrolling on Reddit or watching a sitcom I’ve seen already, every day I set aside time to read my saved Substack fiction posts, and my life is better for it.

And I wish that for you all as well. I’m here to help make it a little easier.

I’d like to point out I’m not the only person who does this kind of thing.

with Top in Fiction, with his Dread Reviews, doing Vinny Reads, and Anne-Marie Hubert scouting the real fiction, and many more.

I’m particularly intrigued by the newer FicStack from and how that is going to end up.

finding the literature is not a rival or competitor to these ‘stacks, which is a good thing, because they kick my ass. I’m just someone who likes reading fiction posted to Substack.

With the folks I’m featuring in this volume, it’s amazing I haven’t already featured them. Over the many months since March, it feels like they’ve become familiar on my feed, posting great stuff and reading others and overall becoming part of a beautiful Substack fiction landscape.

Apparently, though, I’ve been reading and recommending far more than I thought over these past 7 months—I went through ALL of my Notes since then, and besides realizing what a narcissistic shit-poster I can be, I discovered no less than 30 OTHER writers of varying levels vouched for in my feed.

Not to mention what’s in my TBR fiction pile, where I’m sure there’s more greatness lurking! (REMEMBER TO USE THE SAVE BUTTON TO READ MORE FICTION ON SUBSTACK).

So if you’re disappointed I didn’t include you here, know that including Notes in a Substack post very quickly makes the post too long for email, so I try to keep it to 5 features per post.

This just means I am going to probably post one of these for a few weeks in a row and if I’ve mentioned you on Notes before, hopefully you’ll show up later.

Without further ado—here’s vol. 9—

I have to be honest here and admit a bias because is one of my biggest readers on Substack. But I think anyone can see he’s a fiction talent on his own. He’s got big ideas, big dreams, and is someone who clearly writes with their whole heart.

Ricardo experiments with some of his form and stories; for instance, he recently posted an epic poem he typed up on a typewriter—and I loved it.

He does share themes with me, I think. Take this surreal story, for example, diving into male loneliness. And this flash fiction about boyhood fights.

I think he’s had some really interesting thoughts on Substack fiction and is very much a compatriot in my views on that front. He also does author interviews, so very worth subscribing to even if fiction isn’t your thing, something he has in common with another of the writers in this post.

I think and I come from the same thematic literary corner, where you notice the little things and make even the benign significant in an unrelenting and unapologetic way, nostalgia and sentimentality hitting home.

Sometimes I honestly feel like Nico is sort of a younger me. I see a lot of similarities in the writing. There’s an icy simplicity in it. If we are going by their pfp, they even have a mustache.

I hear they are also maybe a conspirator on one of those new lit mags I mentioned, simplistically, appropriately, and beautifully called: drunks. So if you like their stuff, maybe check out that publication.

, in contrast to Ricardo and maybe Nico, is a good example of someone who is not like me, in all the best ways. We don’t seem to have similar taste. We don’t seem to have similar ideals about literature. That’s okay though because they’re someone for whom ‘pulverizes’ is the right word. Their prose puts you into submission because it’s just too damn good.

So when he goes and writes something like the above (or below), it really inspires me. It makes me mad. It makes me want to step outside my comfort zone and write, write, WRITE.

At this juncture, I have to say, I believe all three of the featured thus far are younger than me, maybe even far younger than me.

Are you KIDDING me? This is the talent they all have, at such an age? I hope they remember me when they’re uber-successful.

grips me with his prose. I mean, just look at this excerpt! He’s one of those writers who you can tell puts care into every sentence. Kinda Chabon-esque. A beer can’t just be cracked open; it also has to convey something for the story.

He’s going places, for sure, and I’m just glad to be here where it all began.

One of my favorite things to do on Substack is connect disparate fiction writers with other fiction writers who they might never have found or know about, who I think might be somewhat kindred souls. I felt that with Nathan Slake (who has appeared in FTL before) and Brock.

Brock is someone who is perhaps just as well known for his reviews and cultural writings, like many Substack fiction writers are. I haven’t read as much of that side of his stuff, but I do know he has a discerning eye, so if he praises your writing on Notes, take it to heart.

To ease the appearance of quid pro quo, I’ll have you know Brock does not know I’m sending this out this email endorsement of his work, but he was a very enthusiastic and astute early reader of my novel and maybe has something to say about it in the near future.

Another big reader of mine, I’m particularly fond of and the wise, cool-professor-who-gives-it-to-you-straight vibe she has brought to the Substack fiction party. She writes romance like no one (except for maybe me) but sometimes I feel like even I could learn something from her well-studied examinations of male-female dynamics.

I particularly liked her recent three-part series, Dark Times City, about a publisher in crime-ridden NYC during the 70s blackout. She makes NYC palatable to me by going back to when it was grimy.

And she is a master of dialogue. I cannot stress this enough. A MASTER. If you are scratching your head over your own dialogue, read and study hers.

When Liz has something to say on the ‘stack, listen.

Okay, that’s all of the more obvious ones since March out of the way. There’s still a whole lot more in the backlog for me to let you all know about. Hopefully I get to it next week.

I’ll leave you with this:

A few subscribers messaged to see if I was okay. The kindness I am shown on this application is incredible, and I appreciate and thank all of you. Not to worry, though—it was a good sort of “overwhelmed”, or at least the causes of this…

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Here’s something I figured only people willing to spend money on my writing would care about or be interested in: a 5,000 word short story I wrote circa ten years ago, about a young man struggling with self-worth, guilt, and the loss of innocence. I dug it up from a folder on one of my old laptops along with dozens of other pieces of varying length and quality from a time before I had anywhere to post my work.

Those who have read the novel and my work at large will recognize some of the themes here. There’s even a Bell’s Palsy affliction like Jude gets in the big T. There’s also working in the grocery industry.

I would never publish this story now, because—as you’ll read—I was a far inferior writer then; but I think it really shows how much I’ve grown in the time since and my regular readers may find it interesting to see how some of the themes that pop up have coalesced and found themselves in my present work.

I’m going to use footnotes here to give you my thoughts on my prose and the story at large. Hope you enjoy this insight! If you do, there are more archival stories where this came from, including some incomplete ones.

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What’s on it:

A stuffed animal (puppy), my high school diploma, a baseball signed by Joba Chamberlain, a trophy I won in a youth writing competition.

Every Harry Potter, Pendragon, Artemis Fowl book, the whole Bartimaeus trilogy, and many of the Redwall books.

A complete collection of Calvin and Hobbes comics. ’s Summerland.

A soapbox derby car, an Ident-A-Kid card with my youthful face on it, a photo of me in my soccer uniform and captain’s armband from senior year, a photo of me on a camping trip, of me and my marching bandmates.

This bookshelf would doubtless cause some viewers to question its appropriateness in the context of my age. In fact, it causes me to do so. I mean, a stuffed animal? Really? I am an adult man who will soon have a child of their own. It’s incongruous with the masculine image I have of myself, that most men have of themselves. By and large, we believe ourselves to enjoy hardier bookshelf contents, things like barometers, books featuring 19th century ships, anything made of mahogany, perhaps even weapons of some kind.

Others, of course, would be more forgiving. Certainly, some other grown men have a similar situation of boyhood object retention on display somewhere. Legos, Funko Pops, trading cards. In fact, things like these have, in some ways, also become associated with manhood. We like breakfast cereals, cars, and comic books1.

The problem is that 17 year old boys also like these things, as well as 17 year old girls2. These things—despite being totems of boyhood in the form of interests and hobbies, and not, perhaps, indicative of regression—may imply a certain level of emotional immaturity, especially as regarded by the opposite sex, the relational context with women being the bar by which manhood is sometimes judged.

Women, by contrast, embrace, crave, and return to girlhood often. For many women, youth—both literally and figuratively—is—rightly or wrongly—the ultimate glory of life. My mother-in-law still unironically considers it rude when I say her true age aloud, as though her age were an affront to her intrinsic value. The ‘girlhood’ essays that are overdone on Substack have become so for a reason; for women, it’s very apparent how it’s worth exploring the loss of their innocence in the face of a society that demands it, that craves the youthful spirit of women.

A man young in spirit is not vivacious, nor their innocence lauded. These qualities may be attractive to some women, but to other men and to ourselves, they are to be squeezed out and remediated with time, and pain if necessary. Boyhood, for modern men of my age, is not often a time to be harkened to. It was a time of weak handshakes, when you were naïve and stupid, even if you simultaneously now still enjoy its material trappings.

The older a man is, the more ‘successful’ he’s likely to be, simply by virtue of time and experience. There’s evidence that male-pattern balding is a selectively bred trait—it signals a man as a silverback. I don’t need to cite statistics to tell you that women, by and large, prefer older men in relationships. Nearly every traditionally gendered relationship I know of in my life, young and old, features a man who is older than the woman.

For these reasons, I believe the exploration of boyhood has become somewhat gauche in the culture, whatever plumbed from its depths reductive when applying toward the needs of modern manhood. There are recent examples of successful attempts3 and, of course, pandering to the second largest demographic in the world will never die, along with the many annals of boyhood stories from the past. But the story of boyhood progresses as we further enter modernity; there are truths to growing up in the seventies that don’t apply to the early aughts. In my cultural viewing, we don’t address these enough.

I maintain that we should un-forsake boyhood, as I have both on my bookshelf and in my fiction work.

There was a time, in my early to mid twenties—not coincidentally, the time when a human brain is only just fully forming and we are categorically transitioning from boys to actual men—when I grappled constantly with my boyish past as it retreated into the near distance.

I had, in this time, so many mental health issues and along with them a therapist who informed me: depression is not necessarily sadness; it’s self-hatred. Most of the self-hatred I felt was borne from shame for my recent past within the boyhood that was rapidly receding, the most common symptom being the mental tics of remembrance at times of disquiet:

How could I have been so disrespectful to women? Why was I such a bully? Why did I deal with losing so poorly? What if I wasn’t such a jerk/baby/weakling?

In response I fell into a number of addictions within the wider casting of the term, which were destructive and hard to escape in their own right: video games, sex/pornography, marijuana, etc.

At the time I was at risk of becoming what we in the cultural parlance now call a “ManChild.”4

Like many males, I turned to self-help and psychology (non fiction books!) to try and work my way out of the situation as therapy, apparently, was not enough.5

I found the concept of ‘the Shadow’ by way of Phil Stutz (pre-Jonah-Hill-Netflix), by way of Jung, and while I didn’t directly assess it in the ways they presented, I realized this was what I was dealing with: my boyhood as the shadow. I was quelling the disquiet of my boyhood by further falling into the trappings of boyhood. I was subconsciously placating the boy within me.

The stereotypical ManChild is not a man/child because he is both man and child. We are all simultaneously man and child in that we cannot escape our past (the child) and what makes us the men we are. They are a man trapped in child form, because they do not allow the boy they used to be—the boy they don’t know—to occupy the childish state of their manhood.

You can’t get rid of the boy you carry with you. All you can do is acknowledge him. For me, this was the way out. You cannot change the boy you were, but you can forgive him, and once you can forgive him, you can celebrate him, and no longer do you have to placate his tendencies.

I do this by writing.

I’m known to write stories about masculine youth, perhaps one too many, perhaps giving the illusion I’m stuck in discovering and re-discovering the simple and obvious, the universalities we all learn and take for granted. A large part of my bildungsroman novel, the big T, is firmly anchored in boyhood.

But I’m re-learning what we’ve collectively learned, re-applied for the modern man. There’s no truth too simple to not be learned again, something to the retention of ‘childhood wonder’. We must re-approach boyhood with a certain level of ignorance of the sort traditional manhood is likely to eschew6 if we are to make sense of what made us how we are and how to deal with it.

Maybe that’s where reading comes in, where fiction comes in. Not just of my work, but in the tales that speak to our boyhood, interpreted instead by our older selves. I’m writing what I wish—in that troubled time of my life—I had to read.

It is my belief the individual, as well as the culture, should make way again to embrace the inner boyhood and hold up a mirror to it such that our ManChildren can see: you are reacting to the world with behaviors you had when you were a boy because you have not let go of the same problems.

That’s why I have the bookshelf.

It’s also why you’ll never see it.

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writes about sex.

In all its forms: the act, the genders, the appeal. This much, I think, most Substackers already know.

So when I got this book, I saw the cover and read its title and interpreted the ‘events’ to be sex.

I didn’t order the book because I wanted sex, though I’m not a prude. I got it because I find Emma an endlessly fascinating character an…

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GET the big T NOW BY USING THIS LINK TO GET A $30 YEAR-LONG PAID SUBSCRIPTION TO PERSONA NON PROPRIA.

YOU’LL AUTOMATICALLY GET AN EMAIL WITH A DISCOUNT CODE FOR A COMPLIMENTARY COPY OF THE BOOK AND DIRECTIONS ON HOW/WHERE TO ORDER.

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“You know, I really think fall is my favorite season,” she says, the moment hot chili becomes appetizing and the NY Jets have lost their first three games.

“Summer is definitely number one,” she declares at the first trip to the beach, failing to redact this claim even after her vanilla skin gets turned salmon-pink by the sun.

“Winter is the best,” after cupping her hands around a warm mug of hot chocolate, no doubt specially topped with festive marshmallows and loaded with squirts of caramel, nothing less than the optimal approach to the craft of reveling in the season.

This disposition is either irritatingly inconsistent or charmingly regular, depending on which way you see it, a sort of emotional glass half-full situation. It means she is either fickle in her affections or someone with a perpetually glad disposition, or both, which was how I tended to see it—when I knew her, anyway.

At first I found Audrey to be someone who seemed very happy, always. The thing about people like this: it all seems fine until suddenly you’re not very happy yourself and they are no longer a mirror, but sort of an opacity from which you can retrieve nothing resembling reciprocity.

Me, my mood changes with the seasons. So when we met in spring I was on the upswing, you could never tell I was one half miserable.

“Oh, I love the smell of spring, it’s like dirt and living things and earth!” She said as we walked Albany’s streets late (too late) at night, taking a short cut through Washington Park. I forgave her use of the duplicative descriptors dirt and earth.

“Worm shit, probably,” I said, and made her laugh as she balanced herself walking on a curb like she was a 10-year-old kid.

We had just left a venue called The Fuzzbox, me having been invited there by my Sunday-league soccer teammate, unbeknownst to me that the band he was in played the most blood-curdling of screamo metal, which made for the possibility of a mosh-pit forming like a late-summer hurricane.

Audrey and I found each other when the eye of the mosh pit got spinning and, like others who wanted no part, were pushed to the edges of the vortex and into close quarters. She was there with another teammate’s girlfriend, and I stood with my back to the young men pulling chains and two-stepping, her shoulder pressed between my pecs, a paltry shield against the winds of their limbs.

Something cliched like, “Getting to know each other pretty well here!” was said by me, likewise by her, smiles shared, small talk sporadically exchanged with loud voices over my teammate’s shredding guitar solos. The group was going out to drinks that night and invited me along.

She had on a red lip and a seasonally appropriate matching red leather jacket that night, her hair frizzed and curled enough to engage but barely not enough to make you think she’d been electrocuted. There was a tattoo on her wrist which, she explained, was some Nordic symbol for music, the first known written word for it. Having drinks with her was easy, all we needed was to stand by the juke box and discuss what was there, what was playing, our tastes overlapping beyond the death-metal we’d just experienced. I was tricked into believing things could be easy.

We were walking from the bar to the Ben & Jerry’s down the road, a venture of her suggestion.

“Isn’t it too cold, maybe, still, for ice cream?” I asked, shivering in the early spring night.

“No, never! Never too cold for ice cream, silly,” she said, putting her finger on my nose in what was (undoubtedly) a drunken fashion.

I brought to mind the mosh pit and thought, maybe I should have been braver and taken part. Maybe it’d feel nice to get hurt and have it be no one’s fault, a consequence of a culture, a side-effect of sadism more intentional and more to-the-point than to be hurt by a girl like this.

‘Talking’ is what they—and we—called it, and still call it, I suppose, when you’re having sex with someone but in that limbo before boyfriend-girlfriend or whatever. I’ve always thought it was a strange word used to encompass far too much; something like, ‘un-platonic exploratory sex-having’ would probably be better.

And sex we did have, as often as possible in what time we could meet between my awkward work schedule and her pursuit of a PHD, which wasn’t often enough to rush the process.

Her hair became even more bouncy with the heat and humidity of the coming months and my mood escalated in tandem, as it always does with higher skies. My performance as a partner improved accordingly, in ways innumerable. We discovered, by way of ample communication, that if I held her legs over my shoulders at a certain angle on the futon, she could orgasm during our intercourse. And I came to each of our dates armed with new music I’d discovered, contrarian theories on popular films, and the wicked ability to smile at whim, all of which delighted her.

In early August we lay on my futon covered in the dew of our sex as a fan in my bedroom window did its best to cool us with air from outside, perhaps only a spare degree cooler than the air in my third floor studio apartment.

“So we should talk about something,” she began, and I fortified myself. ‘Talking’ often ended with talking.

One thing I was sure of: I liked Audrey and wanted to be her boyfriend. But in my experience to that point, I never had to make an effort to start the ‘what are we?’ conversation; it was always started by the woman, almost always too soon. With Audrey it couldn’t come soon enough, yet it didn’t, and I was stuck in an awful rut as to what to do about it and hoped this was the end of such stasis.

“I really like you,” she said. “But here’s the thing: I’m going to Ecuador in a couple weeks.”

“Ecuador,” I said, the verbal equivalent of a blink.

“Yes, with my friend Eleanor, to teach English for six weeks. It’s part of like a volunteer thing through a program with my school. I’ve been planning on it for like six months now I think?”

“Ecuador with Eleanor,” I said, tasting the rhyme, bruised by the unexpected nature of the conversation. We lay apart, on our backs, feeling the feeble ceiling fan try and keep up with its window-borne brethren. It was too hot to be near each other.

“Yes, and six weeks is a long time, and I don’t know how serious we are but I didn’t want to, I don’t know, make you commit yourself to me, or me to you, what with me going away for so long. And I figured, well, maybe if we can make it through that, me going to Ecuador, then when I come back we can really be something?”

“Sure,” I said. “That seems fair to me.” It didn’t, or at least I wasn’t sure, but also I figured it was the end of us, although I was wrong (only slightly). She kissed me on the cheek then flopped back over to her side.

“Jesus,” she said, “Why don’t you get some air conditioning?”

I have this theory about my condition. It has to do with barometric pressure. And small sinus cavities. And small ear canals. And capillaries in the skull.

These latter anatomical features I have inherited from my father, and the former comes about in the atmosphere of my home, the continually wishy-washy upstate New York weather, where there are four seasons, if not in a day, then certainly sometimes within a week—the pressure, therefore, always shifting wildly.

Such shifts in pressure, I surmise, narrow my already constricted orifices and the mind follows the body in that such constriction upon my corporeal being translates into a tightening (in the most cliched sense) of the soul, and what is mood if not a tidal reflection of the soul? My mood then is a bad one.

When the high pressure returns, it’s like a fishing hook’s been caught to the skin on top of my head and someone is reeling me up through a mist of clouds that, upon inhalation, reopen the pathways of my skull for a new, better mood to move in, and to render me somewhat normal again.

(I’m aware this theory is scientifically questionable, but I’m an advocate of intuition in science.)

So when Audrey went to Ecuador, a place of few seasons, I was bitter to be left behind as fall winds flew my mood into flux. We called only once, her first day there, but it was penetrated by the awkwardness of the small room she shared with her friend. We texted often at first, but it lessened to a patter because she was spending time in a different country and experiencing life fully. She was obviously forgiven.

We hung out again straightaway. She came by my place the day after her return but I had forgotten we made plans; or at least, I forgot once I woke up tired after a night of staring into a computer screen, then unceremoniously fell back to sleep again and again until she entered my unlocked apartment and found me snoozing on the futon.

“Are you okay?” She asked, her gentle voice in my ear upon waking me. I got up and answered her by explaining my aforementioned condition in a much more succinct and less clumsy metaphorical fashion as we made our way to the apple orchard, site of so many autumnal dates of our region.

“You don’t seem like yourself, that’s for sure. Why don’t you just move someplace that has better weather?” She followed up as we filled tote bags with apples we’d never eat.

All my memories of apple-picking involve being cold, very cold, tips of your ears and nose feeling the sort of cold that turns to a paradoxical burning.

“I don’t trust it,” I told her.

“Don’t trust what?”

“Being happy all the time. How can you live someplace where things are good like that? It’s dishonest. The world is sometimes shitty, sometimes good. Life is sometimes shitty, sometimes good. If I move someplace where it’s nice all the time, it feels like living a lie. I’ll forget, kind of, that sometimes things are bad, and that’s not good, is it?”

She inspected an apple and wiped it on her shirt as I said this, and I realize now she was wondering if I thought her to be dishonest, her perpetually pleased mood a front or misdirection.

It was no surprise our communication slowed over the course of the coming weeks. Excuses were made, plans re-arranged. She was looking for a job, her first after so much schooling. When she found one, it was in Colorado.

We saw each other one last time before she left. There was a deep mid-November snow (only a couple of weeks after some 60 degree sunny weather, of course) and she suggested we go snowshoeing.

“Now see, when you do these, like, seasonal activities you know, unique to the season, get exercise like this, don’t you feel good?” She asked, between the crunching of our boots. “So this way you experience the benefits of all four seasons instead of them making you miserable when they change?”

It was beautiful, I had to admit: the canvas of white spread before us, sparkling in the sun. It was a high pressure day, but the shrinking effects of coldness on their own are hard to overcome. Her nostrils glowed red with refracted light and she’d have a sunburn by the time we got back to the car.

“Would you ever move?” She asked.

“Move where?”

“Colorado.”

“No, never. The altitude alone lowers the pressure significantly. I don’t think I’d ever make it.”

When we got back to my apartment was when I realized Audrey is the sort of person who makes love like a bad romance writer.

When I saw Audrey again it was early summer, at the farmers market. My half of gladness was flipped facing up, the arterials and crevices of my body opened by heat and humidity to let as much of life in as possible.

I sidled up to her after inspecting some tomatoes at a produce stand. She was running her fingers over a carton of pears, testing their ripeness.

“You know, those aren’t in season yet,” I said. “Not till later in the summer, anyway.”

She exclaimed my name and gave me a hug, however she smelled reminding me only of early spring. “You look great,” was exchanged, and it was true for both of us, probably, in that instance. We gave each other updates on the status of our lives, and I managed to make mine seem hopeful since I was in such a good headspace.

Then she told me:

“I met a guy out there. He’s really great. We’re moving to SoCal in a couple months to be closer to his family. I already got another job and everything.”

The thing about Audrey is—most of all—she enjoys change, motion and its perpetuity. Or at least, that’s how she was when I knew her.

I bought Why Teach? knowing, at least, what I was going to get.

I was so glad to discover Peter on Substack because I feel like he and I are, in some ways, kindred spirits. We both like to write about—as he put it to me once (forgive my paraphrasing )—‘men trying to be men and stubbing their toes’.…

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The story subject to retrospection in this edition: bus kids.

It’s been about a year since I’ve done one of these, but figured I’d get back to it as a little insight for my paid subscribers; after all, they are probably the only folks invested enough in my fiction to care about my process and the stories behind the stories. Probably strikes everyone else as a little vain.

I think I’m skipping a few stories to get to bus kids, but it was on my mind lately because it was a little over a year ago I posted it. I only know because it was around the time of the Kentucky Derby, and when I saw some coverage around that pop up, I went through my old posts to have another re-read. It holds up well— mostly—but I am a little surprised it went over like it did.

The fiction community seemed to really dig it. At the time, what is now the Substack Post was something like ‘Substack Featured’ and they were in the process of having select Substackers curate the weekly featured newsletter. PNP subscriber posited the story to a thread , that week’s curator, had posted seeking suggestions. I guess she read it and liked it enough to send to the masses.

I’m forever grateful for the confluence of these two peoples’ enjoyment of this story—it really was a turning point in my Substack career that moved me to tears. 3.6k people looked at this story. Imagine how many might have read it! Never, ever could I have imagined so many people reading my fiction. I was writing and posting because I could, because I wanted to, for myself, then somehow this incredibly fortuitous thing happened and I was writing for an audience.

And how did I follow the success of bus kids up? Let’s get to that later.

For now, let us retrospect…

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Well, not entirely.

The medical report (recovered from my father’s desk) said something like: Traumatic amputation of the right middle (digit III), ring (digit IV), and little (digit V) finger...amputations are complete at the level of the proximal phalanges, with extensive associated soft tissue avulsion and crush injury extending along the ulnar aspect of the hand...full-thickness tissue loss involving dermal, subcutaneous, and muscular structures with exposed bone and tendon.

Translation: I lost my pinky, middle, and ring finger on the right hand, along with a big chunk of the hand itself on that side.

I was left with a sort of finger-thumb halfmoon combo. It looked more like a congenital defect than a traumatic amputation, especially since I was a little kid and it was obvious it hadn’t been blown off by an IED in Iraq or something. I spent a lot of time in pediatric occupational therapy and support groups with kids who were actually born with such defects, and it always made me feel guilty and stupid, because their thing wasn’t their fault, but mine was, or at least it felt like it was for a long time.

My parents told me a million times not to go near the fence, I don’t blame them.

But I was five, and even more unfocused and forgetful than I would ever be. We had a dog I loved. What could a dog do to me? The neighbor’s dog barked all the time because he was angry, all he needed was a little love.

I was thirsty and my dad had forgotten the lemonade. The burgers were already grilling, he’d be back in a second to flip them, and besides, the dog wasn’t out.

Right as my dad went inside, I heard my neighbor’s sliding door open and the familiar smell of marijuana waft down from their porch, the prelude to the dog padding down the steps, like he always did, full speed and barreling toward the fence to ward us away from his home, his huge balls clanging together between his legs.

The last thing I remember was picking a dandelion from our un-mowed lawn, the last employment of more than two digits on my little right hand, small enough to still carefully reach it through one of the diamonds of the chain link fence that separated our lawn from our neighbor’s, and present the snarling Rottweiler with a peace offering.

My whole life I’ve been thankful not to have remembered the actual happening, for the trauma center of my brain to have shut out the part where the dog chomped through the dandelion and into my flesh, when I must have instinctually retracted and gotten caught on the way back through the fence as the dog took it in the opposite direction.

The rest I remember on a reel of film I can see frame by frame; my dad grabbing me, an ambulance, my mom.

I credit my mom with saving me from a lifetime of cynophobia, because when I was in the hospital she whispered, “It wasn’t a bad dog, honey, it wasn’t his fault, it’s not yours either.”

I believed the former, but not quite the latter.

For years she talked about how tough it was to have known the neighbors had to put him down. “Poor, poor Butch, imagine we had to put down Addison?” she’d say. Butch was the offending dog’s name, half of my hand had, I imagined, been incinerated along with him. My dad would shake his head when she acted like this.

“If Addison ever did something like that to a kid, she’d deserve it. You would have killed that dog with your bare hands if you were there. You’d kill him now if he were still alive,” he must have said to her a million times. He was right.

My story could be about fearing dogs, dogs with big testicles, and a bigger bark. Instead, for the the rest of my life I was afraid of chain link fences, and reaching through them.

My way of dealing with the hand thing was to keep it hidden.

Functionally, I adjusted. Technically I am right-handed, but I learned to write with my left, throw with my left and, when the time came, masturbate with my left. It was an impediment, and a differentiator, but with some therapy and a supportive household and friends, I regarded it overall as a plucky differentiator, an unfortunate obstacle that made me stronger.

Yet I became weak the only time I was made fun of for it soon afterward, right in that sweet spot of an age when some of my peers were insensitive and guileless enough to do so. They called me ‘Hook!’, because it does have an unfortunate pincer-claw appearance.

After that, I noticed the looks wherever I went, how it seemed to make people uncomfortable. My custom-fit, three-fingered prosthetic was delivered and I not only wore it, but wore a glove on top as well.

My life, from that point on, was exceedingly normal besides the deformity, so long as I kept it hidden, as if the universe were compensating for the horrible accident by packaging up the rest into a milquetoast experience that would be up to me to imbue with any strangeness or worthwhile happening, which I was understandably reluctant to do.

Until life did it for me.

I lost my copywriting job, for something like the same reasons that anyone loses their job: layoffs, positional elimination, outsourcing, AI. Except the truth was I had lost inspiration and was doing very little actual work.

We were supposed to get a house, get married, have kids; my high school sweetheart, the only girl I’d never have to explain my hand to again. The loss of my job and its income put the house thing on hold, and certainly the marriage thing, as it turned out we didn’t have much in common besides a shared set of simple idealism and convenience once the promise of a future fizzled out.

My parents were happy to have me move back in, but I wasn’t happy to be there, despite those old neighbors long gone and the chain link removed and replaced with a six-foot wood panel one. I resolved to find any job I could, and with renewed time to work on my portfolio and some contacts with old friends, I found one, working on a massive IP as a narrative designer for a video game company.

The only problem was I had long resolved to stay in colder climes; such weather gave me more of an excuse to wear a glove without scrutiny.

Too bad the job was across the country in Los Angeles.

Having one (and a half) hand helped me get ahead in the writing world.

Certainly not because it helped me write faster (I had to employ a point and peck method), but because Butch had given me a story, a hardship to have overcome.

I wrote about it in eighth grade for English class and my teacher submitted it to a journal, where it was prodigally published and lauded, a paradoxical expose leaning into the very thing I kept physically hidden. I parlayed it into a killer college essay, and made connections at a renowned university, along with the somewhat ancillary accomplishment of a degree.

People like a good story, especially when it’s true, and doubly so when it’s tragic.

Why, then, was it so hard for me to explain to this young woman who I’d been texting for weeks what my condition was?

We met on Hinge because my place of employment was markedly testosterone-filled and I had no other friends or methods of meeting anyone new, nor any experience in meeting individuals in the real world, especially not a place of intimidatingly beautiful people like L.A. I was only good at writing, and texting is, primarily, a form of writing.

I was drawn to Helen physically because she had a dimpled chin and the right amount of freckles, features that aroused something Freudian inside me. She was the kind of girl who was suitably embarrassed about liking Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes in the early 2010s; who laughed at puns, no matter how poor; and had at least one tattoo, but not more than three.

Most importantly, she was also a writer.

Yet we were planning our first date and I had not told her about the hand (or lack thereof). All of my Hinge photos had the hand behind someone else or out of frame.

thursday? I’d asked. She had a work thing.

what about friday? She was visiting her parents.

saturday, then! I proposed.

i am supposed to volunteer at the dog shelter that day, she texted. you should come!

So our first date was at a dog shelter up in Van Nuys, which was part of L.A. or maybe wasn’t, depending on who you asked, and seemed pretty close to where I lived, or at least it did when you looked at a map, but I had quickly learned that it could be a 20 minute or 2 hour drive away.

We met and I was grateful custom dictated we have a reluctant hug rather than shake, her eyes only straying to my gloved hand for a half of a second. She was more beautiful in person and smelled wonderful.

The shelter did not. It smelled like every rough dog smell I’d ever smelled. Rows and rows of dogs, some barking, none with big balls, all of them sad in some unknown way, all behind chain link cages.

Our task was, apparently, to sit with this one specific dog.

Just sit.

They put us in a little room with a grey Pitbull called Misty, on the opposite side of a chain link cage. The poor thing cowered in a primal way, as though it lived on an Earth where gravity was twice as heavy.

“She’s been abused. All you can do is exposure therapy. Gain their trust,” Helen whispered to me. We sat on the concrete ground next to the cage while the dog eyed us wearily from against the wall.

It was the saddest thing I’d ever seen, the only thing that could have made me desperate enough to change the topic of conversation thusly:

“So, uh, you probably think it’s super weird I’m wearing this like, glove, and uh you should know...”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I already know. And I don’t mind. I’m not the kind of person to mind, but I think you already know that. I googled you and found the old short story. Pretty good for an eighth grader.”

I took this in, and said slowly:

“And you still invited me to...a dog shelter?”

“I mean, the point of the story was that you weren’t afraid of dogs, right? I wanted to test you.”

“Fair,” I laughed. “But it wasn’t totally a setup, right? Like you actually do come here all the time, right?”

“Oh yeah, have been for years. It makes me whole, you know?” she said, and I did know.

“How do you do it, coming here all the time?” I asked. “Don’t you just want to take every one of them home? Save all of them?”

“One time I did take one home. Do you want to come meet him?”

Helen had a room in a small house she shared with four other people, like most writers in L.A., although I gleaned they didn’t even own the house. None of her roommates were home, but we were greeted by a dog, a smallish hound mix who was happy enough to see Helen but recoiled when he realized she had company. He growled and paced in the hallway.

“It’s okay,” Helen explained. “He won’t bite or anything. Just nervous.”

“Is this one of those, ‘he doesn’t like men?’ type of deals? Because he was mistreated by one?” I asked. I held out my hand, my left one, the whole one.

“He has a history,” was all she said. “His name is Milo.”

Milo sniffed my hand skeptically. I could see that his left eye was a glass fake, an accoutrement I felt was probably unnecessary for a dog, then realized the irony in me thinking so. I scratched under his chin and felt him relax, then his tail wagged and he bumped himself up against my legs.

“Holy shit, he’s never taken to anyone like that!” Helen said.

“Not once? Not for any of the hundreds of men you’ve brought back?” I teased.

“Stop, I’m serious! He loves you for some reason.”

“What happened to his eye?” I asked.

“His owner used to keep him in a cage in the backyard, and apparently some kid stuck a stick through and poked it out.”

“That’s horrible!” I reached down and slapped Milo’s chest in the way dogs like.

“We have a cat, too. He’s pretty skittish though. Do you like cats?”

“Sure.”

“Let’s try and find him. Milo, can you find your cat sister?”

We took our shoes off and went through the house, undoubtedly inhabited by three of the most bohemian artistic Angeleno women you’d ever know, macramé hoisting up plants, thrifted mirrors and trunks, a mandala tapestry, a Dodger’s hat hanging next to the door. Milo took us to her room and went sniffing under the bed.

“This is one of the cat’s favorite spots to hide,” Helen explained. We got on our knees to look beneath, but saw no cat. When we came back up, our faces were simply too close to each other not to kiss.

Milo didn’t seem to mind. I lifted her sun dress off, she took my shirt off, helped with my belt, rolled each other onto the bed. It became clear to her I was favoring my gloved hand, keeping it from her, feeling her body with only my good left.

“Take it off,” she said, looking at it.

“Are you sure?”

She nodded, lips half open, pulling the glove fingers from each false digit and unstrapping my prosthetic as though it were nothing more than another article of clothing.

I addressed this by kissing her even more. I wielded my fleshy hook and brought it down to the gap in the fence between her legs, and put my finger through it.

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BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS:

How does the narrator’s incomplete memory of the accident shape their relationship with their injury?

How do physical and emotional vulnerability parallel each other in this story?

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