Humdrum Places - BlogFlock

Frayed Threads - foofaraw

2026-11-02T17:09:13.000Z

🥉 Third place winner of An Ordinary Contest, Year II

Marta did not notice the rock until Tuesday evening when she went to get the mail. She took the eleven steps to the mailbox and pulled out the week’s bills with an efficient motion that allowed the flap to close on its own. She turned back to her small farmhouse, crooked shutters drawn tight across the middle window. There, on top of her forsythia and wild roses, was an inexplicable boulder. It resembled the ordinary quartzite in her driveway. It scraped the lowest branches of the maple tree. It sat there, without warning or invitation, crushing her flowering shrubs.

For two and a half seconds, Marta stared.

Almost, she veered across the yard to investigate, but she did not tend the garden until Fridays, and the threads in her pocket were too precious to waste on curiosity. Instead, she allowed herself one breath, then hurried back to the house and shut the door behind her.

On Wednesday afternoons, Marta’s weekly grocery order came. Marta had not visited a store in fourteen years and ten months, but she required little. Young Rami, who biked her deliveries from his mother’s shop after school, stared wide-eyed at the boulder for a good thirty-six seconds on his way up the walk. As he carried the brown-paper bags into Marta’s kitchen, the boy lobbed inconvenient questions like water balloons. He wanted to know where the boulder had come from, when it had appeared, was it a meteor, had aliens dropped it there, and what would she do with it? Marta answered that she did not know twice, then probably not twice, and again that she did not know. Thirteen additional words from her normal Wednesday, the rock had cost her. The threads in her pocket would thin.

Rami pushed up his glasses, studying her with his forehead creased. He asked why she wasn’t curious. She did not have an easy answer for this, certainly nothing in fewer than five words, so she left this question unanswered.

After Rami set down the wheat bread, brown eggs and adobo, the one-percent milk, the instant coffee, and the sale-price chicken breast, he shot back out the front door, which banged behind him. Marta relaxed into her usual, well-ordered quiet. Six minutes and twenty seconds later, as she was methodically folding the paper bags, the child let himself back in without knocking to report that the rock looked like a really big rock, and that the pricker bushes were pretty crushed but a few of the yellow flowers might be okay. Marta was pleased enough to hear the last third of this pronouncement that she expended another two words to thank him politely.

She had less than usual to add to the mason jar in the pantry that evening. Marta’s fine, translucent threads of saved time nestled tidily behind the ridged glass. Still less than a third full, and nearly fifteen years since⁠—

She shut the jar.

Her chest knotted as she considered the time she’d wasted that day. Still, the way Rami had blinked in surprise at her thanks, and the bright grin he’d shot her, had almost been worth the exchange.

Thursday evenings, Marta did laundry. Always the same amount of clothes, towels and sheets, the same wash cycle, and the same number of steps to the dryer, inefficiently located on the other side of her kitchen. The same amount of time running the dryer, because the load was always the same weight and volume. The same awful buzz when the dryer finished, and the same ache in her shoulders as she folded the hot clothes.

To put everything away, she had to walk through the hall, past the door she never opened. As usual, she turned her eyes out the window instead of looking at it, but today, without her permission, her gaze strayed to the rock a few feet from the corner of the house. From this angle, she could tell that her wild roses were unsalvageable, even if the rock could be moved. She’d have to hope the roots were still alive, deep in the earth. The rock had also flattened her forsythia⁠—though, as Rami had noted, a small section remained⁠—and marred the careful edge of her lilacs.

She had not known about the lilacs. The lilacs felt excessive.

Marta squinted. On closer inspection, the rock was striking. Whorls of gray-green that looked more metamorphic than sedimentary. The heat and pressure required to form a rock like that would be monumental, but the amount of time⁠—

With a jolt, Marta realized she’d spent eight seconds woolgathering. Pushing down the tightness in her chest, she skipped the bathroom closet and went directly to her bureau before she got further behind.

On Friday, Marta stood at the sink washing her dishes. One bowl, one spoon⁠—both sticky from instant oatmeal. One water glass. One mug for instant coffee. Marta hated instant coffee. She missed making oatmeal properly on the stovetop, with cloves and cinnamon, brown sugar and salt. Still, the instant versions were far more efficient. She dried her hands and touched the frayed threads that slowly multiplied in her pocket each day. She could skip watering the wild roses today; that would add several minutes’ worth to the threads of saved time that would go into the jar that evening. In that way, the boulder might gain her back the time it had cost, at least in the short term.

As she turned from the kitchen counter, a loud crack sounded from outside her front windows, followed by a cry of pain. A young voice.

Marta froze, her body ready to fly apart. She breathed through it, blinking hard. She could see a hand gripping the counter. She moved the fingers. Under them, the rounded corner of the counter was smooth.

She was in her own kitchen.

God, that sound.

If she went to check, that would be most of the remaining threads⁠—but she had to go and check. Her body was already moving. She threw the towel toward the sink without hanging it to dry and ran the seven steps to the front door. She stumbled to the walk, her eyes flicking across the yard⁠—and there, bless it all, was Rami, on the ground near the rock, holding his elbow with one hand and waving sheepishly with the other. A narrow branch from the maple, the one the swing had once hung from, was sprawled under him across the lawn.

Marta crossed the lawn in fourteen steps she barely counted, breathing against the heavy knot in her chest. She shot Rami a glare she hoped inquired what the blessed hell he was thinking while also asking urgently whether he was all right.

Rami grinned up at her, irrepressible, and informed her he’d almost made it to the top of the boulder. He shuffled the branch behind his back, as if hoping Marta would not notice. She didn’t bother to comment. Instead, she scowled and knelt to examine the child’s injury. Rami’s elbow was scraped, but not terribly bruised. At her careful touch, he bent his arm experimentally and then flung it out in a tada! motion that narrowly missed Marta’s face. She let out a breath, shoulders softening, and helped him up. Was it a waste of words to request that he avoid attempting this again? Instinct told her he would apologize with genuine regret but might try again anyway. The conversation would waste further strands of time, and she still needed to clear the branch and deal with the broken bushes. The rock was even encroaching on her hydrangeas, which she had not noticed from the mailbox or the hall window.

Marta walked Rami into the kitchen and pulled a bag of frozen peas from the freezer. He sat at her kitchen counter for the next thirty-seven minutes, nineteen of which were spent icing his elbow, chattering away about the rock. He collected rocks, he confided, but had never seen one this big. Marta‘s throat went thick and she lost the thread of the conversation for a moment. She perched against the edge of the counter, staring at the dish towel she had not put away, half-listening to the boy ramble. It was a nice sound.

When she stowed the now-thawed peas in the refrigerator to eat for dinner, Rami paused long enough that she noticed the break in the flow. It was odd how quickly she had gotten used to a young voice again. When she glanced over, the child shifted in his seat, wasting energy and motion, and pushed his glasses up. Quieter now, he asked why she was always in a rush.

Words rose and died in Marta’s throat. In the end, she simply shook her head and herded the boy back outside. She stood on the porch, watching him retreat down the driveway. He was so busy eyeing the rock that he almost walked into the road without looking.

That blasted rock was becoming a safety hazard.

Thankfully, Marta would not see the child again until the following week’s grocery delivery. Perhaps by then the rock would disappear, returning to wherever it had come from. Pushing away the urge to check the threads in her pocket, Marta crossed the lawn a second time, ignoring her momentary nausea, and dragged the broken branch to the treeline. Now was probably as good a time as any to care for what was left of the front garden, too, so she went to get the hose and, after hesitating, a trowel. She spent the next two hours and seventeen minutes digging up what was left of the forsythia. By the time she was done, she had a plastic five-gallon paint bucket full of water and rescued greenery, and not a single thread in her pocket. Yet, the time had been almost pleasant to spend. She had forgotten how much she loved caring for her garden, rather than simply upkeeping. She walked back to the house with aching arms, dirt she would have to scrub from her fingernails, and a sense of peace she had not known in years.

On Saturday mornings, Marta cleaned the small house. Most of the house. As she pushed her vacuum cleaner down the hall past the door she did not open, she heard another noise from outside. It did not sound like a child’s cry this time, but after yesterday’s bother her heart was already choking her throat and she was halfway to the door before she registered what she was about. When she threw it open, there was Rami again. He did not seem injured this time, and it was clear he’d dropped his bike against the front porch⁠—that was the sound she’d heard. He was standing right up beside the rock, neck craned, but he turned and waved when he saw her.

Rami ran his hand along the rock’s surface and asked what Marta thought it was made from. Before she could stop herself, Marta said time. She sighed inwardly, expecting a barrage of questions, but the boy nodded as if he understood. The two of them stood in companionable silence, watching the rock as if it might do something interesting. Marta realized with a jolt of unease that she had lost track of time. It must have been nearly noon. She got herself moving and told Rami to come inside and call his mother while she made lunch. The two of them sat at her table eating cold chicken sandwiches on wheat bread while Rami told her about his rock collection. After they’d sat for much longer than Marta would ever have spent here on her own, Rami asked where the bathroom was. Marta sent him down the hall to the right, and washed the dishes, two of each thing. Wasteful. She would lose threads again today.

By the time Marta hung the dishtowel properly, Rami had not returned. Marta walked cautiously down the hall, calling his name⁠—and stopped.

The door was open. The door she’d kept closed for the past fourteen years and eight months was open.

Marta’s stomach turned and she reached to close the door. Then she saw the child standing beside the twin bed in the soft light filtering from between the shutters. For a glorious, terrible moment, she thought⁠—but no, it was Rami. Of course it was Rami. The boy gazed at shelves of carefully-labeled stones with wide, delighted eyes. Sensing Marta in the doorway, he turned. This was an amazing collection, he said, and why did she keep it shut away, he said, and whose room was this, because he wanted to meet them, he said.

Marta’s throat closed, thick and hot. The roaring in her ears deafened her. She grabbed the child by his uninjured elbow, shoved him back onto her front steps, and slammed the door behind him. She snapped the lock into place with the finality of breaking branches.

Afterward, she spent eight minutes and forty-six seconds with her forehead against the cool surface of the door, eyes blurred and stinging, wishing the child would come back so she could spend more precious threads on an apology.

Marta watched for Rami on Sunday, Monday, then Tuesday. He did not come back. She told herself it was for the best, that she would regain some of the time he had cost her, but it was a bitter victory. The quiet pressed against her skin as it had not done in years. She caught herself thinking of things she might have said to the child if he had been there. She stared at her mason jar as if it could provide answers, but it sat silently in her hand, less than a third full of those thin, frayed threads after so many years saving time.

On Tuesday evening, Marta did not go to bed. She shut her eyes and pushed open the door of the little bedroom she’d kept closed for so long, carrying a doubled brown-paper bag.

On Wednesday, after school, Rami brought Marta’s groceries. This time, he did not grin, nor try to draw Marta into conversation. He walked each bag to her kitchen counter politely and turned to leave. Marta’s breath caught. Wait. Please. I’m sorry. She pushed the difficult words into the silence of the kitchen. When Rami paused and turned, she took his hand and walked him into the little bedroom, where she had carefully packed some of the best rocks in the collection. They deserved to be with someone else who would love them. She nudged the bag toward Rami, but he frowned behind his glasses. He asked, as if he’d been thinking about it for a while, who used to live in this room. Marta swallowed. Her daughter, she managed. This had been her daughter’s room. The boy nodded. With the same gentleness he might have offered a skittish stray cat, he asked what had happened to her.

Marta forced them past the tightness in her throat: the worst four words, the ones that were hardest to say. I wasn’t fast enough. Elena had fallen from the maple tree while Marta was at work. By the time she’d found her little girl⁠—

Marta pressed her eyes shut. The warmth of a small hand surrounded hers and squeezed. Marta’s eyes welled over. She struggled to keep her voice steady. Elena had been hurt very badly, but if Marta had gotten home faster⁠—

She felt more than saw Rami bow his head. He asked if that was why Marta worried so much about wasting time, and she could only nod. She began to explain that she was storing the saved time in her pantry, holding on to it, so that if someone she loved ever needed her to be fast enough again⁠—her breath caught and she blinked hard. Because she’d pushed everyone away in the saving, hadn’t she? With the solitary life she lived now, who would that person even be?

Marta realized that she was crying. Had been crying. Rami had led her back to the kitchen, as if planning to fetch a bag of frozen peas for an injury that first aid could not possibly touch. He sat next to her, saying nothing, his hand still in hers. Then he tipped his head, slanting Marta a half-smile, and asked if Elena would have liked the big rock.

The two of them went out into the half-crushed front garden and sat leaning against the boulder. Marta let Rami talk, but she found herself talking, too. She told Rami that Elena had been about his age. That she’d collected rocks, acorns, pretty leaves, and one memorable summer, live bugs. That Elena’s curiosity and warmth had lit up their home. That, like Rami, she had always known when someone needed a friend.

Sunset washed across the sky. The soft texture of a spring evening settled over them. Marta glanced at Rami. Cautiously, she asked if he might like to have this rock for his collection, even though moving it would be difficult and he would probably need to come visit it here.

Rami said that would be awesome, but only if they fixed the flower bushes, since Marta liked them so much.

Marta reached into her pocket and pulled out the single thread still nestled there. She held it in her open palm. Then she blew it into the air like dandelion fluff and watched it spin away. Where it landed, moss grew along the edge of the rock, and a few tendrils of wild roses stranded their way up from beneath its weight. Marta swallowed against the open softness in her chest.

She had done none of the laundry and found that she did not mind.

“I’d like that,” she said, and meant it.

Ren Crewell-Fuerst (they/them) haunts the mountains of upstate New York, where they write speculative and literary fiction and poetry laced with sharp whimsy and sharper shadows. Find Ren on Bluesky (@liminalchemy) and their work in upcoming anthologies from Nightingale Press and TL;DR Press. Ren lives with their wife and three cats, and thrives on espresso and folk-punk music. They are delighted to add a trans, queer, and disabled voice to this publication.

Also in this series

Results Some ordinary results — Year II Story — Second place A Cold Day in Hell and Other Graveyard Shift Problems by JA Logwood Coming Nov 9 Story — First place Beyond Anywhere by MM Schreier Coming Nov 16 Announcement An Ordinary Contest — Year II

📮 November 2026 Zine - foofaraw

2026-11-01T17:00:00.000Z

The November issue of Foofaraw Zine is here! Download below or read in our purpose built ebook reader.

Of course, all stories will be published for free on the web throughout the month, but paid supporters receive a PDF/EPUB with all of the month's stories at the beginning of the month, along with a few other goodies. And Patrons get stuff in print!

Or you can pick up a copy of this and more from our webstore or visit our friends at Weightless Books and pick up mags from other publishers as well!

This month...

An Ordinary Contest Winners

Frayed Threads by Ren Crewell-Fuerst
A Cold Day in Hell and Other Graveyard Shift Problems by J.A. Logwood
Beyond Anywhere by M.M. Schreier

Stories

The Elevator Café Tour of the Abyssal Depths: A Journey in Five Cups by Addison Smith
An All-Consuming Hobby by K.A. Roy
The Writing Process by Evan Simon-Leack
A Million Marks Can’t Be Wrong by Colin Alexander
The Abandoned Castle by Andrew Kozma

Poems

Rehearsing for Rain by Clifton Gachagua
Voltaic Girl by jms xuange
Forbidden Cures by Shana Ross
End Time Signs by Melissa Feuerstein

Observations

Our Shiny, Glorious Tech Utopia by Lily Lachance
I’m The Series Finale of Your Favorite Show and I’m Really Looking Forward to Ruining Your Life by Sadie Bitters
Review of Suicide Valley Trail Maintenance by Colin Alexander by Jeff Goldberg
The Playing the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” Infocom Text Adventure for Forty-two Days Before My Forty-second Birthday and Also November 2026 is That Game’s Forty-second Birthday, Though the Book Dropped Five Years Earlier and the Radio Play is Even Older Essay by Nicholas De Marino (with Douglas Adams & Steve Mertzky)

Toons

Modern Society by Rusty Epstein
Tired/Anxious by Ellie Black
Back to Work by Zack Rhodes

Cover art

by Tony Tran

〄

On to the zines...

🎉 Weekend Edition Vol.103 - foofaraw

2026-10-31T20:31:40.000Z

Trying to get my act together again over here... so forgive the expedited edition...

Foofaraw Press Store

Books, ebooks, and limited editions from Foofaraw Press.

The Week That Was

Rain, Modern Society, Underwater Elevator Coffee Tour, and a Tech Utopia

The Back Page

August Cao - foofaraw

2026-10-30T19:26:18.000Z

Read August Cao's Bunk Brother now!

I’d love to know how you think about this story in the context of the hot-button topic of AI?

It’s funny because I wrote the first draft of Bunk Brother early 2022, pre-ChatGPT era. I was a student studying abroad in the UK and was inspired after seeing Spider by Louise Bourgeois; I was always interested in labor and workplaces as well, so Bunk Brother was born. It is sad to me that the main theme I wanted to explore is still relevant today: how to keep working in an over-optimized, over-surveilled environment. When all we do is write prompts for AI then regurgitate answers to someone else who then puts that back into AI to get an answer, what is the value of us as an individual in the workplace?

While neither robots nor cars are human, this idea of lived experience⁠—dare I say, the human experience⁠—feels important here. What role do you think both memory and experiences play in Bots motivation?

Bot’s in an interesting situations where he has experiences but not necessarily memory. I think experiences leads Bot to crave even more experiences, and his inability to remember also means his risk tolerance can be fairly high (sure, Bot knows you’re not supposed to do XYZ thing, but he doesn’t actually remember what happens to someone if they’ve transgressed). Combination of both makes him break out of line.

Do you think of this story as hopeful?

I do think so. I think Bot’s found both solace and a purpose in knowing he’ll graduate to becoming a car part.

Do other bots in the shop have relationships similar to Bot and Bunk Brother?

In my conception they do! I’m much more interested in zooming into mundane, common interactions vs. writing about a single chosen one. In my imagination there are many many more Bots discovering themselves and Bot + Bunk Brother friendships. In a darker interpretation, I also think authorities sometimes permit a defined set of transgressions in order to keep their subjects complacent, and so I do think Company-Father is actually aware and permitting of many of these rebellions happening all the time.

How many times has this story been rejected by other markets?

12 times! For a while I thought of retiring it, but I loved the story and was getting personalized rejections, so I knew it was about finding the right fit. I’m grateful it found its home with foofaraw and hope the # of rejections here encourage writers to keep believing and sharing their stories.

What’s a great short story you’ve read recently?

Gold Can Stay by Rebecca Curtis

Thanks to August for chatting about robots, humans, and life!

The Horror Essay - foofaraw

2026-10-30T16:00:00.000Z

I’m not a horror person.

But I enjoyed Sunday afternoon Godzilla flicks as childhood revenge fantasies. Little boy wrecks fat man’s city. No clue it was other people’s psychodrama.

My favorite was “All Monsters Attack.” That’s the one where a latchkey kid and his Mini-daikaiju-Me battle bullies and low-effort parenting. Wait … a mysterious island … a toy-dangling neighbor … suspiciously timed narcolepsy^[We’re talking Ged from Earthsea levels.]… were those masks in the Epstein files‽ That kid wasn’t “Home Alone”-ing those bank robbers in an abandoned factory; he was “Sucker Punch”-ing them. Can you think of a safer, more legally sheltered place than Monster Island?^[#MeToo.]

特撮 (TOKUSATSU) TANGENT There’s also “Frankenstein vs. Baragon”/“Frankenstein Conquers the World,” a movie that dares to ask (and answer) the question, “What if the Nazis took the heart of Frankenstein’s monster to Japan right before America dropped the atomic bomb(s), and then, like, what if it grew into Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer?” Bonus mutated footage: unlike other creature feature legends⁠—see “King Kong vs. Godzilla”⁠—this one really does have an alternate ending.^[Now with eight times the “Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife” action!] The sequel, “The War of the Gargantuas,” has better fights. If you’re actually into this stuff, check out the “Ultra Q” series. (Think “Night Gallery” or “The Outer Limits” with a bigger budget.) If you insist on leotard-ed protagonists, try “Mirrorman.”

By the time I had as many fingers as birthday candles, I’d graduated Bruce Coville’s extra-terrestrial schooling and was lapping up R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series as quick as he (or, allegedly, his post-#16 ghostwriters) could crank them out.^[Remember the tear-out bookmarks, temporary tattoos, book lights, and not-POGs?] Like a radioactive booklouse (with an allowance), I consumed the rest of the Waldenbookshelf.

The tween angst of R.L. Stine’s Fear Street pubertied into the teenage monsters-equal-sex of Christopher Pike.^[Not that Christopher Pike. The other one.] After my money got tied up in CDs and ditch weed, I raided Mom’s bookshelf and discovered the vampires-are-kinda-gay-and-hey-the-death-of-a-child-must-be-soul-shatteringly-painful ennui of Anne Rice^[And A.N. Roquelaure, one of Rice’s nom de plumes for stories where people fuck statues.] (Anyone know if her Mayfair Witches books are any good?) and classic Stephen King à la “The Shining,” “Carrie,” and “Pet Sematary.”^[None of which appeared under King’s Richard Bachman pseudonym or have anything to do with agalmatophilia, at least as much as I can remember.] ((If you haven’t read King’s short stories, check out “The Man Who Loved Flowers.” If you have, reread “The Jaunt.”))

Soon, I started worrying about how to get rid of blackheads and zombies. The moans, the lunging, the whine of the disc and frantic mashing of buttons on Doritos-stained controllers … even now it gives me horripilation.^[Erm, goose bumps.] I mean, what the hell?^[Erm, Gehenna.] That pixel-imperfect monstrosity just shrugged off a shotgun blast and, shit, how am I’m out of ammo? What kinda red-white-and-blue-necked champion of the second amendment only stocks a handful of shells in a fucking gun store‽ ((If it’s not clear, that’s “Resident Evil 2” on the OG Playstation. If it is, that’s me misremembering*“Zombies Ate My Neighbors”* on SNES with a janky third-party controller with a “slow” feature that just spams the Start button.))

But I wasn’t into horror. Not at all.

I mean, unless you count “The X-Files.” Or Kubrick’s spin on “The Shining,” or “The Simpsons” spin on Kubrick’s spin on “The Shining.”^[“The Shinning,” natch.] And, oh yeah, my stepmom, Lori, played “The Fog” one night when Dad was out. ((Greet Death’s “Country Girl” play button goes here.)) And we watched “Alien” at Mom’s house. Mom loved “Alien.” Is “Alien” horror? Regardless, I already had the action figures. And the Alan Dean Foster novelization. Plus a few packs of the sepia-soaked trading cards for “Alien 3.” And “Alien vs. Predator”⁠—via the comic book, long before the movie.

Oh yeah, comics! Well, manga, mostly. Junji Ito’s “Tomie” and “Uzumaki” are worth another look. And anything by Hideshi Hino.

OUT-OF-PRINT-MANGA-RELATED TANGENT

If you can find it, Hino’s “Panorama of Hell” is a tour de creepy-as-fuck. It’s gleeful in a way that makes Jhonen Vasquez’s “Johnny the Homicidal Maniac” look well-adjusted.

Also, I listened to metal, you know, for all the descriptions of real-life monsters. Cue Slayer. ((Slayer’s “Angel of Death” play button goes here.))

METAL-RELATED TANGENT

Despite writing for numerous music mags, I’ve never had the opportunity to share this: Kylesa’s “Between Silence and Sound” is sublime. It also happens to be the first bridge of Slayer’s “Jesus Saves” over and over again. ((Kylesa’s “Between Silence and Sound” and Slayer’s “Jesus Saves” play buttons go here.))

I forgot to mention my birthday is in the latter third of October. That means I get an annual influx of horror media through commerce-as-love osmosis. Every year, Dad decorated the house, inside and out, and set up huge holiday villages of ceramic Christmas houses, except they were, you know, Halloween houses. I’d pretend the decorations were for my birthday, like I was a character in The Addams Family.^[Dad was more of a “Munsters” guy.] ((While we’re on the topic, could you add your own Edward Gorey reference here? Great stuff.)) And, all October, we’d watch vintage Universal monster movies. You know, with Lon Chaney, Bela Lugosi, and Boris Karloff menacing white ladies.

Like I said, I’m not a horror person.

Horror Half-Movie Binge Half-Reviews

Oh, horror! I thought you meant like slasher and torture and art house stuff. Just to be clear, I mean the fake kind: not the scrapbook stills and “America’s Funniest Home Videos” clips of enhanced interrogation at CIA black sites.

Not my thing. But, in the sleep-deprived delirium following the birth and colicking of my daughter, I did watch a few horror movies while doubling screening at work. Just to help me concentrate. Here’s what I remember …

“A Nightmare on Elm Street”: This guy should have a podcast.
“Friday the 13th”: Wait, isn’t Jason a monster or something?
“Hellraiser”: Clive Barker hates Rubik’s Cubes.
“Hellraiser 2”: Like, really hates them.
“Hellraiser 3”: But he enjoys CDs.
“Hellraiser 4”: And sci-fi?
“Human Centipede”: What is wrong with people?
“Human Centipede 2”: What is wrong with me?
“The Last House on the Left”: I feel sick.
“Funny Games”: My soul hurts.
“Necromantik”: Huh.
“Cannibal Holocaust”: Does this still count as satire?
“A Serbian Film”: Probably not.
“American Psycho”: Now, this is satire.
“Irreversible”: Why am I watching this?
“Guinea Pig 2: Flower of Flesh and Blood”: Poor Charlie Sheen.^[No, wait, fuck that guy.]
“Saw”: That was pretty good, actually.
“Saw 2”: That wasn’t.
“Saw 3”: Nope.
“Saw 4”: I’m out.
“The Cabin in the Woods”: Cute.
“It Follows”: Creepy.
“Oculus”: Sure.
“You’re Next”: Satisfying.
“Anti-Christ”: Was Tom Cruise right about psychology?
“Martyrs”: That hurts on so many levels.
“The Babadook”: This is the one. All done.

I talked to Tom, the viral ‘Jonestown’ Trump rally guy - The Independent Variable

2026-10-30T02:19:23.000Z

“Well, in the late ‘70s, I was a little too young to get involved and go to South America for the Jonestown Massacre. But this is as close as I'll ever get, so that's why I'm here.” Confused, the reporter says “Wait, the Jonestown Massacre?” Hoyle fires back, “That’s right. There's nothing like seeing a cult right up front.”

Given how much the world sucks these days, seeing someone who grew up in or lives in "the south" come out swinging like this makes me feel just a tiny bit better. This whole interview with my new hero, Tom, is full of incredible quotes.

Bunk Brother - foofaraw

2026-10-29T16:00:00.000Z

1

Bot knows no place beyond the shop and no time beyond the clock. That is how Bot was raised⁠—if that word can be used⁠—by Company-Father.

Company-Father looms over Bot and his brothers every evening, a giant arachnid-like bot raining legs down from the ceiling, eight search beams as eyes scanning the room for disrepair. During the day, cars roll into the shop–the easy cases sun-bleached, the hard cases road-beaten. Company-Father presses his legs into each one and lifts up; the bots scurry beneath them like ants.

This is Bot’s favorite part of his day: the beginning of the first repair where he plugs his spine into the car and becomes it, feeling the world for the first time. The mountains he runs past, the splash of hitting a puddle, the wind shaving his cheek, the skid of rubber on asphalt and the final flattening impact⁠—all of it compounding into more and more yearning to fix yet another car, consume yet another journey.

Thousands of self-aware cars are fixed this way⁠—the proper way⁠—in both visage and spirit. A car loses the memory of its crash to its repairbot so it does not fear going on the road again. Otherwise they run timid and fretful; they pull back at a steep curve or dig their tires too deep as they descend a slope. A bot craves the memory of a car, his craving accelerating with each car he plugs into, becoming more efficient and more motivated over the workday. Such is the patented, engineered symbiosis. To deal with memory storage, a bot is reset every evening, and he knows nothing of tiredness. He only knows time from the rust in their knuckles and age from the accumulation of scratches on his body. Every morning, he wakes feeling brand new and thus ready to work again.

Anyway. This is not a manual about how to design a self-aware car repair shop (that is covered separately, in a 125-page technical spec). This is a story about Bot.

2

Bot is the shiniest bot on the line. He is so shiny he could deflect sun into fire, if only the sun existed in the factory. He is so shiny other bots instinctively turn away from him. His belly, a pane so smooth and clear it approaches a mirror, does not reflect the best of each bot. After all, no bot wants to be reminded of their decay.

No bot except Bunk Brother, who never turns away from Bot when he sees him.

Bunk Brother is the dullest bot on the line. Bunk Brother already has a rusting spine and a permanently half-shuttered eye. The whirr of a good bot is steady and soft, the army of them blanket the factory in a gentle tinnitus. Bunk Brother huffs and puffs, labored in his breath, hot to the touch. Bot imagines Bunk Brother’s chest will cave in one day, his entire body collapsing, melting from the inside.

Yet Bunk Brother takes all of himself in with casual nonchalance.

The absence of memory does not equate the absence of identity. The strength of his carapace, the lubrication between his joints, the efficiency of his work–all of it counts towards who he is in the factory. Bots with shinier coats walk with heads high and chests puffed; bots with mottled coats seem to shrink with every step. Upon waking every morning, bots scramble to count their wounds; they count again before sleep every night, assured when they don’t see their number of scratches change. Though a bot will never do anything to harm another bot, Bot does sometimes compare himself to his brothers and indulge in some slight guilty delight. Only sometimes.

Bunk Brother simply gets up in the morning and lies down in the evening. And doesn’t survey his own body or that of anyone else’s, even though Bot does, noticing all of Bunk Brother’s small decays between morning and evening.

It’s not that Bot is specifically looking out for Bunk Brother or that he particularly cares about him. It’s that Bot finds Bunk Brother’s behavior inexplicable. He isn’t sure how he feels about him, and for a repairbot to feel uncertainty feels wrong.

Some nights⁠—partly provocation, partly curiosity⁠—Bot slithers a hand over Bunk Brother’s torso. Other nights, Bunk Brother lays his hand on top of Bot’s. Both never apply more pressure than gravity. Both blink into sleep at the same time.

3

Bot is also a smart bot.

Bot is smart because he knows he is capable of remembering. Although he ends every day forgetting, he doesn’t begin each day on a blank slate. When he wakes up, he knows he can flex his fingers and each one will swivel into a tool. He knows which car to work on, what sequence to work on them, and when to deem a car beyond repair. He has a nagging fear of Company-Father: not enough to make him cower, just enough to make him careful. Every night, he is guided to the right bunk, to lie next to what he assumes is the same Bunk Brother. These are habits, but aren’t habits just memory compounded? So be it: Bot comes to this conclusion every day. He never seems to have enough time to act on his realizations.

If his favorite part of the day is his first time plugging into a car, his second favorite part of the day is the quiet limbo right before sleep, where he savors every memory he’s collected over his shift. Bot never wants to sleep. Some of his brothers welcome it⁠—sometimes there are so many memories to process that the gears in his head throb. They know there’ll be more, newer memories to devour the next day.

Bot does not wish to forget anything. From the warmth of sunshine to the caress of dew, from piercing hail to the brutal gravel that scrubbed his tires raw, he wants to know all of it. Some nights he lets himself indulge in that forbidden thought: if only I were a car.

But Bot is not a car.

Bot is a bot, and he worries that if he has these thoughts too loud Company-Father might hear him. He has known no place other than the factory and no life other than being a repairbot, which he doesn’t hate.

So instead, he just tries to fight the reset every night by tapping a rhythm with his finger or listening to Bunk Brother’s chattering breath. He always loses to sleep in the end. Rest assured the process is never jarring for the bots. The search beams may be bright but they are warm. Imagine them caressing the bots as they sweep from side to side, a lullaby in light form.

Bot wakes with his hand in Bunk Brother’s, warmth radiating into him. He goes through the same pattern of feelings of Bunk Brother every day: annoyance, pity, grudging acknowledgement, worry. But before all of those, the first feeling he comes to is gratitude. In the cold factory, among the rows and rows of bots lying down straight, Bunk Brother’s hand is proof of the possibility to step out of line. Bot holds onto that hope.

4

On and on⁠—all of Bot’s rebellions live in the details. As the workday progresses, he plugs into each car a little longer than necessary, a little less than efficient. When he gets assigned a painting job (he thinks of these as very lucky days), he purposefully becomes clumsy and splatters spots onto his torso, if only to see what he would look like with color. He delights in every slight toe of the line. He has not done anything to impact his work. He has not done anything to affect Company-Father, so he is safe.

He wishes he would do more. Lying on his charging cot at night, reviewing the day, he knows every little moment he considers rebellion is, in the grand scheme of things, merely inconsequential. I will do another thing tomorrow*,* he thinks. And then: some guilt at allowing himself to become soft, to be like the other bots.

Tomorrow is always a safe concept until he encounters a dead car.

Bots do not understand the concept of mortality until they face a dead car. They can fix any physical malady, but when they plug into a car and nothing comes out, they know that car has lost its awareness and become a mere carcass. When Bot feels a dead car, his motor spins slower, his veins tighten, he grows stoic. Other, older bots may carry that experience as a distraction for the rest of the day; they become mired in the realization that they will decay as much as that car one day. A dead car is a workplace hazard. A dead car can immobilize a bot until the next reset.

This particular car was new. Barely any wear on the tread or dust build-up on the seats⁠—it could have run far more distances and brought back so much more mileage and memory into the shop. Bot tries another plug position⁠—still nothing. He should move on.

He should move on, but what a shame! Such a new car. Such a beautiful car.

It is always so easy for him to think himself immortal until he sees a dead car. It is always so easy for him to think he has forever to do something more until he faces a dead car. The more he looks at the carcass, the more he recognizes himself: metal ribs, the same bolts and nuts, even the rubber of the tires are the same makeup as his rubber soles.

He knows Company-Father does not pass his search beams during the day.

He flexes his hand. He thinks about what he was built to do. He thinks about how much he has done already. He thinks about what he could do. A dead car is a dead car, and he doesn’t know where the dead car will go or what it will do, but all that he can think of now is that he could take his small rebellion beyond fighting sleep and holding Bunk Brother’s hand. So Bot reaches up into the carcass and rips out a bolt.

5

Accomplishment surges from his fingertips to his toes. He’s done it. Taken a big, big step when he’d only been toeing the line before. And if he could do this he could do so much more. Does this mean one day he could fight off sleep at night? Carry on memory to the next day? Speak, leave, feel his own rubber on real gravel?

No. Leave is a thought much too loud to have. Something in him tells him it is not an exercise worth trying. Things like this, like taking the bolt, are what’re worth trying.

He backs off from the car, rolling the bolt around in his fingers, transfixed. When he looks up, he realizes the car has already been swallowed by Company-Father.

The car has become part of Company-Father.

Bot has taken something from Company-Father.

All that electric accomplishment drains away. His gaze refocuses, he instantly runs cold, he swears he can feel every nut tighten around every screw in his body.

Did Company-Father notice? He must hide the bolt. Company-Father sits above their heads every day–he tries being surreptitious and curls the bolt under his right toe. For the rest of his shift he keeps his head down. He does not dare do a single task out of place.

The bolt digs deep into his sole. Every step brings him a little joy and increased apprehension. He tries to console himself: every moment he gets before Company-Father’s leg descends upon him is a moment he’s earned! He has committed the crime; there is no repentance available.

There is nothing he can do now. Nothing except wait⁠—and nothing ultimately happens. He has finished the last repair of the day. Company-Father’s legs are retracting, and the bots are cleaning up around the factory. Discarding the bolt will be easy now⁠—he’s proved his point to himself⁠—but he cannot bring himself to toss it.

If Company-Father descends in the night, he will not remember anyways. If he wakes up tomorrow morning stripped of his body, he will not remember what he was like today. There is no consequence that could matter.

He has always wanted tomorrow to matter.

So he keeps his hope. He carries the bolt until midnight.

6

Bot begins his evening ritual like all his other brothers. First his limbs; they can rotate 360 degrees, his gaze scanning from top to bottom. Then his belly and his back as he swivels his head. For his face itself, he normally looks to Bunk Brother, trying to extrapolate his features from the mottled reflection of Bunk Brother’s back. Over time it becomes him examining Bunk Brother. The rust that’s taken root on his body seems to grow every day, almost artfully. Bot finds it a comfortable distraction as his foot tightens around the stolen bolt.

He is trying not to think too much about what might happen. So he counts all the freckles on Bunk Brother’s back down his spine, his slippery spine, and sees the loosening bolts…

His foot tightens around the stolen bolt, as if on instinct.

No, he thinks, he is having another very loud thought.

Looking around at his brothers, some still wrapped in self-examination, he estimates he has around three minutes left before sleep. Does he trust Bunk Brother? Yes, he thinks Bunk Brother won’t mind, but what if he actually does and raises his hand and has Company-Father bring his leg down onto Bot? Is this just a preposterous proposition?

His foot stiffens now. Midnight will strike soon, and he’s already gambled today. So Bot reaches out a hand and gently hooks a finger on Bunk Brother’s shoulder, pulling him across to him. For a moment he is stricken. Is this the first time he has ever looked into Bunk Brother’s eyes? Concentric rings of violet neon⁠—bright and flared in surprise⁠—the newer bots don’t have eyes like this anymore. Eyes that Bot think could cure the forgetting; eyes he should always remember.

He shakes it off; there is barely any time left. He grabs onto the bolt beneath his foot, then twists over to expose his back and points at the base of his own spine. Then he points to Bunk Brother’s back, makes a twisting motion with his hands. He wishes there was some other way to communicate.

Bunk Brother nods.

The feeling, better than the warmth of sunshine, more soothing than the massage of rain. Quickly, Bunk Brother flips onto his side and proffers his back. Bot unscrews the old bolt and handles the replacement gently, and in less than 10 seconds Bunk Brother no longer has a slippery spine. He whirrs a note of gratitude. Before Bot can pull away, Bunk Brother has reached a hand behind him to take Bot’s hand in his.

In his excitement Bot has forgotten that he has to take care of the old bolt as well. He tucks it back underneath his feet. He reasons he could have something to look forward to tomorrow. After all, he has evaded Company-Father the entire day. He does not fight the reset that night.

7

Bot wakes to a funny feeling in his foot and his hand in Bunk Brother’s. Like every other day, he can’t remember why he wakes up this way, but he’s sure of one special thing: he carries no feeling of disgust or surprise when he wakes like this, hand in hand.

The foot, though⁠—that one feels off⁠—a bit too much tenderness between the toes, perhaps damaged yesterday? He swivels his foot and bends to examine it when he finds an impression of a bolt in his rubber sole. Very fresh, edges not yet dulled by wear. Thankfully fresh enough that Bot can extract his hand and massage out the impression before Bunk Brother gets up.

He shouldn’t chase down why he has the impression. He shouldn’t let fear rear its head. That he is finally getting old, getting sluggish, getting ignorant; he has become imprecise, stepping on a bolt by accident.

By habit he begins checking the rest of his body, relieved to find no other evidence of mistake.

For good measure he checks Bunk Brother too.

The base of Bunk Brother’s spine. Shiny silver against dirt red. A new-ish bolt.

His foot clenches as if on instinct. Well, he thinks, he’d have to check all the other bots in the factory. He’d have to see if they also have new parts with old bodies. Maybe there are secret repair bots that lurk over them while they sleep. This must all be one great coincidence. Bot is a smart bot, was he also a brave bot?

Bunk Brother’s back still faces him. Slowly, Bot reaches out and traces the bolt with his fingers.

It is an almost perfect match to the impression on his foot.

He whirrs urgently and shakes Bunk Brother awake. Points to Bunk Brother’s spine, then himself, then mimes fixing with his hands, and Bunk Brother bows his head in an effect of gratitude. The warm joy of celebration fills his body⁠—he has done something. He has gotten this infraction past Company-Father. He can keep doing this, keep making countless other tomorrows a reality.

He passes his gaze over Bunk Brother’s body, delighting at every opportunity found. That afternoon, he pulls another screw out of a car, tucks it underneath his foot, and makes the swap at night. Wakes the next morning, catches the glint in Bunk Brother, repeats.

Again, Bot is a smart bot. When he really lets himself think, he knows there’s one part of the chain he isn’t accounting for. He doesn’t think about where the old parts are going. He is thankful for any mercy.

8

Repetition programs recognition into their skin. It’s become a waltz for Bot; though his body has long become familiar with what to do, every interaction stays taut and electric.

Bot swears he can feel the air coagulate between them. All that expectation⁠—what part of Bunk Brother can Bot fix today? Bunk Brother is the only bot that makes Bot want to converse. How hot is it for you? Why don’t you ever examine your own body? Do you care about what we are doing⁠—or is this just an extension of your nonchalance? Perhaps it is better they cannot truly talk. Bot isn’t sure what answer he would get.

But Bot continues to collect parts and Bunk Brother lets him. Bot knows they are running out of areas to fix. He is also not letting himself think of that.

For now his hands are nimble and precise. Every finger agile, every point needle-sharp, Bot is still the newest (and most functional, he thinks) bot on the line. But one day⁠—Company-Father’s beam flashes just a little too close⁠—Bot slips.

A scratch across Bunk Brother’s abdomen.

Bot whirrs gently. He wishes, again, that he has been granted with words so he could apologize. Then⁠—before he can really think it through⁠—he takes a hold of Bunk Brother’s hand. He wraps his fingers around one of Bunk Brother’s fingers, grabs it, and pulls it towards his belly. Bunk Brother whirrs in protest but Bot holds strong. With the finger, Bot scratches a line across his own abdomen equal to Bunk Brother’s. He proffers his belly. See, he tries to say. We are now one and the same.

Bunk Brother immediately frees his hand from Bot’s. He shakes his head in disapproval, points to his own mottled coat and rotates his limbs to show all his accumulation of injuries. He points to Bot’s mirror pane belly and shakes his head again, whirring, angry, then flips over.

Bot doesn’t relent. He reaches his hand over and lays it onto Bunk Brother’s abdomen, hugging him from behind. He finds the scratch with his fingers and presses. How he wishes this could be repaired by him too, that he could press hard enough to deposit metal from his fingers into the gouged valley.

Art by Addison Smith

9

Bot has a scratch on his abdomen.

A tiny line distorting the perfect pool of his belly.

He immediately pulls his hand out from Bunk Brother and goes to feel his belly. Bot wants to scream. All the other bots are still waking up. Instead, he just focuses and grinds the gears in his arm very, very slowly. It doesn’t make any sense, he thinks. What could have left such a tiny scratch and not damage any other part of his carapace? He is not only getting old, he is getting foolish.

Absorbed by the scratch, he does not check Bunk Brother in the morning and does not make the connection between his feet and the new glint on Bunk Brother’s belly pane. He drags himself through work carefully that day. He does not want to think about himself becoming imprecise. He has allowed himself to slip up, and he will not allow himself to do so again.

There is danger everywhere in the factory. A loose bolt, a sharp edge⁠—he avoids all of it. He finally lets go of a breath when he settles back down on his cot.

Bunk Brother’s mottled coat greets him. This might be the way he’ll go as well, Bot knows. To become so old he’ll no longer find any value in staying whole.

Then he rolls over and Bot sees, clear as day, the identical scratch on Bunk Brother’s belly. He remembers the weird indentation under his feet and reconciles it with the glinting bolt against Bunk Brother’s dirt-like belly. He’s tried to avoid the reason the whole day, not realizing the reason was him.

Bunk Brother catches his gaze and lays his hand on Bot’s belly. He dips his head low in an apology. Then, he takes Bot’s hand in his, and before Bot can react, he’s scratched another line into his own belly. Bunk Brother dips his head lower and bobs it up. His hand is still holding Bot’s. Aluminum shavings tickle the ridges of his finger.

Bot does not want to accept the apology; this isn’t you, he wants to say. This was him. Before he can think, for sleep is coming soon and he must act fast, he pulls in Bunk Brother’s hand and presses that finger to his abdomen.

A delay. Bunk Brother curls his finger, caressing his abdomen. He proffers his belly. We are matching, he seems to say.

Company-Father’s search beams are coming awfully close. He must go to sleep. Instead he presses Bunk Brother in close, belly to belly. He wishes they could lie so close their scratches overlap, valley over valley, become whole that way.

10

A pattern spreads across their abdomen. A little secret no other bot will understand. Together, they wake with the same pattern, add another scratch onto one another, wake the next day, repeat, the pattern expanding over their time today. From the pattern, Bot counts 67 working days. Terrifying monotony if he had memory. Even though he loves savoring memories of the cars he repairs each day, he cannot imagine doing the same for 67 straight days. The more memories he consumes the more he longs to be outside.

Bunk Brother gets as hot as a sun-beaten road at night. Even when Bot isn’t next to Bunk Brother, he can pick out his whirrs among the background tinnitus. One day Bunk Brother wakes with a new wart, a misshapen lump of melted aluminum. Red flakes off his body each morning.

He walks slower now; he has to drag one foot after the other.

Still, they continue their waltz under the searchlights, even when this rebellion no longer makes sense to Bot anymore. His thoughts get louder by the day. Just being different doesn’t satisfy him. He wakes up and sees the patterns on him and Bunk Brother, realizes what he can do, knows there is far more he can do. Really, he should be pushing the line everywhere else. The scratching will not get him closer to the factory door.

He continues because the pattern grounds him. Before, Bot would see an entire factory of himself yet feel utterly alone. Now Bot knows he has someone else.

11

89 scratches later. Bunk Brother wakes up dull in his one half-shuttered eye. Bot looks at the other one, directly, as much as he can that day, wishing he could burn that image into his memory.

12

112 scratches later. The rubber sole of Bunk Brother’s left foot has entirely peeled off. Bot grabs a spare rubber and tries to patch Bunk Brother up again⁠—there are just too many loose parts and wires to glue together. Bot is trying not to have one very loud thought. He just thinks about the now, the hand he wakes up with.

13

148 scratches and Bot wakes, freezing. He wakes hands straight by his side, back to the floor, front facing up towards Company-Father. Though everything is in its right order, Bot feels displaced. On instinct, he turns to examine Bunk Brother.

In the mirror-like back of Bunk Brother, he sees his belly reflected, a smattering of scratches across. Too precise to be accidents. Too irrational for any bot to do. He’s about to turn back when something compels him to lift his finger where he finds tiny aluminum shavings stuck in the crevices.

He hesitates, gears whirring. He can’t be certain what they mean⁠—those scratches could just be from work⁠—but as he runs his hand over his belly again he feels an impulse to curl them up into the pane. So he presses a finger to his belly and digs in.

Afterwards, perhaps by habit, he reaches out and lays a hand on Bunk Brother’s abdomen. Brother wakes and shakes him off with an agitated whirr.

14

213 scratches. Bot adds another one, day over day. The other bots regard him with a mixture of caution and care, always distant. They fear contagion.

15

Bot doesn’t count his scratches anymore. He still does it⁠—prefers it, even⁠—since every scratch shaves away his mottled coat and reveals fresh silver. One day he’ll dig to his core. For now every scratch reminds him he was once new, reminds him that he is now an old bot who just works and waits.

A gorgeous car rolls into the shop today. Mirror-pane finish on a sleek silver facade, cleanly tracked treads, buttery leather seats. A rare car that makes Bot’s heart skip a beat when he runs his hands over it. It floats on the roads. Plugged in, he carves through valleys of burnt amber and digs through snow capped mountains. Pigeons perch on his head. He is momentarily blinded by a sandstorm, emerging halfway submerged in floods. The texture of the roads he’s walked: the soft carpet of grass, the grip of gravel, the silkiness of mud. He would be happy if this is the last car he fixes. He doesn’t remember when he started having this very loud thought. He does not care much about the volume of his thoughts anymore.

The problem is simple: an engine overheating from the stress of mileage. He lays his hand on the engine, feeling the heat radiate through his palm as he attempts to soothe it. The warmth soothes him instead, he wants to keep his hand there.

He shakes himself out of it. He is an old bot now, distractible.

A fluid replacement and restart later, the engine is running as good as new. Bot does another check before he sends it out on the road; the car is so beautiful he wants to be thorough. Wings clear. Seats clear. Tires clean. But when he ducks for the underbelly, he sees a row of scratches, precise and clinical, underneath the hood. An exact match to the beginning scratches on his belly.

Bot feels his veins expand; his engine spins faster. He knows these are not scratches from the road. These are scratches made in the same way he has made his.

He will not see the car again. He will not remember the car. Next time, another bot could get the car–another bot with no scratches and no connection that’ll rip apart the pane and turn it into scrap metal. So today, he’ll rip a bolt from his knuckles and cut a tendon from his calves. Assemble them all into this car and send it off back on the road.

Wait for me, he thinks. He is not afraid of time anymore.

August Cao is a writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. She loves work that mixes the mythical and technological. Her work has appeared in Reckoning and Apparition Lit.

📺 The Media Guide S8E6 - foofaraw

2026-10-29T00:17:47.000Z

Media Guide

Aaaaaand we are back! The last two months have been a bit hectic at Foofaraw HQ with a print edition of the September magazine, a new novelette, and our Best of 2025 anthology all rolling out at once plus many WIP things we can't wait to roll out.

While we did miss talking about a couple things like War on HBO and the return of The Lowdown and South Park, plus movies like Digger (which seems like it's already been dropped by most theaters), and Wicker, overall it was a light month leading into November where things really start to heat up and award season in Hollywood really kicks into gear.

Foofaraw Four

🎬 Wild Horse Nine

The odds that this doesn't end up being my favorite movie of the year feel like they are at an all-time low at this point. First, it hasn't been that great of a year in film so far, and second, and more importantly, it's Sam Rockwell and John Malkovich once again working with Martin McDonagh who is one of my absolute favorite writer/directors. The man does not miss albeit this is only his fifth movie in over 20 years of being in the industry. He also seems to building a bit of a pattern with his filmography, which makes me even more excited to see what a potential sixth movie could look like, but now I'm getting ahead of myself...

📚 Rampant Swine #1 — Ignition Press

I'm not a terribly big fan of King Arthur retellings, but anything from the wildly imaginative Si Spurrier is worth giving a look. He's joined by Christopher Mitten on art who has done a bunch of work in the World of Hellboy so I'm excited to see this monstrously and wonderfully imaginative book come to life. Ignition Press has quietly been killing it in their first year of publishing.

📺 Black Doves Season 2 — Netflix

Black Doves came a bit out of nowhere last year to tell a really tight and engaging spy story starring Keira Knightly and Ben Whishaw, and at this point, I'm just here for the ride. I'm going to need to refresh myself on how the first season ended, but with these two leads, it's hard to imagine it being anything less than great again.

📺 Blade Runner 2099 Season 1 — Prime Video

Lastly, Amazon's second biggest foray into big budget IP-driven TV (right after dropping a few billion on LotR), sees Michelle Yeoh and Hunter Schafer team-up fifty years after the events of Denis Villenueve's Blade Runner 2049.

Claw Machine - foofaraw

2026-10-28T16:00:34.000Z

—Zack Rhodes

The Monster's Toybox - foofaraw

2026-10-27T16:00:00.000Z

The stuffies aren’t asked how they feel
about the state of the playroom, the way
they’re tossed, or disemboweled of stuffing;
to them, the world is a ball
in the clutches of a monster.
It noses the sphere, wanting a playmate
when ruinous diversion tempts–
and to burn down the playground
when its interest is lost.

The world is a ball
in the clutches of a monster,
a sea leviathan we thought we could train
like a seal, barking for claps,
easily accepting of lordship over a small pool,
and meagerly doled out fish, content
with the cheering audience; the myth
of its origin lost to it
like the little girl’s golden ball
tumbled down a well
waiting for a not-yet-named-monster

first, to rescue her precious toy
and then to be made man again
after it had grown accustomed
to having such power, demanding
kisses in exchange for simple human kindness,
treating it like some children’s game.

Lynne Sargent is a Hamilton-based queer writer, aerialist, and holds a Ph.D in Applied Philosophy. They are the poetry editor at Utopia Science Fiction magazine. Their work has been nominated for Rhysling, Elgin, Best-of-the-Net and Aurora Awards, and has appeared in venues such as Augur Magazine, Strange Horizons, and Analog. Watch out for their non-fiction book Thought Experiment Revolution: How Philosophy in Science Fiction and Fantasy Changed the World, forthcoming from ECW Press.

A review of "All Your Friends Are Here" by M. Shaw - foofaraw

2026-10-23T16:00:00.000Z

Prose Over Plot

What is Weird Fiction? What is New Weird Fiction? What is New Weird Horror? What is New Weird Lit or New Weird Science Fiction or New Weird Other and do any of these distinctions mean anything and/or is that the whole point of the genre?

There are some types of weird fiction that we call weird because they truly are kind of incomprehensible (M. John Harrison) or at least wildly strange (China Miéville). But not every beautifully incomprehensible work gets called Weird-with-a-capital-W, because if it did that’s how we’d label our trio of great Irish modernists: Joyce, Beckett, and O’Brien. We don’t, alas, but you know those three reveled in their incomprehensibility and their weirdness.

A lot of weird fiction is a form of speculative horror that isn’t quite scary enough to be straight horror and isn’t quite rule-based enough to be science fiction. This often has an eco-horror tilt (Jeff VanderMeer), it might earn the label because of a cosmic horror/Lovecraftian-but-anti-racist influence (Victor LaValle), or maybe it just doesn’t quite fit into any other category because it’s, well, a bit weird (Carmen Maria Machado). Plus, I’ll again note that one could and should argue Samuel Beckett and Flann O’Brien were writing speculative eco-horror, though no one ever says that but me.

One thing all these New Weird writers have in common is a bit of literary pretension, by which I mean a defiance of the traditional speculative fiction genre rules and⁠—to mixed extents⁠—an allegiance to prose over plot. Some might argue these writers are wielding that literary pretension to avoid having to worry about internal consistency or even writing coherent stories, but that’s just another reason to corral them all into their own separate space to avoid sullying the more boringly-structured plot-based science fiction or horror. New Weird is what you call your book when you don’t want to slum it on the genre shelves but also don’t want to say “literary fiction” out loud at a party. It’s prose credentials without snobbery, genre pleasures without the stigma. Never mind that plenty of genre is beautifully crafted and plenty of literary fiction is freakin’ weird (and not just the Irish modernists).

One might wonder if M. Shaw’s All Your Friends Are Here is classified as New Weird because, as a collection, it has too many discordant pieces to fully fit anywhere else, even if individual stories might earn themselves a more standard genre placement.

It’s got horror/eco-horror/body-horror (“The Only Friend You Ever Need,” “Go with the Flow,” “The Cure for Loneliness”) which maybe skews towards comic horror, a sub-genre having its moment in the sun. It’s got science fiction (“My Dad Bought a Space Shuttle,” “Ready Player (N+1)”), though these, wonderfully, are really transfemme bildungsromans with some satirical science fiction wrappings. It’s got transgressive lit (“The Motorist,” “Roots in the Ground,” “Man vs Bomb”) which I call transgressive instead of body horror because they involve sex and genital mutilation of one kind or another, and according to a poorly argued 2023 GQ review of Bret Easton Ellis’s The Shards that I’m still mad about, it’s not transgressive unless a penis gets disfigured.

I think we can at least agree that any collection with 26 separate content warnings⁠—one of which I had to look up in the dictionary (dendrophilia: sexual arousal from trees)⁠—is clearly aiming for transgression of some kind, though a bit tongue-in-cheekily.

The real question(s) isn’t how to categorize the stories. It’s whether they’re any good. Are they a pleasure to read? Are they befuddling and charming and funny and heartfelt? Do they make you want to read more, as in both more of each individual story and more stories like them? And, also, least and most importantly: are they weird? And the answer is: yes. Yes, they are good, and yes, they are weird.

In “The Only Friend You Ever Need” the narrator manages to draw the attention of a malak, one of the world’s many murderous, ineffable creatures, one per city. There aren’t really any rules or logic or worldbuilding. It just is what it is. I’d have been happy with a novel-length version of this story, or, perhaps, an old-school 22-episodes-a-season television series.

“I worked out a system: every time I wanted to check the back seat, instead of doing that, I made my peace with God.”

In “The Cure for Loneliness,” a woman slowly turns into a plant (which, as we know from Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, is a topic worthy of The Nobel Prize). It’s one of the scarier stories in the collection, though that’s because as a vegan I find the concept of possibly-sentient plants particularly terrifying. Like all multi-dimensional stories, this story of toxic plants is interwoven with the story of a toxic relationship, and it gets you rooting for the roots.

“Not to blame you for anything, but hearing this made it a lot easier to believe, in the ensuing months, that I was conducting a cute little experiment and not ceding the entire ecosystem of my life to something I still barely understand.”

And, of course, there’s “Roots In The Ground,” which deserves mentioning not just because it’s the first story in the collection, and not just because it does a terrific job introducing you to the whole book’s themes of the natural world gone wrong and grief and sexual deviation and self-sacrifice through numbness, but also because it’s the story that needs a content warning for dendrophilia.

“How she had doubled back and passed us without our noticing was beyond me, but it was either that or there were multiple tree orgies going on that night, which I didn’t want to entertain.”

Is it a perfect collection? There are, admittedly, a few stories where the satire is a little too on-the-nose (“The Apology”) or a kind of wry-but-dry recitation of purpose (“One Long Staircase, Just Going Up”). Stories like that can help decode the rest of the collection. They give you a less layered look into the author’s thematic goals (so we’re complaining about the billionaire-led end-stage-capitalism dystopia?) which you can then apply as a template to their more obfuscated peers. Plus, there’s no such thing as a perfect collection, except, perhaps, according to some literary scholars, Joyce’s Dubliners (to bring back our Irish modernists), though those same scholars also call the final entry in that collection, “The Dead,” the best short story ever written, which implies the others are not the best short story ever written. So how could it be perfect?

What all the best stories in this collection have in common is voice. It’s the winking sardonicism of college-educated-but-stuck-in-a-dead-end-job, the liminal space of dying suburbia, a genuine feel that the narrator is chatting with you even as the details swerve from bizarre to bizarrer. Voice, of course, is one way of delivering an allegiance to prose over plot, and this literary elevation is why these stories sit on the New Weird shelf rather than any of the other genres or sub-genres they actually are. Voice like this holds the strangest stories together, because even when logic fails, you’re being talked through it by someone to whom you want to listen.

Gewgaws*

🐟

*Gewgaws are like Michelin stars, but better cause they're for short fiction. They are determined by the editor with input from the reviewer.
1 is great; 2 is exceptional; 3 is perfect.

All Your Friends Are Here

Your new favorite assortment of New Weird Lit stories about car-vampires; fascist deer; memory-devouring tree gods; and the torment matrix; from Wonderland Award-winning author M.Shaw (One Hand to Hold, One Hand to Carve).We've been trying to play it cool, but at last we can confirm what you've secretly always dreamed of: All your friends are here!Why leave your apartment ever again? All your friends are here.Why go to outer space? All your friends are here.Why grow, or dream? Why take that vacation you've been saving up for? Why set yourself free? All your friends are here.

Jeff Goldberg is a writer living in the Berkshires, Massachusetts. His fiction has appeared in Malarkey, JAKE, The Apocalypse Reader, and elsewhere, with work forthcoming in Exacting Clam. He can be found on Bluesky at @mixedmetaphors.bsky.social.

Sarina Dorie - foofaraw

2026-10-23T04:33:28.000Z

💡

Go read The Devil You Know now!

Do you think you’d be good at convincing others to sell their soul to the devil?

I am not a good sales person. If I were, I would probably be better at marketing my novels. I think there are telemarketers and people who have jobs they do for a living who would be better at this than I am.

Given all the deals she has made throughout the course of these stories, is Joyce maybe a bit too confident in her ability to make a deal?

I think Joyce is a bit too confident in many things–including her ability to outsmart the devil.

Do you see yourself in Joyce at all? Or maybe someone else in your life?

There are definitely details in Joyce’s life that were inspired by my own life, like the story, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia Auto Mechanics,” in which Joyce has a horrible car. And the story “Hex Support” was a malapropism that I said the wrong word when requesting tech support. Sensei Dan, is in part, inspired by my time in Japan. Other than that, I don’t think my life resembles Joyce’s and I am not sure I really see myself in Joyce.

I know there is one story left⁠—so no spoilers if it gets answered⁠—but how long do you think it ends up taking Joyce to collect 100 souls?

I can’t answer this without spoilers!

If our friend at the bar truly has zero consequences from drinking, wouldn’t that mean drinking would have zero effect on them?

The devil works in mysterious ways…

Having zero consequences and zero effects might be the catch in the contract. But, I think there might be a difference between consequences and benefits. Then again, it is a nice gray area to think about.

How many times has this story been rejected by other markets?

The first story in the series was probably rejected about thirty times. This story was part of a series, so it didn’t get rejected at all. It was accepted to the first market I sold it to–Foofaraw.

What book are you reading right now?

I started Dance of the Reptiles, a biography about Carl Hiassen’s life, but I haven’t finished it because I thought it was fiction, not non-fiction. Hiassen is a journalist and mystery author who writes humorous detective stories that often involve ecological injustices, and results in awareness about political injustice in Florida.

I also have been reading Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi, which seems to be magical realism, but I don’t know if I will finish it because it is slow. If I can find the book, I will finish reading the book by Alice Hoffman that I can’t remember the name of. I am also in the middle of three non-fiction books.

Right now, I am looking forward to reading Wayward Son by Rainbow Rowell because I enjoyed the first book in the series.

If readers enjoy my fantasy series you can find info about her short stories and novels on my website:

www.sarinadorie.com

The best way to stay in contact, hear about what I am writing, know when I have a new release, or books offered for free on Amazon is by signing up for my newsletter.

Thanks to Sarina for chatting with us again!

The Devil You Know - foofaraw

2026-10-22T16:18:09.000Z

Joyce Ferguson sat across from the devil⁠—or more accurately⁠—a devil. She was sort of glad not to be considered important enough to be seen by the big guy himself. She was only meeting with a caseworker of Hell.

“Looking over your record, I see you traded your soul in exchange for a car that never needed to go to a mechanic," the man across from her said in a calm voice lacking the wickedness she was expecting from someone in Hell. “Later, you also traded your soul to a different devil for unlimited hex support.”

Guilty as charged. Joyce made a noncommittal noise.

She had watched enough television shows with lawyers giving advice to know not to admit her guilt. She attempted not to squirm under the caseworker’s gaze.

He was a petite, Asian man in a black kimono, the fabric covered with a macabre print of skulls. His aura of calm rivalled any Buddhist monk.

She wondered if this was the man’s true form, or if he took on this face and shape to trick her into letting her guard down and forgetting she was in Hell.

“Perhaps you didn’t realize that two bargains would only add more time to your service.” He folded his hands on his wooden desk. “Also, your file indicates you tried multiple times to get out of the contract you made.”

The office almost looked peaceful and ordinary with the tasteful shodo watercolors of misty mountains and the miniature Zen garden on his desk. Though, instead of a rock in his frame of sand, there was a pile of excrement he’d made patterns around with his miniature rake. The only thing out of place was the window behind him, showing a cavern filled with flames.

A beatific smile laced the caseworker’s lips. “You thought if you plotted to die a year earlier than when your contract outlined, your bargain would be void, and you wouldn’t have to sell your soul to the devil. How did that work out for you?”

“When I laid on the railroad tracks, every train switched tracks. When I tried to step out in front of the bus, a good Samaritan pushed me out of the way. My attempt to die early in a skydiving accident by not pulling the cord failed because the instructor somehow caught up with me and strapped himself to me.” Joyce also learned she couldn’t drown. Pills hadn’t worked, instead, they just gave her permanent liver damage-which caused health conditions that eventually caused her death.

Her contract had ended at that point, meaning the devil was free to take her life. Even so, he’d waited another five miserable years. By then, her car had also failed and died. Satan probably thought this last detail was some kind of poetic justice for trying to end things early.

Joyce’s final days had been Hell on earth.

“Let’s get this over with. What is my punishment going to be?” She crossed her arms. “Are you going to boil me in pits of hot lava?”

He chuckled and shook his head. “An eternity of hot lava is reserved for child molesters, serial killers, and rapists.” He waved a hand behind him at the window. A naked man writhed in the flames. He looked a lot like her state’s former senator. “Being whipped while shackled to the walls of Hell is reserved for corrupt politicians, sleazy lawyers, heads of insurance companies, and corporate CEOs whose companies are destroying the environment. There’s a special place in hell for people like you.”

Joyce held her breath.

The devil reached into a desk drawer and removed a folder. “You sold your soul to the devil in exchange for material goods, not once but twice. Had that been all, you would be spending the next two lifetimes, 160 years in your case, as his servant. However, you also tried to cheat my employer, so you have another two lifetimes added onto your sentence. You’ll be in the devil’s service for 320 years.”

Her jaw dropped. Three hundred years wasn’t eternity, but it would feel like it.

He continued on in a matter-of-fact tone, as if this was everyday work for him. “I found your special place in hell using our career survey. The best fit for your skills means you will become one of Satan Industries’ consultants, finding the mortals on Earth who are willing to trade their souls for material goods, power, wealth, or other selfish pursuits.”

“No! I don’t want to be a bad person. Isn’t there a job that doesn’t involve being a con-artist?” Joyce could already feel her karma withering away.

It was as if he had looked into her soul and figured out what would be the worst torture to her that didn’t involve physical pain.

He folded his hands over the file. “This job is perfect for you. I guarantee you’ll love it.”

She was fortunate she’d dated a servant of a devil for a short time. Bub, her former girlfriend, had given Joyce tips on ways to navigate the afterlife.

“I’m Buddhist,” Joyce said. “How does this factor into my religious beliefs? I don’t believe in Christian Hell.” Buddhist Hell was so much better⁠—which was pretty much what life on Earth was. “I need to transcend to the next plane of existence through good deeds and peaceful actions.”

“Once again, it looks like you think you’ve found a loophole.” His sly smile made her stomach flip-flop. “Satan Industries might make an exception in this case… just this once. We do want to honor your religious preference and desire to transcend to another dimension.”

Joyce had a bad feeling about what he might suggest.

“Would you care to make a wager?” He leaned forward, reminding her of a shark about to pounce. “After you collect your first 100 souls, we can discuss renegotiating the terms of your contract.”

That sounded promising. Still Joyce didn’t know why he looked like a cat that had just swallowed a canary. She tried to figure out what she wasn’t seeing that he did. “So I just have to collect a hundred souls, and then I can ask for another job?”

“We will reevaluate your qualifications and newly acquired skills. Then we can discuss other options that might be an appropriate fit.”

This sounded too good to be true. She wondered why he was so willing to discuss this with her. “And what you offer will be an actual job? It isn’t me being flogged in the pits of hell or being burned for all eternity?”

“Those aren’t jobs. Those are punishments. Jobs would include floggers, pitchfork personnel, guards, and other such staff. Of course, I suspect you’ll collect those 100 souls and find the job is more rewarding than expected. Most people do.”

It sounded so reasonable, like he was a real case manager.

“Do we have a deal?” he asked.

She bit her lip, thinking it over. What choice did she have? Either she could do the job and hate it for the next 320 years, or she could do the job and renegotiate after she reached her quota.

“Okay, deal,” she said.

He stood and extended his hand. She eyed his very normal-looking palm, covered in a map of wrinkles. He didn’t look like he would burn her. When she took his hand, she found his grip to be firm, but ordinary. He didn’t even write their bargain in her blood.

He seated himself and handed her the file with her name on it. “Review the contents. Your mentor will be with you shortly to show you the ropes.”

Art by Addison Smith

“So, you got Sensei Dan as your caseworker?” the devil in the blue suit asked. “He’s pretty good. Fair, but not lenient. Keep that in mind.”

Joyce’s mentor devil’s name was Beliel. Despite his old-fashioned name, he looked like a hipster with his sunglasses and pompadour. He drove them around in a pink convertible, which was able to teleport to locations of desperate mortals who had summoned a devil (or a Satan Industries’ employee) by saying or thinking the magic words:

“I would sell my soul to the devil for…”

No one stopped Beliel as he passed a security desk at the try outs for a New York Ballet academy to find his first client.

“How did you do that?” she whispered. The receptionist hadn’t stopped him. Security didn’t stop him.

“No one will notice you until you talk to them directly. Otherwise, you get to move around like a ghost.”

“But doesn’t that mean you might get hit by a car or something?” Joyce asked.

“We’re incorporeal. The physical world doesn’t apply to us. How long have you been dead? You haven’t been hungry once, have you?”

He was correct. She hadn’t even realized it. She didn’t need to sleep or eat. It was her soul that lived on, not her body.

After two hours of watching Beliel con mortals out of their souls, instructing her in the tricks of the trade, and teaching her about teleportation, she could see why some people⁠—not herself, of course⁠—might be enticed by an afterlife of magic and immortality.

“Will I get a car like yours?” she asked.

“No. You get to drive your old Toyota Camry.”

She’d been stuck with that ugly rust bucket for fifty years. She didn’t want to look at it in the afterlife as well.

She would probably stick to teleporting through doors⁠—which was how they arrived at the bar in Reno, exiting out of the men’s restroom.

Beliel waved the scroll under her nose. The client’s wish shimmered on the parchment under the listed name with a sickly chartreuse glow.

Timothy Appler

Reno, NV

I would trade my soul to be able to drink as much as I want.

As Joyce scanned the room, she noticed a man at the bar with an aura that matched the chartreuse glow on Beliel’s scroll⁠—not so different from the jaundice of his skin.

Beliel seated himself at the bar while Joyce hung back to observe. Her mentor hailed the bartender and ordered himself a drink. “You have no idea how much I want this drink.”

The man at the bar grunted.

Joyce understood Beliel probably did want to drink, but he wouldn’t be able to if he was incorporeal.

“I really shouldn’t,” Beliel said. “My doctor says I should quit.”

The older man tipped back a drink so strong Joyce could spell it permeating off him from feet away. “Mine too. What do doctors know? My grandfather smoked cigars and drank all his life. He didn’t die from either.”

Beliel nodded. “I know. Some people get lucky with genetics, I guess.”

The bartender set a drink in front of Beliel, but he didn’t touch it.

“Life is short. I should be able to enjoy it the way I want!” Tim lit up a cigarette.

Beliel slapped him on the back. “Amen to that!”

Beliel nodded and offered sympathy for the next thirty minutes before offering Tim a solution.

“How much do you want to be able to drink all day without any consequences?” Beliel asked.

“I’d give my right eye for that!” the older man chuckled.

“I would give my liver to be able to get drunk all day!” Beliel said.

“I’d give my liver, but that’s the problem. I already did. The doc says I need to quit before I drink myself into the grave.” He sucked on his teeth, as if thinking it over. “I’d give my soul to be able to drink as much as I want, for as long as I want.”

“I can help you with that.” Beliel reached into the breast pocket of his blue suit and extracted a contract.

Joyce thought the contract was more than generous. Tim was allotted twenty years to live his life without it affecting his health.

“He’ll probably die from lung cancer anyway,” Beliel whispered as his client staggered off.

Beliel made the job look easy.

“Don’t you feel guilty enabling this man’s bad behavior?” she asked.

“No. I’m giving him what he wants.”

Joyce had initially been wowed by the magical aspect of the job, but she didn’t love the idea of making people’s lives worse by helping them give into their base desires.

Like she once had. She’d been shallow and given in to selfish desires when she’d sold her soul.

Beliel leaned back against the bar. “If you don’t want to work with alcoholics, you can find other people on the list who you want to help.”

Joyce harrumphed. “I’m not delusional enough to believe I’m helping anyone.”

“Suit yourself.”

Joyce watched a new name appear on the long list of names he had been crossing off. The names shifted around on the paper.

She nodded to it. “I think one just disappeared.”

“Some lucky devil got that one before we did. It happens.”

Beliel found another two souls in the bar who weren’t even on his list.

“Bars and casinos are my favorite hangouts. I always pick up a few extras that aren’t on the list, which means less competition. You just need the mortals to say the magic words out loud to make the bargain. But you can’t say it for them. I guess Satan has some sort of moral code.”

“Right.” She crossed her arms, doubtful.

“He was once an angel, right?” He tapped the scroll of names. “These guys have already said they want the bargain. They just have to sign the contract. You don’t have to be as strict with these suckers. But the freelance work, you need to convince them so they think of it on their own. That’s where the real work comes in. I suggest you leave those souls for veteran devils to collect.”

By noon, Beliel had crossed four names off the list and made five bargains, using his freelance technique on the desperate.

“You’re making bargains quicker than I thought possible,” she said. Despite how unscrupulous a job it was, she was impressed with his efficiency.

“What can I say? I’m too good for Hell.”

“How long does it take you to get a mortal to sign over their soul?” Joyce asked.

“These days? A few minutes to a few hours.” He smoothed a comb through his pompadour. “But that’s only because I’m good at recognizing desperate souls and what they need.”

She imagined it would take her longer as she built on-the-job experience. “How many souls can you collect in a day?”

“You won’t harvest any souls until the contract expires. Satan Industries is usually pretty generous with people’s life expectancy, giving them what they would guess a normal life would be, depending on risk factors.”

Her voice came out a squeal. “So that means I have to wait fifty years to collect a soul?”

“Or more.”

Dread settled into the pit of her stomach. Once again, she had been outsmarted by a devil. She was going to be at this a long time before she even got to discuss being considered for another form of servitude.

Her karma would wither away and she would someday⁠—in 320 years⁠—be born into a life worse than her last one. Life was suffering, as the Buddhists said. So was the afterlife. Her next life would be worse than her last because of all the conning she did in the afterlife.

She wondered if she could get out of that by becoming a born-again Christian and repenting. Then again… she already tried outwitting Satan multiple times and it hadn’t worked out for her any of the times she tried before.

That was how Joyce started her afterlife, suckered into the ultimate pyramid scheme, unable to escape.

Sarina Dorie has sold over 280 short stories to markets like Analog, Daily Science Fiction, Fantasy Magazine, and F & SF. She has over one hundred books up on Amazon, including her bestselling series, Womby’s School for Wayward Witches. A few of her favorite things include: gluten-free brownies (not necessarily glutton-free), Star Trek, steampunk, fairies, Severus Snape, and Mr. Darcy.

You can find info about her short stories and novels on her website:
www.sarinadorie.com

Older Fellow - foofaraw

2026-10-21T16:00:18.000Z

—Ellie Black

Dryad - foofaraw

2026-10-20T16:00:24.000Z

resembling a pair of acorns as they
pushed against the fabric of her blouse
⁠— Han Kang, The Vegetarian: A Novel

You wake up in the morning
with the sap run out
of your veins

into a bucket at your bedside
the sunrise has already come and swept away.

You whistle for the feet you’d
curled like roots
into the steep of dreams

but they can’t lift themselves out of the earth
without breaking off their toes.

You touch your elbows and knees
as if they were knots
the nightmare had loosened but couldn’t untie:

hangman’s knots, perhaps, though you can’t recall
it was suicide or an execution.

All you remember is an evaporation.
A scent you gave off all night.
All you remember is the cold nose of the wind

that seemed to be everywhere without a mouth
and couldn’t hurt.

Robert Perchan’s latest books are the comic futuristic novella Tropic of Scorpio (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2022) and Last Notes from a Split Peninsula: Poems and Prose Poems (UnCollected Press, 2021). His short story collection “Shocks, Meester?” is out now from Spuyten Duyvil as well. His poetry collection Fluid in Darkness, Frozen in Light won the 1999 Pearl Poetry Prize. Bob continues to eat, drink and write in Busan, South Korea, under the bemused gaze of his translator wife, Mi-kyung Lee.

H.C. Ricci - foofaraw

2026-10-20T00:02:15.000Z

Any weird things going on in your home lately, H.C.?

I’m continuously clearing black gunk out of my bathroom sink, but it keeps coming back, almost immediately. I suspect it’s evolving.

If you had to use a word that was not a color to describe how the portal looked, what comes to mind?

Radiant, and blindingly so. Or, maybe more of a shimmering iridescence?

How do you think Doug’s therapist reacts the next time he walks into their office?

I don’t know. But I suppose, if I had to start over and rewrite it, I might set it in the therapist’s office and use that setting to frame the narrative, maybe even embedding the story inside a dialogue between Doug and his therapist, selectively teasing out the details bit by bit.

What do you think is actually going on in Doug’s head when he sees himself in the mirror? Does he recognize something is off? Is he completely subsumed by whatever has taken over?

Like all stories, it’s up to the reader to decide. I’d like to think that Doug’s denial has given way to a sort of radical acceptance. I suppose you could also interpret it as regression and further denial. Perhaps there’s more lurking beneath the surface.

My words hold a mirror to your own beliefs. Are you an optimist, a pessimist, an out-of-the-box thinker who likes to slap your own uncanny and totally unhinged ending on things?

What’s a great short story you’ve read recently?

“Moon Drama” by Ashlee Lhamon. I don’t often laugh out loud when I’m reading, but with a premise like that you can’t help but giggle. Also, “Make Westing” by Jack London.

What book are you reading right now?

Carl’s Doomsday Scenario from the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. I love the tone and voice, but could do with a few less stats.

Thanks to HC for the chitchat on weird portals aplenty!

Sad Salad - foofaraw

2026-10-16T16:00:52.000Z

Derek G.

Glendale, CA

★★☆☆☆ March 30, 2024 | 11:54 PM

took my girlfriend to cheesecake factory tonight for our 2 year anniversary cause it’s her favorite and i was trying to make it a thing even though she’s been all moody lately. we got the buffalo blasts and 2 vodka sodas to start. she ordered her usual chicken madeira and i just got a side salad cause i already ate a PB&J at home. my girl looked at me like i ordered a bowl of napkins and the waitress (danielle maybe?) just wrote “sad salad.” after that she got all defensive and i guess we got loud. the manager said we were “disturbing the other patrons” and asked us to leave which i don’t agree with but he was nice about it so no hard feelings. pretty sure they boxed her madeira though and i paid so whatever.

food: 2/5 - the buffalo blasts were ok
service: 5/5 - danielle was chill
company: 0/5 - we broke up in the parking lot

i’m single now so DMs are open. danielle if you’re reading this i swear i’m not a salad guy. Just being responsible. hit me up.

Jessica M.

Los Angeles, CA

★★★★☆ March 31, 2024 | 1:32 AM

I don’t normally write restaurant reviews, but since my ex-boyfriend decided to post his run-on sentence meltdown, here we are.

The night started with an argument before we even got there, which Derek conveniently left out. He parked six blocks away to avoid the meter. My feet were killing me.

Still trying to salvage the night, we ordered drinks and an app. It was fine until he ordered a side salad as his entrée. It’s not even about the salad. It’s that everything is a joke to him, and I’m always the punchline. Weddings. Birthdays. My grandfather’s funeral. I find myself practicing apologies for him before he opens his mouth. By the time the manager asked us to leave, I knew I was done.

Food: 4/5 - My madeira to-go was delicious.
Service: 4/5 - Danielle did her best.
Company: 0/5 - The Cheesecake Factory didn’t ruin my night. Derek did.

And Danielle, if you’re seeing this, you can have him.

Danielle L.

Burbank, CA

★★★★★ April 2, 2024 | 4:23 PM

This is the cleanest, best-run Cheesecake Factory I’ve worked at. And I’ve worked at a few.

About to start my shift and saw the recent reviews. I’ve served worse couples, but not many. We train for this. To smile, offer bread. I followed the script. I just didn’t have it in me to sell it. By table twelve, everyone thinks they’re the exception. They never are.

Derek: Please stop coming in during dinner rush and “just hanging out.” We are not friends. You’re taking up seats meant for paying guests.

Jessica: Glad you enjoyed your madeira. I promise I’m not interested in Derek. He didn’t even tip.

The Making of Kyrios /// - The Independent Variable

2026-10-15T19:27:45.000Z

The inspiration behind AT Kyrios, the process of making it, and what makes it unique.

I'm obviously a giant fan of both Kyrios and ArrowType given Kyrios is all over this site as both our wordmark and headers. So it was a ton of fun to learn about Stephen's process from start to finish, especially the photos of the graveyard monument that was used as heavy inspiration for the typeface. I still buy blackletter typefaces like they are my lifeblood, but to this day, nothing has surpassed the love I have for Kyrios, with it's fun, psychedelic styling on top of a structured and elegant blackletter font. It doesn't hurt that Stephen made the /// glyph/ligature you'll see in the title of this post after I specifically requested it.

How to Avoid Your Problems - foofaraw

2026-10-15T16:00:00.000Z

1. Distract Yourself

Doug did just about anything he could to avoid thinking about the giant interdimensional hole in his living room. He tried mediation, pottery, weight lifting, even tai chi. His therapist told him the hole didn’t exist. Doug generally agreed, but found that position harder to maintain when an interdimensional tentacle reached through his wall and accidentally slapped him while groping for fodder to feed one of its dozen mouths. But better a tentacle than the bug-eyed gaze of a Peeping Tom⁠—as happened once on a date.

2. Pretend It Isn’t There

Doug had been in the kitchen preparing tea, leaving his date to bask in the radiating glow which filled the living room. The colors which trickled in didn’t belong on the visible spectrum, though green is a fairly close approximation.

To his date, the strange colors and ominous humming felt like an unwelcome acid flashback. Yet for all her uneasiness, the interdimensional hole wasn’t quite a dealbreaker. Everybody had their quirks.

Seeing a fly-faced entity burst through the wall and flash her a demented grin… Now that was a deal breaker. It was also too heavy for Cherly to handle, sending her into a fit of reality-shattering screams.

Doug, calmly setting the tea on the counter and walking to the living room, did his best to reassure Cheryl what she was seeing wasn’t real. That it was merely a manifestation of repressed childhood trauma, or something… Unfortunately, his date didn’t seem to get the message.

3. Pretend Harder

Doug decided to take a break from dating and work on himself. He spent his weeks, journaling, meditating, exercising, and listening to podcasts while the hole grew larger. Cracks from the interdimensional portal spread from room to room, but Doug pretended not to notice. The house became boiling hot and the windows radiated strange cosmic colors. Doug tried calling a technician to fix the heat, but nobody dared enter.

One day, a flock of four-winged creatures resembling manta rays began nesting in Doug’s attic. He spent a few hours Googling “how to get rid of bats,” but ultimately decided to live and let live. It was something he read in The Four Agreements. Or was it The Power of Now? He could never remember.

4. Give Yourself a Pep Talk

Some days, ignoring the hole was easier than others. But the journey to self-improvement was a process⁠—at least that’s what Doug tried to tell himself. When its radioactive glow distracted him from watching television, or its position between the TV and his stereo made cleaning difficult, he tried box breathing. When that failed he recited affirmations.

“I am bigger than the problems I think I have,” he’d proclaim as the interdimensional hole loomed over him, big and green as ever. Then he’d state, “I have control over my life and home.” Unfortunately, the gurgling which echoed from the cosmic void made that difficult to believe. Finally, he’d end by saying, “my challenges are opportunities for growth,” which was true, and offered him a bit of solace in those strange days.

5. Face Your Fears Head On

One day, after morning yoga and before pottery class, Doug decided enough was enough. The interdimensional hole had been sitting in his living room for nearly three months and he was still dancing around the problem. Doug decided the only way to prove the hole was a figment of his overactive imagination was to step into the glowing green void. So with unshakable courage, he ventured to go where no person had ever gone. Doug stepped into the void.

6. Go Back to Pretending

Doug didn’t feel any different when he stepped outside to grab the mail. If anything he felt lighter⁠—as if a huge weight had been lifted off his shoulders. He began whistling as he walked, attracting the attention of Fred, Doug’s elderly neighbor who was hard at work mowing his lawn. Fred could hardly believe what he saw, and Fred had seen a lot of strange shit over the past few months.

“Are you alright Doug?”

“Just peachy Fred. How ‘bout you?”

“I’m good. I’m good.” There was a pause. “The only reason I ask… it’s just that… well… you’re glowing.”

“Thank you. I’ve really tried to give myself space to prioritize my mental health.”

“No, you’re literally glowing!”

“Ok then, you have a good one. Make sure to tell the missus I say hi!”

Doug chuckled as he closed the door behind him. Oh Fred, what a joker, he thought as he stepped into the bathroom. Doug flipped the switch and the lights flickered on. The face he found staring back at him in the mirror would have horrified most other people, but Doug was not most people.

Doug’s chestnut hair had turned white as snow, his skin radiated a previously unseen color, and a budding tentacle wriggled from his left nostril. Doug took three deep breaths, gave his reflection a smile, and got ready for pottery class. He stumbled across his reflection again in his car window looking even stranger and more radiant than before. This caught Doug by surprise, but he quickly found his footing. “You’re more than your fears,” he mouthed in a quiet attempt to assure himself that everything would be alright.

H.C. Ricci is a copywriter by day and author by night. His genres of choice include fantasy, sci-fi, and mystery. You can check out his work at hricci.com/fiction.

In Your Tzara Dream - foofaraw

2026-10-13T16:00:54.000Z

The hands have been pulled out of all the clocks in the world.
⁠—Tristan Tzara
Grains et Issues

The clocks wait, naked. Hands left late last night.
Now vacant time can’t name later or now.
Your floor is too orderly⁠—black squares, white
oblongs stare back with evil smiles to spite
loose clocks. You’re naked and your left-hand knights
a random pawn that entered from the right
side of a black bed. It’s time to bow
to naked clocks. Their hands escaped this night.
Now vacant eyes open late. Open now.

—Mark J. Mitchell

Humdrum Places - BlogFlock

Frayed Threads - foofaraw

📮 November 2026 Zine - foofaraw

This month...

An Ordinary Contest Winners

Stories

Poems

Observations

Toons

Cover art

🎉 Weekend Edition Vol.103 - foofaraw

The Week That Was

Story

Poem

Observation

Toon

Interview

Media Guide

The Back Page

August Cao - foofaraw

I’d love to know how you think about this story in the context of the hot-button topic of AI?

While neither robots nor cars are human, this idea of lived experience⁠—dare I say, the human experience⁠—feels important here. What role do you think both memory and experiences play in Bots motivation?

Do you think of this story as hopeful?

Do other bots in the shop have relationships similar to Bot and Bunk Brother?

How many times has this story been rejected by other markets?

What’s a great short story you’ve read recently?

Thanks to August for chatting about robots, humans, and life!

The Horror Essay - foofaraw

Horror Half-Movie Binge Half-Reviews

I talked to Tom, the viral ‘Jonestown’ Trump rally guy - The Independent Variable

Bunk Brother - foofaraw

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2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

📺 The Media Guide S8E6 - foofaraw

Media Guide

Foofaraw Four

🎬 Wild Horse Nine

📚 Rampant Swine #1 — Ignition Press

📺 Black Doves Season 2 — Netflix

📺 Blade Runner 2099 Season 1 — Prime Video

Claw Machine - foofaraw

The Monster's Toybox - foofaraw

A review of "All Your Friends Are Here" by M. Shaw - foofaraw

Prose Over Plot

Gewgaws*

Sarina Dorie - foofaraw

Do you think you’d be good at convincing others to sell their soul to the devil?

Given all the deals she has made throughout the course of these stories, is Joyce maybe a bit too confident in her ability to make a deal?

Do you see yourself in Joyce at all? Or maybe someone else in your life?

I know there is one story left⁠—so no spoilers if it gets answered⁠—but how long do you think it ends up taking Joyce to collect 100 souls?

If our friend at the bar truly has zero consequences from drinking, wouldn’t that mean drinking would have zero effect on them?

How many times has this story been rejected by other markets?

What book are you reading right now?

Do you have anything else you’d like to share?

Thanks to Sarina for chatting with us again!

The Devil You Know - foofaraw

Older Fellow - foofaraw

Dryad - foofaraw

H.C. Ricci - foofaraw

Any weird things going on in your home lately, H.C.?

If you had to use a word that was not a color to describe how the portal looked, what comes to mind?

How do you think Doug’s therapist reacts the next time he walks into their office?

What do you think is actually going on in Doug’s head when he sees himself in the mirror? Does he recognize something is off? Is he completely subsumed by whatever has taken over?

What’s a great short story you’ve read recently?

What book are you reading right now?

Thanks to HC for the chitchat on weird portals aplenty!

Sad Salad - foofaraw