“Is it really possible to stay awake for four days?” said Jaya. “Will we even enjoy it?”
Four days. That’s all we had. Two of which we’d spend in the train, coming and going. I decided: we mustn’t miss one minute. We emptied coffee sachets down our throats, giggling at the sari-swaddled middle-aged woman frowning at us across the aisle. We climbed up to our top berths. The bhang we drank discreetly, from a flask: mixed with rose-scented lassi to cloak the smell. Jaya was nervous: with edible marijuana, dosage is tricky, and she’d had panic attacks. I did her dosing for her. Studying for exam after exam, in noisy hostels in Allahabad, in summer’s endless heat, I’d perfected bhang dosing. Coffee and bhang: that’s all you need to stay awake and happy. …
Passed a cadaver in the hall, ribs cracked and spread like wings. The stench was strong as I walked into the room— preserved organs lie about on the aluminum table, waiting to be poked and prodded by the incoming round of nervous, curious high school seniors on a field trip. Kidneys, a dark and bulging liver, a heart enlarged by yellow fat, a stomach attached to small intestine lapping around the room. I wondered if these all came from the same body, or if it was some communal, visceral collage.
The doctor handed me a brain, a handful of one’s entirety, a small blob, about three pounds, death-grey, with the throat-clenching reek of formaldehyde. What residual thoughts or memories lie tucked away sleeping in the damp folds?…
K. Johnson Bowles – ‘E is for Evidence’K. Johnson Bowles – ‘Fight or Flight (For Julie)’K. Johnson Bowles – ‘Hidden Agenda (Snake in the Grass)’K. Johnson Bowles – ‘St. Catherine and the Cockroaches (For Sarah)’
I’m riding and reading – sitting silently in the back of the bus on the way to work, engrossed in a miserable Mark Fisher book about the inescapable institution of capitalism, my nose inches away from my first-edition Kindle Fire, which I bought from Amazon in 2012 for two hundred dollars. You can buy one with better battery life for fifty bucks now, and they’ll deliver it to you in two days for free, as long as you’re a Prime member – but I don’t like to replace anything until it breaks.
The content is bleak: the book posits persuasive points that even our attempted rebellion against capitalism is controlled by corporations. WALL-E can criticize capitalist excess, but the film is still distributed by Disney. We’re caught in a never-ending cycle, cognitive dissonance helping us separate a movie’s thesis statement from its producers or ignore the irony of reading anticapitalist content on an Amazon device, our micro-acts of rebellion ultimately satiating our desire to fight back, keeping us complacent in our corporate comfort zones.…
“Don’t forget to F.O.I.L,” Mr. Larson reminded his students as his marker slithered across the whiteboard like a snake. He transcribed several equations but Maia only jotted down two of them. Sure, one of her ears was listening to her teacher but the other was in love with the sound of her pencil as she filled her notebook with intricate portraits.
Many of her classmates had the privilege of being immortalized by her graphite, but her favorite subject, by far, was Kaito Ito. He sat two rows down and one across, and Maia would sketch the back of his head all day if she could. A tiny smile played with her lips as she shaded in his thick black hair and added a few wrinkles to the edge of his blazer.…
Frank Jackson is a short story writer living in Brooklyn, published in journals including Shabby Doll House, Four Chamber Press, X-Ray Literary Magazine, and Have You Seen My Whale.
In this episode of Cover to Cover with . . ., Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum speaks with Jackson about his fiction piece “Brunch Warriors,” the power of satire in creative writing, the pros and cons of “cancel culture,” some favorite musical genres and artists, and much more!
I have always been great at lying and I rarely, ever, get caught. I studied the masters for decades and concluded that I would join their ranks without fanfare or notice. I became an expert by process of elimination. I deflected lie detector tests, ex-girlfriend’s scrutiny, and initial employment background checks. Never caught once. When Shakespeare told me, “the eyes are the windows of the soul”, I closed the curtains to avoid a baseline examination of the real me. That is the truth (pause for a Falstaff laugh) to being a great liar. NEVER LET ANYONE KNOW WHO THE REAL YOU REALLY IS!
All lie detection methods are based upon one or more of three basic principles as follows:
1) Physiological response (increased blood pressure, increased body temperature, change in galvanic skin resistance, etc.)…
