They say that Iowans aren't born, but rather that we simply emerge from the corn in search of Busch Light and the nearest Casey's General Store. If you’re not familiar, Casey’s is a regional gas station that is “famous for pizza.” Go ahead, laugh, but it’s true. That’s their slogan, and trust me, you never had gas station pizza until you had Casey’s.

     But Casey’s golden empire is being encroached by a newcomer from the North – Kwik Star, with their fancy espresso machines, fresh fruit bins, and actually sanitary bathrooms. Oh yes, Kwik Star is playing for keeps. Like, you remember how, as a kid, when you walked into a bank, and you just got that feeling that things are more prestigious here?

     Kwik Star has that same aura.

     The only difference is that instead of a deposit slip, you stroll out with a Karuba Gold coffee and some cheese-filled breadsticks. Start the day off right, am I right? Now, I know some prefer a latte and croissant, but the Kwik Star duo was my preferred choice, at least a few years ago, back when I was a 37-year-old father of three.

 

     Not so long ago (ok, last year, but sometimes this section gets booked up - hey, we got a lot goin' on!), our editor-in-chief was interviewed by Angelique Fawns. If you've been around here for any length of time, you know Danny says it like it is. Check it out HERE, especially if you're an author desiring to get published.

by E. M. Dasche

 

The ad appears overnight on your favorite coffeeshop’s billboard. It hangs among the posters for local concerts and canned-food drives, handwritten in red sharpie on cheap printer paper, its floppy corners dangling like guilty puppy ears. You stare at it, clutching your latte and the croissant that you promised yourself you wouldn’t get but definitely need, already compiling songs in your head.

     Mostly, it’s because you feel for the guy. The songs (the flyer explains in slumping fine print) are for personal use. You’re a mother yourself, albeit of two rather than three, and you’re thirty-eight years old, not thirty-seven. Dating is a different game, you learned, after you turn thirty: one with devastating, diminishing odds, worse each time another partner cashes out and forces you to roll the dice yet again at a slightly older age. You only cut your losses and married your spouse because you’d started suspecting the whole casino was rigged.

     Plus, the flyer offers two dollars per song. This could mean a lot of croissants.

     The work starts immediately. You plop into one of the stiff black armchairs with wafer-thin pillows, create a playlist on your phone, and add every breakup song that you know. There are a lot. You try not to think about what that says about you. In your increasingly distant youth, you’d even fantasized about writing your own breakup song, getting famous, escaping from the humid folds of the country’s flabby midsection to the sexy, sun-toasted, star-freckled West Coast.

     Eventually, the barista drifts by and asks whether there’s anything else that he can get you. You tell him there isn’t. He keeps lingering there, though, just beside your chair. That’s when you realize that he’s holding a broom and a dustpan, and that the café is empty, and that it is, in fact, dark outside. You’d arrived just after ten o’clock that morning.

     As you start your car (yes, you drove the quarter mile to the coffeeshop), you try not to feel guilty about having left your partner with the kids all day. These are back-breaking mental acrobatics to pull off, given that you dread returning home with every molecule in your quickly evaporating soul. Yes, you love your daughters more than anything; having reached toddlerhood, though, they show no particular investment in your continued existence. Your partner convinced you that working from home would help restore your bond. So far, the only appreciable effects have been cutting your income in half while your daughters remain contentedly aloof, and your partner leverages his new status as the primary breadwinner to exempt himself from any childcare, and from washing his own underwear.

     Now, though, you have this new, important work. A moral obligation. A chance to prove to this heartbroken stranger—and, by extension, every heartbroken post-breakup version of your past self, unfolding accordion-style through the space-time continuum like a karmic paper chain—that he is not alone. How might your life have turned out differently, you let yourself wonder, if someone had given you a list of songs to help mourn your breakups? You probably would’ve fallen in love with him right then and there.

     You keep thinking of more songs all throughout the drive home, the long overdue taking out of the trash, the sacrilege that your family makes of a dinner ritual: Dino nuggets with boxed mashed potatoes, strawberry Pop-Tarts for dessert. Even after your partner rolls into his first snore (no sex tonight, but they were losing odds anyway), you cannot sleep for all the songs popping into your head, one after another, each a red strobe accompanied by a burst of vengeful lyrics. So you roll out of bed and scavenge another Pop-Tart pouch—chocolate-fudge flavor this time, from the stash you’ve hidden for yourself in the back of the freezer—then occupy the recliner and continue working, your face aglow with your phone’s light in the darkened living room.

     In the morning, your partner staggers out of the bedroom wearing his robe, bleary-eyed, unbecomingly bewildered. He asks whether you’ve made coffee yet. As an afterthought, he kisses your cheek. You wipe away the imprint of his morning breath, take the Pop-Tart wrappers to the kitchen, and make a slapdash pot of coffee. By the time you return with his mug, he’s already commandeered your recliner.

     You take a sick day from work, which grows into an extended long weekend, which then morphs into a week-long staycation. Every minute is spent plugged into your phone: in bed, on the toilet, during your two daughters’ bathtime. This is an investment in their future, you think, as they prowl and pounce through the scented bubbles. Statistically, they’re almost guaranteed at least one breakup in their lives—several, if your condition is genetic. You wish that you could give them a song for when it happens, one that encapsulates their slick, raw perfection here in the bathtub, worrying about and beholden to nobody. As they dry off, you snug your headphones tighter, and you crank up the volume.

     Soon, your daughters have eaten the Dino nuggets into their extinction, ushering in a new era ruled by Goldfish in a canned-soup ocean. The seasons seem to cycle through at an accelerated rate as your family runs out of clean summer clothing, moving prematurely to their fall wardrobe, then their winter outfits. Your oldest daughter trudges out the door to her first day of kindergarten in fleece pajamas under the blazing August sun. Your youngest itches constantly at last year’s pumpkin costume, but enjoys wearing it immensely. Only when your partner runs out of clean underwear does he ask what’s got you so busy. You tell him it’s a work project (shorthand for work of art and passion project) and ask whether he could help out around the house while you’re working. He instead buys himself several packs of new underwear and counts the problem resolved.

     Your first sweep of your music library results in just over four hundred songs. It is dismally insufficient. No single song can fully capture the grief and relief and terror of a breakup, just like no single word can describe a latte’s confusing bittersweetness, the aftertaste of melancholy. So you keep searching, sifting through obscure romance movie scores and one-hit wonders’ forgotten B-sides. Your search algorithms become saturated with breakup songs; the tiles on your YouTube homepage, a scrapbook of Alannis Morisette; your Spotify suggestions, a shrine to Adele. Just as much time is spent sculpting the playlist, the order replicating a real breakup’s crushing falls and wavering rises and violent, unexpected cracks in mood. When you finish, it totals 82 hours, 7 minutes.

     Meanwhile, your household has continued disintegrating. The Goldfish crackers have been wiped out, evolution taking another step back to Ikea meatballs revived from an ice age of freezer burn, then crackers matted with peanut butter like primordial sludge. Your youngest has embraced the savagery and delights in biting you, her sister, everyone, everything with her fresh, sharp teeth. Your partner now strolls through the house wearing nothing but white briefs straight from the package; your oldest daughter’s kindergarten teacher called to complain about her smell. Your boss had called, too, to ask when you’d be returning to work. She isn’t calling anymore.

     Yet though you are lost to the world, you feel more in your element than you have in years. You listen to the playlist in its entirety for quality control, taking long drives and longer walks to the soundtrack of divas squeezing their bleeding hearts onto platinum records. As you belt the latest Ariana Grande song in the shower, it occurs to you that you might’ve missed out on a very lucrative career. You’ve certainly had enough inspiration. Enough to make up for not having a popstar’s creativity. Or a popstar’s face. Or a popstar’s perky, ageless body. It would be a depressing line of thought, but the music playing in the background makes it masochistically pleasurable. You lie back in your unmade bed with your headphones clamped over your ears, smiling with each song raking at the itchy scabs on your soul, shuddering as each peels away to reveal what might’ve been.

       On Saturday morning, exactly four weeks after you first saw the ad, you wake up as early as your growing disorganization allows. Your partner still snores and snuffles, but your daughters are already awake, befriending the giant amoeba of stained T-shirts occupying the laundry room. They sense an adventure afoot and invite themselves along, an argument that you know you cannot win and lack the energy to attempt anyway, so you strap them into their car seats, drive the quarter mile to the café, and leave them in the still-running car with a promise that you’ll be right back, and with croissants. You say it with an overdone French accent, cwahssahns, an ode to the kind of quirky, free-spirited mother you’d once hoped you could be.

     As you stride into the café, you wave to the barista, who quickly pretends not to see you and busies himself with the milk steamer. The flyer still hangs on the corkboard, as plain and lonely as the man you imagine put it there. There’s a phone number at the bottom of the page. You dial it. As you hit the last number, your phone links it to an existing contact, helpfully popping their name onto your screen.

     It’s your partner.

     You stare, dumbly, at his contact photo, his name, the three kissy-face emojis that you added after your first date years ago, and which you sometimes contemplate swapping for monkeys, or devil faces, or piles of poop. You double-check the number on the poster. It only proves that you’re doubly screwed.

     He picks up on the first ring. “Hey, let me call you back, I’m in the middle of—”

     “Forget You,” you say.

     There’s a long pause. “What?”

     “Somebody That I Used to Know,” you go on. Straight down the playlist. “Bye Bye Bye. We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.”

     Another pause. Longer this time.

     “I’ve got more,” you say. You’re not sure if it’s a threat or a plea.

     He sighs. Over the speaker, a toilet flushes. “So you saw the ad.”

     His belt buckle jangles as he cinches his gut back into his jeans. Your jaw trembles. You imagine your eyes popping out like a Mrs. Potato Head’s, first the left, then the right, from the building pressure in your skull. “You. Are. Leaving. Me?” The barista glances at you, concerned. You are aware that you are screaming. You just don’t know how to stop. “And this is how you were planning to tell me?”

     “I mean, I was planning to tell you with the playlist.” Your partner sounds injured, as if he’s the victim of a ruined surprise. On his end of the line, the bathroom door opens, closes. He didn’t even wash his hands. Disgust ripples up your vertebrae. “I know you go nuts for those crummy breakup songs. Thought it’d be a nice farewell gift, you know. I guess you can still have it anyway.”

     Footsteps, flapping across your kitchen’s tile floor. The suctioning whoosh of the freezer door. A cardboard box popping open, crinkling wrappers, chewing noises transmitted directly into your ear. That bastard. That bastard is eating your chocolate-fudge Pop-Tarts. “But … but …” You retaliate with the last bid for your relationship that still holds any truth. “We’ve got kids. Two kids! The ad says father of three.”

     The chewing stops. He swallows wetly. Laughs uncomfortably. You can just imagine him rubbing his hand over the fuzz on the back of his fat neck, that guilty grin curling the lips that’ve always been too thick to kiss comfortably. “Right. Well—” he begins.

     You throw the phone to the floor, stomp on it, kick it across the café as hard as you can. Its screen detaches as it ricochets against the wall, skittering across the floor, dragging loose wires like spilled intestines. Your partner’s voice shrinks to a puny buzz, then fizzles out completely.

     The barista gapes at you from behind the espresso bar. The customers queued up by the pastry cabinet have all stopped to stare, except for the old man with the cane, who uses the distraction to shuffle several spots forward in line. Aside from your labored breathing, the only noise is the inescapable coffeeshop music, still whispering happily to itself through the speakers overhead.

     It is, of course, a breakup song.

     The irony is not lost on you. You want nothing more than to escape into a breakup song all of your own: to take control of the story, to revel in the vengeance, to be, for once in your life, the one who vanishes overnight into an exciting and glamorous future all of your own choosing, rather than the one left sitting at home, alone, asking yourself what happened.

     But then—you did drive here yourself.

     You have your daughters, and your music.

     You need nothing else.

     The thought empowers you, in the literal sense, sending an electric current vibrating through your body. You can almost feel the bars of a battery icon lighting up along your torso, hips-belly-chest, one, two, three. Ready. Set. Go.

     These are the first three words of the song that hits you just as you and your daughters reach the freeway. The chorus hits you at the city limit. By sunset, you have the verses made and memorized. You stop for fuel and bathrooms at a new coffeeshop, buy yourself the croissant that you know you always deserved, and scribble the lyrics on a napkin while waiting for your latte. They’re slick, raw perfection. You belt them out as you fly down the highway, punching out the rhythm on the horn, your oldest daughter singing along while your youngest cackles in her car seat, the three of you finally bonding over the abandon.

     You speed west, ripping through the velvet twilight, a star in the making.

 

~~~

 

About the author:

     E. M. Dasche is the admittedly pretentious pen name of an award-winning writer and professional nerd. They published their first novella, a superhero storybook for adults titled Fill, in autumn of 2024; this, and their growing portfolio, may be found at emdasche.com.

 

by Robert Bagnall

 

That was my summer as a skateboard punk-rocker. I’d grown up the barefoot kid you see in grainy footage playing in fire hydrant spray, then graduated to tagging subway cars with spray cans. Our sounds were transistor radios with tinny speakers. Odd jobs paid for Coke, not coke. We got drunk, not drugged up. Weed if we wanted to get high. We called ourselves a gang, but it was a pale precursor of the gun-toting tribes that followed, a Sesame Street dress rehearsal for the Reaganite urban hell to come.

     Like a poor cable soap opera, our cast revolved but the characters remained. Regardless of faces, there was the clown, the schemer, the lieutenant. I was a mere foot-soldier, a gofer. Culver was our leader, our general, our quarterback. He’d say let’s do and we’d do, let’s go and we’d go. He carried assurance and reassurance but, looking back, I don’t think he led us anywhere we weren’t already heading. Whatever we suggested, he’d just say sure, and we’d do it anyway. Like leading water downstream.

     Snake was different.

     Snake arrived on the scene like a firework and made an impression so searing he’s branded on memories he’s not part of. It couldn’t have been two weeks from our first encounter to my last sight of him, but it feels like he played a role that whole summer.

     We already had a clown, but this guy was above and beyond. He was a crazy. “Snake” we called him, but we never found out his real name. Tall and of indeterminate age: was he a twenty-year-old who’d been shaving at 11, or a baby-faced thirty-something? He wore a shapeless knitted hat trapping a head of unruly mahogany curls. He was forever tweaking his right ear with his left hand. His limbs were too long for his body, dangling, out of synch with his lanky, jittering gait, rolling like a dinghy in a speedboat’s wake. If a snake stood and walked, it would look like Snake. He was comedic and knew it, played to it.

     We first saw him in Jefferson Park. A dedicated skatepark in years to come, we’d practice our ollies and kickturns on steps, benches and curbs. Some afternoons we’d take a basketball—not to play, there were courts for that—but just to roll it around under our feet and sit and smoke, drink beer and hang.

     An accident of geography placed Jefferson Park between our business district and railway station. Afternoons, a steady stream of office drones, ties loosened, would stride by—them avoiding our eyes, us disregarding them. I could only imagine the same scene played out in reverse each morning, ties tight to top buttons, but otherwise evening’s mirror image. But how would I know? It would be hours before I emerged to a breakfast of cereal and television cartoons in yesterday’s underwear.

     Here, Snake came into his own. He picked a distracted, desk-drained salaryman or secretary and followed behind, walking in their footsteps too close to get a cigarette in between, in perfect imitation. He got their strides, the bob of their heads, the roll of their shoulders, exactly. If they were reading the paper as they strolled, he’d have his hand down at his side, holding an invisible Daily News, studying the headlines.

     Initially, I thought he was doing it to entertain us, so we’d invite him to join our gang, but his indifference was soon apparent. He would have carried on whether we were there or not, probably preferred us not to be. Our merriment too often alerted a victim to his pranking. A man with a head as bald as an egg heel-spun and glared Snake down, who, feigning injustice, peeled away, his face a picture of wide-eyed, child-like innocence. The insulted pencil-pusher went on, by which time Snake was in perfect step with his next mark. When he had enough of jesting, he wandered up, hooked thumbs, dapping us, and was then gone. Whole time, he never said a word.

     Snake’s antics had the strange effect of making us want to go to Jefferson Park. Strange, because when you’re an adolescent silverback you can’t be seen to be wanting too much too hard. Second afternoon, somebody said, “Let’s go down Jefferson,” and Culver said, ”Sure.” That was an easy call, Snake’s performance was a one-off, so who was to say he would be there again? But when he was, next day nobody said nothing. It would have been trying too hard. And when we went and he wasn’t there, we had to act cool despite our disappointment, like we’d been going anyway, regardless. Unwritten rules are hard to understand, I know. We just didn’t want to appear to be in thrall to a crazy. Even if we were.

     Snake was how we dubbed him, but that last day he demonstrated a whole new level of serpentine mystery. He was doing his schtick, having narrowly escaped an umbrella over the head from an aging middle-management type, sufficiently risk averse to carry one despite the cloudless sky. We were passing a bottle of Cold Duck around, goofing off, when Snake got too close to a woman in an unseasonably carpet-like blue two-piece. She had this strange, uneven, shuffling gait, and Snake had got too close and clipped her heels. She spun round, ready to holler in his face, then froze.…

     Picture the scene: Snake and the woman, leaning in, face to face, in perfect silent symmetry, just swaying, like a cobra and its pungi-playing charmer, eyes locked.

     Snake’s eyes—first time I saw them, I looked away. A reflex action: I glimpsed something I didn’t understand, like a whole other dimension, a portal to the unknown. Years later, I saw one of those Magic Eye stereograms, the pixelated images you look through to form a floating three-dimensional image. When a face rose off the page, my first thought was: Christ … Snake’s eyes.

Amongst us, laughter stopped. Jaws slackened. The Cold Duck bottle paused at my lips. Someone still talking received a kicked shin to grab their attention.

     Snake began to sway from the hips. Back and forth, like corn in a field under the gentlest summer breeze. The woman followed, mirror perfect, never taking her gaze from his face.

Snake added a circular motion, a knee-dip as he oscillated.

     Again, every move copied.

     Snake twisted his head, back and forth, like an Indian dancer.

     Mesmerized, connected in some fundamental way that was almost beyond comprehension, she responded, as symmetrical as the Taj Mahal.

     Other office drones filed past, not caring, thinking one of their number was merely humoring a drunk in the park, dancing with him. One or two glanced as they went, but didn’t slow, their feet on auto-pilot, automata dictated by the mass transit timetable.

     Snake took the woman’s hands. Utterly mesmerized, she gripped his, reinforcing the impression of them moving as one, each mirroring the other. And, like that, a single entity, perfectly balanced in shape and motion, they continued to sway, like a candle flame licking.

     And then it was over, and the woman was alone, squatting on the granite curb, almost falling back into shrubbery. Her face was blank, uncomprehending. Not that we had more idea of what had just happened. We called out, asking if she was okay, but she just looked at us as if she didn’t speak English, shivering like she’d been pulled from the harbor.

     Rapidly, she was surrounded by concerned individuals, people like her with suits and briefcases and horn-rimmed glasses. They knelt by her, put hands on her shoulder, quietly questioned her. The need for an ambulance was aired. No longer held by Snake’s eyes, she was one of them again, a fellow traveler, deserving of compassion and aid.

     And that’s when I saw it, through the knot of people: her left hand go up to her right ear, give it a twist. It wasn’t shivering. It was Snake’s jittering. She couldn’t help herself.

     I peeled my eyes away from the drama before us to Snake walking away, by this time almost out of the park. I had to double take to verify the distant figure was him, but that knitted cap was unmistakable. But everything else about him had changed. He was no longer Snake, his nickname suddenly absurd. He had lost his rubbery, double-jointed lithesomeness, and was instead walking in a cumbersome, uneven shuffle. He’d become someone else. He’d become her.

     Then he disappeared from view, and I never saw him again.

     Next day, we were interviewed by two policemen. There was a suggestion that the woman had amnesia, no longer recognized her family, denied the simplest of facts about herself. The cops were of the view no crime had been committed and their time was being wasted, but they still needed our testimony—skateboard punk-rockers. They didn’t expect us to be helpful.

     I don’t think we could have been, even if we’d wanted to.

 

~~~

About the author:

     Robert Bagnall was born in Bedford, England, in 1970, and stood for parliament for the Green Party in 2024. He has written for the BBC, national newspapers, and government ministers. He is the author of sci-fi thriller ‘2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth’ and two collections, each of which gather twenty-four of his hundred-plus published stories. Five of those have been selected for the annual ‘Best of British Science Fiction’ anthologies. A social media recluse, he can be found at, and contacted via, meschera.blogspot.com.

LESTER: One thing he should not do is show the rest of the world how wise he is, because chances are―or judging by most of the writers who want to do that―the readers are just as wise as they are, so why should they educate and uplift their readers? That’s a snotty attitude.

TANGENT: A big ego-trip, huh?

LESTER: Yes. An ego-trip.

JUDY-LYNN: These deep philosophical novels that are being turned out by students from philosophy classes, you know, it sounds terrific to them, but it’s the same old stuff to us. It’s not adding anything, it’s not telling a story, and the idea that if somebody manages to sit down and type out sixty-thousand words, and those sixty-thousand words deserve to be published―it’s ridiculous. Books serve the function of reading and entertainment and then it can do all those other things.

 

Read the original interview - preserved by Tangent Online - by clicking HERE.

Listen on:

Dear Story Unlikely,

     I’ve actually known of Story Unlikely for a while now, thanks to The Submission Grinder, but I was too intimidated to subscribe or submit. But a friend recently mentioned this site in places I should aspire to get published in someday, so here I am.

     And of course, how could I doubt any publication that hires people with an eye for talent like David Wallace? (I couldn’t actually get the video on the other end of the link to work, but if that’s a meta-joke on Dunder Mifflin’s own capabilities as a company, then bravo)

 

Sincerely,

Hopeful Submitter

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