Issue 2 Digital Issue
ON AND AROUND THE ENDLESS LINE
by Jeffrey Stuker and Jan Tumlir
Jeffrey Stuker interviews Jan Tumlir on his forthcoming book The Endless Line, a study of gesture and painting, which will be published by Inventory Press in Spring, 2026.
JS: This metaphor of “the endless line,” in the title of your book, is evocative for a number of reasons. One of which is that it expands the scope of what we tend to call art history and various accounts of aesthetic production. You are extending this concept of aesthetic production well beyond the lifetime of an individual artist and the confines of their epoch, into something like an evolutionary horizon, or the deep time of pre-human activities. We can think of primates, or even other animals, as somehow included in, and therefore continuous with, your concept of gesture. Could you talk a little bit about that expanded scope?
JT: Yes, so that title, The Endless Line, suggests that there’s just one line, and we add to it, and keep it going. That allows me to look at the works of artists as, in a sense, perpetually unfinished. And it allows me to look at something like a painting—something we like to consider a completed object—as a document or an artifact of process. And, as you said, this is a process that reaches beyond the individual artist, or their particular epoch, and connects with something potentially primordial, while also pushing into the future, because other artists, later, will pick up that gesture, and will continue to develop it in some way, according to their own spacetime coordinates. This book features lot of “great” artists and works, but I want to discuss them as links in a chain. So, while this is not exactly a radical proposal, it is a way to shift our perspective away from the idea of art as a singular and rarefied occupation. I want to treat it as something more fundamental, and I also want to embed it more firmly into the communicative processes of everyday life.
JS: The expanded scope of aesthetic production that you describe, has it placed pressure on the way that you have gone about writing this book? Before we started recording this interview, you said something quite suggestive about how this modality of writing leaves you feeling some ambivalence. Was this perhaps necessitated by the subject of gesture?
JT: This ambivalence has to do with a literary tendency I make out in my writing. Literary writing is something that's plotted, and it’s plotted differently from the way that a theoretical essay is plotted. I don't even think we should talk about plots in regard to theoretical essays, because what you’re expected to do there is to deliver information somewhat more directly. You have a thesis. You mount an argument. In a theoretical essay, you're never intentionally withholding anything; you're getting to the point. But in the case of this book, and more generally in my writing, I sometimes feel like I'm foreshadowing something, and therefore withholding that thing. And then I’m waiting for the right moment to bring it in, and then developing it still further, later on. So, there's a certain amount of manipulation, I feel, of the reader that's going on this writing. But, in a sense, I’m also manipulating myself, because often I don’t really know what I want to say until I write it down. I enjoy surprising myself and, over the years, I’ve learned how to “set up” the surprises, if I can put it this way. I suppose that it has to do with a desire to somehow dramatize the encounter with ideas. I'm always on the fence about it. I'm not sure if it's working, I'm not sure that it's even something that one should be doing. But in a sense, I can't help myself.
JS: I’d like to follow up this question about your mode of writing, your voice, to ask about the genealogy of historical writings on gesture that your book traces. Your references span from Kant and Hegel to authors of the ancient world. Of course, we also have Brecht and Benjamin here, and we have a more contemporary art history—that is to say, from the postwar period. But this book, and this history, goes back into what we might even call deep time, into evolutionary time, or natural history. Can you speak to this long arc that connects the ancient conceptions of gesture to the contemporary ones? But maybe first: what is a gesture?
JT: There's the general question of what is a gesture. And then there's the question of what is a gesture relative to artistic production, and particularly, in the case of his book, to painting. Gestures are typically defined as actions, intentional actions that communicate something. Obviously, in art and particularly in painting, we come upon these actions once they've already been completed, set down as a mark of some sort. But a central thesis of this book is that gestures actually are points of transfer between bodies and non-bodies, inorganic things like mark-making tools and surfaces of inscription in the case of painting. Gestures thus are completed on a canvas, but not completely. We can say that they are stored there as a form of latent energy to be reactivated in the viewer. This might well be another painter, who will literally reactivate that gesture in their own studio.
That's another reason the book is entitled The Endless Line: I'm considering the brushstroke as a line. No matter how brief it may be, even if it is just a daub of paint, it is part of a line. I'm considering many painters and paintings in this book, but the title suggests that there is just one line. Again, I feel that what I accomplish straight out the gate with this title is to detach gesture from any particular person or work. Also, I'm suggesting that there's an intrinsically dialogical quality to gestures in general and the painterly gesture specifically. There is a gestural line of exchange between works and this has something to do with quotation. The painterly gesture is an openly borrowed form of communication. And if we want to trace its genealogy, we will go way back in time, potentially back to the very first marks that were made by a pre-human figure in the intent of communicating something of their experience. So, yes, this book takes on a very broad historical scope: I want to trace the gesture in every painting back to some common point of origin, which will essentially be found in prehistory. But then I also want to project it forwards toward a moment I’m calling post-historical. Or, putting this in other terms, I propose that there is in the painterly gesture a pre-linguistic element, which, at the same time, heralds the inception of the post-linguistic. So, in this way, I'm connecting the handmade mark with, let's say, digital coding.
What is a gesture? Again, it's something that I want to consider in the broadest possible sense. There is in it an element that cannot really be owned, ever, by anyone. It cannot be traced back to a single individual as their own unique form of expression. It contains subjective elements, of course, but these are added to something that might actually preexist any subject. At every stage in its unfolding, the gesture is the recapitulation of something that happened before. And we can trace that “before” to a “before the before,” as I put it in the book—that is, before we conceived of anything coming before anything else, or before we became historical beings.
Precisely for that reason, there is, in every gesture, a kind of fundamental, baseline aspect against which we can measure the extent of change that constitutes our own particular moment. This relates to the thinking of Vilèm Flusser, an important source in the writing of this book. He seizes on gesture as a point of inflection in every present moment. It is something that one must witness and interpret; this is effectively where it happens; the gesture happens on the side of its reception, its interpretation as a gesture, and this means that it always happens “now.” Thus, it can reveal to us what's actually happening at that moment, in the course of our development, or evolution through time. Variations in the form of gestures, which can be quite slight, are indices of our changing circumstances.
JS: Here, we might say that, even as you've encountered the gesture as a phenomenon that reaches into prehistory, it is by no means universalized, or enlarged beyond the scope of the very social history that gestures do so much to animate. In fact, we might say that your argument is that the gesture is so thoroughly historical, that we have to look into the furthest past, into something like a prehistory of the gesture, and at the same time, paradoxically, focus on the specific histories and traces of history from our all-too present moment that are encoded in the gesture. What is this manner of thinking about the gesture as something that comes to us from so far in the past? And how does one reconcile this understanding of the gesture, as something akin to a phylogenetic inheritance, with an action that is inscribed in the social and, for that very reason, unfinished—ready to continue, propelled by its own contradictions, into the future. The gesture is there for something that we have to attend to, in the realm of the social. This seems to be one of the complexities that your attention to figures such as Benjamin and Brecht allows you to tackle in your theory of gesture.
JT: There's a quote from Brecht in the text, where he asks something along the lines of “What's the use of a model?” We know that every gesture has a model. But what's the use of the model? Certainly, for the gesture, the use of the model cannot come down to strict repetition. Simply repeating a model endlessly into time, I would argue, takes us elsewhere: we're now encountering something else, some kind of reified experience. Gesture is instead characterized by a certain malleability. That, again, is what allows it to reflect changes in our social being.
I'm also drawn to this quote by the art historian Henri Focillon from The Life of Forms: “the artist must live all the primitive experiments over again.” I feel that the key term here is “live.” It's not a question of repeating ancient experiments. It's not an attempt to, let's say, indulge in primitivism as a stylistic mode. It's about reliving primitivism—if we want to stick with that problematic term—as a kind of existential necessity. According to Focillon, this is a process the artist undertakes today no less experimentally than the first time around. What value does the ancient have for the present, for the production of the new? In art, this question is continually in play. We need to have some point in the past from where to develop a new form. A form that is entirely new, without historical bearing, might be of no artistic consequence.
So, we're always oscillating between a model and, to return to Brecht, its adaptation. The idea of adaptation, in a sense, sums up Brecht’s entire approach to theater. All theater involves adaptation, which means bringing something that was written down, sometimes very long ago, into the present, reactivating it somehow. What’s the use of a model? You can make Antigone, for instance, bear on the social realities of life in the time of the Nazis, or in the postwar era, or under Communism, or whatever the social circumstance might be. Brecht’s idea of adaptation is something that I want to relate to the work of painting. There's an attempt to move quite fluidly between these two arenas, which are typically set apart. One is the arena of visual art where we confront a done-deal object; the other is live performance. So, we're talking about the static arts versus the temporal, durational arts. But I want to establish some kind of connection between these two poles. I want to think about the static work of painting as undergoing adaptation in the Brechtian sense, where, again, there's always a model and it has to be interpreted historically and then reinterpreted in the light of the present.
We're always going to trace a painting back to some other earlier painting—this is art history 101. But we don't typically do this through the framework of theatrical adaptation. And so, this allows me to discuss the finished work that is painting as a kind of event in which we participate as viewers. I would say further that gesture is, for me, a figure of participation. Its function is fundamentally phatic. It is the function of acknowledging the context we're in and the interpersonal nature of our communication. That can appear as well in a painting and, I would again argue, in a way that can be related to what happens on the theatrical stage. An actor, becoming attuned to stirrings in the audience, might well adapt, from moment to moment, their performance to what's going on in the room. Of course, it's not exactly the same thing with a painting, because here we're dealing with a delayed time experience. All the decisions have already been made. But on the viewer’s part, a similar dynamic can come into play, because we're also making the painting happen. The painting happens as an event for us. It's not a done deal. It happens when we walk into the gallery. We see it; we move back and forth before it; we align it with the other paintings in the space. And yes, I'd like to consider this event through a theatrical perspective.
JS: One way of following up this set of connections that you've just elaborated is to think about some of the examples that you presented in a shorter text on gesture that was published in Effects. It addresses the public sphere, the Salons of Paris of the 19th century, as well as the world of wrestling—or, in French, catche. And here, you draw a number of canny connections. Of course, we have the connection to Baudelaire as the author of the epigraph in Barthes’ famous essay on wrestling from Mythologies. Central to your text are the gestures that comprise a painting by Delacroix, The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople, as described by Baudelaire. Here, the staging of history borrows from the techniques of theater. This is not just a matter of modifying an existing iconography so much as it is an accumulation of the means by which those iconographic elements would have been achieved. Here, then, we have a series of gestures, not just painted depictions of people gesturing but gestural figurations. So, we have something that's mediated and thus not present, but that's enlivened or made present to us by means of a series of gestures that are continuous between what is depicted and the act of depiction itself. Can you speak more about this gestural aspect of painting as a means of registering the dimension of the historical?
JT: Baudelaire is an author who is deeply attuned to the gestural aspect of painting. In a certain way, his poems also come down to a gesture. This gesture is one that is always equating, to put it in his own terms, what is most lasting and essential in art with what is most contingent and fleeting. I’m paraphrasing that language from his essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” which mainly concerns Constantin Guys. But that's also what Baudelaire does in his poetry. To equate the eternal and the transient strikes me as a classic gestural move.
Again, the content of a gesture is quoted, which is to say that its iconography is always to some extent given. It comes with the model; it is pre-established as a kind of grammar. In the book, I argue that the gesture actually is more on the side of syntax. What gestures do, then, is syntactically bend that grammar to the particular contingencies of the moment. But then, as you've said, it's not just the grammar that's being reworked; it's also the whole accumulation of syntactical moves on that grammar, which get repurposed in some way through gestures. In the Crusaders painting, I suggest, Delacroix is reworking his own prior painting, Liberty Leading the People, which deals with the events of the French Revolution—a more recent history for him. So, in this case, the artist is actually reworking his own gesture, to signal potentially another shift in perspective on a historical event. That's one way that time gets encoded in the gesture: between the paintings of an individual painter. But further, it gets encoded between the paintings of that painter and the paintings of other painters that precede him, and then so on, all the way down the line. Delacroix, after all, makes “history paintings.” At the same time, the minute that temporal perspective has been reconsidered and gesturally reformulated in paint, it is now anticipating further elaboration.
JS: Here, again, we find an example of the dual temporality of the gesture. The gesture is the condition of possibility of methexis, being co-present as viewers before the work of artists. It’s the condition of possibility for having an audience at all, for the painter. It's the condition of possibility for the audience to have an encounter with the painting.
JT: This is the key point: the gesture is that which addresses the audience. It could be addressing an audience in the deep past and, equally, it could be addressing an audience closer to the present and even the future. But it is that phatic element that addresses. It's like a handshake, or a hand that goes up to hail the viewer.
JS: What makes this this argument exciting is that you don't leave it there. You're not simply addressing the mere phenomenology of the mode of address of the artwork, you're connecting it to the potential of that artwork to become other in the scope of time. Because the gesture allows you to address its futurity in this way, does it also allow us to consider its politicization?
JT: Two things come up here. The element of theatricality in the gesture can also be described as an element of artifice. So, yes, one is being addressed, but one is being addressed in a very artificial way. The address is something that is very deliberately and obviously set up; it has to be understood as such to qualify as a gesture. It's not an everyday hand that's going up here, spontaneously. This hand subscribes to a certain set of conventions and traditions, a set of stylistic parameters, and also breaks with these. It openly acknowledges the fact that it is produced for the occasion. And this is what, to me, syncs up with Brecht’s thoughts on theater. As Benjamin notes, Brecht’s whole stock in trade is “to make gestures quotable.” So, we want to make sure that we're not considering gesture as something that is simply happening as a consequence of an event, as a reaction; it’s actively producing the event. And, in order to do so, it has to somehow evidence its own manufacturing process. We have to be able to recognize the fact that this thing was specifically produced to bring about this occasion. You’re right: this takes us into the realm of politics.
JS: To take a half-step forward, from Brecht into Barthes, might we say, following this concept of the gesture and its potential artifice, that to shut down, to no longer look at, or to ossify this gestural process by which the work addresses us, is to de-politicize, to de-historicize. Ultimately, as Barthes says, it is to reduce human-made phenomena into something like myth—that which is inalterable, that which is mere nature, etc. This makes me think that this double work of delving into the past and, at the same time, addressing the contemporary modalities of gestures is a way of, as I said before, insisting upon their historicity in the near timeframe, right? This seems also to be an ethical political project, insofar as you're not attempting to eternalize the gesture within the artwork, even as you describe it as an endless line. To eternalize would be simply to reduce something which has been made, and that has specific agencies within our society at this moment, into something which we can no longer talk about, because it simply is.
JT: Yes. So, that which is simply repeated—and, let's say, repeated with fidelity, with an emphasis on accuracy in representation—will tend to move into some other area where it can no longer really be qualified as a gesture. Because then it becomes an expression of power. This is what I think you're suggesting: the rote reiteration of certain stock postures and expressions—in paintings just like political life—can produce an effect of unchangeability in the order of our experience. This is always done in service to an ideology. And it is the openly theatrical and artificial nature of gesture that allows it to escape the fate of what might be termed an authoritarian form of repetition. So, yes, I agree that there's something inherently political about the gesture inasmuch as it allows us some kind of leeway in the face of what we experience, often crushingly, as everyday reality. And that leeway is precisely what appears through the quality of its constructed-ness. It suggests that anything that is made, and is recognized as such, could always be made otherwise. So, again, there is the repetition of a model, but that repetition must always be seen as provisional. We're repeating the model in order to have it repeated further and with further changes and nuances added to it. To be clear, the politics we are discussing here do not belong on the side of the content. Gestures are formal constructs. I am interested in resuscitating the discourse of formalism through gesture, which is where form becomes, we might say, immanently political.
JS: Here, we might find ourselves, given your method, with an inversion of Barthes’ theory of myth, or the reduction of history to nature. You've looked as far back into human history as you can, into something close to nature, a kind of pre-human or prehistorical moment, in order to find still some social agency. You're looking to nature to find the historicity as far back as it can reach.
JT: There's a tendency within cultural anthropology to see gestures as preceding language, or coming before speech, certainly coming before writing per se, and hence as connecting to a more “natural” part of ourselves. And this is certainly something that I want to push back against in the book. Because the same tendency still haunts our interpretation of, let's say, Abstract Expressionist painting. There is often an attempt to connect such work to something more essentially human or true, which is not in itself wrongheaded. But I would add that what is essentially true about humans is precisely the artifice of humanity. The minute we start to reflect on our experience, and in some way to manifest that reflection as some kind of a mark, some kind of imagistic or linguistic construct, we are fundamentally exempting ourselves from the natural order. That artificiality is essentially the birthplace of the human, so to speak, and I want to place the gesture in that context.
JS: This makes me think of a quotation we're both fond of from Minima Moralia, a book published right around the same postwar timeframe we’ve been discussing with Barthes, namely: “that which does not wish to wither must take upon itself the stigma of the inauthentic.” Somehow, connection to, if not life itself, then lifelikeness requires a binding relation to artifice, to the constructed, and to that which does not merely exist, but somehow exists in a kind of luxurious state, surplus to requirements. Maybe this is a way of thinking about that endless line, as well. To talk about the gesture as the endless line is also to imply a skepticism about certain temporalities that assume that something dies or is done with— the limited shelf life of a certain type of aesthetic activity. We know and we've seen, multiple times, the announcement of the death of painting, or the end of this or that mode of aesthetic production, only, a few years later, for that to be the most fashionable thing that ever happened, with all the customary claims about its enduring vitality. I know that your methodology for researching this book—which has something to do with the voice that emerges from it—has to do with this skepticism about the possibility of an artistic modality ever being over and done with.
JT: What this suggests is that there is no improvement in art, which I believe to be true. Moreover, we could say that the urge to improve, to perfect, actually constitutes a threat to the form. So, there are certain foundational texts in this writing. As already mentioned, some of them come from Brecht and Benjamin, particularly that kind of writing that they were producing, pretty much in tandem, in the 1920s and 1930s. And then there's also Flusser’s book on gesture and Agamben’s many essays on gesture. And in the course of reading and rereading all these texts, something became very apparent—because it's a shared concern of all these authors—and this is that there's really two main dangers that face every gesture. One is the danger of withering. As I put it in the book, the gesture is always undergoing a “slow fade.” At some point, it could disappear forever. So, that's the first danger; the second, which we've already touched on, is the danger of reification. In first case, the gesture disappears, and in the second case, by staying too stubbornly put, it becomes something else, no longer a gesture. So, the emphasis on the endless line is simply an emphasis on what actually has survived up to this point—and has survived precisely as the result of its adaptation and mutation through time.
JS: This brings up the question of the relationship between technology and gestures. Technologies as technology, singular—the “logos of technē,” as you put it in the book—is one way that we might think of a specific horizon of historicity for the gesture, or the way that the gesture gets historically encoded. And we might say, also, by means of a dialectic, our understanding of which is aided by turn of the century French anthropology, especially Marcel Mauss' work, that the gesture is already a technology, a “technique of the body,” as he calls it. Could you speak to some of the ways in which gesture might serve as a proto-technology of Homo sapiens? How does this happen? And how does it become reconfigured—which is to say, made strange to itself—through technologies of visuality and other technologies that we hear so much about today in the news?
JT: Well, my book opens with this meditation on a recent attempt to program a robot to paint like Jackson Pollock. So, that's really the opening gambit of the book. Thereafter, I go on to furnish an origin story for the painterly gesture. The middle section of the book returns to Pollock, who marks a point where painting becomes all and only gesture. Pollock’s gesture, as we know, reaches back to some primordial source. Later, it will be encoded and introduced into the technological life of our cybernetic moment. In the book’s final section, I delve more deeply into what this process entails. But what I wanted to do by opening the whole discussion in this way is to suggest, as you've already noted, that the gesture is from the first moment something technical.
There's a long passage on finger pointing where I attempt to connect the first pointing finger, as performed by our ancient ancestors, with current processes of digitization. In the light of the operations we perform daily on our touchscreens, this most basic human act takes on a technological glow. So, this technical link between archaism and futurity is a recurring theme, a kind of leitmotif of the book. Maybe the best way to start thinking about this relation of gesture and technology in reference to painting is to downplay the role of the creator. Technical inventions, as we know, are for the most part collective productions. Painting, too, is technical: we are here dealing with a set of tools and materials and techniques. To produce a painting, we first had to produce the implement to make that painting with. The production of the implement—the stylus, pencil, or paintbrush—is something we would typically relegate to a sphere outside aesthetics. Yet I want to argue that it is absolutely imbricated in the aesthetic sphere from the get-go. At their point of origin, the realms of aesthetics and technics are inextricably linked—this thesis is derived from Heidegger, who also figures prominently in the book. So, we are devising tools and modes of expression simultaneously. And if we take that thinking back to the origins of the human, this functions to, let's say, lessen the shock of an Abstract Expressionist robot. Because, right from the outset, we can think of painting as a kind of machine, one that involves all the processes of extension, externalization, and feedback that constitute our technological life. I'm suggesting that this is what happens with the first pointing finger: the whole apparatus of our digital moment appears on the horizon. Pointing becomes refined with the production of a tool that will then inscribe what was pointed out onto some kind of surface or substrate, and bring it into the sphere of a shareable memory. Thereafter, we can imagine all the devices that follow as an evolution, as a succession, rather than a series of breaks taking us further and further away from what we once were. In fact, there's the possibility that, at the furthest point of this development, we discover what we have always been.
JS: So once again, we find ourselves up against this paradox of the ancient and the modern, in which the most recent, supposedly the most technologically advanced moment, refers us back to an original condition, if there is such a thing.
JT: Yes, and this comes back to another fundamental Heideggerian insight, frequently returned to in the writing of the book, that technologies are fundamentally tools of self-revelation. They perform all kinds of tasks. Yes, they are pragmatic, they are functional. But behind all the work that we perform with them is this continual process of revealing what we are essentially. It would seem that we are building these technologies to understand ourselves. And so, here again, we have to consider the reverse perspective offered up by our many technical devices as that within which the human has existed from the first moment.
JS: We've talked about alternating modernity and archaism, about a theory of the gesture that your writing is uncovering. Wrapping up the conversation—at least temporarily—I want to ask: how might we see the future of this ancient gesture in painting and other acts of aesthetic production, as you're encountering them today? You are not the type of thinker who turns his head away in horror from the contemporary world. You're as interested in it as an array of symptoms, and as a realm of radical possibilities, as you are the ancient past and canonical thought. If anything, we might see this book as a departure from your absolute contemporaneity as a writer. So now I wonder, do you feel empowered to think about some of these much more longue durée concepts in the present moment, not just here in Los Angeles, but in relation to what we're seeing in terms of the transformations of the visual realm, in terms of technical imaging, and the interconnectedness of various computational regimes?
JT: Yes, this book took me outside my “comfort zone.” When you write about contemporary artists, which is what I mostly do, you basically attribute every thought you might have about their work to them. You’re masking yourself in their person. But this is something else. I anticipate that some readers may find the thoughts presented here somewhat far-fetched. Perhaps a problem, but this also is how I have signed them with my own name.
On the question of the longue durée, I will say that a good part of this book is taken up with technical matters, which cannot be confined to the present. I was interested to explore the point of inception of a condition, that we're now fully immersed in, by somehow returning to earlier points, when something new is introduced, when we're still gauging our relationship to it. I feel it is very useful as a method of sussing out what exactly it is that we're dealing with now. The writers who experienced first contact with the new remain entirely valid, even as it turns old. This goes back to your point about historicism, I suppose.
Certainly, there is something historical about this work. I have thought of a follow-up book, possibly series of interviews with contemporary painters, and specifically painters that, in one way or another, are contending with this realm of automated creativity that we're living in today. And I suppose that the point of connection between this book and that one, should I write it, would be this notion that, again, what is particular and unusual about painting is that it's ancient. It is pretty much the same thing that it was at the beginning. So, speaking about having a kind of baseline from which to gauge changes in our experience, this is, in a way, the ultimate medium. Its whole purpose, at present, seems to hinge on the fact that it has lasted for so long. Every painter that comes to this given assortment of materials, tools, and techniques is making contact with painting in general. And at the same time, I want to use this notion of painting-in-general to think about, well, what is painting today? What can painting still do? What can it still tell us about life that all these other more contemporary means cannot, because they are so new, because they’re constantly appearing, from day to day, in unfamiliar forms that we're clumsily trying to get a grip on. We are living in an era of permanent change. We are constantly trying to re-up on our programs, to get a handle on how to work the latest version of our phone, for example. So, painting actually is the place where every novelty we're dealing with—even if barely, or unsuccessfully—can be very sensitively negotiated. And this is precisely because the ground of the painting has lasted so long. Anything you put there is going to be measured against something much older, and this establishes the baseline from which we can gauge what exactly it is that is changing in the order of our so-called reality.
JS: We’ve talked about the ancient qualities of the gesture. And in some ways, just knowing how you think, it does seem that there's a double work that's always happening, that you're also thinking of the future possibility of the gesture. I'm thinking that one of the ways your book helps to orient us toward the present is to think about painting as a sensorial membrane that is recording traces, not just of human perception in some immediate sense, but also of the historical condition. Yes, when what you call the negotiation, or the reorientation, that we're experiencing in the technological world, this is something that paintings record as existential or perceptual fact, as mere phenomenology. But that’s not really what you’re talking about. This makes me think, then, perhaps of painting, of the painted gesture, as technology in the strict sense. Here I am thinking about technology, as defined by you and the antecedents you trace, as the externalization of memory. Here, painting is simultaneously technological and ancient. The ancient cave is technological in this way, as a place of preservation of those painted gestures and, of course, of the negotiation with the tool and everything else. So, I wonder if you might share with us your thoughts or reflections on this expanded field into the future of thinking about painting as a technology, and not just as sign for the persistence of what is archaic, obsolete—although it is interesting for that reason, too.
JT: Well, there's the glimmer of a thought that appeared while I was reading Bataille on prehistoric art. He’s looking at the paintings in the cave of the Trois Frères, and there noting that these are superimposed images. They don't give us one scene, they give us multiple scenes, superimposed. To return to Brecht and to theater, it is as if the painting were being performed. Each time people enter the cave, there is the idea that they're watching the painting being made, a new painting on top of the old one. Bataille was clearly pointing that perception away from the notion of a reified art object. It's very much an anti-capitalistic perception of what art is, or should be, fundamentally—i.e., that it should fundamentally come down to a process. And, moreover, we can say that this process should be considered, at least to some extent, collective. Sure, there's one person, perhaps, that's making these paintings, but they're making them in time and space, and before this human gathering. And so, it's a form of painting that, again, does not reach a conclusion. It's constantly being rethought. Now, we can say this painting that features animals and men is being considered in relationship to, you know, the hunt that's coming, or the hunt that’s already happened. We could look at it as a strategic plan for a future hunt or the commemoration of a past hunt. But all of those readings become, to some extent, impossible. When we think about the process of what's going on in the cave, we can't really think about that production from any kind of strategic, pragmatic, or nostalgic angle. It's actually a living phenomenon. And, again, it’s an event. What does that bode for contemporary painting? We've seen all these moments in postwar history—many of which I have discussed in the book—where there's attempts to activate painting as performance art. But these also have produced artifacts, which can become just as reified as the paintings that preceded them. So, this would be an attempt to think a way around these various impasses and discover a function for painting that really exceeds anything that we've experienced up to now—even if only slightly.
Bios: Jeffrey Stuker is an artist and filmmaker based in LA. He has exhibited his work at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the International Biennial of Contemporary Photography at MOMuS, and the Hammer Museum. His writing has been published in Mousse, the White Review, Art Handler, and he serves as a contributing editor for Effects journal. Stuker received a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and his MFA from Yale University. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in art at University of California, San Diego. Stuker is represented by Ehrlich Steinberg in LA and Ben Hunter Gallery in London.
Jan Tumlir is an author and teacher based in LA. He is a contributing editor to the journal Effects, and a regular contributor to Artforum and Frieze. He has written catalog essays for such artists as Bas Jan Ader, Uta Barth, John Divola, Cyprien Gaillard, Allen Ruppersberg and James Welling. Books include: LA Artland, a survey of contemporary art in Los Angeles (Black Dog Press, 2005); Hyenas Are…, on the work of Matthew Brannon (Mousse, 2011); The Magic Circle: On The Beatles, Pop Art, Art-Rock and Records (Onomatopee, 2015); and Conversations, with Jorge Pardo (Inventory Press, 2021). An exhaustive study on gesture and painting will be released by Inventory Press in 2026. Tumlir is an Associate Professor in the Humanities & Sciences department at Art Center College of Design, where he has taught since 1999. Since 2022, he also serves as resident art historian at the Southern California Institute of Architecture.
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Surah 1
By Albert Abdul-Barr Wang
# 1 — Al-Fātiḥah — 1–3
[Frame 001: Opening Dedication.]
In the name, a hatch cycles open on a pressureless corridor and the breath writes itself across the visor like frost,
heartened by the old syntax of mercy, I run diagnostics on praise as if praise were dark matter,
everywhere implied yet stubbornly unobserved, and through Metropolis of chrome the vow moves
like a train with no conductor, of turbines.
«ٱلرَّحْمَٰنُ» — the All-Merciful, and the invocation behaves like a zero-day patch to the soul’s firmware—
[Voiceover: calibration subroutine; adjust compassion thresholds; re-index every starfield by tenderness before proceeding]—
so the mouth opens not as a door but as a decontamination lock, vowels scrubbing the hull
while consonants flicker like status LEDs.
Praise be, and the universe answers in spectral gradients—nebular blues, Pantone 1585 C at the rim of a dying sun—
while the title “Lord of the Worlds” compiles across parallel instances, countless shards of habitat and archive,
each one a patient server rack humming with stored winters; with Shannon of entropy
the sentence tests its own checksum of awe, of recurrence.
[Frame 002: The camera drifts over a mat that speaks—fibers recounting footfall data, dermal salts,
the astronomy of entry and exit.]
The Most Gracious, the Most Merciful—redundancy as design, not error—
like twin coils around a ship’s spine, spinning up artificial gravity
where meaning might otherwise float away, and «ٱلسَّبِيلُ» — the path,
suddenly renders as a corridor of spectral whites whose walls remember every pilgrim’s heat-signature
and return it, kind, cooler by one degree.
I catalog the particulars because particulars resist oblivion: hinge squeal (D-minor), residue of saffron,
trace ions of longing; [Bracketed Archive: a non-linear index of stolen midnights]—
and the vow expands, a field of force that refuses spectacle yet loves precision,
a hobby-horse I ride peaceably past the airlock where even thinking requires a helmet.
Lord of the Worlds, again, but now as network topology, each node a mercy packet
routed past voids of misunderstanding, and beside Basquiat of crowns a margin sketches gold halations, of asphalt.
The mouth resets: Most Gracious, Most Merciful—two frequencies phasing
until compassion becomes interference-free signal—
[Frame 003: thermal scan of a heart, pixelation induced on purpose, concealment as reverence],
and the cosmos answers with a soft systems-check: no alarms; proceed.
Praise is a low-gravity walk—heels tapping the hull with comic timing Buster-Keaton-style—
except the joke is metaphysical and the banana peel is time; under Tarkovsky of rain
the corridor gains a horizon, of mirrors.
[Voiceover: Reader’s impatience—registered, honored, folded into the tempo.]
The recursion holds: mercy before and after, mercy as bracket and brace,
mercy as coolant riding the conduits so nothing overheats, and «ٱلنُّورُ» — the light,
flares like a patient star measured in kindness-lumens while, near Naqshbandi of breath,
a quiet orbit stabilizes, of returning.
# 1 — Al-Fātiḥah — 4–5
[Frame 004: the chronometer stalls at a clean noon; the hull lighting flattens to tribunal-white.]
In the vacuum-lit chamber I address the engine that names itself custody over endings and tallies,
and a line etches across the viewport like a legal horizon— ۞ مَلِكِ يَوْمِ ٱلدِّينِ — Sovereign of the day of reckoning—
then the ship’s clock, acquisitive and prim, accepts jurisdiction as though time were a courthouse
and gravity the bailiff; with the dry chalk of Oppenheimer of calculations
the sentence calibrates its own blast radius, of conscience.
[Voiceover: The camera retreats to observe how awe behaves under audit;
note the absence of applause, note the clean silence that sounds like a vinyl runout groove.]
I don’t bargain; I enumerate, because enumeration is a way to stand still
when the stars drag you elsewhere—so the field report reads: Sovereign, day, recompense,
each term a sealed crate in the cargo hold, each crate emitting a faint mercy-heat
like stored summers.
[Bracketed Debrief: an index of debts paid in attention,
the only currency that doesn’t inflate in vacuum.]
Then the corridor narrows into a vow-tube— إِيَّاكَ نَعْبُدُ — You alone we serve—
and the pronoun compresses the crew into a composite figure walking as one gait, one pulse, one inference,
while the floor-tiles—obedient little satellites—spin their micro-gyros
to keep us aligned with the axial good.
A single request threads the bulkheads— وَإِيَّاكَ نَسْتَعِينُ — and You alone we request help—
which in this ship’s argot means authorizing the quiet software of need to open its ports;
under the recursive stairs of Escher of corridors the plea cycles upward, of patience.
[Frame 005: thermal whites bloom at each threshold;
a velvet-red failsafe blinks, not alarm but reminder: do not simulate dependence—practice it.]
The tribunal-clock resumes, not cruel, merely exact,
and the sentence about sovereignty turns a notch, seating itself in the socket of consequence;
with the rubber suit of Gojira of scale the heart rehearses smallness, of humility.
I let redundancy do its sacred work—serve, ask, serve, ask—
like a two-stroke mercy engine pushing a habitat through a fog of probabilities,
every piston timed to a syllable, every syllable a bearing that refuses corrosion;
[Voiceover: Reader, your skepticism is a gift—retain it—but watch how the vow refuses spectacle
and instead specifies procedure.]
The deck-plates reply with faint resonance, a consent you feel in the knees,
and the registry of power shifts from spectacle to stewardship—no banners, only maintenance logs—
under the paper labyrinth of Borges of footnotes the resolve finds its map, of return.
A final systems check— ۩ ٱللَّهُمَّ أَدْرِكْنَا — O God, overtake us—
floats like a cool towel across an overheating mind, and the console prints a thin white line
that means proceed; we proceed, because the corridor has become a throat
and the ship a carried word, and with the shy ribbon of Hello Kitty of decals
the airlock wears its joke, of tenderness.
[Frame 006: closing shot—an open corridor, lights breathing, gravity gentle—
service declared, assistance requested, engines idling at mercy RPM.]
# 1 — Al-Fātiḥah — 6–7
[Frame 007: the ship reduces its chatter to a single cursor blinking—patient, monastic.]
Guide us to the straight path, I say, and the corridor tightens into a laser line that refuses parallax,
a ribbon of gravity with no side doors and with the early hush of La Jetée of memory
the request edits itself for accuracy, of return; «﴿دَرْبٌ مُسْتَقِيمٌ﴾ — a path straight»
skims across the floor like cold neon and leaves a faint ozone of resolve behind it.
[Voiceover: We test the vector by walking it;
the body becomes an accelerometer; the conscience, a gyroscope;
small errors precess, large errors confess.]
The path of those favored, so the habitat populates with courteous ghosts
who maintain things without applause—filters replaced before clogging,
promises honored before asked—while the vents exhale a temperate mercy
only slightly warmer than the human hand.
[Bracketed Systems Note: guidance is less a compass than a maintenance schedule;
favor is the machine that keeps the lights unremarkable.]
Not the path of the angry, so we rewrite the fuel map to remove vanity’s throttle
and jettison the cinematic explosions the ego craves;
«﴿نُقْطَةُ تَوَازُنٍ﴾ — a balance point» flashes at each junction
and the ship obliges by dimming its spectacle until only function remains.
I keep my helmet on because desire still throws sparks in oxygen-rich rooms,
and the sentence about straying drifts into view like a billboard in vacuum—
polite, absolute, unignorable—then with the brittle metronome
of Thelonious Monk of silences the vow finds its syncopation, of steadiness.
[Frame 008: thermal blacks at the edges, spectral whites in the middle—error margins narrowing.]
Those who stray populate the side corridors with enticing signage—
free upgrades to sorrow, flash sales on cleverness—
and every detour has pleasant lighting and a snack bar,
but the floor knows the weight of our feet and keeps whispering forward, forward, forward.
[Bracketed Detour Report: a map of rooms we will not enter,
annotated with their flattering mirrors.]
The path of favor now expresses as a topological fold,
simple as breath when unperformed,
and the console quietly stamps our route with the stamp that means continue;
«﴿لَا غَضَبَ﴾ — no wrath» cools the cabin air by one merciful degree.
I practice being audience to what is right in front of me—no spectacle, only repairs—
and with the grainy weather of Rashomon of recollection
the mind admits its multiple camera angles, of humility.
[Voiceover: Precision does not guarantee arrival;
it grants direction—that is enough.]
We walk until the line becomes a habit and the habit becomes a climate,
and the request—keep us—notches into the ship’s clock
so that every second is a handrail; «﴿بِدُونِ ضَلَالٍ﴾ — without straying»
writes itself along the hull in a script the void cannot smudge.
The quiet science agrees: guidance is a low-entropy corridor
where choices shed their theatrical makeup and keep their bones,
and with the clean chalk of Hilbert of spaces
the heart accepts its infinite rooms, of finitude.
[Frame 009: closing—an unremarkable door, already open.]
The favored step through by not performing the step,
and the path is now the gait itself; «﴿نِعْمَةٌ جَارِيَةٌ﴾ — a flowing favor»
hums in the bulkheads while, under the mild rain of Turing of proofs,
the vow passes its own Turing-test of sincerity, of practice.
Bio: Albert Abdul-Barr Wang is an indigenous Taiwanese-American Los Angeles-based Oulipo-influenced poetic bard, experimental writer, and visual artist. He received a MFA in studio art from the ArtCenter College of Design (2025), a BFA in Photography & Digital Imaging at the University of Utah (2023), and a BA in Creative Writing/English Literature at Vanderbilt University (1997).
Wang's prose and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in the New Delta Review (NDR), BRINK, The Ekphrastic Review, The Hooghly Review, Brooklyn to Gangnam, and fractured lit. His art has been exhibited at The New Wolford House, Postmasters Gallery, Site:Brooklyn Gallery, Filter Space, Equity Gallery, Texas Photographic Society, and Tiger Strikes Asteroid. Also he has been an artist-in-residence at the School for Visual Arts and a recipient of the Working Artist Org grant. He is currently the literary editor-in-chief at Brooklyn to Gangnam and a prose reader for Quarterly West. You can find him at www.albertabdulbarrwang.art and on Instagram at @albertabdulbarrwang.
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Chapter 1: The Loser (From Welcome to Art School)
By Chunbum Park
The Loser. The Outcast. The Creep. That’s how I would characterize myself back in high school.
“Kung Fu Kamikaze Chung!” they would call me.
I obviously was not a Kamikaze pilot, and I did not know Kung Fu or Taekwondo, but would it have helped in dealing with those kids if I had a black belt?
“Ching Chong Chung Pak!” they would say, while making monkey faces by widening their nostrils and rolling their eyes.
“Come on, his name is Jung Park. Cut out the nonsense,” Edward would tell them.
Edward was one of the more humane and principled kids at the school.
“We were just joking!” they would explain. “We love Chung — I mean Jung!!”
Jung, which was my first name, actually referred to the concept of Jeong in Korean, which meant shared empathy and universal compassion, and Park was an English version of Bak, which was a common Korean surname.
I felt that Edward was confusing at times because even as he looked out for me, he also kept somewhat of a distance from me.
I wasn’t quite sure who my friends were. I could not tell if the kids were playing or if they actually meant the words that they said. I could not know if the other “friends” looking out for me were my real friends because they seemed to be doing it out of courtesy or good manners, rather than any kind of true affection or friendship.
In history class, I would have arguments with the teacher, Dr. Delilah Clements. She declared that the Europeans had the right to the American lands because they made more efficient use of the land than the Native Americans or the Indigenous People.
I was quite sure that I wanted to pursue history in college because I was very passionate about political and historical issues, even if I did not “win” the argument or the debate all the time.
I was probably the worst debater in the school’s debate program. I did not understand half of the words that I had to read from the texts during the oral arguments. Bizarre and abstract concepts of some French-sounding philosophers confused me. I wasn’t sure if anybody actually understood what they were talking about in relation to those texts. I did garner some knowledge from my experience, though. From reading those texts, I learned that the CIA imprisoned and tortured brown people, many of whom were innocent, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and put them in Guantanamo Bay.
During Mrs. Rosie’s art class, the kids, all white, began spouting nonsense about America being the greatest country on Earth and having the power to nuke my home country of South Korea at will. In response, I brought up what I learned in debate about not only Guantanamo Bay but also the manufacture of evidence regarding the weapons of mass destruction, used to justify the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
“What is this kid saying?” One of them would say. “Where did you hear those things?”
“At the debate program,” I would respond. “These are the materials that we cover and debate in the program.”
“Should we beat him up?” One of them would say. “He’s talking smack about our country.”
“Nah, he’s the worst debater in the program—he isn’t doing well. He’s not worth the bother,” one of them claimed.
The other kid who was also having a hard time was Ryland Brown.
“Ryland, you are browner than a dark chocolate,” they would say.
“Are you saying that just because white people are smarter than brown people?” Ryland would say. He had internalized the racist way of thinking and was submissive to the white kids.
“Yeah duh,” they would say. “You are really funny.”
They would start kicking him nonstop in the computer lab next to the Wallace Library.
When I asked them to stop, they would turn to me and look at me real funny.
“Hey, you watch porn,” they would say. “Go hide in a corner, Chung. You have no moral authority over us.”
“You are talking funny,” I would retort quickly before running out of the computer lab.
What a cowardly thing to do. I did not have the guts to defend my classmate from getting beaten up in the computer lab.
I was so mad at them that I would type away death threats against the kids and the entire school onto Google search.
Obviously the FBI was watching, but they were on the side of the kids and the school, not me.
Fuck white people. Fuck the United States of America, I would think to myself.
I will destroy you, I would proclaim in my own thoughts, out of a strong sense of defiance against the injustices of life and the American society, which was racist against Asians like me.
This was in the mid to late 2000s, after all.
Bio: Chunbum Park is an artist from South Korea, born in 1991, who received their BFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts (2020) and their MFA in Fine Arts Studio from the Rochester Institute of Technology (2022). Born a male, Park likes to cross dress and depicts themselves as a woman in their paintings. In 2023, Park began writing exhibition reviews for various online and print magazines, including the New Visionary Magazine. They currently reside in Cliffside Park, New Jersey.
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Matrix
By Henry Aaron Argueta
I emphatically detach myself from this universe
The union formed was deformed from its inception
The perception of fulfillment was that of fairytales
Unicorns, rainbows, and a knight in shining armor
Each page encapsulated by a bright charm
No harm was intended, but made its way through the margins
No concept of karma, no respect for consciousness
The characters tread the tightrope
Searching for errors, but no signs exist
I insist, maybe a plot twist can arise?
I am the creator, am I not?
Have I forgotten the innate power I have been gifted?
Or has the ability drifted off into the polluted skyline?
If only I could edit the timeline to make it beneficial
Eradicate every issue and reissue the first draft
Would the earth collapse?
That’s a risk I am willing to take
I’d rather have the fake you than experience this void
I have the fate of humanity in the palm of my hand as I flip coins
Nobody Here
By Henry Aaron Argueta
It’s time for you to leave
She cheated again
She’s a repeat offender
Got you on a bender
(Nobody Here)
Body was leaking like a faucet
Corpse headed to a coffin
Who shot him?
No witness
Nobody’s talking
(Nobody Here)
So much corruption
Children abducted daily
Kept from the public
That shit is crazy
(Nobody Here)
Nothing amazes
We all go through phases
Rooting and praising
While we all remain strangers
(Nobody Here)
I take my vitamins
Addicted to writing
It’s like Vicodin
Jump off the building, I’m Spiderman
(Nobody Here)
Cold turkey off the pot pie
And the devil’s juice
When you leave
Will they grieve and remember you?
(Nobody Here)
No need for apologies
We practice monogamy
Bondage, role play and some sodomy
(Nobody Here)
My girl’s a nympho
Barely talk, we use symbols
And when I stop to pray
I’m hoping GOD won’t say
(Nobody Here)
Depression
By Henry Aaron Argueta
Depression is aggressive
What’s the message that my brain conveys?
I’ve fought and continue to fight to keep these thoughts contained
For no apparent reason
Feelings arise without a sign or symptom
I close my eyes, meditate, and tell my mind to listen
Listen to my true self
Listen to what I want and need
I’m not greedy, no need for riches
I just want to heal completely and remove these stitches
The mental wounds that won’t subside
Some days are great, some days aren’t right
It’s like there’s two of me and they collide for dominance
This ominous shadow follows me everywhere
I look in the mirror, I’m barely there
But, if I truly believe that I’m blessed then I shall be patient
I mean life is full of ups and downs and we don’t get to choose the ratio
For now, I’ll keep busy, keep faith, keep writing
In the end I’ll be more than content and enlightened
Primary Delusion
By Henry Aaron Argueta
Politicians politic on how to move you in the opposite direction
Regardless of the vote we all lose the election
Puppeteers administer sinister ideas in conference
Poets assassinated for promoting caution and exposing dockets
Chemtrails all over the spectrum breaking you down…
I put the pieces together like Tetris; this is chess, it ain’t checkers
The folks that try to control you with lectures are the same ones that spill blood on the cross on their necklace
Inhale corruption, exhale destruction, the media constantly promotes dysfunction
Erectile dysfunction?
Pills this, pills that…if you fight back you’re exiled into the deepest dungeon
Robots with badges given authority to kill in daylight with standstill traffic
And what the hell happens? I’m second-guessing progression, more like regression
Life moves in patterns, chain of events can’t be broken unless “WE” strategize properly
Talk is cheap when the population’s indebted to certain monopolies
Mega-Pharma taking payments to keep people suffering with curable ailments
Advertisements to get impaired by the thousands
It’s endless, might as well surrender…
Fuck that! Can’t stop, as a whole “WE” can overthrow their agenda
Thousands of acres available to house the poor, but the powers that be would rather focus on population control
Manufacturing new diseases
There are no regions of hell that they won’t explore
Big fish eat little fish
Then one day the little fish built a bomb, and both sides got blown to bits
I think I’ve had enough of this
I might just join the freedom fighters and build a new empire
Bio: Henry Aaron Argueta is a poet and writer born and raised in Los Angeles, California. He began writing in his early teens, discovering in language a place to hold memory, tension, and the minutiae of everyday life. Argueta writes to trace the moments that shape us and to illuminate the stories that live between silence and sound. He continues to explore new forms and voices, driven by a lifelong belief in the power of words to witness, transform, and connect.
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Wedding Veil
By Ian Powell-Palm
I bow my head
And a dark window fills with light.
My lungs fill with light.
I have been lonely all my life.
It’s ok. The way I love
Has been too much wealth already.
I have a mission. I have made a good Antigone.
My sister’s body is in a field, and I can’t reach it.
All the torment of my life has come
from not knowing how to enter the field.
No, that’s wrong.
I buried her, with my mother’s help.
Poured ochre over her eyes and asked her to visit me when she could.
That was when I learned how to love my mother.
Past the mere expectation of a son. To love her as a friend.
To love how she showed me the collapsing line between love and grief.
To love your grief, grieve your love.
My greatest friendship
Has been my mother. If I close my eyes
My sister is dancing in front me, movements like black piano keys
Banging down beneath a wide, red sky. The song
So familiar it doesn’t need a name.
She sings it through me, my mouth wide and not my own.
O, my mother. Her love was like receiving Christ’s imprint.
A finger on a forehead, lying by a savior’s side as he hangs.
Waiting for him to wake. Knowing he will.
I wanted to put a hole
In language and crawl inside. I wanted to be a bride
Shut up in a veil of music, running through my desire
Like It understood me, and I it.
I am not pushing anyone away. You. I am not pushing you away.
Read deeper.
Don’t pay attention to the violence that is already laced in this poem.
It’s all violence. I’m sorry to tell you this. For every good day with your lover
There is a family disappearing into the death of history. Do not turn away from this.
You, too, can be a bride. Here. Take my veil. Wear it. Tear it. Undo everything
I thought I’d built. I want you in my anger, in my violence. I love you.
I love you, and you must believe that. Or not.
Just let me put this ring on your finger. Marry me. Wed me
to the ground. Fasten me to your back and start walking.
Out the window
By Ian Powell-Palm
a long, dark green.
It's spring again. Then summer. Everything is alive.
I have no more requests. I have emptied myself on the doorstep
Of God. The trees off the road forge a line of hands
Pushing our weight into the sky. Someone’s father
Plays piano in the backroom of a memory
when a man hands him a package with a wedding ring inside.
It’s just an image. Don’t take it seriously. I’m lying again.
There is a piano. It’s always playing and when it does
The night stretches itself wide enough for anyone to slip through it
And into wedding attire. That was it. We were at a wedding.
It was spring. Everyone was dancing, even with the gunfire
Echoing in the distance. Everyone was passing
A bride’s veil between them, taking turns wedding themselves to the Earth.
Even with the gunfire
Drawing nearer, they danced, the soles of their feet
Made bright by the ricochet of bullets. Everyone was dancing
To the story rising out the veil, folded in the grass.
The veil was a girl. She was singing. They could all hear it.
O Lord, how she sang. O, lord, how we sang back to her.
Bio: Ian Powell-Palm is a writer, poet, and musician currently living in Belgrade, Montana. His work attempts to interrogate familial trauma, sexual identity, and the resurrection of the dead. He is the founder and EIC of the journal Rejected Literature Magazine and is a PhD candidate at UMass Amherst. He wants you to fight with all you have for a free Palestine. He is happy to be here.
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Adventurer
By Dana I. Hunter
Curves and lines
to trace with fingernails
mountain passages
carved by rivers of sweat
hikes through brunette fields
hands graze flesh
slip into the cliffs’ fold
sink upon her meadow
pioneering tongue tip.
Golden sapling spread.
Bouquet
By Dana I. Hunter
Folded within
flesh moist
firm heat
tap slightly
gentle flick
tongue.
Dawns petals
rain drenched
slick with secrets
embers and sparks
screams and peaks
beauty within,
explore.
Her Scent
By Dana I. Hunter
Our afternoons were slippery with heat,
movement, and emotions that leaped
from desires tapped before
every touch murmured instant emissions
as her flavored sweat drifted with perfume
heady and pure, like our encounters.
She drew me in with those eyes
that catches you as you leave
questioning your departure.
On cold evenings, my body aches
for her and our dim-lit hotel room
inhaling the mixture of us
and gardenias.
To Die
By Dana I. Hunter
hover
sweat
nipple
tweak
thighs
warm
hips
kiss
stroke
nuzzle
taste
pleasure
tongue
inviting
madness
arch back
seize behind
curl toes
surrender
Forgettable
By Dana I. Hunter
Like a plastic garbage bag
forced until the final give,
the plunge and his relief
is raw without pleasure.
Knees snap shut like magnets, followed by
a distant mummer, “It gets better in time.”
His empty emotions create a dulling stare of
disbelief. Filled with discomfort and shameful regret.
Shattered romanticisms fall, landing in my lap.
When does it become a desirable passion?
Where does the flame emerge?
Not from a heaving chest and quick extraction.
All is pain, and I refuse a sequel.
My childish hopes that ‘this’ would evolve
into love, given time. Vanished
when he withdrew and exited.
Bio: Dana I. Hunter (she/her), a top poet in the NAMI NJ: Dara Axelrod Expressive Arts Poetry Contest, has been featured in Heather Stivison’s Ekphrasis! at Pleiades Gallery in NYC; published by Bottlecap Press; published in The Decolonial Passage Literary Magazine, Songs of Eretz Poetry Review, The Journal of Undiscovered Poets, table/FEAST Literary Magazine and Open Minds Quarterly. Dana has a B.A. in Communications. She is an African American poet living and writing in New Jersey.
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Your Ticket to the Theatre
By Daniel C. Blight
Your ticket for the theatre
is crumpled with joy
when I look
in your pocket
Other people, I observe,
enter stage left with zips closed
things are hiding sure
but rarely obscured
because we all see
as you so astutely told me
the tricks
during the interval
when the lights go on
I’ve always wondered how
your only coat survives the winter
when its edges are frayed
and the edges of you
are frayed too
Will you outlive your pockets
or will they swallow you
I wondered
while queueing for ice cream
You’re a crumpler
I’m a thinker at the interval
while lined up for a pocket of sugar
You’re a person
who may die
before their coat
from all the stress
of seeing
every sleight of hand
Bio: Daniel C. Blight is a Lecturer in Photography (Historical & Critical Studies), School of Art and Media, University of Brighton. Recent work includes the chapter contribution “Ways of Seeing Whiteness” in Ducey, K., Feagin, J. and Headley, C. (Eds.) George Yancy: A Critical Introduction (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021) and the edited book The Image of Whiteness: Contemporary Photography and Racialization (SPBH Editions/Art on the Underground. 2019). He is currently working on a monograph — Photography’s White Racial Frame — and slowly preparing a PhD in Education, Communication and Society at King’s College London.
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Hill Blossoms
By Carolynn Mireault
The wigwam’s built from scavenged poles and stained mattress ticking, wrong angles everywhere. The artist waves her in without standing. He’s cross-legged on a mound of sand so full of ground glass it looks sugared, shining up into the root-shadows. The air smells like burnt resin, as if the place itself has been cauterized.
Around him: the animals. A menagerie of glass blown until collapse. Abandoned at the edge of beauty. A horse with its muzzle gone inward! A bobcat with a squashed belly! Ribs blown hollow! Ear tips melted to points! Swan with the hook-shaped neck!
Dominga sits on the elk. Its antlers catch the hem of her shorts but she doesn’t move.
“You want a beer?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
“You come here to fuck?”
“Where’s the beer?”
He picks up a blowpipe, long and charred, puts it in his mouth, and blows into the air until his cheeks balloon. “Could shape a whole woman on this.”
Dominga laughs, and it dies in her chest when she looks down at the sand. There are tracks. Fresh paw prints the size of her palm are pressed deep with claw marks cutting the grit. They circle the cot, scrape up the corner, then vanish through the wigwam wall like the bobcat dissolved through cloth.
“You see it?” she asks.
The artist shakes his head, not looking. “I don’t have any beer, either.”
Dominga slides down onto her knees to get a closer look. She’s so sick of Spinney Drive and Joe’s dumb yellow clothes and his lazy way of touching her, the Cardinals collar he puts on Willie-Willie, chips ground into the futon cushion, socks balled up by the radiator, all that fucking malt liquor, lemon cleaner, the violence under everything and heat and loneliness and tenderness that failed. She puts a hand on the paw print like it’ll warm up.
“Blow,” the artist says.
##
Bio: Carolynn Mireault holds an MFA from Boston University. Her fiction has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, CRAFT, and Cutleaf among other venues. She teaches at Norwich University.
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Tree Man
By Sherif Mohamed Mattar
Part 1
I had a crush on this girl once that always walked around with a bag of chocolate, until one day I realized that it wasn’t chocolate at all. It was actually mice poop. She was keeping an underground chamber of mice that she was breeding specifically to make them poop into little baggies because she loved the smell and pretended they were chocolates so she could carry them around in school all day. I weirdly still had a crush on her even after learning of this horror. In fact, it actually increased my attraction to her.
One day I decided to confront her mysterious obsession during recess at the school playground. I walked up to her slowly, with a fraudulent confidence that masked my underlying anxiety, and asked politely if I could try one of her chocolates. She immediately started blushing. I watched her face grow from sudden shock to complete and utter terror and she ran away crying. I felt terrible for the humiliation I had obviously caused her. I decided the next day I would apologize and tell her I know the secret she is hiding and how I want to assist her in seeking help for it. Maybe all she needed was some professional therapy and then she and I could live a happy, mice poop-free life, riding into the sunset together on a blue dove.
The next day I was even more nervous than when I had originally approached her. I took a sip of orange juice from my lunch box in an attempt to calm my nerves. Slowly I built up the courage to approach her for a second time and made my way over to the swing set. I sat down and greeted her and to my surprise she wore a pleasant smile as if she was happy to see me, as if she had been expecting me. I told her I was sorry for the day before and that I knew her secret. I said that I would be happy to go with her to the therapist to try to seek help. She started crying again. This time there was no terror in her eyes, only sad melancholy. She explained to me that she did not have an obsession with mice poop after all and that she was actually under a horrible curse placed on her by the Tree Man. Tree Man was very old and his life as a plant was slowly dwindling. Tree Man was forcing her to fertilize mice poop and grow it under him every day in order to keep him alive longer while he continued to deteriorate. She was forced to sniff the bag every day to breathe human oxygen into it that the Tree Man needed to stay alive. I felt great sadness sitting next to her on the swing as I sympathized with her plight. What a horrible burden to place on a sweet young girl.
I felt a sudden burst of courage come over me and I told her not to worry as I would stand up to the Tree Man tonight and tell him he must end this vicious cycle at once. She looked up and smiled at me and by the look in her eye I could tell she had faith in me to rescue her. The next day I had a really uneasy feeling in my stomach. It was like a pack of wild worms were digging into my insides. I hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before thinking about how I would confront the Tree Man. What had I got myself into, I thought. Did I decide to confront true and pure evil just to win over a little crush? After all, she probably would only let me get to first base anyway even if I did rescue her. And that was the best case scenario, the worst case was that we both ended up dead before we got to middle school. I had to keep a clear mind and focus and get the bad thoughts out of my head. I was determined to save this girl and make her my girlfriend and I quickly pulled myself together.
What would a Tree Man be scared of? I thought. A lightbulb went off in my head and I ran to my father’s room and stole his old rusty lighter out of his top drawer where I knew he kept it. He had quit smoking years back but kept the lighter as a souvenir, or at least that’s what he tells my mother and I. I then grabbed some Febreze spray out of the kitchen cabinet and was off to school, equipped with the deadly weapons I would need to free my love and end this nonsense. When the bell rang for recess that day I stepped outside and saw the girl waiting for me on the swingset with a big, warm smile on her face. This put me at ease. When I approached her this time I had a confident swagger to my walk that she picked up on quickly. I could tell she was now comfortable in my presence. She ran up to me and gave me a big hug and said I was her hero. I suddenly felt a tingly sensation under my pants as she held me in her small, fragile arms. I wondered what it might mean but it quickly went away before I could give it a second thought.
I told her that I was ready to face the Tree Man tonight, and that we would wait until it got dark that night to do it. She agreed and we went about the rest of our day until darkness took the sky. I met the girl in the park that night and we went on to confront the Tree Man. It was pitch black, blacker than any night I had ever seen. I gripped my lighter and my Febreze can tight as we inched closer. We had gotten about three feet from the Tree Man when I whipped the lighter out furiously. I told him that he must free her immediately from his curse or I would light him on fire and send the rest of the forest burning down with him. The Tree Man did not reply back. To my dismay, the tree stood there in utter silence as the impossibly dark night began to shutter with a gust of wind.
I approached the Tree Man even closer, ready to repeat my demand and that’s when I noticed a small gravestone right under the tree to the right of its stump. The long, tangled branches of the old tree hid it from the naked eye, especially in the darkness of the night. I walked closer until I was standing right above it and there I saw the gravestone which read In loving memory. Beloved husband, father. Rest In Peace John. The little girl screamed out “papa” and burst out in tears. There was no Tree Man all along. The poor little girl’s mind had created it as a way to cope with the loss of her recently deceased father, and she had forced herself to believe she had to visit him every day in order to keep him alive, when the sad truth is that he had passed on forever. A single tear swam down my cheek as I came to this realization. I held the girl in my arms with all my might and told her everything would be okay. There was a sea of tears flooding down her face at this point and she faintly repeated the word “papa” until she could utter no more.
The next day the girl did not bring a bag of mice poop to school. Instead she just wore a nice blue dress and looked more beautiful than ever. She came up to me during recess while I was waiting at the swing. She smiled at me and told me to come with her to the slide. We got into the slide together and she grabbed my face and kissed me. I felt the tingly feeling come back for a second but it vanished quickly after. She said thank you and hugged me and then recess was over and we went back to class. She didn’t visit the tree that day.
Part 2
So it’s ten years later and I finally figured out what the tingly sensation under my pants was. The girl and I are dating now and she’s even prettier than when we first met. Her hair is still luscious and wavy and she peels fresh mangos when we need a snack during movie night. Everything was all gravy and I had just bought the retro Super Nintendo for sixty bucks. We were spending our days carefree, just playing Super Mario and doing the tingly, until one day I started hearing rumors of another Tree Man circulating in my neighborhood. Suddenly I reverted back to my twelve year old state, and I remembered the anxieties I had once overcome dealing with my greatest fear. Even now as a fully-fledged human adult having discovered the Tree Man was no more than a figment of a little girl’s imagination, it still left me uneasy. What could be causing this ruckus? I wondered. Was it another poor young soul facing psychological trauma in the midst of tragedy, or something much worse, something much more real and unimaginable? Something not from this world.
The next day I was playing Yoshi’s Island after I got home from work. I had just dropped little baby Mario and I was trying to catch him before he got carried off to face a treacherous death when I heard a knock on my door. Before I could get up to see who it was the door swung open and to my relief it was my girlfriend. She sat next to me on the couch and playfully began tickling me and blocking my vision as I calmly retrieved baby Mario. After we beat the level she told me she had bad news to share, and the uneasiness I felt from the day before returned to my stomach.
She told me that she too had been hearing the rumors of the Tree Man’s return, and that we must get to the bottom of it. I challenged her demand, arguing that it was not our problem and that we should stay out of it. She told me that she needed to help whoever it was that was suffering, just as I had helped her, and that it’s what her father would have wanted. I then had no choice after being guilt shamed and there was no way I was going to jeopardize my perfectly happy relationship so I agreed that I would play detective with her.
We ate some cheeseburger flavored Cheez-its to fuel our mission and then we were off. We returned back to the park where we used to play as kids and started asking children nearby if they had heard anything about the Tree Man. A group of kids by the slide said they weren’t allowed to talk about it. We asked them who told them not to talk about it and they quickly got up and scattered away. Our Curiosities heightened as we continued to explore until we came across a little girl who said she knew where the Tree Man was. We asked if she could take us to see him and she said that he can only be seen by children. We then asked why the kids were scared of him. She said the Tree Man put a spell on her and she had to visit him every night and play dress-up or else her whole family would die. This did not sound like some kid’s imagination to us. It sounded like pure evil.
We told the little girl that she must take us to the Tree Man tonight so that we could lift her curse. She became very frightened and explained that the Tree Man said that if she showed anyone his secret hiding place he would kill her entire family. There was real terror in her eyes that started to fill up with tears as she sobbed. My girlfriend consoled her and gently stroked her hair, assuring her that nothing would happen to her family. She calmly explained that I was thoroughly experienced in dealing with Tree Men and that I had once defeated one all by myself with my bare hands. She promised her that if she took us to him that I would put an end to the torment once and for all and lift the curse he placed on her. She agreed.
We waited for daylight to fade as the little girl explained to us that he only comes out at night. I started to get a feeling of déjà vu and slowly played back that dreadful night from ten years ago in my head. I realized that I would need some weapons for self-defense and that they might have to be upgraded from my previous encounter with the Tree Man. I packed a sharp knife from my kitchen and my girlfriend grabbed a can of pepper spray and placed it in her purse. The sky grew black and all three of us looked at each other simultaneously, signaling that it was time.
As the little girl began to guide us to the Tree Man’s secret location, she started telling us of another rumor going around about a secret monster that lived under the bridge who was turning kids into poptarts. Kids have the wildest imaginations, I thought. We brushed the story off as a silly folktale and kept it moving. She led us about a half a mile into the forest behind the school. I was ashamed to admit I still had a fear of the dark that I never quite overcame from childhood. My girlfriend had just bought me a Ninja Turtle’s nightlight for my room that was helping me sleep lately. I slowly reached down and felt the knife in my back pocket and assured myself I would be safe. After crossing a bed of rocks through a small pond she told us we had arrived at our secret location. She pointed up at a big oak tree about 200 hundred feet away and told us that’s where he stayed.
We instructed her to approach the tree as we hid in the bushes and waited for him to reveal himself. We took the high ground, slowly walking behind in the shadows as she inched toward the tree. A tall, large man came walking out from the darkness. He wore a costume made of wood and leaves and a brown mask that matched his earthlike tones. To my horror he had brought another little girl along with him dressed as a Disney princess. He told her that it was a special game of dress up tonight and she was to make a new friend. He picked up a suitcase from the ground and opened it, pulling out several more costumes. He ordered the little girl dressed as the princess to take off her clothes and put on a bumblebee costume. After she had gotten into her new outfit, he instructed her that she would then put her hands inside his pants and find the honey.
I jumped out of the bushes, knife in hand, and yelled for him to stop at the top of my lungs. He looked up at me rather unshaken, with a freakish smile on his face that stretched from ear to ear, and charged at me full speed. I was so shocked by his split second reaction that I stood there stunned as he tackled me onto the floor. I felt the knife fall out of my hand as I crashed to the ground. His body was massive and powerful and I felt helpless laying underneath him, flailing my arms and trying to break free. He glanced over at where the knife had fallen, picked it up and stabbed me in the arm, aiming for my chest but missing as I fidgeted. I led out a harsh scream of pain and panic. Was I going to die tonight? I thought to myself.
My girlfriend quickly jumped out of the bushes and sprayed him with her pepper spray. He cried out in agony. Both girls were screaming and crying in terror at this point. Everyone was screaming in a dark blur of insanity and it felt like the forest was alive. I quickly jumped out and approached the man who was still rubbing his eyes trying to gather his vision. I looked for the knife but couldn’t find it. I picked up a big rock instead laying nearby and smashed it over his head as he fell to the ground. I saw blood oozing from his forehead as he got up and let out a horrifyingly evil laugh. He had the same freakish smile on his face as he charged at me once more, sending me flying to the ground again. I wrestled with him on the ground and he reached over to the cut in my arm and dug his nails into it. I screamed out in pain as he continued to laugh. My girlfriend found the knife on the ground, ran up to him and shoved it right into his back. He fell off my body and laid there motionless in a pool full of blood.
We got up, gathered the two little girls, walked them out of the forest and called the police. I was sent to the hospital to get treated for my wounds and my girlfriend rode in the ambulance with me. When I got to my hospital room I told the cops what had happened and they went searching in the forest for the Tree Man. They found a suitcase but no body. In the suitcase there was a bunch of children’s costumes and a note. The note read I KNOW ABOUT THE MICE POOP. I never showed the note to my girlfriend. That was the last we saw of the Tree Man.
Part 3
So it’s another ten years later. The girl who once carried mice poop to school is still dating me and I’m proud to say she is now my wife. We still play Nintendo and we just got the new Pokemon game for the Switch 2 and you can actually aim the pokeball when you throw it and not just release it generically by the press of a button, so in other words life is pretty great. It’s Halloween this weekend but all we can think about is the new season of Stranger Things dropping on Thanksgiving, and how convenient it would be to just press a button and fast forward through life by one month. But hey we’re here now and we were given the gift of life so we might as well enjoy it. Plus the pumpkin shaped Reese’s taste even better than the original ones so that’s always a plus this time of the year. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the most important new update, we have a daughter. Yes, the little kids from back in the day that once battled the horrors of mice poop and forest creatures now have a child of our own and she is the most beautiful thing in the world. She even plays Nintendo with us and when given the blessing of free will, selects Charmander over Squirtle and Baulbasaur as her starter Pokemon, confirming that good taste runs in the family. I know it’s hard to imagine that life can really be this great but it truly is.
At least it was until one Monday morning. Now a lot of people hate Mondays, but really that just means you hate your life. I for one look forward to the reset of boundless opportunities in a world full of limitless potential. But not this Monday. I was just getting home from work and went to greet my beautiful wife and kiss her on the forehead but her forehead had a wrinkle in it. I’m not talking about a wrinkle from old age either, that wouldn’t be great news but it would be manageable, after all aging is part of life. No, something was troubling her. I wondered what it could be but before I could ask she spilled the beans. I never thought the greatest horror I ever dealt with could come back into my life a third time but as they say, ““it comes in threes”. She told me that when our daughter got home from school that day she said she had been visited by a Tree Man at school today. My face quivered in shock. I stood there frozen until my wife shook me. I felt a little bit like George W. Bush after the secret service informed him of the 9/11 attacks while he was in the middle of an elementary school visit and he just sat there continuing to read the children’s book to the class until his brain caught up with the information presented and he figured out what to do next. Or at least that’s how I thought he must have felt. How can it be? I thought. The first Tree Man existed only in the mind of a traumatized little girl. The second Tree Man was defeated by none other than my beautiful and heroic wife and I, but his body was never discovered and it had never been concluded if the stab wound my wife inflicted upon him proved to be fatal. I thought about the note I found in his belongings that read I KNOW ABOUT THE MICE POOP that I never had the courage to show my wife. I must take this horror to the grave, I thought.
I quickly snapped out of it and rushed upstairs to consult and question my daughter, after all I am a man and I have a fully grown woman and also a miniature size woman I must protect and provide for, no matter how scary and challenging it might be at times. I asked my daughter where the Tree Man visited her at school, my wife by my side eagerly anticipating her response. She said that the Tree Man came to her during recess and asked her if she wanted any candy. Thankfully we are good parents and one of the first lessons we had taught her was to say no to weirdos that offer candy to children or other strange things. We also don’t let her watch rated R films. My parents showed me all the most horrific films when I was a little kid with no filter. The Exorcist especially terrified me, and maybe that’s why I developed such a strong fear of the dark growing up. I am proud to announce, however, that after many years of sleeping with the Ninja Turtle nightlight my wife had ever so kindly gifted me back when we were teenagers, I now sleep with no light. I sleep like a baby.
Sorry I’m getting a little bit off topic here, I guess it’s just the jitters. Anyways, our daughter declined the Tree Man’s jester but two other kids weren’t as lucky, and they ran off with him at the promise of pumpkin shaped Reese’s. Who would have known my greatest pleasure could turn into my greatest horror. I guess that’s the duality of life. I’ve grown more philosophical over the years but at heart I’m still just the same kid who likes Nintendo and peanut butter. I asked my daughter where we could find the Tree Man and what it looked like. She just said he looked like a tree and told her he would be trick or treating tonight if she wanted to join. I asked her to be more specific on his appearance and she just said he looked like the super hero from the movie we saw this summer and I think she was referring to Groot from Guardians of The Galaxy. But this man was no super hero after all, no, he was made of the worst evil imaginable. Now I’ve looked pure evil in the face before and defeated it but that didn’t make it any easier. I’m ashamed to say I felt cowardice at that moment. I felt like a kid again, but not in the beautiful nostalgic way, no, in a helpless and pitiful way.
I wondered if I could once again muster up the strength to defeat my arch nemesis for a third and final time. It is not an option, I told myself. This man came after my daughter and now it is personal. The beautiful life I live, filled with Pokemon catchings, pizza nights and two beautiful women that I adore and cherish, though one still miniature sized, is now threatened. I thought about what Kobe Bryant might do if he was in my situation and what his mentality must have been during the fourth quarter of a close game. When your life is on the line, whether figuratively or metaphorically, you can’t hesitate. The shot must go in. I thought of the ball swishing through the bottom of the net and a bullet piercing through the back of Tree Man’s skull. It then hit me that I had to once again upgrade my weapons of defense, first from a lighter and a Febreze can, then to a knife and a can of pepper spray, and now, finally, to a .45 Magnum. Now personally I’m not the biggest fan of guns, except in video games of course, but this was the one day I felt thankful that I have a conspiracy crazed friend from Texas who I used to write songs with who a few years ago insisted I arm myself incase the apocalypse was coming and martial law was implemented, and he wouldn’t take no for an answer.
I ran upstairs to my attiq and grabbed the gun he had gifted me last time he visited. I’ve never fired a real gun before but I’m pretty good at Halo on Xbox so I thought it can’t be too much different. For some reason my gut instinct was to not get the police involved. I can’t explain it, but I saw my destiny laid out before me and I knew it was a destiny I had to face alone if I was ever to rid this evil from the world once and for all. When I say alone, I mean with my beautiful wife of course. I know this sounds crazy, and don’t judge me for it, but I knew I had to use my daughter as bait to catch the Tree Man. My wife was somehow on board with the idea, though terrifying as it may be, so I guess I can’t be that crazy. Either that, or we’re equally as crazy as each other. We are a family after all, and if you mess with my family, you will meet the full wrath of destruction weighed upon you. In the new Pokemon you can mega-evole, which means even after reaching your third and final evolution stage, you can actually evolve again to something never seen before, something even more powerful. I knew this was the type of strength I had to find for this mission. Without further ado, we suited up for battle.
I dressed as a beecatcher, my daughter as a bumblebee and my wife as Sailor Moon. If I could only describe to you how sexy my wife looked dressed as Sailor Moon, you would understand me when I say I have the most amazing life ever. I thought to myself, If I get out of this alive, I will never take another moment for granted, I will cherish every night with my two ladies, all the new Pokemon we catch together and every bite of slightly cold pizza I dip in ranch with a little bit of Krystal’s Louisiana hot sauce for the perfect bite. I also thought about how Jason Statham must have felt when he played a secret assassin disguised as a beecatcher in that new movie he was in. I couldn’t remember the name of the movie but I’m pretty sure it was just called The Beecatcher. Sometimes life is pretty straight forward. There is good and there is evil and when they clash, evil must be defeated and love must prevail.
So here we were, it was Halloween night and we stood in our disguises ready to find our monster trick or treating in our neighborhood. I tucked the .45 Magnum in my bee suit and we were off. As we started walking around the block I bit into a pumpkin shaped Reese’s to calm my nerves. Should I feel guilty for indulging in the very poison my enemy has used as a weapon of deception, lust and lure? No, in order to track my enemy down I must think like him. And besides, you can’t destroy pure evil on an empty stomach. As we began trick or treating and keeping an eye out for a man dressed as a tree, my wife and I started asking around to see if any parents heard of two kids going missing after school today. To our dismay no one had heard anything. Hopefully the kids returned home, or maybe they just had really terrible parents that hadn’t even noticed they had been gone that long. I prayed for the best but prepared for the worst. Kobe mentality. A black mamba must be a ninja. A ninja can anticipate every move and see things a normal human can’t. Bruce Lee was shapeless like water, and I was thirsty for revenge.
I asked my daughter once again if she could think of any other identifiable characteristics to track down the Tree Man, and once again she just insisted that he looked like a tree. Seeing how trees are not the most popular Halloween costume, I thought this must be enough to catch him. We continued to scour the streets in search of our elusive villain, and we continued to eat candy along the way to calm the nerves. I hoped that our sugar rush would help our adrenaline kick in when the vital moment came to attack our enemy. It was deep in this thought that my heart skipped a beat as I saw the Tree Man standing before me, maybe twenty meters away. I was instantly transported back to that same night ten years ago. I felt the terror, the anxiety and even the stab wound from my arm as my mind played tricks on me, kind of like the sensation of a phantom limb but for one still intact. I reached down to make sure my .45 was still intact, and as I looked back up he was gone, and so was my daughter. My heart sank to the deepest, darkest corners of hell as my wife screamed out in agony. How could I be so careless as to use her as bait? What kind of man was I? And what kind of man was he, to abduct her that fast in a split second? Were we dealing with the same man from a decade ago or were we dealing with something far worse, something supernatural in nature? Maybe more time had passed then I had thought and I had just frozen up again like George W. Bush without noticing. It was then that we heard a number of voices coming from the woods nearby. Stop thinking, just react. Pure instinct. Pure animal. The snake does not think about pouncing. It just pounces.
I darted into the woods at the speed of light. My wife darted with me like a binary star, two stars gravitationally bound and orbiting their common center of mass. I didn’t learn about this in science class, it was actually from an old Detroit based hip-hop group that released one incredible album and then vanished off the face of the earth, just like the Tree Man did with our daughter. We were two souls possessed. Fear no longer existed, only rage. The woods were pitch black. My wife turned on her phone’s flash light mechanism. The horrors of darkness vanished only to be replaced by an even greater horror, the greatest horror known to man: pure evil. The Tree Man stood there with our daughter in his clutches, a sharp metal object pinned to her throat. I reached for my .45.
“Hey Tree Man, hand over my daughter or this Magnum will decimate every twig, branch and leave you’re made of”, I said.
I knew Tree Man wasn’t actually made of some type of tree-like anatomy but it just felt cool to say. It felt like something Clint Eastwood would say. It’s amazing how Clint Eastwood is still directing movies at age ninety five. I hope I am still playing Pokemon at age ninety five.
“I’ll hand her over alright, if your wife can hand me some mice poop”, he said.
My wife suddenly burst into tears. How could you make a beautiful woman revisit childhood trauma of that magnitude from twenty years ago? It’s just not right. It’s the stuff made of pure evil. Who was this Tree Man? And how did he know of my wife’s deepest, darkest secret?
“I’m afraid I don’t have any mice poop, but I do have a bullet for the back of your skull, or should I say tree stump”, I said.
“Now, now, no need to get all riled up, I’m just trying to give your daughter a little candy on Halloween like the nice man that I am. And this is real chocolate too, not like what your wife is used to”, he said, followed by a horrifyingly evil laugh, the same laugh from a decade past, except this one had humiliation aimed at my beautiful wife and a blade aimed at my beautiful daughter, which amplified its evilness tenfold.
Time was now frozen again. I tried to be the snake but the blade was centimeters away from my daughter’s throat. I thought back to my skills playing Halo on Xbox 360. I recalled that even in my best games, games where I racked up multiple killing sprees and led my team to victory, I still only shot with about forty seven percent accuracy. Now if this was a basketball game, that’s pretty good chances, you would usually take those. But with my daughter’s life on the line, I couldn’t risk it on a coin toss. Through all the madness I didn’t even notice that she wasn’t crying. She just stood there calm, on edge of course, but relatively calm given the circumstances. I must be as brave as my daughter, I thought. With that thought, almost as if it were communicated telepathically between us, my daughter bit the Tree Man. The quick jolt in pain stunned him and she managed to slip a few inches away from the blade, and with the split second window I was granted, I fired the three shots from my Magnum into the back of his skull. And as his guts exploded onto the dimly lit woods, I can indeed confirm that he was made of human anatomy and not tree anatomy. No, this man was not a supernatural force, he was only just a man. A sick evil man, pure evil. My daughter rushed into my arms and the three of us embraced.
This marks the second time the Tree Man was defeated by brave heroic women, women I am lucky enough to call my family, and as his guts oozed onto the earth, the tree of life was once again complete. The cops came and our mess was now theirs. We never did solve the mystery of the Tree Man, but it no longer mattered who he was. It only mattered that evil was put into the ground where it belonged. The next morning we caught some pokemon. My daughter evolved her Chameleon into a Charizard. We ordered a pizza. It got a little bit cold and I dipped a slice in ranch with a little bit of Krystal’s hot sauce. My daughter handed me a pumpkin shaped Reese’s that she had chilled overnight in the refrigerator for added flavor and maximized texture. Life was amazing.
Part 4
Now I know what you’re thinking: how far can this little story be stretched out? Trust me, I didn’t want to write this just as much as you didn’t want to have to read it. Fate and destiny have a funny way of creeping up on us when we least expect it, and when all semblance of structure and expectation go out the window, horror returns. Palpatine once said good and evil is a matter of perspective. Whether you’re a Star Wars fan or not, you have to admit it’s an interesting point of view. So here we are, another ten years later. Time flies when you’re having fun, raising a seventeen year old daughter and balancing work with marriage as the giant rock keeps spinning around the infinite black abyss. The strange thing about aging is you never really feel your age, maybe physically never mentally. In your head you’re kind of always 18 or 25 or 32 so when you sneakily slip past 40 it becomes a daily mindgame to look yourself in the mirror every morning as the mind catches up to the body. But it’s not all bad. Not when you still have two beautiful women in your life and they still release alternative shapes of Reese’s based on whatever holiday is around the corner, in this case Christmas. And what do you know, the miniature version of my full sized wife is now full sized herself.
So there I was, browsing through the new release section of video game titles at my local Best Buy shop to surprise my daughter for Christmas. I know these days you can just purchase video games online and download them directly to your video game console without ever stepping foot outside your house but I was feeling nostalgic. Nostalgia is one of the most powerful drugs known to man, capable of vast consumer manipulation, psychological warfare and borderline hypnoticism, but we still feed into it because the memories of yesteryear are just too enticing to let slip away. Super Mario and Pokemon were still our favorites so anything along those lines always caught my eye. But what caught my eye that day was something too terrifying to even fathom. My heart skipped a beat as I came across a brand new game called Tree Man. I stood motionless for a second, then I pinched myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming, then I picked up the case and began surveying it. As much as I tried to read what the game was about, I couldn’t concentrate, and the details on the cover kept rescrambling themselves like a self-moving Rubix cube. I purchased the game immediately and drove straight home. I didn’t want to, but I had to. And as they say, curiosity killed the cat.
I got home and kissed my wife, hugged my daughter, and that night we ate dinner like everything was normal. But I knew everything was about to be the furthest thing from normal. I waited until my wife and daughter had fallen asleep to play the game. I didn’t want to worry them, and anyway, hopefully it was all just a big coincidence. How could the game have any possible connection to the events of our past, the trilogy of terror that wreaked havoc on our otherwise nice little existence. I carefully opened the game and inserted it into my Nintendo. I was so struck by the title I had barely noticed the contents of its cover, but at second glance it was just some vague illustration of a forest, not very revealing.
The game loaded up and I felt an immediate sense of dread. The title screen played the most beautifully haunting music I had ever heard. It had the serenity of the underwater level from Donkey Kong but there was something lying underneath it that gave it a much more startling feel, like layers of sound buried underneath the mix that subconsciously tormented you, hidden instruments of death. The game was strange in all aspects. While most games have various options to scroll through before you start, the main menu consisted of only one mode: Story. I pressed start and was not greeted with a cut-scene like usual. Instead, I was thrust immediately into the middle of a forest. I started walking around. The music from the title screen played at a much lower level now, almost undetectable but just loud enough for you to know it was there. It was too dark to be day and too light to be night. I know this doesn’t make any sense but I can’t explain it. The forest was so familiar yet so foreign. I walked around a little more and felt lost. Usually games give you some type of objective to follow, but there were no other characters to instruct me on what to do and no guide revealing my purpose or what was the point of all of it, sort of like real life I guess. You just have to find out. I kept walking. The trees and bushes were difficult to differentiate from each other, yet they were obviously not copies of one another. I finally came across some berries to break up the monotony. I picked them up and ate them. The game didn’t tell me to, I just did. It felt like instinct. I kept walking some more until I came across a tree that didn’t look like the rest. The tree moved. My stomach dropped to the floor. It slowly approached me and as it grew nearer I realized it was Tree Man.
I got up to turn the lights on, I could not face him in the dark, not even the digital manifestation of his spirit. I hit the lights and I saw my daughter standing in the hallway, stiff as a tree, eyes transfixed, body frozen. I called out to her and she screamed the sound of pure evil, not the kind you hear in a horror movie, not the kind you hear in real life, a scream from a different dimension entirely. The scream made me scream, initiating a chain reaction which then awoke my wife in a horrid yell to complete the trifecta of disaster and the whole house was alive. Insanity had returned.
We took a few moments to gather ourselves. I asked my daughter what she was doing there and she said she didn’t remember anything. My wife and I concluded that she had been sleep walking. I used to sleep walk when I was a child and would walk around the house moving random objects around for no apparent reason as my sister and brother stood horrified, so this didn’t really seem all that farfetched really. Eventually as my adolescence withered the sleepwalking slowly faded with it. It wasn’t too much cause for concern, I thought. After we had a few more minutes to calm down we eventually laughed the whole thing off and then we did what any rational folks would do, ate Christmas tree shaped Reese's to calm the nerves and went back to bed. Well, at least two of us went to bed. I knew I had to face pure evil once again and I knew it couldn’t wait until morning.
I waited for my wife and daughter to fall asleep and then I turned the game back on. There he was, staring right at me, Tree Man.
“You’ve finally found me, after all these years”. He said.
The game gave me the option to either respond with Who are you Or This will be our last encounter. I didn’t want the truth, I just wanted it to end. I clicked on the second option.
“Aw, but this is only just the beginning. You know the funny thing about trees, you can tell exactly how old they are by cutting them down and counting their rings. Humans on the other hand, they’re a little more deceptive. Take you for example, you think you’re in your forties, when really that couldn’t be further from the truth.” He said.
The game once again presented me with two options of response: Enough lies, time to meet your doom or What do you mean?
Again, I did not want the truth. I chose the more aggressive response. I was hoping that the game would soon give me an option to slay the Tree Man and end this nightmare, perhaps with a .45 Magnum, or maybe with an even more advanced weapon this time around.
“Not yet I’m afraid. Patience, my friend. I still know about the mice poop. And now the whole world must know the truth once and for all.” He said.
I couldn’t take it any longer. My anger had caught up to my fear. Sometimes you need both when fate and destiny clash and a mere mortal must defeat an otherworldly presence for the fourth and final time. I grabbed an axe and swung at the Tree Man with all my might, but I didn’t hit anything. Just then I woke up.
I woke up screaming, I didn’t mention this earlier but along with my sleepwalking I used to have night terrors as well. Night terrors are interesting in that they’re technically classified as a psychological disorder, but I always thought that was an overly dramatic classification for mildly worse than usual nightmares. But I guess this nightmare was about to get a whole lot worse. I didn’t wake up in my house. I woke up on a space station.
“Honey what did I tell you about too much sugar before bed? You weren’t sneaking some of those toxic Reese’s into living quarters were you? I thought they banned those after the migration.” She said while calmly scratching my head.
Now first of all, everyone knows Reese’s don’t taste like real peanut butter. They have a distinct artificial quality to them that somehow make them even more tasty even though you know how unnatural they must be, but toxic is a stretch. And second of all, what did she mean by migration? I asked her to tell me what was going on. She told me I must be suffering temporary memory loss from a new drug they started testing on certain family units on the station. They had to keep the identity of the test subjects hidden from themselves in order to eliminate the placebo effect and contaminate the results of the study. She explained to me that we were now on a spaceship orbiting mars and we have been for the past decade, ever since the deadly virus broke out on earth that wiped out ninety seven percent of the human population. After years of quarantining, experimenting and fighting for our very last hope, one scientist finally found a cure: Mice poop. Small regular doses of mice poop incorporated into our daily diets were able to completely reverse the effects of the virus and save mankind.
But planet earth had become a barren wasteland after a decade long battle fighting the virus, and what was left of humanity was forced to colonize on mars in an attempt to start over. We had brought a few hundred mice along with us on the space station and by carefully monitoring their procreation and general health, were able to provide us with a steady food supply of their droppings that ensured to keep the virus off of the space station and our new home planet.
I couldn’t believe my ears, was this all a dream? They say that time is completely warped in a dream-state, did I just dream a whole decade? Or more? How old am I? I was afraid the more questions I asked my wife, the more horrifying truths she would reveal. I settled on asking her what mice poop tasted like. She said they microdosed microscopic portions into our daily food supply so small that the taste was virtually undetectable. Perhaps that was our last bit of saving grace, I thought. I was so caught up in this new revelation of our space dwelling, rodent waste consuming lives that I had forgotten to ask about our daughter. I asked my wife where our daughter was.
“Silly, you know the number one side effect of the mice poop is rendering us sterile. This new drug has you really out of loop, maybe we should have the doctor check up on you” she said.
I assured her I was fine and just needed a little more time to get fully acclimated to the new treatment and we headed to the shared headquarters for "first meal”. She bought it but I knew something was really off. If the remaining population was rendered sterile how did we expect to survive our mars colonization? Anyways, I didn’t know what was going on but I knew I had a daughter. I couldn’t have just dreamt up seventeen years of memories. A living breathing human being can’t be manifested that vividly, with that much detail, not in any book, not in any film, not in any subconscious. No, my daughter was real, I knew this much to be true. But then what truth did that reveal about my wife? Was my greatest love now my secret enemy? Was she in on this? Was I still dreaming? Everyone knows the first rule of night terrors is that the only way to wake up is to scream. I threw my breakfast tray up in the air and started screaming at the top of my lungs, hoping to wake myself up from this nightmare.
“Stop, honey, what are you doing? You’re embarrassing us in front of our entire community” she said.
Just then security swarmed in and apprehended me. My wife told them I was having adverse reactions to the medication and needed to be checked up on. They carried me off, threw me into a dark room and then I opened my eyes.
I woke up in my bed in my house next to my wife. I was sweating profusely with my heart rate soaring and she was lying there calmly, sleeping like a baby. I got up and rushed over to my daughter’s room. She was sleeping as well. I let out a sigh of relief. I then rushed over to my living room and turned on my Nintendo and there was no Tree Man game in sight, just Super Mario and Pokemon. I let out a second relief, this one even larger. Sometimes dreams can be so realistic. There is nothing more terrifying than your own mind, the demons lurking deep within your subconscious. Imagine if you could actually see it, your subconscious standing before you, as vivid as day, and not just in dream form. I was so unnerved I had to walk to the kitchen pantry and eat a Reese’s. We were out of Christmas tree shaped ones so a Santa Clause shaped one would have to suffice. Every variation of Reese's has a slightly different ratio of peanut butter to chocolate. That’s why they all taste just a little bit different. What’s the perfect ratio? Only God knows.
I decided to surprise my wife and daughter with pancakes. A cause for celebration was in order for once again ridding the world of evil. Sometimes simply waking up counts as a victory, like Frosty The Snowman saying “Happy Birthday” every time he comes to life. Life is a gift. I wanted to show my wife and daughter how much I appreciated them so I sprinkled extra chocolate chips in the pancake batter. I fried up a few eggs for a little protein. Orange Juice. I wish it was back in 1999 and you still read the morning paper with your breakfast, a random yearning for nostalgia that drifted in the back of my mind. I didn’t even have to wake my wife and daughter up, the smell was too effervescent to go undetected by the human nose. As they gathered around the table and started thanking me for the scrumptious surprise, I thought to myself: Life is amazing again. But then again, it always has been.
My daughter finished up her pancakes and started telling us about a new movie she wanted to go see.
“Dad, can we please go see this new horror movie I just heard about. It’s like one of those A24 super artsy flicks, like horror with social commentary where the monster is like this great big metaphor for a much deeper meaning or theme or whatever” my daughter said.
“Yeah, sure, I’m always up for the theater. What’s it called?” I replied.
“Tree Man” she said.
My wife and I stared each other dead in the eyes, silent as a mouse.
“What’s wrong with you two, we can just stay in if you’re feeling lazy” she said laughingly.
“Oh nothing honey, we can see the movie, why don’t you go get ready?” I said.
Our daughter left the table excitedly and we continued to stare at each other in silence. We both knew without saying a word that we had to go see the movie. One thing about evil is, you always have to face it. If you try to run away from it, it always catches up to you. Choice is an illusion and destiny is persistent. I wondered why my daughter wasn’t at all shaken up by the coincidental events of our past in relation to the movie title. Perhaps she was too young to fully put the pieces together. That’s a good thing, I thought. We saved her the burden of trauma, her innocence still intact. I cleaned up the table and checked my Nintendo console one last time. No Tree Man. And though he was waiting for us at the cinema, once again it could all just be a big coincidence. I once heard a song that had a lyric in it about God being a funny story teller. I couldn’t remember the name of the song but it gave me a small sense of comfort.
On the way to the theater my wife held my hand tightly. I could tell she was really nervous at what lay ahead and I tried to shield my own fear the best I could to comfort her. I put on American Pie by Don Mclean. It’s a nine minute song that somehow never gets old. It’s like watching an entire movie in audio form and even though you know what’s going to happen each time you listen it somehow makes it even more entertaining. If this is the last song we ever hear, it’s a good one, I thought. Who am I kidding? We’re just going to see a film. It’s not like the Tree Man can pop out of the screen and slash us to bits or something. I need to stop letting my thoughts get the best of me. I know we had a strange past and dreams can be even stranger but this is reality and reality has a set of rules that the universe abides by and we can count on. I smiled at my wife and we arrived at the theater.
I purchased three tickets and we walked to our seats. My daughter said she wanted a snack and started getting back up.
“Yeah actually can you get us a large popcorn to share?” I asked.
“Popcorn, dad you're so old. Who eats popcorn at the movies anymore?” She said laughing.
What a strange joke, I thought to myself. I tried to remember the last time I’d been to the theater but I knew it hadn’t been too long ago. She came back a few minutes later as the previews were finishing up and I trembled in horror as she came back with a huge bag of what was definitely not popcorn. It was mice poop.
“They got a brand new flavor this week. It’s so good Dad. You gotta try it" she said.
She started viciously attacking the mice poop as though she hadn’t just eaten a huge stack of pancakes a couple hours prior. To my even bigger dismay my wife began joining in on the feast. I couldn’t believe my eyes, my ears, or any of my other senses for that matter. I quickly got up and told them I had to use the bathroom. I walked over to the men’s room and looked in the mirror. I couldn’t tell if I was 18 or 25 or 32 or 47. Reality was caving in on itself. I splashed my face with water. I looked at myself again. I couldn’t recognize myself. I was exactly the same but completely different. I splashed my face with water a second and third time. I grabbed a paper towel and dried my face and then headed back into the theater. It was empty. My wife and daughter were nowhere to be found and I was the only soul present. The previews ended and the Tree Man appeared on screen. That same music that was eerily similar to the underwater level in Donkey Kong yet more menacingly terrifying began playing and Tree Man poked his head out of the screen and addressed me directly.
“Do you wish to know the truth?” He said.
I opened my mouth but no words came out. I didn’t have a voice at all. The Tree Man let out that same terrifying laugh from years ago.
I woke up on my couch with the Tree Man video game on. I had dozed off playing it and it was still stuck on the same section with the Tree Man staring directly into my eyes telling me that the world must finally know the truth. A text bubble suddenly popped up saying Press A to proceed.
I hesitated. I turned the game off and ejected the disk from the console. I took the game and smashed it with a hammer, opened my balcony door and threw it into the woods. I closed the door, climbed into bed and held my wife. I didn’t sleep one second that night. My wife woke up and went to work. My daughter woke up and headed to school. I called out sick and sat on my couch. I didn’t eat anything that day, not even a Reese’s. My wife came home from work and kissed me on the forehead and asked me if I was feeling better. I told her I was. My daughter got home from after school practice. She was really excited.
“Dad, can we please go buy this new video game I just heard about. It’s like even better than Mario and Pokemon. It’s more like Legend of Zelda but scarier, it’s kind of like an RPG but supposedly like no other game you ever played before, with the most beautiful forest and most enchanting music.” She said.
“What’s it called?” I said.
Part 5
Every night, after I finish my night time snack, I get this sad feeling from knowing that I won’t be eating any more food that day. Of course I could just eat more, but then I would get fat. But why the sadness? The next meal is coming shortly after I wake up and I don’t feel sad between the hours of lunch and dinner, so what’s the difference? I guess it’s just knowing that the last calorie has been consumed that always gets to me. I always wondered if anyone else gets that same feeling. Anyways, it’s not important right now. What’s important is that my daughter found out about the Tree Man game and now I have two choices: A. Confess to her that I already played it and smashed it to bits and its remains are now scattered around the forest. Or B. Tell her we can go purchase the game today and take another gamble with pure evil. Or wait, how about C. Tell her I heard the game sucks and buy her the new Pokemon game instead. No Man ever got anywhere by taking the cowardly route. Destiny always catches up to you. If you skip Final Destination 5, they’re just going to make an even crappier sequel a few years later so you might as well just concede. I told her we could go buy the game.
At least there was one bit of good news amidst the otherwise terrible news. This confirms that the game is real and that I didn’t dream it up. I wasn’t on a space station and mice poop hadn’t taken over popcorn as the go-to movie theater snack of choice just as popcorn had once overtaken deviled eggs many years back. I know it sounds crazy that we used to eat devilled eggs at the cinema but life is always stranger than fiction. No, the good news was that I was indeed sane. What is insanity anyway? A great philosopher once said insanity was the only rational reaction to an irrational world and that always stuck with me. I guess it’s all just a matter of perspective. Everything is just a matter of perspective, and at the end of the day all we are is matter anyway. Dust in the wind. I’m getting too philosophical and that’s probably because I haven’t eaten today. My brain is eating its own thoughts in replacement of calories. My wife cooked dinner. It was delicious. Some more positive momentum. I’m starting to feel a shift in the right direction.
We headed to the mall. This time I played Purple Rain by Prince. It’s another nine minute song and I guess I like nine minute songs. The average song is about three minutes in length so I guess this is just giving you an additional six minutes of peace and comfort before you have to burden your mind again with the choice of which song to play next. Too much choice leads to analysis paralysis and studies show that an increase in choices leads to a decrease in happiness. And now that we as a species have access to every film, television show, song, album and game ever made in the entire history of human civilization at our fingertips at any given moment at the mere click of a button, we all kind of just sit around endlessly wondering what to do and doing nothing.
Prince played the guitar solo of a lifetime and we parked. I hope the Best Buy employee doesn’t recognize me and remember that I already purchased this game, I thought. We could just go to Gamestop instead. Did they go out of business after the whole Roaring Kitty short stock thing? I can’t remember. Or did they just discontinue physical locations and now operate entirely online? I can’t remember. Nostalgia is mixing with the Mandela Effect garnished with a bit of good old anxiety from all the commotion and it's all blending into a nice little molotov cocktail and reality is starting to blur again. I need to get a grip. Which gaming console had the best grip of all time? I always had an affinity for the Game Cube controller but then again the new pro controller for the Switch 2 was remarkably sleek. It must be 2025, I told myself.
I decided to stick with Best Buy. For some reason figuring out whether Gamestop had gone out of business or not frightened me. Most fears are irrational, just like the fear of running into the same Best Buy employee that sold me the game. The store was pretty big and with the rotating employee working schedule, mathematically the chances were pretty low, not that it would matter that much anyway. I bought the game. I didn’t even look at any other games in the store this time. I wanted to face my fears head on. Just then a greater fear came to my mind. Why was I letting my daughter play this game with me? Was I not just using her as bait to lure the Tree Man in again, just as I had so regrettably done all those years back when my wife and I took her trick or treating with us? Well, this was a little bit different. This on one hand was a video game and that on the other hand was putting her face to face with a child predator and serial killer. Or wait, was he a serial killer? What was his name again? Why can’t I remember any facts of the case or details of any news reports that came out after my wife and I captured him? Did it even happen? Get a grip. Gamecube grip. Of course it happened, why else would my wife give me that terrified look when our daughter asked to purchase the new Tree Man game? I need to get a hold of myself. I had a few bad dreams, that’s all. Don’t let it deconstruct the fabric of your reality.
We got home and got ready to play the game. I set up a whole snack board and everything. I wanted to create a casual environment as a way of keeping the bad omens away or something. Evil can’t attack us while we’re eating popcorn right? Why do people even like horror movies?I turned the Switch 2 on and that nostalgia kicked in again. When the Nintendo 64 came out, you couldn’t even describe the feeling of going from a two dimensional world to immersing yourself in a fully 3D one. Every kid on earth was shook. Most people side-scroll their entire way through life, never truly interacting with their environments. I popped the game in and handed my daughter the controller but she handed it back to me. I was surprised she wanted me to play first since she was the one so excited to get her hands on the game. When I was young playing Nintendo I used to let my big brother fight all the hardest boss battles while I hid behind the couch for good luck. I felt like somehow my daughter was now doing the same thing for me and it gave me a new found sense of confidence that I could finally beat this evil once and for all. Tree Man had to die tonight, virtually, physically, metaphysically, existentially, I just needed to rid him from our world. I needed to restore order and balance. I needed to bring peace back to our home, to my two beautiful ladies, because one day there will be a third beautiful lady and I will be a grandfather, and I will be old. How old will I be then? How old am I now? Snap out of it. Too much math. Stop thinking. I know the universe is governed by math and science but most of the time that math and science goes unseen and we are camouflaged by primal instinct. But is there a driving force behind it all or is it all just chaos?
The title screen popped up: Story mode. I found it a bit odd that my daughter didn’t comment on how the game didn’t give you any other menu options but I shrugged it off and hit start. So here we were, back in the haunted forest. But there was a difference this time. This time I had my two ladies with me and they were the ones that had defeated our legendary foe twice before after all. Repeat after me: There’s only one rule, I will not lose. I think that was a lyric from the Blueprint or something. I don’t think there’s any nine minute songs on that album but it’s still a good album. I started walking through the forest. There was that eerie, Donkey Kong underwater level esque, demented demon music playing again. My wife and daughter were strangely silent. I know my daughter had played Donkey Kong before, after all I taught her well, but her only reaction was her eyes remaining transfixed on the screen. I didn’t know what was scaring me more by then, the game itself or how hypnotized they were by it. I kept walking. I found the berries again and I ate them.. If the game doesn’t give me the option to eat them then how do I eat them? I kept walking endlessly. It felt like more time had passed by then on my first playthrough but maybe time was just moving slower now that my senses were heightened. Is that how that works?
I looked back at my wife and daughter again. The trees of the forest seemed to reflect off their eyes, one by one, the uncannily similar yet distinctly individual trees. After what felt like hours I saw a tree move, and the Tree Man revealed himself once again. My wife and daughter remained silent as their eyes followed the figure on the screen as he drew nearer.
“Are you finally ready to know the truth?” He said.
I needed to adjust my strategy. Running away from the truth is the same thing as running away from evil. It’s what got me stuck in this loop, this vicious cycle. Waking up from a nightmare only to unravel a greater nightmare. It’s time to face evil, to face truth, most of all, it’s time to face myself. I didn’t have any upgraded weapons this time. I was equipped only with my own mind. The greatest weapon of them all. Two options popped up on the screen: The truth about what? or I’m not falling for that again. I clicked on the first option.
“First of all, the truth about your daughter. I know it’s hard for you to believe…that she was never born. A coping mechanism for a pain too strong, a shame too severe. The inability to spread your seed, to carry on your legacy, to fertilize the branches of the tree of life, it was too hard for you to come to grips that it all might end with…you.” He said.
The Tree Man’s branches began to grow and wrap themselves around me, suffocating me. I woke up on the operating table in the medical lab on the space station. A trio of doctors and nurses were holding me down, arms flaying around frantically, a human octopus. Chaos. I heard them yelling instructions to each other, but I could barely make out what they were saying. Some fainter whispers filled the perimeter of the room. The louder noises acted as a forcefield shielding the quieter noises but a few of them managed to penetrate through to my earlobes. I heard one voice saying the medication wasn’t working. The patient isn’t adjusting well to the isolation of interplanetary travel. The sterilization from the mice feces was not the only side effect, that’s only what the government wanted us to believe. The patient was also losing his mind. Hallucinating. The invention of his daughter was his brain’s last hope of creating a false sense of normalcy, but the disconnect between him and his wife is breaking his psyche down. He will continue to dissociate until he reaches a catatonic state.
I knew this couldn’t be. During an unconscious state, the mind does a phenomenal job of creating a believable world. It isn’t until one’s consciousness is restored that they realize how farfetched the dream really was. I searched for clues. Something to prove the laws that governed this new universe contradict themselves. What changed that fateful day I went to purchase the video game that led me into this trap? Which reality was now worse? I had to wake up. I had to wake up once and for all and end this. I started screaming again, even more violently, convoluting like I was in the middle of an exorcism. Sometimes night terrors are stubborn and you have to put up a good fight to pry those pesky eyes open. The nurses started injecting me with more needles. Then came the restraints. I started feeling woozy. They were sedating me. I couldn’t fight it any longer.
I woke up screaming on the couch with the Switch 2 pro controller in my hands.
“Get a grip dad, it’s just a game.” My daughter said laughing.
“He’s always been like this, when we were still in college I bought him a Ninja Turtles night light to get over his fear of the dark. It took him years to stop using that thing” My wife said, laughing twice as hard as my daughter.
They slowly fixed their eyes back on the screen, back on Tree Man.
“Now that you know the truth about your daughter, are you ready to know the truth about yourself?” He said.
This time I didn’t even hesitate. What could be worse than what I’ve already seen? I clicked Yes.
“Very well. You remember your second encounter with me? Back when you were still in school and you and your girlfriend started hearing rumors of the Tree Man’s return. You went into the forest to investigate and you had a violent tussle where you defeated me but barely came out alive yourself. But what you don’t remember is that your stab wounds never healed, and your near fatal injuries put you in a coma. You’ve been asleep this entire time, for all these years. Your girlfriend never abandoned you. She came to visit you every single week for decades. She never gave up on you, and it looks like you never gave up on yourself either. Though your injuries eventually healed, the mind never quite caught up with the body. Medically speaking, you're perfectly capable of waking up from your coma, but something is holding you back. Your mind has created some type of mental block to shield you from the real world, to keep you dreaming forever.
Over the years, technological advancements in the medical field have given way to all sorts of new treatments. Some years after you fell under, a drug was invented that has the ability to influence the contents of one’s dreams when incorporated into the blood stream. With your parent’s permission, you were one of the first candidates to get approved for usage, and we have been administering you with this treatment ever since. At first, our initial strategy was to focus on positive, happy and comforting dreams. Our theory was that if we could put you at ease for an extended period of time, your mind would eventually reverse the mental block and awaken itself. So we gave you a perfect life, a happy marriage, a beautiful daughter, a wife and child that shared your adoration for video games, your favorite snack incorporated into every episode and so forth. Of course the drug isn’t responsible for one hundred percent of the dream’s content, it more so aids in building the environment, setting the general tone and atmosphere, incorporating certain characters and emotions, and your mind does the rest. Sort of like an outline of a movie script that your brain follows and writes and evolves accordingly as it progresses along.
But too much comfort had a reverse effect on your brain, you started showing decreased signs of activity and awareness. You were falling deeper and deeper into your slumber because you were happy and content in the dream world we created for you. The mental block you created to prevent yourself from waking up only strengthened. Afterall, if you were given the perfect life, what motivation did you have to abandon it? So we started altering our strategy. We had to add some anxiety into your storyline, some tension, some dread to shake up your comfortability and heighten your brain activity. So we wrote a plot twist and introduced Tree Man back into your life. The third time you encountered me, when you went trick or treating with your wife and daughter and slayed me with your trusty .45 Magnum, that was our way of bringing you back to the last memory you experienced before your coma. We thought if we brought you back to the scene of the crime, to come face to face with your fears once again, that might be just what was needed to reverse the mental block, to confront the trauma head on in order to move past it. So you defeated Tree Man, Clint Eastwood style. You have such a vivid imagination, you always incorporated your favorite movies, games, songs, etc. into the storylines we developed for you.
But it didn’t work, all the added stress and anxiety, it just created more psychological weight that your brain couldn’t handle. You went from low levels of activity to hyperactivity. Your mind created a loop where you kept waking up from one nightmare only to unveil an even greater nightmare. In a sense we created a monster, and it only strengthened the mental block once again and drove you deeper and deeper into your eternal slumber. We realized our first two methods functioned on two varying ends of the extreme. So for our third strategy, we are attempting to bring you back to equilibrium. Our final attempt to wake you was to introduce a lucid dream into the equation. We hoped to find a way to inform you that you are dreaming, and if you know you are indeed not awake, your brain might help to join in on the fight to wake you up.
We thought there was no better way to incorporate this lucid dream than with your favorite pastime: video games. So we created the Tree Man game to notify you of your slumber, and leave you with one last final choice. Now that you have access to all this information, do you wish to wake up, or do you wish to keep on dreaming? Like I mentioned earlier, your mind and body are fully capable, the choice is completely yours. Today, we are giving you that choice, will you wake up?
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Wake up
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Keep dreaming
I pressed A. I woke up. I was sitting on a couch but it wasn’t the same couch. I saw an old woman moving around my peripherals. She was beautiful. I then saw another full sized woman that was younger than her and then a miniature sized woman that was even younger than her. All three of them looked alike. I heard voices but my ears didn’t feel quite the same as they used to. Maybe I haven’t cleaned them in a while. I felt tired.
“He’s at it again. He can’t tell if he’s 18 or 25 or 32 or 47 or 162. He refused to eat lunch today because he was afraid the government was secretly injecting our food supply with mice poop. Now what’s all that about? Maybe it’s time we put him in one of those homes” Somebody said.
Aging is a funny thing.
I turned my head toward the window and looked out at the forest. It was beautiful. Sometimes when you take a couple more seconds to appreciate something, it’s like seeing it for the first time. The light was hitting the trees perfectly. It must be golden hour. It was like an oil painting, or maybe a video game. One of those classic games from the golden era, before the graphics became so photorealistic and they just concentrated on the details that really mattered. Those were the days. I saw a tree move. Or maybe it didn’t. I don’t trust my eyes anymore.
The End
Sherif Mohamed Mattar Is an Egyptian American filmmaker, producer, screenwriter, actor, songwriter, recording artist and film composer who has quickly forged himself as somewhat of a jack of all trades in the industry. Originally aspiring to be a novelist, he began his artistic endeavors penning short stories and comics while also writing and recording songs in grade school. Musically he is known for his conceptually driven bodies of work, vivid storytelling and an eclectic blend of hip-hop, synth-pop and alternative R&B. With a father from Cairo and mother from New Orleans, his musical influences range from jazz funk to arabian percussion. He has since released 6 full length albums and over 200 songs independently and has had his music featured in MTV’s Teen Moms, Tyler Parry’s Sistas and Amazon Prime’s Hatchetman 2 to name a few.
In the film world, Sherif began as an actor and in just under three years garnered over 50 credits on IMDb, including A Hip Hop Story with Affion Crockett, Henry with Tammy Blanchard, No Way Out with Marques Houston, and a leading role in the upcoming films I Am Ryan and Miami Strip. His commercial work includes campaigns with notable brands such as Jack In The Box, Buffalo Wild Wings, Airex and Faraday and he has collaborated on music videos with Beyonce, Dua Lipa and Deadmau5. With a strong passion for films since an early age, he always knew he would eventually make his own. He eventually founded the production company Good Ones Films and wrote, directed, produced, composed and starred in the films Eggs, Method and Check The Gates Recently he won two best screenplay awards for Method at East Village New York Film Festival and for Check The Gates at MegaFlix Movie Awards.
In the literary world, Sherif has recently published a sci-fi horror short story titled 'Tree Man.' His upcoming works include a comic book series called Tsunami Samurai and a children's book titled The Lucky Pecan. He has begun work on his debut novel which remains untitled.
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Grapes of Sorrow: Dismantling My Father’s Heroes
By Nancy Glowinski
The seedless supermarket grapes that my high school boyfriend and I sometimes snacked on at his house after a make out session were cold, sweet, and juicy but otherwise had no flavor. I preferred the dark blue, fragrant Concord grapes hiding in a thicket of vines growing by the side of the road or against 17th century stone walls of long abandoned farms. Along with blooming loosestrife and goldenrod, ripe wild grapes were a bittersweet late summer harbinger of shorter days and sweater weather in rural Massachusetts where I grew up.
So, I didn’t mind that California grapes were banned in our house because of my father’s solidarity with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers movement.
After 20 years in the Navy, my father retired in 1968. He was 38 at the time - and thanks to the GI bill, able to attend college, a first for anyone in my family. At his advanced age, he was now a student in Boston in 1968, a rather turbulent time to be on campus. That same year, Cesar Chavez ended his hunger strike by breaking bread with Bobby Kennedy. And so began a radical transformation. It wasn’t long before my father grew out his hair, sported a beard, and tried in vain to get my Japanese mother to grow her hair long and part it in the center just like Yoko Ono. During this time, he had become a John Lennon fan too.
My father was born in 1930 to immigrants who came from Poland and settled in Hartford, CT. Social activities of their tight-knit and tidy community centered around St. Cyril’s Catholic church and the Polish National Home, a banquet hall that played host to many weddings, anniversaries and get-togethers after funerals. Local postwar vocational opportunities for the young, working-class men in this group would guarantee they would stay put. The only way one could see the world was to join the service. My father opted for the wide horizon of the open sea.
And see the world he did. Exposed to other religions - including those of my mother, who he met while stationed in Japan in the late 1950s, my father remained a devout Catholic. But he embraced the reforms of the church implemented under Pope Paul VI and was inspired by the social activism of Catholics like Chavez, Bernadette Devlin, the Irish civil rights leader whose 1969 visit to the United States included meeting with the Black Panthers (here in Los Angeles), Robert Drinan, a Jesuit priest and staunch critic of the Vietnam war who won a seat in Congress and was a delegate in 1972, the year in which George McGovern (one of my father’s non-Catholic heroes) lost the presidential election to Richard Nixon in a huge landslide, and of course, Bobby Kennedy. Like so many back then, my father truly believed that one day pacifism, fairness, and humility would prevail.
He was thrilled to find out that my 6th grade teacher, a young nun who wore civilian clothes, had been transferred to my school at the beginning of 1969 from Memphis. She had been arrested the previous year for her involvement with the sanitation workers’ strike. And you know what happened after that. Her transfer to a small town was presumably to keep her from causing any more trouble for her order. After making us read Grapes of Wrath, we discussed the present-day farmworkers movement as part of our current events studies and although overshadowed by Chavez, it was in this class that I first heard the name Delores Heurta. So perhaps Sister B. was still causing trouble after all. Good trouble.
Sadly, cancer would claim my father when he was only fifty-one. Gone before neoliberal globalization would usher in the unfettered greed of the 1980s that is partly responsible for where we are today. By then I was living in New York and feeling like an alien amongst the yuppies who were my peers in age. In the early aughts I attended a sales conference where the then CEO of the company I worked for urged the audience to stand up and chant, “Greed is good” while an image of Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko was projected on the screen behind him. Greed was now normalized, admired even. I remained seated, grimaced, and discretely vented by texting a like-minded friend from my Palm Treo, and wondered what my father would have had to say about such a revolting spectacle.
I’ve outlived my father by decades so now I’m the one who knows this world better. And I’m cynical, jaded - and in our current era of misinformation in which there is plenty of virtual – and vitriolic stone throwing, I’m skeptical of practically everything. I’ve seen many once revered icons topple - some witnessed with great satisfaction and glee (Ah ha! I knew it!), others with crushing disappointment, as is the case with Cesar Chavez. I look at the photo of him breaking bread again, a turning point in my father’s life. Over time we found out that quite a few of the ones we looked up to, brilliant as they were, were not flawless human beings and could even be capable of being monstrous. When a hero or heroine falls from grace, especially one of this caliber, our sorrow is deep and complicated. Hard fought gains and the progress of a whole movement has run into a detour - a detour and distraction, not a dead end. We feel for the ones who suffered. We are ashamed of our complacency and ignorance. We also thought we were too smart to be duped so now we feel stupid and gullible, seduced by an illusion of what we wanted to believe. I don’t want to think of my father as a fool but maybe we’re all fools.
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Nancy Glowinski was born in 1959. Growing up biracial in rural Massachusetts during the 1960s was not easy. She attended the School of Visual Arts in New York from 1978-1981, majoring in painting and graduating with a BFA in fine art. She abandoned painting to pursue photography and later discovered a knack for the business side of visual content, eventually becoming the global head of photography for Reuters. After forty-one years of living in New York, Nancy Glowinski moved to Los Angeles at the end of 2019. During the ensuing lockdown of the pandemic, she began to write (and occasionally draw and paint), unleashing decades of suppressed expression. Since then she has been published in the LA Times, The Inlandia Journal, and has performed in numerous storytelling events throughout Los Angeles. She is currently working on a debut novel.