new writing

“Already Almost Over: Part Three” by Filiz Turhan

NEW FICTION

(image c/o forgotten ny)

I met Dizzy Gillespie once. No joke, it was really him. Who could mistake him for anyone else? The charming smile, French beret, puffy cheeks and yes…the famous trumpet. My friend Freddie and I had wandered into the Village Gate on Bleecker Street one night. I was an underaged teenager and thrilled to be in a jazz club at 1am, even if it was just around the corner from my college dorm.

 A hostess led us to a little table and asked resentfully (the place was empty and obviously she wanted out of there) what we’d have to drink. We ordered a round (a beer and a coke) and then poor Freddie nearly plotzed when he saw Dizzy standing by the piano, trumpet at the ready.   

I had always been a fan of old music and old movies, so I, too, recognized Dizzy immediately. In fact, it wasn’t my first such celebrity sighting: just a few months earlier, I had been in Los Angeles for the first time, staying at a friend’s parents’ house. One night they hosted us at Spago, a restaurant so famous that even I had heard of it. Once we were seated, I began scanning the room for famous faces. Right away, I spotted one and gleefully stage whispered to the table: “Look! There’s Louis Jourdan!” My friend’s dad was impressed. Why? because I was 18 and it was 1986 and Louis Jourdan’s last big movie, Gigi (I know, cringe), had come out in 1958. Had I seen Molly Ringwald and Judd Hirsch making out in the corner, I couldn’t have been more excited.

So there we were: a coke, a beer and… Dizzy Gillespie! 

I don’t have words to describe the music. Actually, Dizzy was wrapping up this unofficial gig in an empty club and so this magical moment was already almost over. We asked if we could speak to him, and when Freddie explained that he was a professional saxophonist, Dizzy graciously chatted about the business with him for a few minutes. He then kindly turned to me and said, “You look a little bit kind of familiar.” He asked me a couple of questions and when he heard I was Turkish, he said, “Oh, yeah that’s it. I remember…in Constantinople….” His voice trailed off and his eyes fluttered to the ceiling. 

I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I just followed him up to the ceiling, gazing at the something I could only guess at.

Filiz Turhan is a writer and community college English professor, living on the North Shore of Long Island. Her work has appeared in The Sonora Review, The Threepenny Review, The North American Review, Litbreak.com, and elsewhere. She likes cats.

“Already Almost Over: Part Two” by Filiz Turhan

NEW FICTION

I was attending the opera with my friends Jenn and Melissa. Before going in, we ran into an acquaintance of theirs. As they chatted, I was thinking, “Gosh, this man looks so familiar!” Later, it came to me. He resembled the actor John Lithgow. I meant to mention this to Melissa, but in the rush of people getting in to see Madama Butterfly, I forgot all about it. 

After the show, we were in the corridors under Lincoln Center on our way to the subway. We approached a doorway and they went first; as I entered behind them, a man tried to dart through from the other direction so that we were both in the doorway at the same time. I am very short and the man was very tall.

It was John Lithgow. The REAL John Lithgow. 

In that moment of proximity, he asked, “Excuse me, do you know the way to the stage door?” 

Time stopped as I was already calculating the wild improbability of this encounter. I wished I could have explained to him all about the Lithgow look-alike, how, in my opinion, real-Lithgow should have waited for me to pass through the door first, that we had a cool six-degrees of separation thing (I had briefly known his Third Rock co-star, Kristen Johnston, back in 1986 when she was the summer roommate of my best friend Meredith), that in fact, I had no damn idea where the stage door was (why should I), but alas, this was already almost over because neither of us had ever stopped moving. 

What I actually blurted out to the perplexed man was: “I’m sorry, I can’t talk to you right now.”

Part 3 coming in three days.

Filiz Turhan is a writer and community college English professor, living on the North Shore of Long Island. Her work has appeared in The Sonora Review, The Threepenny Review, The North American Review, Litbreak.com, and elsewhere. She likes cats.

An Excerpt from “A Portrait of a Lady in Gold” by Elizabeth Ohga

NEW FICTION

Penny knows she should tell her husband. She wants to tell him. Maybe if she tells him, he’ll say, “That doesn’t sound terrible, and who cares? I love you and the kids love you and we know you’re a great mom and that’s all that matters.”

What he actually says is a couple minutes of nothing, which Penny feels compelled to fill in with an apology. Then he says, “Listen, Penny, I know it’s been hard for you lately. Why don’t you try to find a babysitter to help you out, maybe you can go to the spa or something and treat yourself?”

Penny loved her husband. Really, she did. You can love someone, know they are your soulmate, and still hate them every once in a while. Love was a choice, and Penny and Gabe chose to love each other every time the choice presented itself. The thing Penny was trying to figure out was at what point did the choice present itself too often? At what point did the moments of searing contempt arise with a frequency as to inform her, this is probably not the right choice. She is sick of explaining parenting to him. She is sick of explaining being poor to him. She is sick of explaining that they are pretend rich people, which is the same thing as being poor.

COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!

“The Forbidden Fruit Bites Back” by John Haymaker

A Quirky Take on Data Overload, Entropy, and AI


When a Microsoft 1990s advertising campaign asked, “Where do you want to go today?” Our minds raced. Possibilities seemed limitless. I just never thought anyone’s answer would be batshit crazy, but that seems to be our final destination. Cognitive-load research clocks the average adult processing nearly 34 GB of information daily, outpacing our neural architecture’s capacity.

From a frontier for discovery, the web transformed into a massive online data dump, burdening the human mind with too much information everywhere all at once. We got sidetracked, and Silicon Valley capitalized, turning every click, scroll, pause and search into a commodity sold to marketing firms. Humans became subordinate to profit. To maximize their bounty of data, they’ve addicted us to an Internet of Things, no household gadget too trivial to wire up and shadow. If we look away, clickbait sucks us back in.

As a result, many of us have surrendered to endless scrolling, binge-watching and algorithmic echo chambers. I worry that entropy, the curse of the universe that trends toward chaos and disorder, has tripped the circuit breaker of rational thinking. When even Elon has gone all crackbrained, what hope is there for the rest of us?

Fortunately, humanity has a fallback: artificial intelligence. All mankind’s knowledge sits in microprocessor warehouses, ready to perform in seconds calculations that would confound our feeble “lizard brains” for eons. AI might shoulder the heavy lifting for us while we Twitter, troll and follow.

Despite warnings from scholars that AI poses existential risks to humanity, tech gurus seem giddy for a post-human world, willing to risk AI wiping out humanity. Before that worst-case scenario unfolds, however, entropy may still have the final say. If Eve’s “forbidden fruit” has left us choking, the inherent volume of data stored in AI may well trip its circuit breakers exponentially faster than ours did.

Hey, ChatGPT, what is the probability for that? 

John Haymaker currently surfs the web from New Hampshire. A former educator and programmer, his essays and fiction appear in print and online in various journals, including Hawaii Pacific Review, The Bookends Review, The Hooghly Review, Quibble Lit, Cosmic Double and New Pop Lit. Find out more at https://johnhaymaker.com/. 

(main page portfolio image c/o richard rogers partnership)

“Notes From a Hotel Balcony” by Joseph Pfister

NEW FICTION

Who knows what thoughts cross the man’s mind as he gazes upon this glittering, green slice of paradise? Who can map that tangled interior, those labyrinth chambers of his mind? What memories flare like sparks, and which corners remain dark, dormant?

Does the sight of so many all-but-naked bodies stir something in him? Or does it pull him backward—to his mother, to her hand tugging him toward the car after swim, to a half-remembered sermon about shame, to the certainty that beauty and loss are always intertwined? Does the crash of breakers remind him of the relentless crush of time? Or does it remind him of the natural ebb and flow of all things? Of the sweet futility of resistance?

Perhaps his thoughts are smaller, pettier: Are the Mets losing (again)? Does the rental car really have to be returned with a full tank of gas? Does the persistent bump on his left testicle warrant a call to Dr. Benson? Or another month of avoidance? Does he turn over, again and again, the whisper-fight with his wife by the pool, the one about nothing and everything?

Does he worry about his waistline? His cholesterol—the bad one—which Dr. Benson warned him to keep an eye on? Does he worry about the hair gathering in the drain and the twinge in his left knee that feels like a harbinger, even though he’s not even fifty? Does he consider the balance on his credit card, the health of his parents in Phoenix, NATO, genocide, the day-by-day destruction of democracy and the earth itself?

Will he remember to tip the valet? The housekeeper? Does he wonder how his investments are doing and whether he should get that new iPhone and will his oldest daughter go in state or out of state, which is what the man and his wife were fighting about, anyway? Should he check his fantasy team for the thousandth time today? And beneath all this static, does he glimpse it? The truth? That everything is fleeting? That he is one of those waves, rolling endlessly toward the shore, collapsing in a rush of foam and silence? Does he recognize that he is just like those surfers standing on their boards in the setting sun, caught up in the sweep of something beyond their control?

Joseph Pfister’s fiction has appeared in Hobart, PANK, Juked, and X-R-A-Y, among others. He is a graduate of the MFA Writing program at Sarah Lawrence College.

“The Day of Her Burial” by Peter Mladinic

NEW POETRY

(image c/o ncronline)

A man at the diner
made the server cry.
The cops weren’t called.
He wasn’t even asked
to leave. The manager
came. The man’s yelling
rattled us diners, his loud
early morning swearing
at the end of the twentieth
century—five hours later,
an ice cold day,
my mother was buried—
is what I mostly recall.
He paid his bill
but didn’t tip
or invite anyone
to see his side.
Around his greasy hair
florescent light
signaled nothing’s
going right.

Peter Mladinic’s most recent book, The Whitestone Bridge, is available from Anxiety Press. An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico, United States.

“Would You Rather” by Anne Marie DiStefano

NEW FICTION

(c/o hiltondotcom)

My career as a Seattle restaurateur has really taken off. A food magazine recently referred to me as “the grande dame of the Northwest dining scene.”

On a dark gray day, in the pouring rain, you pull up outside my flagship restaurant in a brand-new black Corvette. When you roll down the window, my employees recognize your distinguished profile and say, “It’s him! He’s back!” 

I take off my apron and hand it to my manager. I get in on the passenger side. You tell the car’s voice-activated navigation system to find the freeway on ramp, and we speed south down I-5.

We spend the first night at the Benson Hotel in Portland. The pillars in the lobby are made of Circassian oak, and the floors are marble. We reserve one of the suites, and have dinner in the steakhouse. People turn their heads when they see us together, because they know who we are.

The next morning, we find that the car has turned into a Mercedes. It’s still raining, but the sky is brighter, colors are more vivid, and everything seems less blurry. We spend the second night at the historic Ashland Springs Hotel. We taste the lithia water and eat dinner in a restaurant with a Midsummer Night’s Dream theme.

By the time we leave the Travelodge in San Francisco, our car has become a Honda hatchback, and we listen to classic rock on the radio. On the steep rise of the Grapevine, the car gradually loses speed, and it shivers every time we’re passed by the hulking, honking semi trucks. We have a friend who’s going to UCLA and she lets us crash on her dorm room floor for the night.

We cross the border into Mexico in our VW Bug. We have to stop to top off the oil, but the engine doesn’t overheat. After asking for directions several times, we finally find our way to a place at the end of a dirt road where they rent hammocks and you can sleep on the beach. That night, we hear whales breathing in the warm shallow water of the Sea of Cortez. In the morning our car is gone. We have no way to get back. We’re two sunburned kids sitting on the hot sand, playing “would you rather” and trying to figure out how we are going to pay for breakfast.

(photo c/o daltonjohnsondotcom)

Anne Marie DiStefano was, until recently, the owner of the Lucky Horseshoe Lounge in Portland, Oregon. She has owned a historic movie theater and worked as a freelance journalist and as a columnist for The Portland Tribune. She studied English literature at Reed College and Oxford University.

New Pop Lit’s Editor Appears in Frighty #3!

BIG LITERARY NEWS

IN THE BIG PUSH back to humanity and reality, Wred Fright‘s new zine Frighty is at the forefront.

IN THE AFTERMATH of the Halloween season, with smashed pumpkins and out-of-control squirrels everyplace, it’s appropriate that another issue of Frighty— #3-– appears on the scene.

Does the pumpkin on the cover foretell the fate of the established literary realm?

One thing for certain is the zine is filled with terrific writing nowhere else to be seen: new work from Markell R. West, Pat King, The Midnight Rider; articles about Morrissey and ducks in jeeps, and other cool stuff.

HERE’S Wred’s own write-up of the issue’s debut, which explains how it can be easily obtained, for free!

(In the 19th century, what were in effect zines of the day were “Beneath the American Renaissance,” in David S. Reynold’s famous phrase. Today, are they beneath American decline? Or an escape– or rescue– from it? Is another renaissance coming?)

“The Day Trump Died”

A SHORT STORY

(image c/o skycasketsdotcom)

We heard the news and rushed outside. The sun was shining. Birds singing. Everyone happy.

We scribbled out a song in celebration, came up with a quick melody, then went down the basement to our little home studio and recorded it. Fun singing. Total throaty energy. She strummed a guitar. I clapped out a beat. No AI.

We posted the song online and announced it on social media. We didn’t think of charging anything. No paywall. Total goodwill.

Within an hour thirty million people had streamed it. Neighbors who’d heard about the song collected outside our house and began singing it. We joined them. People were dancing. More people. Soon: beer and pizza. Wild rejoicing.

A major record label contacted us and offered a contract. “Yes!” we said. Prepare the papers.

More news appeared online and on TV, with more details. Someone reported the president’s last words: “Melissa Maloney.”

Melissa Maloney? His first girlfriend, apparently. He’d met her after prep school, the summer before he went to college. The only woman he’d ever really loved, before he became a ruthless, narcissistic sociopath.

Reporters tracked her down to a retirement home in North Carolina. An elderly woman sitting next to a window. “Who?” she asked.

New President Vance meanwhile revealed plans to remodel the White House yet again, with plusher sofas.

Then: more news. “President Trump is not dead,” a serious-voiced network commentator intoned on television screens, with more frowns on his dramatic face than normal. Dark clouds appeared outside, threatening rain.

Our recording contract with the major label was cancelled. We hurriedly reversed quitting our shitty jobs, telling our bosses we’d been joking.

No parties this weekend.

-Karl Wenclas