"Wrapped in Unkept Promises"
featuring playboy millionaires, fearful things, worms, holes, rich inner lives, bim bam boom, and double, yes double!, the Lillie E. Franks
/ Now at AC: Lillie E. Franks, “You Are a Spy”
You are a spy.
That means you recognize the basic details of the role your handler assigns to you. You’ll be approaching his company as a playboy millionaire interested in investing. All the necessary letters of recommendation and documents have been exchanged. From there, you’ll do what you always do. Pick at the loose ends of the organization. Watch for the signs of something unusual moving beneath the waters of everyday business and slowly map its shape and size.
You are a spy. That means you are drawn to secrets. You understand secrets and the people who have them. In truth, all secrets are similar. The longer they are kept, the closer they come to each other. They grow, slowly, in the dark places where no one is watching, and shrink away from anything busy and well-lit. Without anyone ever noticing, secrets all become maps of the places people do not go.
You are a spy. That means you are such a map yourself. Your name, which everyone asks for, has been ground down into a hundred aliases years and years ago. Your taste in food, drink, entertainment, and company have all gone the same way, eroded away into whatever they needed to be to fit your latest job.
Somewhere, at the center of all of it, in the place where no one asks and no one goes, you are waiting.
A spy story, a Bond pastiche, a labyrinth of identities. Read the full text here.
/ From the Archives: Lillie E. Franks, “The Broken Parlor Games”
A double Franks email edition? Is that even legal? Sure, why not. We love this—story? series of interconnected flash fictions? set of meditative instructions? hybrid text???1—and will take basically any opportunity to repost it.
The Upside-Down Candle
For two players
The first player thinks of a word. The second player guesses a word, but the first player tells them they guessed incorrectly. “What do you mean?” asks the second player. “You just didn’t think of the right word.” The first player tries with all their force to think of the right word.
The Fearful Thing
For two players
The first player thinks of a a word and shares it with the second player. The second player says nothing, but the first player knows it is not the right word.
The Upside-Down Candle, continuation
For two players
My word was not worth guessing, the first player realizes. I am made to be a guesser of words, not a knower. I am made to guess and I do not guess correctly.
Read “The Broken Parlor Games” here.
/ Elsewhere
New work by AC Issue 5 contributor Kim Ha-ri at Bending Genres:
Outside, people on their way to work walked the streets with exclusionary expressions. Old men selling ferns and bean sprouts, wormwood and beans in the open air carried vegetables in baskets. A woman walking with a calm face with a blue bottle’s latte in one hand unintentionally hit Minji on the head with her elbow. Minji frowned and looked up at her. The woman saying sorry with a firm smile. Minji saw holes in the woman’s forehead, the bridge of her nose, lips, chin, and neck, and a long worm shaped like a cut sausage moved from the holes.
Mom pulled Minji’s arm hard and said,
“Tell her it’s okay.”
“It’s okay.”
Cardboard Clouds, “a Surrealist collection of one-page-one-act plays” by (forthcoming!) AC contrib Benjamin Niespodziany, is out now from X-R-A-Y.2
&&& AC contrib Ori Fienberg’s chapbook Interim Assistant Dean of Having a Rich Inner Life is available, for free, from Ghost City Press as part of their 2023 Summer Series.
(The Ghost City Press Summer Series has previously published chapbooks by AC contributors Matthew Kosinski, Kenneth M. Cale, and R. Stempel, as well as by AC editor James Tadd Adcox3)
/ Today’s Soundtrack
Like any reasonably self-aware literary magazine, we often very much like things that could be described as hybrid texts, but feel silly using the phrase itself
With a blurb from, no shit, Alex van Warmerdam—you know, the guy who directed the Palme d’Or nominated Dutch horror movie Borgman.
We’re run by an all-volunteer staff, please do not think we will pass up a chance to hype our own work.