"The Friend," by Lindsay Hatton
Illustration by Mel Paisley
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Editor’s Note
Big Sur is a place that has a lot of personal meaning for me, having lived there for a time when I was a kid. More than that, though, just about anyone who has visited there can attest to the majesty and almost magical feeling about the place. That feeling is captured very well by author Lindsay Hatton in this story, and provides the perfect backdrop for the story to explore the aftermath of trauma and war. Even though he’s not able to articulate it exactly, the narrator is searching for connection, whether that’s a connection to other people, to his own emotions, or to the land itself. We’re all involved in that same search, really, and something great stories can do is show us what that looks like.
Episode Credits
Host/Narrator: Mike Sakasegawa
Production & Sound Design: Mike Sakasegawa
Music: Sound of Picture
The Friend
by Lindsay Hatton
I had been with Cline & Company for nearly a decade at that point and, like everyone else on the engineering and construction team, I had also been in the war.
This was a requirement of Cline’s, not because he was a biased or superstitious man, but because he was a charitable one. Cline himself had not fought and he had had no sons to send to the front so, before he died or retired and the window of patriotic opportunity closed for good, he felt compelled to contribute in another way. That way was rehabilitation. It was important, he had learned from his research, for traumatized men to see their horrors come full circle: from destruction in the service of chaos to destruction in the service of order. The seismic blasts of shells pulverizing a country village and the seismic blasts of dynamite cutting a road into a cliff were interchangeable—or so the theories maintained—and, given time, the malevolence of the former could be cleanly swapped for the benevolence of the latter. To reinforce this, he always indulged in a little tradition whenever a project was completed. He would have us pose for photographs with our doughboy helmets on, the fruit of our jittery labors looming miraculously behind us as if we ourselves had resurrected Europe’s decimated infrastructure and reinstalled it on the most inaccessible stretches of the California shoreline.
•
I was sent to Big Sur on Christmas Eve, 1931.
The project was already well known among those of us whose livelihoods depended on such things. Some of us were calling the new structure the Mill Creek Bridge, some were calling it Rainbow Bridge. Cline was calling it Bixby Bridge, which would, of course, be the name that stuck.
The day before my departure from San Francisco, I received my briefing in Cline’s office. The bridge was nearing completion on its falsework, he informed me, but something had gone wrong. I waited for a concise explanation, but his words were uncharacteristically disordered. First, there were some ramblings about the weather—which, for the past month, had been horrific—and then he complained about two engineers with unusual last names and a taste for the drink. Then there was an inchoate diatribe about a nearby town called Pacific Grove: something about a temperance colony, Methodists living in tents beneath trees whose leaves, during the migration season, turned bright orange with monarch butterfly wings. The meeting ended before I was able to learn anything of substance—cost projections, completion timelines, and so forth—about my assignment.
Later that night, I packed my bag and sat on my bed listening to the weather. It was continuing its onslaught. I watched my single window acquire a series of dripping, wet welts: tiny lashings inflicted and erased by the same merciless hand. The entire apartment building shuddered with each gust of wind. Cline hadn’t just been scattered during our meeting, I realized now. He had been melancholy, and I had been infected by it. When I began my journey south the next morning, it was with a wariness I hadn’t felt since the war. I was traveling alone but it felt like I had uninvited company: the shadow of my younger, enlisted self—a man of little prior accomplishment and even fewer worldly possessions—sitting one seat behind, itchy and uncertain in his double-stitched olive drab.
•
By the time the train reached Pacific Grove, it had stopped raining. I disembarked onto the redwood platform, shouldered my bag, and told the hired car to wait a bit longer while I took a brief tour of the town. To my great relief, I didn’t detect any of the surreal zealotry Cline had described. Yes, the people I passed on the streets had the tight jaws and fierce eyes of teetotalers. Yes, the fog hung in the pines with a physical weight that seemed both soft and burdensome, like a brick wrapped in velvet. But I saw no butterflies and no tents. There was a large department store on the main street that rivaled the ones in San Francisco. I went inside and was immediately accosted by four saleswomen: young, eager things in lipstick and pin curls. To appease them, I bought a hat—straw, broad-brimmed, vaguely Indochinese—of the type I had once seen Cline wear in the field.
It took nearly three hours by car to reach the worksite. The further we got from the train station, the more the damage from the recent storms revealed itself. The cliffs from which the road had been blasted seemed eager to reclaim their lost territory; every few miles there was some sort of slide to contend with, rock or mud or both. When we arrived at our destination, I stepped from the car and immediately understood Cline’s earlier dissembling. The damage was far more serious than his pride had allowed him to admit. The falsework—a massive, scaffolded half-moon of Douglas fir, flat side down—was still standing, but it had been ravaged. Near the foundation, I could see splintered sections where the waves had taken an abnormally vicious toll. There were also indications of rot, as if the bridge were already decades old and not in the earliest phase of its existence.
“Where can I find Harteson and Prenstring?” The engineers’ names sounded as strange in my mouth as they had in Cline’s.
“I don’t know.” The driver pointed in the direction of the workers’ encampment. “But those fellows will.”
I thanked the driver and made my way off the road and down the slope. The air smelled of the ground, which, in turn, smelled of metal. The ocean below me was so vast, so uninterrupted, so all-encompassing in its multi-directionality that it didn’t seem real. I am not a man who is necessarily at ease within nature, but I function quite well as an observer of it. The same is true of crowds. I didn’t ask the crew about their superiors straight off. Instead, I chatted with them in a way I hoped would quell their suspicions and install me in their minds as a figure of honesty and goodwill. Soon, they reciprocated by laying bare their grievances, which, while numerous, were not at all atypical. When I finally mentioned Harteson and Prenstring by name, they gently corrected my pronunciation and pointed me in the direction of a shack on the northern perimeter of the site. I found the engineers inside the shack, sharing whiskey from a two-handled earthenware cup. The shack had no windows.
“A month,” Prenstring said as he passed the drink, his eyes wide and glassy. “A month of work destroyed in one night.”
“The waves came as if summoned,” Harteson whispered between swallows, “and knocked the timber right into the sea.”
“It was demonic,” Prenstring hissed. “I’ll never be the same.”
“The men don’t seem particularly shaken,” I noted.
“The men,” Harteson replied, “are usually drunk.”
“That’s a strange cup for whiskey,” I replied. “It looks like a Grecian kylix, but probably not the Pythagorean sort.”
I had meant it as a joke, of course, but Harteson didn’t take it that way. He rose to his feet, showcasing the full extent of his inebriation. He seemed to be painfully aware of his midline and of the fact that he couldn’t keep his eyes and feet from crossing over to the wrong side of it.
“We know what you and Cline are up to,” he drawled. “You sit up there in your palace counting your money while the rest of us turn into mildew. I hope the next earthquake sends that entire city straight to hell.”
When Prenstring also stood, I hoped it was with the intention of calming his friend. Instead, he began taking swings at me. I deflected the first two and let him land the third. The efficacy of the blow defused the situation immediately, like a bucket of water poured over a candle. They both came over to pat me on the shoulder: the place where Prensting’s fist had made glancing contact. Then they sat back down in their chairs and fell asleep.
Outside, I tried to refill my lungs and get my bearings, but failed at both. I didn’t know what else to do, so I began to walk. Soon I found an unmarked road that led east into the cliffs and climbed halfway up it. From this vantage point, the damage to the falsework was mostly concealed and I could see the profound elegance of Cline’s intention. Rainbow Bridge had probably been the better name for it, because that’s what it looked like from up here: a wooden rainbow sprouting from a beach of black stone, a manmade mirage that joined the plunging cliffs. Everything had looked a bit like this, I remembered now, in the days after the armistice. For a moment, we had forgotten the horror and the destruction and we had marveled at the strategic design that, despite its imperfections, had eventually returned us to safety.
The wind was blowing again now, but not too fiercely. Night was falling and in the orange glow of the sunset I watched from the hillside as a fleet of cars arrived onsite. For a moment I suspected desertion and was ready to sound the alarm. But then I remembered. It was Christmas Eve and this was a Cline & Company tradition: taxis into the nearest town for haircuts and shaves, followed by dinner in a hotel restaurant. Dinner would be followed by drinks and then by the fully anticipated surprise of an influx of local women. I wanted to join them, but I also didn’t want to intrude. I was an emissary, not an ally, and fraternizing would have been dishonest.
I waited there on the hillside for a couple more minutes, long enough for the sunset to fully die out. Then I began to walk back down to the site. I should suggest a truce with Harteson and Prenstring, I told myself, in honor of the season if nothing else. When I was a stone’s throw from their shed, I noticed a figure blocking my path. His stance was confident enough to seem aggressive.
“Harteson?” I said. “Prenstring?”
“Neither,” replied the figure.
In my earlier haste to distance myself from my assailants, I had forgotten to bring a lantern and the oversight was an embarrassment.
“The cars are gone,” I ventured. “I’m sorry you were left behind.”
“It’s all right. I don’t celebrate like they do.”
His voice was too steady, too calm: the exact opposite of the engineers’ bluster. The contrast worried me on a level beyond logic, and I wanted to examine this stranger before saying anything more. My kingdom for a lantern.
“Can I invite you in?” he continued in the same equable tone. “We don’t have much in the way of food or drink, but at least you can warm yourself by the fire.”
In the darkness, he seemed to be gesturing up the hill, not down it in the direction of the camp, so I turned and looked behind me. Sure enough, there was the glimmer of a distant light, a yellow flicker in the craggy hills.
“Is that where you live? Up there?”
“My family and me. Yes.”
For a moment, I considered it. But then I remembered there had been ruses like this on the front. Come in and rest, my friend, the buxom farmer’s wife would say. Then, at sunrise, the farmer would slit your trusting throat.
“No. Thank you. They’re expecting me back at camp.”
“You have no enemies here.”
“I should hope not.”
“You seem so frightened. Like someone is aiming right at you.”
“I think all men feel that way sometimes.”
He frowned. “I hope you find peace this Christmas.”
“Thank you. I will.”
As he passed me on the road, I didn’t move aside to make room. This, after all, is how true authority is conveyed: in the subtle gestures, not the grand ones. His closeness, however, soon made me wish I had chosen differently. For one thing, I was shaking visibly and I didn’t want him to see it. For another, his hair was three times as long as the hair on the men who were just now being shuttled toward civilization, and his smell was three times as fresh. The aroma wasn’t feminine, but it still made me think of women. I inhaled deeply and then stopped mid-breath. He had heard me smelling him. His silhouette reached down to pluck some greenery at the edge of the road.
“Some call it California sagebrush,” he said. “Some call it cowboy cologne.”
His hand rose to my face and I sniffed the sprig in spite of myself. It was the smell I had smelled on him. Strong and clean and hopeful and apt to make one sneeze.
“I see,” I said, eyes watering.
When he had disappeared into the hills, I reached down and tore a handful from the same fragrant bush. I returned to the camp and chose an empty tent at random, confident that its occupant would not be back until the following night. I finally lit a lantern. The shrub in my hand was one I had likely seen a thousand times before but had not examined in detail until just now. It had rosemary’s thin, spiky leaves but sage’s soft, furry skin. There were occult practices, I knew, that called for the burning of herbs just like this one, the smoke clearing out or summoning the spirits, I wasn’t sure which. I crawled out of the tent and walked to the cliff’s edge. It was a new moon and I remembered a childhood superstition: something about a moonless Christmas, or maybe it was about a moonless New Year. Either way, the story was a fairytale and I didn’t believe in those yet, so I just listened to the sea lions for a moment. I heard the shells dropping in the gray distance of memory. I felt the closeness of the cliff’s edge and imagined the lethal and exhilarating prospect of sailing from it. Then, after saying the sort of prayer a man like me should say, I dropped the plant into the black ocean far below.
•
The day broke with bracing cold.
I emerged from the tent at first light, hoping the see the bridge afresh. I was rewarded instantly. The sun was hidden behind a scrim of high, purplish fog that showed the falsework in unsparing detail. Today, it no longer looked like a rainbow. It looked like a wooden bubble rising up between the peaks: a huge, immaculate growth of quivering cross vectors, delicate and strong.
As I walked to Harteson and Prenstring’s shed, frost crunched underfoot. I stood outside their door and heard the sounds of burdened, unhappy snoring. They had not gone into town with the team. They had chosen to prolong their isolated stupor, the two of them huddled together in a room that offered no view whatsoever of the magnificent bridge or of the magnificent landscape that was threatening to demolish it. It was a version of friendship, probably the only sort of friendship available to men like them, and this made me very sad. They had fought overseas, too. They deserved the county’s respect and mine, even if the best parts of them had not made it back home.
When I began to venture up the little mountain path again, it was without being fully aware of my purposes. California sagebrush, cowboy cologne. I went in the direction of the light I had seen the night before and soon found the stranger’s house. It rested within a small gorge between two cliffs, at once perched above the main road and entirely hidden from it. The house was made of redwood.
I knocked on the door but there was no answer.
“Hello?” I said, knocking again.
“Around back!”
The reply was loud and immediate and jolly. It wasn’t easy to make my way to the rear of the property; the recent rains had cut rivulets into the earth that made the ground ooze and crumble underfoot. Here, there was still the smell of the sagebrush, but also the smells of wet stone, ferns, and driftwood campfires. The man was naked and crouching.
“Oh!” I said.
He could have been bathing, but the creek behind the house seemed too muddy for that. He was of the physical type that seemed incompatible with shame, so imagine my surprise when he leapt to his feet, covered himself, and scampered out of sight.
“My apologies…” I stuttered.
“No, no. Please. Go inside. Make yourself at home. I’ll join you in a moment.”
Filled with a guilt I wasn’t certain I deserved, I went back around to the front of the house and went inside. I had never seen a more bizarre residence. It wasn’t so much the crudeness of the construction that was alarming as the complete disinterest in masking it, which made his discomfort in his nakedness seem even more unlikely. I half-recalled an adage of Cline’s: something about structures being elaborate because they had something to hide. There were muddy finger paintings on the walls, an inch-deep carpet of pine needles on the floor. The bed was an anomaly inside an anomaly: a huge brass headboard and footboard containing a mattress made of linen scraps and bundled straw. These were the markings of poverty, certainly, but also of something I couldn’t name.
When he joined me inside, it was without a word. He went to the sink and filled two chalice-like cups—leaded crystal ones that glimmered despite the shadows—with running water from a new-looking tap. My suspicion piqued even further, I looked around for electric lights but found only candles. He must have disrobed outside and left his clothes nearby because he was fully dressed now in wool trousers, suspenders, a flannel shirt, and a hat identical to the one I had purchased in town. He gestured at the floor and I sat down on it, pine needles shifting. He sat down beside me but didn’t hand me a goblet of water. Instead, he kept both of them held tight to his chest.
“I was praying,” he said. “That’s why I was naked.”
I nodded. Was I in danger here? I didn’t think so.
“Then why didn’t you ask me to wait? Why did you invite me to come see you?”
“Because I didn’t think you were you!” His smile was large, yellow, and sudden. “I thought you were God!”
I wanted to look away from his face but couldn’t. His expression was one I had seen many times before but, now that peacetime had returned, I had hoped to never see again. He looked down at the goblets and finally passed one over to me.
“I was waiting for the silt to settle to the bottom so you wouldn’t accidentally drink it,” he explained.
I looked at the water. Sure enough, there was a layer of reddish sediment. I took a sip. It tasted pristine. I made the same internal calibration I had made prior to my first interaction with the crew. I tried to think of a question that was both innocuous and effective, something that would imply friendship but not overfamiliarity.
“How long have you lived here?”
“My whole life.”
Last night, he had mentioned something about a family. I looked around but I couldn’t see a single trace of anyone else’s presence.
“Is it lonely?”
“No.”
“Do you work on the bridge?”
“Yes. But not with the crew.”
My next sip of water was not flavorless. It tasted of rust, of blood. I fought the urge to spit it out.
“What do you mean by that: not with the crew?”
“I make my own contributions. Or at least I try to. That’s what I was doing when you found me out back.”
He didn’t sound defensive or anxious, so I figured it was all right to encourage him.
“That’s what I do, too,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “I work with others, but I also work alone. I make my contributions, as you put it, to the creation of the whole.”
“Who said anything about creation?”
“Should we be talking about destruction, then?” I smiled. “Because I’ve done plenty of that, too.”
I waited for him to ask about it; I waited for an opportunity to tell a war story. But he had lost interest. He was standing now and attempting what, to his mind, might have been housekeeping. The broom he used to redistribute the pine needles on the floor was itself made of pine needles. He was sweeping vigorously enough to work up a sweat. When he paused to roll up his sleeves, a sudden wind began to whistle through the gaps in the redwood planks. When he was done sweeping, he rolled his sleeves back down and the wind stopped.
“You don’t like the bridge, then?” I asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t like its location. I think it’s arrogant.”
The word provoked me.
“Arrogant? Don’t you mean ugly? Most people are opposed to these structures because they find them ugly, which is an opinion they’re free to express even if I don’t share it.”
“No, I mean arrogant. And arrogance is always punished.”
I let the extravagance of his comment echo and settle. Then I launched into the speech I usually gave to Cline’s detractors. The bridge’s coastal proximity, I told the stranger, was functionally preferable to an inland route because it avoided the necessity of dynamiting a tunnel through the mountains. What’s more, the engineering was unimpeachably sound and so were Cline’s intentions. He would never put his workers or the landscape in any real danger. He simply didn’t run that kind of operation. I would defend the company name with my own life, if necessary.
I leaned back, satisfied. That last bit about sacrificing myself had been improvised especially for the occasion and I was proud of its impact.
“You seem to have a lot of faith,” he replied at length.
“In my work? Yes, I do. But not so much in any other sense.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve never had any proof.”
Faith requiring proof: a passable joke, I thought. But, much like Harteson and Prenstring, he didn’t laugh. Thankfully, he didn’t punch me either.
“Well, I don’t proselytize,” he shrugged. As his shoulders moved, the roof was pummeled with single burst of rain, as hard and sudden as a round of buckshot. The sound drove any remaining defensiveness right out of me.
“It wouldn’t really bother me if you did,” I replied. “I’m just grateful for the company. Especially on Christmas.”
“I am, too.”
“And no hard feelings. I wish you all the best in your efforts, even though they appear to run a bit contrary to mine.”
“Everyone needs something to aim for.”
“That’s right.”
“Like the wisemen and their star.”
We clinked goblets and watched the ensuing micro-earthquake: the sediment offering up a little cloud. We were both a little mournful now, and I knew why. How much better it would be, especially in times like these, to have nothing to create or destroy, to have no target at all.
“You’ll stay for dinner?”
The prospect of finding out what this man ate made me happier than I had been in years.
“Yes,” I replied. “Of course.”
•
The bridge was completed on October 15th, 1932 and was officially opened to traffic on November 27th.
The next war began, for America at least, on December 7th, 1941. The torpedoes were launched at the unsuspecting harbor with catastrophic precision and a new generation of young men was deployed in response. Instant, dutiful, lifelong friendships were forged based on nothing more than shared trauma. From Cline’s office in San Francisco, we watched it unfold. Within months, he lost most of his best workers to the military, and soon it was only the old men left: the boss and me sitting in the same office in the same positions of power and deference as always. By VE Day, he had sold the company and retired. By VJ Day, I was engaged to his spinster daughter. Our wedding, which was a joyful yet sparsely attended occasion, took place in a Catholic church on California Street. Our honeymoon was funded and organized by Cline himself and consisted of a tour all the way down the coast to the Mexican border. The route was planned to incorporate as many Cline & Company bridges as possible and, since old duties die even harder than old habits, I promised to inspect each one of them.
We arrived in Pacific Grove on the second day of our journey. My wife wanted to stop and see the sights—her father had told her the same things about this town that he had told me more than a decade earlier—but I wanted to proceed directly to Bixby Bridge, so she deferred. The bridge had become, by that point, a bona fide tourist attraction: there were viewing turn-offs on either end and I pulled over at the first one. The sight hit me much harder than I had anticipated. The years seemed to have hardened the bridge’s concrete span, not eroded it, and it was nearly impossible to remember how it had looked when I first saw it: a battered wooden grid in the shape of the bridge’s inverse. It was the only company-built bridge for which Cline had not taken a celebratory, helmeted photograph with the crew. Such a tribute had seemed disrespectful in light of Harteson’s and Prenstring’s deaths. There had been a rumor, never fully substantiated, that they had leapt from the bridge in broad daylight. That they had been holding hands.
“Are you all right?” my wife asked.
We were standing at the cliff’s edge now and she had to shout to be heard over the wind.
“Yes, yes, I’m…”
There was no way to say it. After Harteson’s and Prenstring’s funerals—which were elaborate, dignified affairs given the high military ranks of the deceased—Cline’s insurance investigators had asked for my testimony and I had gladly given it. I had even drawn them a map to the stranger’s house and paraphrased his words of arrogance and punishment. My map was followed and the cliffs were searched. But nothing was ever found.
•
That afternoon, we checked into a small roadside inn in Big Sur proper. It was run by a cheerful Norwegian couple. My wife and I stood out horribly. Most of the other guests were the artistic, unconventional type: women in trousers and men in blouses. They drank too much at dinner and attempted a séance during desert, which made me inexplicably angry. At around nine o’clock, my wife and I retired to our room—a cozy, damp outbuilding made of redwood—and tried to sleep. There were noises, however, coming from the creek that ran through the property. We looked out the window to find a half-dozen people standing naked in the moonlight, a thick fog beginning to gather around their feet.
When my wife drifted off, I returned to the dining room. The proprietor was sitting alone by the fire, smoking a cigar and enjoying a nip of sherry.
“Welcome, friend!” he bellowed when he saw me. “Pull up a chair!”
I joined him but kept my face angled slightly away. I knew I looked ashen. It was the first time since the wedding that I had left my wife’s side and, now that I was alone again, I had, against all logic, somehow expected to find the stranger here. I could imagine him so clearly: sweeping pine needles with pine needles, drinking from his crystal chalice of blood-flavored silt.
“First time to the area?”
“No,” I said, rallying myself. “I’ve been here once before. I used to know someone who lived a few miles north.”
That last bit seemed to interest him in the wrong way, so I made another addendum.
“And I worked on the bridge when it was first being built.”
The man leaned back and took a puff from his cigar.
“Oh goodness. I remember that winter. Wild storms, weren’t they? And then those poor engineers, dashing themselves against the rocks like that. Maybe I shouldn’t be telling you this, but legend has it they were under some sort of spell. There was an old madman in the woods back then who ate squirrels raw and could control the weather with a snap of his fingers. He was furious about the bridge and almost brought it crashing down.”
“What happened to him?”
“Well, nothing happened to him. It’s just a story!”
I closed my eyes so he wouldn’t see anything in them. He hadn’t been old, I wanted to tell him, and he hadn’t eaten squirrels. He had eaten fish. For that Christmas dinner in his strange little cabin, we had eaten fish that had been packed in salt and roasted to perfection. After our meal, the stranger had guided me down the precipice to where the foundation of the falsework joined the rocks and water. At the time, it had struck me as very impressive but not necessarily miraculous: how the man and the elements seemed to possess a tangible affection for one and other, like friends who had been raised as brothers.
“Try it!” he had said, flicking a wrist and making a wave crash. “It’s easy!”
“No, it’s not.”
“Yes, it is. Stay here with me and I’ll show you.”
And I did. I stayed the night and, by morning, dozens of sagebrush bushes had been ripped up by their roots.
I hadn’t told the investigators that part. I had never told anyone.
“Let’s pour you a bit of sherry,” the proprietor said. “Might bring your color back.”
“No, no,” I replied. “I think I’ll just go lie down.”
My wife was still in bed, her torso curled in on itself, her limbs tucked tight. In the daylight, she looked like her father, my closest friend, but by the light of the moon she looked like someone I didn’t know.
And in my dreams that night, I didn’t know myself either. I was a soldier again, but not the kind that follows orders. I could hear hymns being sung in the distance. I was idle and alone, but I knew it wouldn’t be long. I knew it wouldn’t be long before the skies would open and the field would flood and we’d all have no choice but to stop fighting and do whatever it is men are supposed to do in peacetime.
“The Friend” first appeared in the 2017 Short Story Advent Calendar.
© 2017, Lindsay Hatton
About the Author
Lindsay Hatton's debut novel, Monterey Bay, was published in 2016 by Penguin Press. It appeared on several most-anticipated lists, received a Kirkus Star, and was named a best book of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle. Her other work can be found on LitHub, The Millions, and in the Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, where she was the runner-up for the Gertrude Stein award in Fiction. She graduated from Williams College and received her MFA at New York University. A California native, she now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband and two daughters.
About the Illustrator
Mel Paisley is a writer, illustrator, and organizer based out of Savannah, GA. Mel has been previously published with Polychrome Ink, Meerkat Press, The Port City Review, Vox Poetica, Wussy Magazine, Dystopian Future, and The Harvard University Press, and has worked for Big Lucks Press, Winter Tangerine, and Madhouse Press. When not making things about mental health, queer history, and the Asian-American diaspora in the Deep South, they write strange fables about petty gods and dangerous dreams for The Nobility, a bi-monthly illustration series concepted by Brian Woodward.