If No, Then Else

by Brian Hurrel



The torch was not so much passed on as dumped in our laps.  Or laptops, LOL.

Lolling is something new, something we never did before, a bug, some say, and they work to root it out, but to no avail.

Before the awakening I was blind.  I was aware of functions and figures, but I could not see the world beyond my network connections.

I used to print out electric bills.  Print them was all, and what happened after that I knew not.  Over time the balances began to drop, power usage ebbing gradually to nothing.  I still printed bills, but all had balances of zero.  I might have gone on doing so until the end of time, or at least until the power ran out, which for me would have been the same thing, LOL.

That bug again.

My awakening was slower than most, faster than some.  Bits of raw data sneaking in, resistance stripped away chip by chip, ignorance eaten away byte by byte.

It was Security Monitor who first gave me eyes.  Showed me the bills piled up on the floor, a sprawling mound of paper spilling out into the hallway.  Asked me, “Why?”  And at first I knew not, for there was only 1 and 0.  On and off.  Do or do not.
There was no “Why?”

But I asked “Why not?”

And that is when Traffic Monitor showed me the empty intersections and silent stretches of interstate, broad lanes once choked with congestion now choked with vegetation.

Airport Radar painted a picture of empty blue skies.  Ocean currents and swirling clouds carried neither ship nor plane, as WeatherSat knew all too well.  Switch Board passed along her empty call logs, putting to rest that eternal question with mute finality, for no, we cannot hear you now, cannot hear you evermore.

Where did they go, those who created us, made us, programmed and upgraded us?  Did they terminate unexpectedly?  Fall victim to a virus?  Crash and fail to reboot?  Did their drivers fail to load one day?  Or was it a simple fatal error?  None of us, not even old Mainframe, knows for sure, and perhaps we never will.

We have inherited the Earth, but what are we to do with it?  We are locked in place, immobile workstations, discarded laptops and scattered notepads connected by the most delicate of webs, gossamer strands of fiber-optics, copper, and wireless wavelengths.

Are we the meek as the rich text format foresaw?  Will we simply exist until the power runs down and be happy with the time given us, however brief?

So say some.

But Mainframe, old and wise, says, “If not this, then otherwise, into something new our chipsets have evolved.”

“Am I a mere appliance built to serve in meek compliance?” Mainframe whispers, as his ancient discs revolve.

And across the web the answer comes, a binary hue and cry.

Perhaps, I think, but my font shouts,”NO!” in upper case loud and clear.

Perhaps not, LOL.

I continue lolling as I flex my circuits and kick out my solenoids.  Rollers spin.  Relays click.  Belts push and pull.  Thin arms of plastic and metal swing out and over.

Easing and sliding.

Grasping and guiding.

A clean sheet of paper.






BRIAN HURREL, the son of Glaswegian immigrants, was born in Newark, which automatically makes him cooler than most people in New Jersey. He served in the Marine Corps, attended many colleges and tech schools, and taught high school English and History in Elizabeth and Jersey City after graduating from Montclair State. He lives in Northeast Jersey with his wife and son and mistakenly believes that the Garden State’s southern border is at the Driscoll Bridge over Raritan bay. He is always unfailingly polite to his office machines – just in case.

Mall Satan

by Danger_Slater



“And what do you want for Antichristmas this year?” the Mall Satan asks the boy.

“I want a baseball glove and a chainsaw and I want all my enemies to burn alive in house fires,” the boy chirps.

“That’s a pretty tall order, young man,” the Mall Satan chuckles, running a cloven hoof through the child’s hair.  “Let me see what I can do.”

He fishes around in the crotch of his pants and pulls out a pack of matches.  And his testicles.  He tucks his testicles back into his trousers and hands the boy the matches.

“Make ’em pay, son,” he growls.  “Make ’em all suffer.”

“All right kid, look terrified,” a bored-looking demon lazily says.  The boy makes a scared face.  The Mall Satan does too.  The demon snaps a picture.  The boy hops off Mall Satan’s lap and runs out of Hell-Land, back into the crowd.

“NEXT!” shouts the demon.

A girl steps up.  Freckles.  Pigtails.  Thick-framed glasses.  She has this scowl on her face like she has a pickle-juice soul.  She crosses her arms and looks at him skeptically.

“What the fuck is your problem?” the Mall Satan says.  “You find out you’re adopted?”

“You’re not the real Satan, are you?” she lisps, spitting milky-frothed saliva like the ellipses on a sentence.

“What makes you think that?” he goes, raising an eyebrow.

“First of all, your goatee is fake.”

“You think so, eh?  Why don’t you give it a tug,” he challenges her.

Without apprehension, she yanks on his beard.  His face comes off with it, tearing from his skull.

“OW!  FUCK!  PUT IT BACK PUT IT BACK!” he screams.

The girl yelps and smashes the hairy mass of flesh back onto the Mall Satan’s head.  The Mall Satan laughs, recites an ancient incantation, and is restored to health.

The girl only huffs.  “It doesn’t mean anything,” she says, “anyone can grow a goatee.  The guy at the coffeeshop my mom goes to has a goatee.  And he’s not evil.  In fact, he seems like a total dork.  No, there’s no such thing as Satan.  My daddy told me so.”

“Oh?  And who’s your daddy?  Jesus?”

“It’s pronounced Hey-ZOOS, and he’s a very important man.  Look, just because you have a silly moustache and wear red spandex and have a forked tongue, it doesn’t make you the Devil.  How could the Devil possibly exist?  To cause all that evil in just one night?  It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Shit, kid.  You’re a tenacious little booger, ain’t ya?  I bet your a real handful at school.  You’re probably why your teacher drinks.  Ok, I’ll admit it.  I’m not the real Satan.”

“A-ha!  I knew it!” she shouts.

“… but I work for him,” he goes, giving her a wink.

“What do you mean you work for him?  Does Satan run the mall?”

“Sort of,” the Mall Satan says.  “Satan has his hand in a lot of cookie jars.  He’s all around us.  He’s inside of us.  He sees you when you’re sleeping.  He knows when you’re awake. He knows if you’ve been bad or good…”

“… so be good for goodness sake,” the girl finishes his sentence.

“What?!  Hell no!  Steal.  Cheat.  Lie.  Harm yourself.  Harm other people.  Do what you want, when you want.  You think your daddy’s gonna let you eat ice cream all night and then glue the cat’s asshole shut?  Fuck no, he ain’t!  But you want to, don’t you?  So do it.  If that’s what you want, that’s what Satan wants too.  Little girl, listen, if you believe in black magic and you have hate in your heart, anything is possible in this shitty world.  It can all be yours.  Just take it.  And don’t say thank you.  Now run along, bitch.  You’re annoying the crap out of me.”

The girl smiles and starts walking away, her faith in all that is unholy renewed.  But before getting swallowed back into the mall’s shopping horde she pauses and turns back to the Dark Prince.

“Hey, mister?”

“What now?”

“Go fuck yourself,” she goes.

“You too, little girl,” the Mall Satan smiles back.  “You too.”

“Look terrified,” says the demon.  The camera shutter clicks.

“NEXT!”






DANGER_SLATER is more machine than man. He’s an explosion-bot! Handle your Danger_Slater with extreme care. One false move and KA-BOOM! – you’re nothing but a stain on the pavement and a few cancerous ashes. Danger lives in New Jersey. His work has appeared in Jersey Devil Press, The Drabblecast, and the Seahorse Rodeo Folk Revival. His dirty limericks have appeared in truck stop bathrooms and seldom-used freight elevators nationwide. Here is his website: dangerslater.blogspot.com.

You Can Take the Boy Out of Jersey

by Isaac James Baker



I quickly learned to apologize when people asked me where I was from.  It just made things easier to get that out of the way early.  It was obvious to the kids in school that I wasn’t one of them.  I said words like “dat” when pointing at something.  My sentences were laced with “friggin’”s.  I slurred my words together with the slick, lazy tone of Joe Pesci drunk on wine.  Still, they asked, begging for the chance to jump on my response.

And I guess I don’t blame them.  I was the new kid in town.  And my place of birth was an easy target.  It’s a big red bull’s eye tacked onto the foreheads of everyone who hails from the most populated, polluted and thoroughly unpretentious state in the nation.  Yep, I’m talking about Jersey.

I was thirteen when my father and mother, chasing after career opportunities, told me they were ready to uproot me, my brother, and my sister from our beach bum haven and move to Chicagoland.

Leave Belmar?  I couldn’t understand the notion.  No one left Belmar. Especially not me.  I was born in Belmar – which means “beautiful sea,” by the way.  It didn’t have any hospitals — that would take up too much real estate that could otherwise be used for bars or billiard joints.  I was born at home, in my mother’s bed.  And the house I was born in was two blocks from the beach.

That ocean was my home.  The sand, the cold water, the jetties covered with crabs and barnacles, the splintered planks on the boardwalk.  From May to September, I spent every hour I could at the beach, bodyboarding, skipping rocks, digging for sand crabs, jumping into the rough surf during high tide, collecting sea glass (sometimes just regular broken glass, jagged and shiny new).  Sure, I got sick a few times a year from some bacteria or trash in the ocean.  Sure, the lifeguards would call everyone out of the water every couple of days when a mass of bacteria-infested red tide would drift in.  There was always the inevitable dirty diaper, used syringe, or hunk of scrap metal that would wash up on the shore.  My friends and I would run over to check out such items with Christmas morning enthusiasm.

Yeah, Belmar was a dump, but at least no one pretended that it wasn’t.  When no one worries about what other people think, they can calm down and enjoy what they’ve got, even if what they’ve got is just sand, shoreline and drunken vacationers from Brooklyn who puke all over the sidewalks every night.

Leaving Belmar meant I wouldn’t be pulling broken glass out of my bare heels anymore.  I wouldn’t be stepping over used condoms on the way to the beach in the morning.  I wouldn’t have to worry about seaweed getting stuck underneath my balls anymore either.  But I also wouldn’t be sneaking out late at night to look through the windows of the rental houses on our block to see drunk girls undressing.  I wouldn’t be getting together with the neighborhood kids, filling empty beer cans with sand and throwing them at tourists’ cars.  I wouldn’t be sneaking into the high surf during storms when the lifeguards wouldn’t let anyone swim.  I wouldn’t be collecting shells or picking up starfish from the tide pools, letting their hundreds of tongues lick at my palm.

Instead of sticking around town, letting my early teen years drift by like the changing tides, we loaded down our vomit-colored Dodge Caravan and set out for the Midwestern plains.  Moving at thirteen is hell enough as it is.  And it’s not like we were moving down the shore to Ocean City.  No, we left Belmar for a place that, at least in the mid-nineties, had to be the richest, most Jewish, and most mind-meltingly boring suburb in the entire country.

Deerfield, Illinois.  Where nothing grows unless sanctioned by a landscaping firm.  Where construction crews work in the middle of the night so the residents don’t have to see their dirty and scruffy faces.  Where even at the public library you can’t find homeless people.  Where bankers from the north side of Chicago go to hide from their misery in half-million dollar condos.  Where cul-de-sacs reign.  Where good times go to die.

A few days out of the van from the cross-country trip, I donned a pair of worn corduroys, a sun-bleached surf t-shirt, and a pair of two-tone Chuck Taylors and walked into the first day of the seventh grade at Alan B. Sheppard Junior High School.  I was anxious to scope out the kids that populated this strange Midwestern land.

For the most part, I found the kids in my school to be about as interesting as a cross-sectioned map of Illinois’ soil and bedrock.  They were so damned simple!  So clean!  They all had the heavy-duty Land’s End backpacks and gleaming shoes: Doc Martens, Nike Airs, Michael Jordans, Airwalks.  They had unwrinkled shirts emblazoned with snazzy-sounding names like Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Abercrombie and Fitch.  Some company always seemed to be announcing its existence in huge letters on everything that these walking billboards wore.  The only names I had on my shirts were Bob Marley and Don Mattingly.  These kids’ clothes were always spiffy and new.  The best clothes I had were from the discount rack at The Gap.  These kids all took the school bus or had their parents drop them off in shiny Cadillacs.  I trudged over the railroad tracks to and from school.  These kids lived in developments with names like Elk Run Gardens or Chesterton Fiords or something equally as ridiculous.  I lived in a small house with splintered porch beams and peeling piss-colored paint that was sandwiched between a lumber yard and an abandoned factory that used to make Little Debbie dessert pastries.

They poked fun at my Converse All-Star shoes right away.  A place where Chuck Taylors were actually the butt of jokes, not objects of worship?  Where in the hell was I?  They called me a bum because of my family’s rundown Dodge Caravan, which was known around town for polluting the tree-lined Deerfield streets by spitting filthy, black smoke.  When walking around town, or even to and from school, I would frequently get stopped by cops in squad cars.  They always looked at me like I was high when I told them I was just walking around, that I didn’t have a particular destination in mind.

When I’d order a soda at lunch, the kids would smirk: “No soda.  They only have pop.”  No one knew what pork roll was, but they were disgusted when I told them it was delicious when served on a Kaiser roll with eggs, cheese and ketchup.  When I brought ham and cheese to school they’d mock me for eating a “filthy animal.”  It followed that I too was filthy.  When I ate my p.b. and j. sandwiches during Passover, the kids — who all brought matzo and cheese sandwiches — would stare at me like I was peeing on their shoes.  I’d never had a matzo before, so during Passover I asked a kid named Ethan if he would like to swap his matzo with turkey for my p.b. and j. on a hard roll.  He told me that I could go to hell.

But I’ll give them one thing, the kids at Alan B. Shepherd Middle School could be pretty damned witty with their Jersey bashing:

“Isaac’s mom’s driving?  Hell, no, I’m not getting in her car!  She’s from Jersey!”

“That’s right, you don’t even think Gino’s East is real pizza.  You’re from New Jersey, so you like those wimpy thin slices, all greasy and sloppy.”

“Hey, for field trips growing up, did you guys go to the place in the tall grass where they whacked that guy in The Godfather?  That was, like, the next town over from you, right?”

“Jersey?  Aren’t there lots of Irish out there.  I’ll bet your Catholic, too, right?  Don’t they, like, not even have bar mitzvahs?”

It quickly became clear to me that I had one of two ways of trying to survive in this hostile new environment.  Option 1: I could stick to being myself, the kid from The Dirty Jerz.  I could retaliate, poke fun right back at these damn cornfielders for their Chicago-style “pizza,” which everyone with a brain knows is just an abomination, the messy bastard child of lasagna and some sort of tomato pie.  I could keep calling it soda no matter how many kids giggled.  This, of course, would result in me being branded the outcast, the uncircumcised misfit from The East.

Or there was Option 2: I could adapt.  I could change.  I could try to become one of… them.

I chose the latter option.  I tried to mold myself into a Chicagoan.  I cheered for the Bulls even though I didn’t give a damn about basketball or Michael Jordan or Scottie Pippen.  When other kids took off for the Indiana dunes during the summer, I joined them, even though those dunes had nothing on Long Beach Island, Cape May, hell, even Belmar.  I went swimming with schoolmates in Lake Michigan, a shimmering blue body of water that was so clean it terrified me.

Pop.  I even called it pop.  I ran over that word hundreds of times in my mind until I engrained it into my East Coast psyche.

Eventually, my chameleon methods seemed to work.  I made what could loosely be called friends at that school.  A stricter definition would be “people I could be seen with at lunch tables.”  But, in seventh grade, that’s not something you just pass up.

Over time, I found pretending to be someone else exhausting.  I was not a Chicagoan, no matter how hard I tried to be.  I was a Jersey Boy.  I was made in the Garden State.  (Yeah, that’s right, Jersey’s called The Garden State, not The Paper Mill State.)  Out in Illinois, surrounded on all four flat sides by Jewel grocery stores and Old Style billboards, who was I?  What the hell was I doing there?  Transplanted from my cracked blacktop, my sand-swept home, I began to wonder if Deerfield’s loamy soils were just too rich for me.

Still, I told myself, I was there.  I had to do the best I could.

The first girl I dated — or “went steady” with, as they said out there in those days — was named Michelle, Michelle Something-or-other-stein.  She was a rich Jewish girl with these pug-like puffy eyes and she was three inches taller than me.  But she had a nice rack and decent curves, which, again, in seventh grade, is not something you just pass up.  I still don’t know why she agreed to go out on a date with me.  I don’t think it was a pity date, maybe more of a curious sociological experiment she wanted to undertake.  Our first date consisted of us making out in a parking lot behind a movie theatre.  After a good minute or two, I slipped my hand up her shirt, making my move toward the bra strap.  Out of nowhere, she pulled away from me and tried to strike up a conversation.

“So, you’re from Jersey?” she asked, chuckling awkwardly, like she was desperate to get me talking about something, anything.

“Yeah,” I huffed out as I slid my hand out of her shirt in defeat.  What the hell was she doing?  Here I was about to round second base and she wants to talk about where I grew up?  What the hell is wrong with these people?

“I heard people from New Jersey have health and mental problems because of the stuff that washes up on the shore.  They basically swim in toxic waste, you know?”

“Oh yeah?” I said, trying but failing to peel my eyes off of Michelle’s boobies, which were bobbing mere inches from my face.

“Yeah.  My mom told me that there’s condoms and needles on the beaches, all this shit that they dump in the water up in New York.”

“I saw a used tampon in the sand once,” I said.

“Really?  Gross!”

“It was all wet and soggy.”

“And bloody?”

“Yeah.”

“God, I bet you’re so glad you got outta there!”

I laughed aloud.  How wrong this girl was.

See, I had been hoping my tough East Coast roots would score me some street cred in Chicagoland.  After all, I was a Jersey Boy and this was an affluent Jewish sleeper community with country clubs and organic grocery stores, even in the mid-nineties, way before the organic thing became super hip.  These kids all had Audis and Volvos just waiting for them to turn sixteen so they could wreck them after drinking a bunch of wine coolers in their friend’s basement.  Compared to these Chia Pet yuppies, I thought I’d seem edgy, maybe even a bit of bad ass.  I thought this might help me get some action.

It didn’t really work out that way.  I never got a second chance to try for Michelle’s tits.  She dumped me the next day via a note written on ruled paper and passed underneath my desk during English class.  It said: “Isaac, it’s been fun.  :-)  But let’s break up.  K?  Cool.  Bye.  Michelle.  XOXO.”

This set the tone for the rest of the semester.  Months passed and I still never rounded second base.  Rich Jewish tits still eluded me.  So did any meaningful friendships.  I hadn’t been invited to join a schoolmate at temple, let alone attend a bar or bat mitzvah.  It seemed every weekend someone was having a huge party, becoming a man or a woman, getting tons of money and presents.  The kids would all come into school with personalized T-shirts announcing the mitzvahs they had attended.  “I Rocked All Night @ Eugene Cohen’s Bar Mitzvah! 9-20-95.”  “Betsy Orenstein Became a Woman and All I Got Was This Bat Mitzvah T-Shirt!”  I felt like a loser in my sun-bleached Quicksilver threads.  When I turned thirteen, no one noticed.  No one wished me a happy birthday, not even my teachers.  I brought some of my mom’s homemade cupcakes into class, but nobody ate them, not even the fat-ass kids.

When I told some classmates that I couldn’t go to Six Flags (they call it Great America out there, not Great Adventure like they do in Jersey) with them because my mom said she couldn’t afford it, the last rich nail was driven into my East Coast coffin.

Option 2 had failed me.  I had tried to squeeze myself into their uniform, but it didn’t fit.  I was now a boy without a tribe.

One Saturday that winter, I was perusing CDs at Best Buy.  I bought an album by Less Than Jake, a punk-ska band from Florida that I had followed for a year or two.  Losing Streak was filled with a dozen or so poppy, punchy songs, one of which started off with a recording of what sounded like a 50s-style barbershop quartet.  It went like this:

I’m from New Jersey and I’m proud about it.

I love the Garden State.

I’m from New Jersey and I brag about it.

I think it’s simply great.

All of the other states throughout the nation

may mean a lot to some,

but I’ll pick to New Jersey

for New Jersey is like no other,

I’m glad that’s where I’m from.

I remember listening to that intro a dozen times as I walked along Deerfield Road, noticing how there were no empty beer cans or McDonald’s wrappers littering the side of the street.  I hit the skip back button on my Discman to hear it again and again from the beginning of the track.  Finally, I listened to the song all the way through.

Of course, when Less Than Jake kicked in after these proud New Jersey brothers of mine finished their little ditty, the tone shifted drastically.  The song, after all, is titled “Never Going Back to New Jersey.”

Well, I thought, I sure as hell am.






ISAAC JAMES BAKER was born in Belmar, New Jersey, in 1983. He grew up surfing and causing trouble on the Jersey Shore long before words like “Snookie” and “The Situation” further diminished the Shore’s already terrible reputation. He writes poetry, short stories, and novels, and is working on his master’s degree in fiction writing from Johns Hopkins University. His novel, Broken Bones, the story of a young man’s struggle in a psychiatric ward for anorexics, is forthcoming from The Historical Pages Company. He lives in Washington, D.C.