wonder hearse volume 1.0
illusions with closed mouths
welcome to the first official volume of wonder hearse, an experimental photo literature zine. in this edition, words are spoken to empty space. art enters the vacuum. illusions offer only temporary solace. when the void offers you a wink, consider the possibility that it’s only a reflection.
press play and open up:
on the beatthe only way to start is to begin at the end
A traced line begins before the line is traced, and continues long after it ends.
the writer
feeding the fantasy again
of a writer by the swollen water
spilling that vacuous fluid
from his pretty head that makes
meaning from absurdity
and he looks just like me
but with an unshakable
resolve in his eye, yet
even in the dream his words
miss the page for all his
tenacity cannot absolve the vision
of utter uselessness
he hangs over the water
until he meets his dissolution 
Gutted and in the cluttered gutter of self I lay In frag]ments; backwards at work bent for display, And their sole entertainment. At their soles dirtied with souls hurting, their Sol dimmed. Innards turned tar when the pearls get torn Away—It's all them! Never I
lolita goth dreams
The man’s fingers swiped, pressed, swiped, swiped, and pressed some more as he browsed on the onion for filth. The moldy layer, yellowed like a bruised frail arm.
Gray.
Oxidized meat. Infants plumped like balloon animals bloated, their beady eyes swollen shut with pus pouring out and down the hill like flushed red cheeks of some; while others looked like grilled sausages, their squirmed bodies blistered, their eyes cooked like snails in herbed butter inside their sockets.
yummie, the knees, feet, and knuckles must be delicious! like burnt ends! pineapple bbq sauce, anyone? he commented in the thread.
like 3k❤️
closed lotus commute
bucket hat bucket list
if only everyone saw each other’s clutter
Ferrytale Woman
[ fiction ] by
As his sickly breath raises the gooseflesh on my neck, all I can think about is how sweaty and gross my panties are after walking up and down the Randolph Street Market. This utopia with darkened towers against wet mist, and I can feel his erection in his voice.
"How about here?"
Through the L car windows the streets appear clean, the lights of the spires shine rhinestone-sparkle with a whole city as witness, and he wants to fuck like we're on stage? I tell him no and he bitches.
"Aw, come on!"
Such a compelling argument.
In this resolution he looks six foot. With this filter he's wearing slacks and a crisp collared shirt. In my heart he's good intentions. But turn my brain-chip off and the filters come down. He's five foot nine, this I know, and he's probably wearing sweatpants and that godawful stupid shirt I hate, the one that says happy waifu happy laifu above a print of a big-tittied anime schoolgirl.
My bones know he's a road to hell.
Me? I look like I'm running out of patience as I’m fiddling with my new hatpin like it's a fidget toy. Well, new to me anyway.
Silent to all but me, an advertisement for my demo’d vision filter says: with You-topia™ the bustling streets of Chicago will be all to yourself, and as the railcar turns, jerking me to the side, I accidentally drop my hatpin. I watch as it bounces forward on the gleaming white floor near the pristinely clean seats. Not a soul in this car except for Travis and me, but the pin rolls in a semicircle before vanishing.
With You-topia™ anyone can enjoy our Windy City as they imagine it.
Travis grabs my hips with his too cold hands and pulls me to him, grinding his groin on my ass.
"It'll be quick,” my romantic partner says.
I tell him I dropped my pin and take a step forward, but he's pulling me back to his pelvis and complaining that he doesn't see it— and you know what that means.
You-topia's™ filter makes the unsightly shine!
This pin of mine? It's the only thing I've ever asked from him, aside from the silver coins that came with it. It’s his apology for my black eye. The date was his idea, the trip to Randolph Street something he wanted to do; public sex to spice things up? All him. When I saw it at the market next to an assortment of other antique trinkets, I told him how ladies in the 1880s used them to keep their hat on their heads. These long, ornate needles, some of them nine inches, they'd be stabbed into these absurdly pretty hats, then through the woman's hair to hold both in place.
My only gift, gone behind the filter, and my sweet Travis?
"I got something to stab you with," as he rubs against my ass.
"Fine," I say. "But let me find my pin."
"You'll have to turn off your filter."
You-topia™ makes a good day no matter the weather.
I reach into my purse and take out my phone as Travis guffaws at me. His parents can afford to buy the new brain-chips with the virtual menus where the cursor is controlled by thought alone. I still need my phone to control the apps in my outdated version. Opposites attract. Rich boy and pauper woman.
You-topia™ brings fairytale to reality...
I thumb the app off and the filter comes down. The pristine clean chairs and immaculate white floors of the L car melt away, leaving kids’ cafeteria-level of grime in their place. My eyes raw-dogging this sight, I see stains on every surface. No less than two dozen advertisements are on the ceiling and burnt tinfoil tumbleweeds to a bare and gangrenous foot ahead of me, as I see my hatpin next to a dead body.
I race to swallow back the throat bile, then gag. With the filter down, I can smell deadrot and curdled soured milk; Travis’ erect penis bulges on my hip.
"You find it?"
I nod with my hand over my mouth.
"Hurry up!”
Back at the market, after I meekly asked the love of my life to buy me my only gift, I kept quiet about how these hatpins were controversial. Safety was not a word the Victorians cared for and they were worried that women were using these sharp, fashionable hatpins to protect themselves. When the clerk handed me the pin and the coins, my wonderful, sweet Travis quipped that I could have them if I put out.
Now, my antique hatpin gleams, even with the filter off and at the foot of a dead man. Its pearl top just within a sneeze of blackened toenails. As Travis' cold hands reach up my skirt, pinching my thigh, I look into the lifeless eyes of a man who’s been dead and ignored long enough that a maggot falls from under his shirt.
It could have been fentanALL® that killed him. The tinfoil tumbleweed seems to think so. Maybe he starved to death. Vendors stopped taking cash for fear of disease even before I was born. Might be that someone murdered him. Whatever the case, he was ignored in life, as he is in death.
I hold my breath and kneel down by the body. Scurrying in my purse, I pull out the other half of my gift and place my two silver coins over his eyelids to keep them shut, and whisper.
"What are you sorry for?" Travis says behind me. With his filter up, he is seeing none of this.
I tell him I'm not talking to him. This is happening earlier than I planned, but what the hell? He's right, a train car is as good a place as any. I pick up my hatpin, it might as well be an icepick without a handle, the thing is so long and sharp.
"Come on, baby," he says. "Let's have some fun,”—and he’s not asking.
With my other hand on my phone I turn the filter back on, and the dead man vanishes behind an illusion of cleanliness and safety. I can't bear to look at my beloved Travis any other way. I stand and turn around to face him.
Outside, with a whole city rhinestone sparkling under glowing fog as witness, I’m cockstabbing him with my hairpin quicker than he cums. Again -and again- and again. The filter autotunes his scream to pitch-perfect T-Pain and butterflies in place of too much blood erupting from his wound. He’ll vanish under everyone’s filter when I’m done, but unlike our homeless friend, there will be no coins for his eyes.
The vendors stopped taking them.
the world is a safe space as long as you ignore it
we never see eye to eye when we battle the I in I
reflections are a reminder of everything being a fabricated illusion
strange
[ fiction ]
In the rounded reflection, our bodies warped and warbled. The bleeding sun washed this other convex world in unearthly white. He drew near to my ill-proportioned ear and spoke something distorted by the bent of reality. In one end and out the other, as they say. When I pulled my gaze from the heated metal, I found the flat thing I returned to was exactly as I recalled it and I grew bored. For a moment, in the bean’s wobbling glow, the laws of physics and possibility had been rewritten and I sagged like a steel beam under the knowledge that here they were the same and unchanging for always. He smiled funny at me when I explained this line of thought. He called me strange, and I said, well someone’s gotta be.
Okay, might as well be you, then, he said touching my elbow—and pulling his hand back like a cracked whip.
Mirrored on the surface of The Cloud an alternate cut played. Their faces were like their faces and their mouths moved as theirs moved, but the words were wrong.
Inside my head the head of another man with a hat on, spoke to me and said: Spin your neck until the world spins with you.
A smell of cooked salmon coated the bridge of my nose like VapoRub. Lisa looked at me funny, crossing her hands in front of her stomach; she gave me an awkward smile.
The words tickled my eardrums and made me smile.
The Man with the Hat, and the man that made me smile were two heads inside mine.
Joe gardened my lips; where the roots led was still beyond his limits.
The Man in the hat said: He is not for you. You are a mess. His inside joke with his friends.
The voice carried the stench of dead birds, and my ears were wet with anger as I looked at Joe with contempt.
I knew that he isn’t for me, I can tell he doesn’t care.
Joe’s gaze landed heavy on mine, a hummingbird lying on its nest. Beautiful, I guess, if you’re a bird watcher.
Soft looks and echoes.
To some that is all they need, but, what about the others? the ones that…
Run in front of that bus, I heard the Man with the Hat say backwards. Somehow I understood him, I knew what he meant, and I knew what I had to do.
Lisa, who’s been with us all day, tried talking to remind us she still existed in that space. Her words were bricks breaking her teeth as they came out.
Her mouth poured as her empty gums waterfalled red.
Lisa bawled clutching her face, she tried talking but her tongue was gone.
The Man’s voice in my head said she was right. I looked to my right and saw him there, wearing a hat—with no face.
Isn’t it weird how the hat doesn’t warp on the reflection? I asked.
Lisa fled in disbelief, but her reflection stayed.
What hat? asked Joe.
Where’s Lisa? I asked, knowing where she was. Stacked neatly behind that bricked wall.
Maybe the laws of physics were bending to an unknown force of will or maybe the only possibility that ever was is that of no change.
The Man with the Hat grinned inside my head, his rotting mouth was mine.
I ran my tongue across my teeth looking at Joe’s unmoving body.
He drew near to my ill-proportioned ear and spoke something distorted by the bent of reality. It went along the lines of: He smiled funny at me when I explained this line of thought.
He called me strange, he said, Well someone’s gotta be.
open four hours
alternately
won't you read my palm
and tell me a story; any kind
will do. soothe or scare or grind
to a bland and endless pulp,
just make me
something elsesomeone’s always there to watch us fall; let’s give ‘em a show
sit with it.
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This whole thing just took me somewhere and made me feel things. One of my favourite pubs here, no doubt! Thanks for tossing me into the mix on this one. Deadly job creating and curating all the bits. 👌
Love this especially with the beat playing it just gave everything such a feel! Nice 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽