A magazine for weird art.
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Behold, readers! The first volume of the Zone has been released on itch.io here:
https://studiomystrem.itch.io/impression-zone-volume-1
Featuring Ouroborista, Uranium Coffee, Lee Waters, Myself, and Rileystar.
Also included is an interview with Trixie the Golden Witch!
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RILEYSTAR
Jason Tyler woke up in his bed dazed and not fully sure how he got there. After a long pause he saw his pregnant wife sitting on the side of the bed with a hollow look in her eye. He kissed her and headed to work, the whole routine set on autopilot in his mind. He drove roads he never recognized but instinctively knew every turn. He’d walk through the doors greeting the receptionist and find his office where he’d file the same few HR complaints he’d seen a million times. Bryan harassed some woman. Tiffany said something insensitive to a minority group. Finally, he made it home and went to bed.
Jason did this routine over and over again; kissed his wife, went to work, filed Bryan and Tiffany’s mistakes, and slept. Wake up, kiss his wife, go to work, sleep. Wake up, go to work, sleep. One day, amidst the blur of his life, the only notable thing happened: his wife was gone. He felt something deep down maybe, but her disappearance didn’t truly matter; he went back to the old routine. He’d wake up and sleep, wake up and sleep, wake up and sleep, wake up and sleep, wake up and sleep, wake up and sleep, wake up and sleep, wake up and sleep.
Desmond Tyler and his friend Kyle drove to a shady, out-of-the-way neighborhood late at night, looking out of place in their nice Jeep amidst the run-down, forgotten housing. Finally, they made it to the place Desmond’s mother told him about—the house his father’s supposed to live in. He entered the rotted building, and the inside was worse than the outside. Trash littered the floor, bugs clinging to every surface, and the smell of a dying animal lingered in the air.
As he crunched his way through the trash-lined floor calling out his father’s name, he heard a moan coming from behind a closed door. Every step closer, the pained moans and wheezes grew louder, until eventually he opened the entrance to a pitch-black basement and walked down, each step on the flimsy wooden stairs causing the house to moan out in pain. At the bottom he turned on his flashlight, finally seeing the source of the noises. He saw a grey, withered, broken man on the floor. Half the features of a face were missing; its nose was flat, its ears were just holes, and its misshaped body was slick with a strange substance. Its arm twisted at unnatural angles, dragging behind its body as it slowly crawled forward with its feet.
Desmond woke up next to his pregnant wife, not fully sure how he got there or what he had been doing before. He crawled out of bed, stared at her lifeless face, kissed her, and drove off to work.
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Nick could feel the plastic tin of nightcrawlers bulging and writhing against his palm. He’d cracked the lid open at the bait shop and seen some monsters and knew tomorrow morning was going to be good. He opened the front door with his free hand.
“I think I’m going fishing tomorrow.” He hung up his cap and slipped off his boots. “Honey?” The TV silently lit the living room in flashing blues and the empty room on the right was open. “Honey?”
He peered through the doorway. Anna was curled up asleep on the rug–otherwise, the room was about the same. The bed remained made, with cross-country medals pinned above. The curtains were still drawn open. “Hey, let’s get up, okay?”
She stirred. “Why?”
“C’mon.”
Her head dropped back to the floor. He knelt down. Anna was not heavy, but she was completely limp and he struggled to lift her in front of him. He carried her across the hall to the bedroom door and jostled the handle with his elbow. The lightswitch was too difficult to reach–he navigated by feel to the bedside. She was snoring softly already, and he was careful to lie her on her side before pulling the other half of the comforter over her.
Nick paused for a while. He brushed her hair out of her face, stood up, and went to get a trash bag from the kitchen.
—–
The second wine bottle was on the desk. He dropped it into the bag and it rattled against the first, rising in pitch quickly—Nick spun the trash bag around until it was silenced. The journal on the desk was open to April, and he closed it before tucking it back between the mattress and the wall. He tied the bag around itself before placing it next to the kitchen trash. The worms were still by his boots, and he took them to the fridge in the garage. As a reminder, he brought his tackle box in front before turning off the lights.
Inside, he set an alarm on his phone for 5:00AM and swapped HSN for South Park. He liked the little guy with the orange coat.
—–
There was a weathered wooden fence maybe one-hundred yards in front of him, and he was aware that he was inhuman–something smaller, and far hungrier. This was not a surprise to him, although it was becoming uncomfortable, and reflexively he knelt his head to the ground. It was fibrous and dewy and each blade popped gently under his teeth. He digested, then chewed his cud, before shuffling forward and repeating.
His head bumped the fence, and he realized that some time had passed since he’d begun eating. He looked up–the fence continued about fifty yards towards either side before stopping at a corner. In front of him, beyond the fence, more food stretched along the ground a short distance before fading into a layer of fog. As he knelt down again to eat, he noticed a round object to his left, and he rotated his body such that he could bite it.
The outside was tight and sweeter than the soft, airy interior. He could feel the skin snap with the second bite, and he bit and bit until his mouth was full. He ground it side-to-side, savoring how it melted on his tongue even before ruminating. From his first stomach, he felt it begin to vibrate and ring and he woke up.
Nick shook his eyes open and turned off his alarm. He dug the remote out from under his thigh and stood up.
——
The garage door shook against itself as the motor powered on. Weak blue light ran up and down the lawn through the pines at the end of the drive, casting shadows even to the edge of the house. Nick lifted his tackle box clear of the fridge door, then took out the worms. The box, he threw in the bed–he took the worms in the cab of his truck and left for the lake.
——
The sun would not be above the horizon for another ten minutes. He switched on the radio. Fifteen more minutes of driving, and then about a six-minute walk from the parking lot to the pier. The guardrail at mile fifty-one was still bent down, but the gash in the dirt had overgrown quickly. Linda Ronstadt came on, and he found the volume dial’s reeded edge under his fingertips.
He was the first person in the lot, and given that it was a weekday he didn’t expect to see anyone else for at least another half-hour. The serpentine belt squeaked and stuttered as he turned into a spot and pulled out his key. He put the truck in first and took the tin in his hand. The worms were writhing no less than yesterday.
A steady, light wind blew from the water and towards the dawn. It did little to cut the humidity, but kept the morning pleasant. By noon it would be above ninety and too muggy to sweat. He couldn’t quite see the other side of the lake, and to his left and right the shoreline continued nearly straight for some miles. The pier’s branched end was barely lit, and he clutched his tackle box eagerly as he began the half-mile walk. The further he got from shore, the weaker the breeze became, and Nick knew the fishing was going to be good.
The last time he went out was six weeks ago, and the walleye were already huge–he didn’t have a cooler today, but maybe next week he could find some time to come out again. It’d be a nice dinner. Could pan-fry it–maybe make some coleslaw, too. Aren’t any more lemons, though, and he needed to get eggs. On the way home, maybe…
He could feel sunlight crawling down his hair and warming the nape of his neck and he smiled. Even without the breeze, the lake was still cool–the temperature at the pier’s end was still pleasant, and he set down his tackle box on a bench. Next to it, he cracked open the worms and reached for the hook he’d dug into the handle of–
His curse was audible to none but himself and entirely damped some twenty-one minutes back home. The dawn yellowed and crept up through the garage door windows, across the carport and up the wall towards the cork handles of two fishing rods.
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I twisted open the lid of my bottle of hard kombucha, the result of my eleventh home-brew. The previous attempt, a botched try at pilsner, landed me in the hospital for a week and a referral to alcoholics anonymous (I didn’t go, obviously). The smell didn’t totally knock me over, which was a testament to either my increasing brewing competence or toxin-desensitized nose. I prayed it was the former.
I sat on a folding chair in my lawn, next to the Pacers-brand cornhole game I bought while I was drunk and regretted immediately after. I didn’t hate the Pacers. That would require knowing who they were. Around twelve o’clock, my wife woke up, and she was the first face I saw not behind a windshield.
She gave me a cursory look and sighed. It might have been because I wasn’t wearing any shoes, or because the stench of alcohol was heavy on my breath. My wife and I had a game some mornings where I would take a deep breath out and she would guess my newest brew. She didn’t seem to like that game.
“Hey,” I said. “Do you want some?”
She sighed in place of responding, climbed into her truck, and drove off to work. The mainstream news gives unemployment a bad rap, but there’s something mesmerizing about staring at the cars on the street. Sometimes you see them even more than your own friends, in between games of Angry Birds and YouTube videos of cars getting hit by trains. FSL-9203 was the bad boy in town; I don’t think I saw him within five miles per hour of the speed limit even once in my time carwatching. He was a hulking blue truck, the front of which looked to my drunk eyes like an especially amicable smiley face. What did he have to be so happy about? I saw the human driver once. He was pale, had short black hair, and generally looked like a college student studying engineering with a minor in African dance. He looked like the kind of guy who would reveal to you some random tidbit about his life that you’d never expect after years of knowing him. FSL truly was one of the best.
Around three, I saw a black compact car with a The Office bumper sticker; SXW-4957. She slipped under my radar for a while because of her sleek design, and how little of an effort she made to stand out from the crowd. She was exactly that, average. Not a bad average, though, the kind of average that shows up to work forty hours a week, nine-to-five, and pays for their son’s college tuition to study Robotics. She was the kind of average who let her son live with her until he was twenty-five, instead of kicking him out at seventeen because he was a ‘toxic influence’. I figured that her son saw past the average façade. He must have, at some point, talked to his mother and for the first time in his life said “Oh, you are a person, no different than me, and you have bills to pay, and you have to eat, sleep, and make money. What have I done?” I bet he asked that question years before he reached the point of no return.
631-ZYG was smart. He was a cube, with windows too tinted to get a good look at the driver. It was totally illegal, but he was the kind of guy who was too cool to care. ZYG struck me as a bright kid with a big future, who fell in with the wrong guys at the wrong time. He was the kind of guy who never reached the “Fuck, what am I doing?” part of the descent into madness and fermented science experiments and instead skipped straight to the deepest pit of it. But, ZYG didn’t seem like the kind of guy to stay down, at least not for long, and I knew he would pick himself up eventually. It was obvious to me that he would succeed in whatever direction he pointed his sword. I just hoped, and prayed, that that didn’t lead him down the wrong path. It was around five that I realized I hadn’t seen ZYG in a week. Good for him. I bet he’s in New York, or LA, or another ‘somewhere’ where stuff happened.
I sighed, stumbled back inside, and turned on the TV. My wife got home around eight, and when she entered, she looked exhausted and disheartened. We made eye contact, and she nodded to me, before walking up the stairs and into our room. Once she was gone, I went back outside and got a good look at her truck. It was covered in mud, and its headlights made a screaming face, like usual, but a blotch of dirt formed an eyebrow that made the Jeep look furious.
I wondered how the car felt about this whole ordeal. It’s being dragged through the mud, working forty-hours-a-week, and what does it get in exchange? Covered in mud and ignored throughout the night. That’s life for you. Those types of cars don’t last long, I’d heard, and the stress couldn’t have been good for the engine. That much milage without support can cause a total breakdown, if not handled correctly. She obviously wasn’t being handled correctly.
I sighed and got up from my lawn chair. I turned the flashlight on from my phone, and after a moment of searching in the closet, I found the bottle of ArmorAll car wash.
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It was my sirloin steak, and, yet you ate it, all of it, not even just a nibble, or a bite, not even a big bite. All of it. Some part of me understands. You just got home from a long day at work, at the whatever-it-is-you-do factory, doing whatever-the-fuck-it-is-you-do for eight straight hours. But, also, this is the third time you’ve violated my boundaries this week.
The first time I can remember is when you came home at eight PM instead of the scheduled six, for the second night in a row. I understand, things happen, but also, my feelings deserve consideration, and if you’re going to come home at eight instead of six, who’s to say you won’t show up at ten the next day, then twelve o’clock, then two, and before I realize it, you’re staying at work twenty-four hours a day. And that doesn’t leave much time for Star Trek marathons, now does it? Do you not want to see me?
I get that the decisions are out of your hands. But are they really? If how late you work is out of your hands, so then is where you work, and so then is what you buy, and where you can afford to live, and at that point we fall into an endless pit of absurdity. So, perhaps try to negotiate with Mr. Buford instead of allowing this problematic part of our relationship to persist, if you think that you have any choice in anything. The alternative would be a rather radical position, now, wouldn’t it? That we’re just floating around in a sea of cosmic dust, dancing, running, shouting, sexing until we die. Sounds absurd when it’s phrased that way, huh?
If we are just infinitesimally small biological robots marching along to the orders of our clockwork universe, then why be together at all? And why would anything matter, from world leaders to genocides, let alone the romantic relationship between two tiny, tiny mortals. I don’t want to lose sight of you. But we’re both so small and everything else is so big. There’s so much nothing out there, I don’t want whatever we have to become part of it. Maybe it already is, I don’t know. It makes me sad.
Either way, my second grievance is more important. When we were in Fort Lauderdale, resting on the breezy beachside, I tried to reach out to you. Not reach out reach out, just tell you “I see you.” And I tried to do that by reaching for your hand when you had just got done surfing the Florida waves, hoping to hold you, albeit in this minor way, but you didn’t notice. I can’t remember why, maybe you were reading a book, or scrolling on your phone, or maybe even talking to a passerby. But it took a lot of courage for me to reach out to you, after everything that’s happened recently.
Your life sucks. I know that. You work long hours, have your own mental shit, and with everything going on with your parents, I feel bad even bringing this up. But you tell me that I don’t know you, that I don’t consider your feelings. When I saw you on the beach having fun with your friends while I pretended to read Little Women, it sank in. You’re right. I don’t know you. I have no idea who your friends are, your work, or your parents’ names. Fuck, I don’t even know your favorite color.
After volleyball with Colleen and Jeff, I realized that they like each other. Like, if they met all over again, they would fall in love over again. And I don’t know if that’s true for us. I want it to be. What is your favorite color? What are your parents’ names?
I enjoyed the beach, the hotel, the restaurants, but I kept getting the nagging feeling of ‘What am I doing?’. Why am I here, with you, instead of anywhere else?
Some of my favorite moments in Fort Lauderdale were at the Boathouse. You were forced to talk to me. I couldn’t pretend to be busy. You told me about Brian at your work, how he was promoted before you, even though you do a better and faster job than him. And I felt angry. Angry that you, this person I barely know, was cheated out of a better job in lieu of this other guy who I don’t know at all. Why would I care?
Maybe it’s just that we’ve spent so much time together that I’m bonded to you in the same way as a cat bonded to a human. Maybe it is just you are a warm body that I know. But I don’t want to think that that’s all it is. When I hear you talk about your work, the dog, or your projects you just sound so passionate, like you know what you’re doing and where you’re going. Like you’ve charted the course, and now it’s just a matter of riding it out. I think I envy that about you.
In the Boathouse, you told me about your most recent project; a program that helps you run your Dungeons and Dragons game smoother. I told you it was childish. You got quiet. I think I wanted you to be the one who made me angry. I wanted to provoke you to react, to lash out at me, to comment about how my interests are actually the childish and dumb ones. But you didn’t. You never do. Of course you don’t, you’re not a monster.
I want to join your stupid Dungeons and Dragons game. I want to play as an elf wizard girl who shoots fireballs out of a wand or whatever you do in that game. You seem so passionate when you talk about it. That made me jealous. But I know that’s stupid.
Even still, there are things I need from you too. This isn’t just a letter documenting my numerous fuckups. You’re always going and going and going and you never stop and I feel like no matter what I do there’s nothing that will keep you in place or stop your wandering and I always get the sinking feeling that if something (or someone) new and shiny and novel came by that you would switch up in a heartbeat even though I know logically you wouldn’t and that it’s just my manic neuroticism but I need you to make me feel anchored. Like you’re here to stay.
That leads me to my third complaint. You’ve been self-deprecating more and more lately. It feels like you’re spiraling out because of this thing with your parents, and I don’t know how to help. It feels like we’re so far apart nowadays that I have no clue how to navigate your emotional storm. Ever since we got back from vacation, you’ve been on edge. And I know you don’t want to tell me because you feel like I won’t care or won’t know how to respond, and you’re right to feel that way. But it would help if it felt like you trusted me.
There’s not been a moment when we’ve been together where it’s felt like you believed in me. I mean, you trust me with the house key, bank details, and the dog’s welfare, so you must have some faith, but I always feel like I’m talking to a hypothetical person you’ve constructed to please me. So that I won’t complain about it. You’re walking on eggshells. I know that. I used to not care, because it was just more convenient for me. But I’m coming to realize that it’s not good for either of us.
The truth is, I can’t keep being the person I have been and expecting things to magically get better. There is no relationship wizard coming to cast a spell and cure us of our problems. Maybe we are just tiny biological Roombas bumping against the universe’s furniture, but maybe that doesn’t matter. I don’t know. Maybe not everything has to be so deep. Maybe I can just be me, and you can just be you, and I can think about the universe until I’m blue in the face and then sit down on the couch and watch Star Trek: Voyager for the fourth time with you.
Listen up. I have demands. First, you must tell me your favorite color, your parents’ names, your D&D character, everything. I will write it down, because otherwise we both know I will forget. Secondly, tell me how you’re feeling. Or at least try. It can be a stupid fucking letter like this one for all I care. I just want to know. And, also, try to care about whatever book I’m reading at a given time. I know it doesn’t have lasers or spells or goblins or whatever, but I care about it.
I just want to know you, man.
P.S. For the love of God. Stop eating my steaks. They’re expensive. At least ask.
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Welcome all creatives and intellectual miscreants! In this first zine, the magazine is going to be focused on themes of Birth, Creation, and Generation! As the manager of the magazine, I hereby swear to make this into some cool shit. The Submissions open now and close in two months.
To give a brief introduction to what exactly this zine is, I want to receive the most personal, irreverent, strange art you’ve made and want to share with the world. Stories about a unicorn trying to find her place in a Sci-Fi dystopia, essays about how turtles represent the ineffable cycle of destruction and rebirth, and visual artwork that could frankly mean anything are examples of the kinds of things I’m looking for.
SUBMISSIONS OVERVIEW:
SUBMISSION TYPES:
You may submit up to:
If you have some kind of art not listed here, send me a message on Discord if you have my account, otherwise send an email to mystremstudios@gmail.com
SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS:
You can read more about the editors of the magazine in the staff page.
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Impression.Zone 