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On this episode of the Dance Cry Dance Break, we open with “Wrong World,” a new original story by New York Times bestselling author of the Warm Bodies series Isaac Marion followed by refuge, the debut album available only on the Dance Cry Dance Break from Seattle duo Quand il Pleut.
Wrong World 
by Isaac Marion
Beth sits alone in a cafe she’s never seen before, sipping pale yellow coffee that tastes like cherry juice, watching impossibly fat rain hammer the pink pavement, diligently straining to learn about this world she’s fallen into. 
Her laptop sits in front of her, but the internet is still too overwhelming. It was overwhelming even where she came from, but here, without any context to shape its flood of information, it might as well be pure noise. She prefers to learn slowly by looking and listening, a few revelations at a time.
“Did you hear about Maxico?”
“Yeah but I don’t get it. Why would Maxico attack Colomdia? Weren’t they allies in the Pedro Bank war?”
“All about that lithium, baby.”
Beth finds eavesdropping to be the most manageable method. A drip feed of information slow enough to seep in without drowning her. The best way to learn a language is immersion. She struggled with Spanish for years until she spent a few months in Mexico—which is apparently now “Maxico,” which has apparently always been “Maxico” and she somehow had it wrong her whole life. So she immerses herself in what used to be her own language, her own country and culture, now altered in so many ways she might as well start from scratch here in the Unified States of Anerica.
“Sorry, do you have cow’s milk by any chance? I’m allergic to dandelion.”
“He says he’s more of a cat person, doesn’t really like raccoons, is that a red flag?”
“Should we do Greenland for winter break? Soak up some darkness?”
She scribbles lists in her journal of things she doesn’t understand, things to research further when she’s a little less overwhelmed. But some questions resist research. The social norms and unwritten laws.
“Of course they’re closing the beach, Beth, four people drowned this year.”
“What do you mean ‘why are we freaking out’? Malaysia put trade sanctions on Brunei, it’s called ‘global conflict,’ Beth.”
“You’re going on a walk without a sunscreen rubdown? That’s ten minutes closer to cancer.”
Sometimes the facts are familiar and it’s only the context that’s shifted, the mutual understanding of normality which has suddenly ceased to be mutual. Other times it’s the facts themselves, a sudden onslaught of unbelievable statistics and rattling confrontations.
“You kissed someone without a mouth screen? That’s a one in four chance of syphilis, Beth.”
“Beth, you should never stop for gas alone, the average gas station has a hundred kidnappings per year.”
“You really don’t have asteroid insurance? We get two hundred house strikes a month in this state.”
That can’t be right, she finds herself saying again and again. She’s never heard of that. She could have sworn.
But she’s never completely sure. Did everything really change, or was she always wrong? Had she been misspelling “Anerica” all her life? Undervaluing all the dangers around her? Was she simply that uninformed?
“Did you see what Mackie tweeted about AOP?”
“Oh my God, so messed up, right? That one’s going straight to the Pound.”
Beth doesn’t recognize most of the names she overhears. Politicians? Pop stars? Both? A quick google would slot them into the puzzle, but it’s a puzzle with no edges, ever-expanding—fill in one section and another one spills off the table.
“Is the Pound even still a thing?”
“It is as long as Tertia’s on the Desiccant train.”
“Ha! Fair enough.”
Sometimes the references are so thick, Beth can’t follow a single word. Is it just her age? Did she fall into a foreign universe the moment she turned forty? She sneaks a glance at the two

On this episode of the Dance Cry Dance Break, “So Near Where Earth Sees Its End,” written by Elizabeth Kilcoyne, inspired by No Place Safer, the EP by The Good Williams Fringe.
The Good Williams Fringe. The Somerset, KY band is the new project from songwriter Boone Williams - formerly indie darling Tiny Tiny - and a rotating cast of friends, family, and collaborators. This debut album reflects a growth and transformation from Williams's earlier work to a darker, more ominous writing style. "I wanted it to feel like dread. Like how it feels just before things turn for the worst," says Williams of his new album.
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Elizabeth Kilcoyne is an author, playwright, and poet, born and raised in Kentucky. Her first novel, Wake the Bones, a YA Southern Gothic from Wednesday Books, is a finalist for the William C. Morris Debut Award, and received a starred review from both Publisher's Weekly and Kirkus, who described her as "a new standard-bearer in YA Horror." She currently lives in Lexington, Kentucky, where she gardens, serves on the organizational team for a local community vegetable market, and teaches writing.
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So Near Where Earth Sees Its End
By Elizabeth Kilcoyne

The mud on my boots would have bothered me once, but it doesn’t condemn me in a town like this, and I’m far beyond old vanities now. Everybody around here knows the river silt on these banks sticks to you, even after you’re baptized. Every holy roller knows to expect a little smudge of it on the hems of their whitest whites. After sin is scrubbed from you, that mud still lingers and the preacher lets it because there’s only so much God can do about it. God made dirt. Dirt don’t hurt. Or so I’ve been told.
That’s why I don’t mind to get right up next to the lip of the bank where it kisses the river, close enough that mud closes over the toes of my boots and clings so thoroughly to the hem of my pants I know years of current couldn’t wash it all away. Of course, even your graveyard dirt wants to sink its claws in me. It clings. It sinks into me like nails digging into my palms. The water won’t wash that away, no matter how long I stare into it, looking for your face and seeing only mine, dim and rippling in the darkness.
You’re somewhere in this river even still. You were dispersed into these waters twice, first in those days held beneath the current, moved slow and rhythmic, skin torn from muscle revealing hipbone, ground into limestone riffle-grit, then again after you were raised from the current by search and rescue divers, like angels lifting you into the clouds. Your parents had you torched in holy flame at the Blue Haven Crematorium, near enough to heaven but not quite there. Then after your funeral rites were said, they scattered you back down here again, the place you considered heaven, the waters where in life you often floated face up to the sky, smiling a placid, Ophelia smile for only the sun to see. Water to water to water again, too fluid and lively to have ever been made from or kept in or crushed back into dust. 
So hell, if you want to get holy about it, I’ll be a prophet now, tired of my short career as a priest. I’ll be a seer, scrying here in the shallows among the crawfish and the hellgramites and the glimmer of low-hanging stars until God defies death and rolls away the moon to reveal your face to me once more. I’ll be the holy man who starves away, who, rose-breathed and emaciated, looks towards sainthood and away from the world, into any darkness that will show me your lovely reflection. But all I see in the darkness is a reflection of the man who thought he could be your redeemer–I suppose I once fancied myself that. A one-time baptizer, I brought you all the way to God, hand-delivered, and now he’s got you, and I’ve got the water you drowned in lapping at my boots.
Sending you to Jesus was the last thing on my mind when I held you

On this episode of the Dance Cry Dance Break, “So Near Where Earth Sees Its End,” a story written by Elizabeth Kilcoyne, inspired by No Place Safer, the EP by The Good Williams Fringe. This extended version contains a bonus interview conversation between the writer and artist.

On this episode of the Dance Cry Dance Break, we open with “Hello, Handsome,” an original story by ¡Hola Papi! columnist and author John Paul Brammer followed by the exclusive premiere of please don’t let me be, the deluxe edition of the album from eighteen-year-old producer and songwriter Sarabean.

Eighteen-year-old singer/songwriter, producer Sarah Holland has been releasing music as Sarabean from her Florida bedroom since 2019 and recently relocated to Portland, Oregon. Her stunning, full-length debut album, “please don’t let me be”, blends dreamy synths and warm acoustic guitars with blunt, confessional lyrics and breathtakingly intimate vocals.
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John Paul Brammer grew up in rural Oklahoma with aspirations of writing and making art. He started his path in journalism writing for The Guardian, NBC News, and Teen Vogue, then moved to Condé Nast as a writer while running his popular LGBTQ and Latino advice column, ¡Hola Papi!. From there, he worked with the Trevor Project to consult on their editorial content. He currently self-publishes his column at Substack and has a memoir of the same name published under Simon & Schuster’s flagship imprint in June of 2021. He writes and illustrates for outlets like The Washington Post, Guernica, Catapult, and many more. He’s also presently working with Netflix on The Most, a small team that creates content, consults on projects, and builds community based on the company’s LGBTQ material.
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Hey, Handsome
by John Paul Brammer
It’s been over a day since I’ve asked Peter if he was free on Thursday. This is nothing new for us. I didn’t consider the text to be risky when I sent it. We do this at least once a month. One of us will ask what the other’s week looks like, and we’ll figure out a time to get together, always at my place. It takes some planning as he lives uptown and I live in Brooklyn. This feels farther than it is. I don’t consider our meeting up a routine. Although there’s a rhythm to it, it nonetheless always feels like a spontaneous and welcome thing. Each month one of us happily remembers the other. 
Dealing with men, loving men, being attracted to men—however you want to say it, it has its lessons. The lessons are often silly, sideways things. They are intuited over time rather than set in stone, and so they’re difficult to articulate. Setting anything in stone with men is nigh impossible anyway. One of these lessons is how to divine meaning out of silence, how to measure quiet in emotional cubits. Thirty minutes, he’s busy. A few hours, maybe something came up. A day, uh oh. 
I wake up, eat breakfast, start work, and at some undetermined point I pass the threshold into unreasonable territory where it’s unlikely that Peter simply hasn’t seen the text. Another lesson when it comes to men—it’s never the convenient excuse, the one you’re rooting for. It’s always the unwanted, the banal, the thing you hope it’s not. Work. Eat again. Sleep. Now comes either the long nothing, or the dreaded formality of a follow-up, the explanation as to why business as usual can no longer be conducted. 
The follow-ups have become more common in my experience. I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting older and people feel the need to be more mature about things, or because it’s a trend on social media to practice a sort of bureaucratic honesty with your flings or lovers or whatever you want to call them. I can’t decide if I like it more or less than being quietly disposed of. In my more cynical moments, I like it less. It smacks of self-satisfaction. I am emotionally mature for this. 
Yet another lesson in dealing with men, though. You don’t usually get what you like. “Hey, handsome,” the text begins. I’ve noticed this, too. The measuring out of salt and sugar, the affirmation up top followed by the heart of the matter. “So, I’ve started se

On this episode of the Dance Cry Dance Break, “The Source,” written by Josh Hanson, inspired by Apparition, a song by Jessie Marks.

Dream-folk pianist and singer-songwriter Jessie Marks grew up in the Bay Area. Born in Marin, yet having spent her life almost everywhere between Berkeley and Santa Cruz, and nurtured by the rugged seaboard of Big Sur, it’s certain that the Central California Coast is her true blood line. The sea is her biographer, and it’s evident in the fluidity and oceanic nature of her compositions. Influenced by the female artists Cat Power, Fiona Apple and Hope Sandoval, Jessie's music takes her audiences on a journey that is both intimately personal and transcendent.

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Josh Hanson lives in northern Wyoming where he teaches, writes, and makes up little songs. He is a graduate of the University of Montana MFA program, and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sinister Smile Press, BlackPetals, Fast Flesh, Stoneboat, and Diagram. 
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The Source
By Josh Hanson
They’d moved at least once a year. Furnished houses filled with anonymous furniture, or sometimes hollow, empty rooms that they would half-heartedly fill with a mattress on the floor and a pressboard chest of drawers. All things that would be left behind with only a water ring on the top or a black scuff along the base to show that they had belonged to anyone, had seen use. 
This new place was nice, a low, ranch-style house under tall trees, with a wide, fenced yard. Plenty of room for him and his brother to play. But beyond the fence was a stand of trees that led further back into the hills, into a maze of old concrete foundations and rusted girders and the frames of old machinery whose purpose they could not even imagine. 
It was here that they found the first of the bones. 
It was in the loose gravel hemmed in by the remains of a ruined foundation, and the boys had been using the space as a kind of no man’s land, scrabbling over the crumbling walls and belly-crawling across the gravel amongst the hail of imaginary gunfire and shrapnel, fingers digging down into the dusty rock, where he uncovered that circle of bright bone. 
There had been no moment of confusion, no mistaking it for something else. It was so clearly the crown of a skull, off-white with the sutures along the crown clearly marked with dirt. 
He called to his brother, and by lunchtime, they had uncovered most of the skeleton, the rib cage collapsed and lying in a thousand tiny pieces, but the long bones all whole and almost fully articulated. They stood over the bones and looked down, both of them quiet for a long moment. Who were they? How long had they rested here beneath the gravel and dust? It was as if someone had simply laid down in the center of the floor and gone to sleep, waiting and waiting--how many years the boys could not imagine--for someone to uncover them. 
He got down on his knees and began to shovel with both hands in the dirt. Somehow he knew there were more. He could almost hear them humming below the surface. They’d waited so long.
Within minutes, he’d uncovered the fine bones of a hand, and calling his brother over, the two boys began to clear the ground. Both boys worked in quiet, their faces white with dust and streaked with sweat. 
The next morning, at the excavation site, the bones shone bright in the morning sun. Three figures laying rigid in their beds, chests collapsed, staring upward. They were about to get down in the gravel and move away more rock and dirt, when he heard something off to his left. He straightened and looked deeper into the trees, back where the rusted frames of machinery were half-hidden by weeds and the ground sloped slightly upward toward the hillside. He watched and listened. Nothing. 
 There it was again. He moved off, leaving his brother playing in the dirt, up, toward the direction of the sound. Almost a voice. He passed through

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On this episode of the Dance Cry Dance Break, “A Parting Gift,” written by James M. Maskell, inspired by Everybody Loves Christmas, the song by Seattle artist and producer Nat Bayne.


James M. Maskell has taught high school English for over twenty years and writes poetry, flash, and a bit of humor in the early mornings before heading off to class. His poetry has been featured in Loud Coffee Press; he is a regular contributor to Friday Flash Fiction; and his first non-fiction work is forthcoming in Windmill: The Hofstra Journal of Art and Literature. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife, and is thankfully just a short drive from each of his three adult children.
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A Parting Gift
By James M. Maskell
It wasn’t until after she decided not to decorate that Mary found the package tucked away in the closet one Friday morning in December. Its blue and green plaid giftwrap blended seamlessly into the folded stack of flannel bed sheets and she thought she may have even seen it before without realizing. Silver and white ribbon crossed impressively tight over the top of the box—something she’d insisted on for years—but the bulky, irregular folds under the taped edges were  unmistakably his. It was the one thing he’d left behind after walking out last month without an explanation. “It’s just not working out” he’d told her, his things already packed in the car when she’d arrived home from work. Last week a friend said she saw him out with a woman she had met once or twice, Katie or Kaitlyn, or something like that, and Mary wondered for how long that had been going on.
She thought about the package her whole way to the office as the first snow of the season drifted down, thought about it through her morning coffee and into the staff meeting where management reminded everyone about the upcoming holiday party. Small decorations had begun to show up in cubicles since Thanksgiving, and now the more aggressive office-wide celebration was taking shape: garland hung over doorways; potted poinsettias on desks and countertops; a plastic menorah on the table by the watercooler; and of course, the horribly misshapen four-foot artificial tree in the corner, its cheap ornaments with their tattered satin threads revealing the Styrofoam core beneath. Of course, nothing could be tackier than the mistletoe someone hung over the copy machine. She suspected it was Derek, the office creep, but found out later it was actually Janice, the jovial assistant manager whose inappropriate office banter fell just under the radar of the general public. 
And yet, despite the poorly executed holiday displays at work, and the newly discovered gift left behind by the man she thought she’d eventually marry, the season still managed to hold for her a certain charm. 
Mary had loved everything about Christmastime as a child. Department stores transformed into shining lands of red, green, and silver. All through the neighborhood, ladders leaned against the gables and gutters of capes and split-level ranches as children fed strings of lights up to their fathers, untangling the lines one kink at a time and working desperately to finish the job before the first snowfall. And the music... Perry Como, Brenda Lee, Sinatra, Nat King Cole, and Mary’s absolute favorite, the angelic and haunting “Carol of the Bells.” God, how she loved the music. 
What she adored most was the enchanting conversion that took place inside her childhood home. Her mother wrapped and ribboned the picture frames so imaginary presents hung from the walls. A wooden manger replaced the clock over the fireplace, as monogrammed stockings spread outward across the mantle, Mom’s and Dad’s on the left, hers and her brother Joey’s on the right. And then, once Dad had set the tree in its stand and strung it full of lights, the four of them trimmed it with ornaments and silver tinsel, as the fragrant Douglas fir became the center