Author(s): Max Restaino

FICTION | AMPHETAMINE SULPHATE | NEW ARRIVALS

“Bodies are weird.  I think that’s why I’ve always been so drawn to them. Watching them, that is.  You could call it a curiosity but I get how it looks.  My eyes are always drawn to skin and the way you can see the calcified pistons and joints bend and protrude, testing the limits of the soft nets protecting them.  I see the jocks stretching in their muscle shirts and think about how their shoulder blades look like vultures’ wings trying to tear free.”  In my imagination I’ve killed myself a thousand times. Others, too.

Max Restaino’s Coyote is a drawn out dissociative episode, a lucid nightmare of disemboweled animals, nosebleeds, vomit, tapeworms, soundtracked to System of a Down.  Kids play video games, trespass into abandoned homes, chat in the school cafeteria, but the universe disintegrates slowly, leeches crawling underneath skin, every moment pierced by a knife. 

Coyote is raw, enveloping violence. Danielle Chelosky