In Alex Dezen’s “Every Night I Pretend to Save You,” the narrator is trying—and failing—to save his business and, ultimately, his belief in himself. If only he gets his artist-mistress to sign one drawing, he might be able to pull his gallery out of debt, keep his wife from hating him, make his son think better of him. Full of perfect, precise details, this is a story you won’t be able to look away from as the bad decisions pile up one by one.
Melinda doesn’t want me to sell her drawing—my hand with all the fingers, including the ones I lost to a table saw in college—but I need the money. The gallery needs the money. It’s a sinking ship. The cars, the mortgage, the college funds. It’s all on board. I put everything into that place. There are notices now, thin letters from law firms that are warm to the touch. I don’t open them.
Melinda can’t believe I would sell her precious gift. She doesn’t understand, stomping around this rat-hole apartment of hers where I’ve been staying for the last ten days, yelling so the neighbors will hear. Not for a million dollars, she says, though Mark Lewknor isn’t offering anything like that.
“This is your chance,” I say, but with a 35 percent commission, here’s what I mean: This is my chance.
My phone buzzes on the table between us. Home. I can see Avery on the other end, my nine-year-old, who’s just smart enough to know his father hasn’t been away on business for the last week and a half, that his father isn’t a real businessman. Geoff, three, still calls me Daddy.
“You’re a son of a bitch,” Melinda says, and lights another cigarette. She can’t believe, in her tiny world bereft of children and wives and debt, that I would even consider answering the phone.
“Time,” I say, and take the highball glass from the double-stacked milk crates next to the frameless mattress. I use the bad hand because I know she likes it. “What we need is a moment here. Let’s not be stupid about this.”
“It was a gift!” she screams through her hands.
“I can’t make out what you’re saying, honey,” I tell her, though I can make it out just fine.
Mark Lewknor told me he won’t buy the drawing without the signature, and, needless to say, she never signed it.
“Forget it,” Melinda says. She turns to me, newly resolute, Zippo lighter in her hand, her stuffed nose blowing a wheezing pianissimo. “I’d sooner burn it.”
“This is big picture.” I’m pinned under the real world and she’s spun a granule of self-righteousness into a moon. “Don’t be fucking stupid.”
The phone buzzes again. Home. Home. When she grabs the cheese knife off the table and holds it out to me, I hide my drink behind my back. I don’t know why I do this.
“Give me a break,” I say.
Then this: 1) her matted orange tabby scurries through my legs, chasing a nubby pencil eraser from Melinda’s drafting board; 2) kissy-kissy kitty-cat—I reach down to grab him, but he slinks away from me, under the plastic table; then 3) I look up and catch the sterling tip of that cheese knife right in my brow. I can’t believe it, so I’m laughing for a second as I stumble backward. Melinda tosses the knife on the floor and covers her mouth with her hands. My head starts pounding. A flap of skin hangs in my periphery. I reach up to feel it with fingers I don’t have.
“What in the fuck are you doing?” I say. I look at her, waiting for something, though I’m not sure what happens now.
When I start at her, the blood goes careening down my head, down to the tip of my nose and onto my shirt. It’s everywhere. My legs go weak.
“Just relax,” she says, and I’m sitting. Just like that. The room jolts and jerks like a rudderless boat in a squall and I pray it will just capsize, that I will descend peacefully into the depths of the ocean of my life and watch everything I love shrink away. Sink already, you bastard.
“What?” Melinda asks.
I must have said it out loud.
“Just stay,” she says, holding a terrycloth towel against my head and pushing me back down to the seat. Apparently, I tried to stand up.
At the hospital the nurse gets peroxide in my eye and mouth. I could still taste it walking back to my car. The doctor wrote me a prescription for ibuprofen and gave me a band aid.
Melinda didn’t answer the phone.
“I’ll need stitches,” I told her voicemail, and hung up.
* * *
My wife, Kathy, used to be an artist, a painter, sculptor—marble powder in the bed, clumps of clay in her hair. This was in college. She was going to get her master’s at Cal Arts. Had applied and gotten in. When we found out we were pregnant with Avery, we decided she would apply again in a few years. Then Geoff. A few years became nine. We got jobs. Kathy: real estate; me: moving, painting, hammering, cleaning, watching the kids. When Kathy closed on her first big house—a two-million-dollar deal in Echo Park—we put the money into the gallery. We would become patrons of the arts and dodge The Midlife. It was a beautiful place to be in that moment, everything coming back to life for us in simple, expected ways. Now it’s all collection agencies and short remarks at the dinner table. Geoff still goes in his pants. Avery’s got a lock on his door.
Kathy knows about Melinda—doesn’t know her name, but knows there is one. It would kill her if she knew. I know this because Kathy said so.
I found Melinda at a Starbucks on La Cienega three months ago. She was drawing on the window with a fat, black marker. It was a good ten minutes before the manager even took notice.
“It’s not permanent,” she told him, wiping her finger through the figure’s torso, cutting it in half.
I followed her outside and told her to bring me some drawings to look at, gave her the address of the gallery. We were showing some old mid-century furnishings at the time. I’d bought them cheap off a picker and was sweeping up the wood dust from termites by week’s end.
“I’ve heard of your place,” Melinda said, but I knew she hadn’t.
I kept my bad hand in my pocket and shook hers with the other, even though she offered the right.
She came by the gallery the next day and I bought one of her large drawings with money that wasn’t really mine. She said she didn’t know what they were worth, so I gave her five hundred dollars. When she ran off to the bathroom, I pulled her sketchbook out of her canvas bag. I held it to my face—turpentine, cigarettes, rose. I flipped through, quickly. Sketches, drafts, each masterfully detailed with a steady, trained hand. On the last page she had drawn a figure sitting alone at a table before a familiar coffee shop window. Above him, several close-up studies of a hand with missing fingers.
That night I spread the rolled-up drawing flat on the table after dinner for Kathy to see.
“Look at this,” I said.
Geoff bangs his spoon on the table. “I have to go bathroom!”
“What is this shit?” Avery says.
“Watch your mouth,” his mother says.
“Go now!” Geoff is yanking Kathy’s pant leg. When she lets go, the print spools back up to my end.
“Who is this?” she asks, wiping a dried ketchup stain from Geoff’s chin.
“I found her at Starbucks.”
“I have to go!” Geoff howls until his face goes crimson. It’s a color that gives Kathy worry because he’s so young, too young, she says, to be so anxious about everything.
“Go in your pants,” Avery says.
“Take your brother,” Kathy says, and Geoff starts crying. He’s afraid of the dark, and Avery often locks him in there and turns off the light.
Avery pulls Geoff by the back of his shirt. “Come on, Poo Man.” He tosses his fork in the sink as he passes. It clangs and rings against the dishes, and Kathy winces at the sound, waiting for something to break.
“No rolling!” I yell after them. It’s code for rolling blackout, and only Avery knows what it means. If I say Don’t turn off the lights, Geoff will piss himself.
The bathroom door closes. I unroll the print, again.
“Who is this?” Kathy asks again, anchoring her end with Avery’s milk glass.
“A local artist. Melinda Winebrenner.”
“No,” she says, stabbing at it with her finger. “This. Who is it of?”
It was a broad female form, moving, arms reaching off the page.
“I don’t know.”
“It’s me,” she says.
“It looks nothing like you.”
“No,” she says. “Me, as in something I would have drawn.”
“That must be why I loved it so much.”
“It’s good.”
“It’s great.”
“It’s killing me,” she says.
* * *
When I leave the hospital with my band-aid-head, I drive to the gallery and sleep in my car. It’s 10am when Gina, my sole employee, knocks on the windshield. I don’t remember falling asleep, but looking at her through the fogged window, I remember dreaming of headaches.
“Are you okay?” she asks. Gina is small, narrow-faced, and young. Pale everything—legs, hands, lips. She eats sliced fruit out of a reusable tin. I pay her twenty an hour for all the work she does, and she’s never asked for more.
“I’m fine,” I say, and toggle the window button for a moment before realizing the car isn’t on. I open the door and step out onto the gravel drive.
“I’m the greatest,” I say.
Gina points at my shirt. It’s covered in blood. She looks at me like I’m floating upside down in a fishbowl.
“It’s fine,” I say.
“You were in an accident,” she says.
I turn and voila my 4Runner. Not a dent.
“Then what?”
“Someone,” I say, closing the door behind me. I straighten my collar, flatten my cuffs. “Someone tried to kill me.”
Gina closed the gallery for me last night, so she had the key. There were once two keys, but I lost the other. I wasn’t about to call her when they released me from the hospital at four in the morning, and the night was cool enough to sleep it off in the car with the windows cracked, or at least I was tired and humiliated enough to think so.
There’s an extra shirt in my office bathroom, the one I wore to Melinda’s opening here two weeks ago. Wingtip collar and pleats down the front. One cufflink is missing, so I roll up both sleeves. I unbutton two from the top. Keep it casual. In the mirror, I am a clown.
The mail is already here, scattered over the cracked-tile entranceway, soaking in the sun. I kick them across the floor. When his thick shadow moves over me, I look up and find Mark Lewknor’s forehead against the glass, hands cupped around his pudgy face. Gina hasn’t turned the lights on yet, so I keep still, hoping he’ll think I’m a coffee table. I could slip out the back, into the car, up the 101, out of the city. Gone.
“Hello?” He’s standing in the doorway now.
“Gina’s just getting the lights on,” I say.
He points at my face.
“I got attacked,” I say.
Mark is a producer, investor, lawyer, whatever. Slim, gray hair, thick arms. Always dressed for my funeral. He recently made his first purchase from me. A Melinda Winebrenner charcoal on paper that was not for sale. This is why I’m a son of a bitch.
I pick up the scattered mail and leave it on Gina’s desk next to another stack of mail.
“I’m here to pick it up,” Mark says.
“Not ready.”
When the lights finally come on, my head is pounding again. There are plastic cups of champagne and red wine wreathed around the top of the walnut table in the center of the room. The confetti and streamers have been swept into a corner. I still haven’t cleaned since the opening.
“What do you mean it’s not ready?” Mark asks.
“It’s incredible,” I say, and then decide not to tell the story.
Mark had taken a liking to Melinda at the opening, making drunken, loutish comments about her this and that. I knew Melinda could hear, so I took him back to my office for some off label scotch I keep on the shelf. Her drawing was rolled out on my desk—the gift. He wanted it. I told him he couldn’t have it. The hand, he said. He would pay anything for it.
“I’ve got it at the framer’s,” I say to Mark now.
“I don’t want it framed.”
“It’s got to be archived.”
“Signed?”
“Of course.” But of course it’s not, and Mark knows it. The drawing is rolled up in a Fed Ex tube in the back of my car, and Mark’s check is still in my pocket.
“I don’t want it if it’s not signed.”
“Let me run my business.”
“Business,” he says, and smiles, like I’m pronouncing it wrong.
Gina runs over and stands by the side of the desk, her cheeks puffed like she’s just swallowed a bird. “Kathy,” she whispers.
She’s here, parked out back.
I direct Gina by the shoulders and sit her down at her desk. “Steer the ship,” I say, and she looks at me like it’s the Titanic.
When I walk outside, the sun is bright, blinding. My eyes are tearing up and I’m dizzy. Kathy’s got her new sunglasses on, the kind we used to make fun of people for wearing. She sits with her hands on the wheel while the engine quietly hums. I knock lightly on the window. She keeps her head straight, won’t look at me. I follow the outline of her silhouetted face. The proud, small chin and tight lips. This is her world without me. Inside that car, there is a whole universe where I do not exist.
“Avery’s sick!” she says.
“What’s wrong?”
“The school’s called!” She tries to steady her voice and keep from crying. “They said he’s sick and that I have to—someone has to—pick him up and take him home.”
“They didn’t tell you what was wrong?”
“I didn’t ask. They said our son was sick and for me to come get him, but I can’t because I have to show a house on the west side.”
I put my hand on the glass, the good hand. If she would only look at me.
“You have to go get Avery,” she says. “You have to do it.”
“I’ll get him.”
She’s breathing quickly, fighting something, maybe a string of insults, maybe a plea. She could be running away. My phone buzzes in my pocket. I take it out. Mark is calling me from inside the gallery.
“Is that her?” Kathy asks.
“No,” I say. “It’s not anyone.”
“Go pick up our son,” she says. “He’s sick. Avery is sick.”
I grab the keys off my desk without a word to Gina or Mark, grab the scotch on the shelf, take a swallow, then another with two ibuprofen, and make my way out the back.
* * *
There is nothing written on or above the fogged glass door, and when the security guard closes it behind me, I am alone in a room with an empty coffee mug sitting on an empty desk. The mug reads: Everyone brings joy to this office. And on the back: Some when they leave.
Through the open office door ahead, Avery sits in a large leather chair watching his feet dangle over the linoleum floor. This chair is swallowing him. I wave but he doesn’t see me. I walk closer. He looks up, feet stop. I hold my arms up like Where is everybody? but I realize he thinks it means, “What the hell did you do now?”
“My dad is here,” he says, and rolls his eyes.
Principal Caffery or Cafferty. Mrs. Caffry? She smiles without showing her teeth. “Come in,” she says, holding open the door to her office.
The only free seat is a small, red folding chair in front of her large desk. Avery has clearly taken the adult chair. When I sit down, my knees are up at my chest. This place smells like glue.
“What’s the occasion?” she asks.
“Shouldn’t I be asking you that?”
“I was referring to your shirt.”
Right. “I’m having a dinner tonight.” Then, when I realize Avery must know I’ve been staying with another woman: “It’s a client dinner.” But Avery’s still watching the floor. If his eyes were drills, he would have reached China by now.
“So,” I say, “what is the occasion? My wife told me Avery was sick.”
“My god,” the principal says, and leans forward, hand over her blouse. “Are you bleeding?”
It had almost run into my eye, caught by my brow. When I reach up and wipe away the trickle, I realize I can only feel half of my face. “It’s nothing,” I say. “Interesting day.”
She eyes my bad hand.
I wink.
She sits back in her chair. “Your son seems to spend an awful lot of time with a certain group. It’s a recent development.”
“What does this have to do with him being sick?”
The principal gets up from her desk and walks over to Avery. “Can I talk to your dad a moment?” she asks. She kneels in front of him and takes his hand ever so gently, as if handing him a baby bird. When she leads him out of the room, I reach out to touch his shoulder, but miss him somehow, just grazing his back.
The principal closes her office door and walks back to her desk. I can hear the distant screams of children through the windows, and it gives me a start. They are playing, I realize. The playground is just on the other side of the brick, and I knew it was just children playing the moment I heard it, but that sound—it rises like ice in your blood once you’ve had a child of your own. Having children requires that you learn how to stay put when you hear them scream, though every impulse is telling you to run to them. It requires you learn to live with a broken heart. Isn’t that silly?
“Your son,” the principal explains, “is habitually bullied. There have been some abuses we are only now finding out about.”
“What kind of abuses?” My phone vibrates in my pocket. I feel over the top of my pants to shut it off but can’t find the button.
“The other girls have been sent home and I am meeting with their parents tomorrow morning to discuss their behavior and the disciplinary actions that will follow.”
The phone keeps humming, buzzing in my pocket. I find the button and press down hard. Now it’s ringing.
“Do you need to get that?”
“I’d like to know what the hell is going on,” I say.
The principal takes off her glasses and places them on the desk. “They took him into the girl’s bathroom during a short morning recess and tried to force him to eat feces. Ms. Wright, Avery’s teacher, heard them from the hallway and defused the situation as best she could. Avery became ill, and that was when your wife was called by our nurse. Now, sir, I do not believe your son actually ingested any excrement per se—”
“Are you kidding me?” She wasn’t kidding, and I knew she wasn’t kidding because kidding’s not the deal here. Avery is outside the door, and in my mind we are on separate sheets of ice and he is drifting away from me, hunched over, watching his feet dangle over the dark ocean that passes below.
“What are we supposed to do?” I say, which doesn’t make any sense, but I don’t know what else to ask at this point, and maybe in that giant funhouse of a question I’ve just posed she’s got an answer for me.
“I’m sorry,” the principal says, though she has no idea what for.
* * *
Back at the house, Avery runs straight into his room and slams the door. I tell him not to lock it, and say it in a voice that means business. Through the door I can hear the rustling of covers, sniffling. I wait a full minute before opening the door with the lockpick I’ve fashioned out of a paperclip. The bed is a tangle of covers.
“Hey, buddy?” I say.
I stand in the doorway like I used to do when he was a baby, when Kathy would ask me to check on him in the middle of the night for the hundredth time. Check that he wasn’t on his stomach, that he wasn’t choking, that he wasn’t smothered by something—a pillow, a sheet, his own hand—that someone hadn’t climbed in through the window and snatched him. I would walk down the hall, just to please her, and stand half asleep in the doorway to Avery’s dark room, listening to him squeak and snore. I only walked in his room to check on him the first few times, though I told Kathy I did every time. She would stay awake and cry, regardless. “Even when he’s in my arms,” she said, “he’s still too far away from me.”
Now I’m standing in the doorway to Avery’s room again, too afraid to go in. I’m afraid because if I do go in, all these failures will become real. I don’t like to go into this room.
“You need anything?” I ask.
Still not a peep.
“Are you feeling okay?” I walk over to the tousled comforter, trying to figure out how he’s got himself oriented under there. The thing is covered with the logos of every Major League baseball team. The tip of the Angels is intersected by the broad C of the Cubs, and the Yankees insignia is folded in half, partly under what I think are his feet. When I reach down to touch them, I get nothing but bunched quilt.
“Come on, Buddy. Come out from under there. I’m gonna figure this out. We are gonna figure this whole thing—”
“You don’t even live here anymore!” His voice is coming from the other side of the bed, under the Diamondbacks and Pirates logos.
“I certainly do live here! Mom and I are having some issues but that has nothing to do with you.” I sound like a soap opera, an after-school special. If only I could run out of air.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he says. “I don’t want to talk.”
“Is there anything I can get you? You hungry?” Christ.
“Just leave me alone!”
“I love you, Avery.”
“I hate you!”
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do. I hate everything. I hate life.”
“Come on.”
“I don’t wanna live.”
“Stop.”
“Why?”
“Because,” I say, and my bottom lip quivers. I don’t know how to maneuver this. “That’s not the way it works.” I grab my chest to see if my heart’s still beating. I grab my chest to hold myself up. “Come on, buddy.”
“Can we just talk about this later please?” he asks.
When he was a baby, every night Kathy thought he was going to die, and every night I pretended to save him. I stood in the doorway, but I never went in. I close my eyes and see Avery in his crib. I see Geoff, Kathy. My life is shattered, stuck in my head like the chorus to every Beatles song.
I shut the door to Avery’s room, soundlessly, holding the doorknob turned in my hand so it doesn’t snap against the lock. There’s a bottle of red wine on the kitchen counter with the cork shoved back in. I pop it out and fill a glass from the sink, drink it down fast, refill to the brim, and drink again. Blades of light stream in through the living room blinds, illuminating the dust in the air. It’s always there, I realize. Silent witnesses to our lives, dancing around our little catastrophes like so many blind ballerinas.
As I walk out into the living room, the glass slips from my hand and shatters in a wide, red sparkle. Twenty-plus-years, I swear I can still feel the fingers on that hand. Sometimes I can even feel them ache. The glass stem rolls down the hall. It keeps rolling because the floor is uneven. The foundation. It’s been sinking for years.
My phone rattles against the keys in my pocket. I answer without even looking.
“I’ll do it,” Melinda says. “Be at the gallery in an hour.”
* * *
Avery rides with me because I’m not leaving without him. The wine’s made me soft with the movements, so I take side streets. Avery sits in the front passenger seat and pulls the shoulder strap of the seatbelt behind him. I tell him to pull it back in front.
“I could be decapitated,” he says.
“Give me a break.”
He sniffs the air like a bloodhound. “Your breath smells,” he says.
“That’s nice,” I tell him.
He looks at me, eyes narrowed. “Are you drunk?”
“Who taught you that word?”
“I’m not a baby, Dad. I know words.” He crosses his arms over his chest. “Well, are you?”
I pull over after the intersection of Spaulding and Melrose and take a breath. “You wanna drive?”
“Serious?”
“Yes.”
“For real?”
“Yes.”
He lifts himself up in his seat and looks out the windshield at the empty street ahead. “Is it a good idea?”
“It’s not the best idea,” I say, “but there’s a lesson we can learn here. Do you know what lesson that is?”
“No.”
“Responsibility.”
Avery’s not tall enough to reach the pedals and steer at the same time, so I take him on my lap and wrap his fingers around the wheel.
“Hold tight,” I say.
A rusted Honda inches by. Young, college-aged girls stare out the window at us. I wave as they pass. Avery sticks out his tongue.
“Let’s go!” he says, and I square him on my lap.
The sun drops for a moment behind a little cloud and covers us in weak shadow. Avery wrangles the wheel, turns it back and forth.
“Wait,” I whisper, and we get real quiet, the two of us looking up through the windshield.
“Wait for what?” he says, and I don’t even know. Maybe cops. Maybe common sense. Maybe we’re waiting for God to take our picture.
I tell Avery to adjust his mirrors, signal. “Check your blind spot!” But he just wants to go.
We start out slowly down Spaulding, a palm-lined avenue with stucco bi-levels on either side. Too narrow to fit two-way traffic, I make Avery pull over to the side as another car passes coming the other way. When we start moving again, Avery shakes the wheel and tells me to go faster.
“Going too slow,” he says, “is just as dangerous as fast.”
“I’ll go faster,” I tell him, “if you promise me something.”
“What?”
“That you’re not gonna die it until you’re old and gray and have a bunch of children and win the Nobel.”
“What’s that?”
“A dumb award where they give you a bunch of money.”
“Dumb name.”
I bring the car to a halt. “Promise me.”
Avery tugs on the wheel, pulls it back and forth. “You can’t do that.”
“I can do whatever I want because I’m the one controlling the speed.”
“You can’t bribe me.”
“Not like it should matter to you,” I explain, “but it’s called blackmail.”
There’s another car heading toward us, at the far end of the street.
“We gotta go!” Avery says.
“Not until you promise,” I say.
“Fine, Dad.” He turns the wheel, but I haven’t given him gas yet. “Fine!”
“Say it.”
“Say what?”
“Say, I’m not going to die until I’m old and gray and happy and rich.”
“Jesus. Fine! I’m not going to die until I’m old and gray and happy and rich.”
I can feel his little heart beating through his back. He is so small, made even smaller by the steering wheel and the roads, trees—the whole fast, blunt world on the other side of this windshield. How do children survive all of this?
I give a little gas and Avery pulls the car to the right.
“Dad,” he says, and I look up. Another nine-year-old driving a car from his father’s lap.
“How about that,” I say.
The kid sticks out his tongue. Avery gives him the finger.
* * *
Melinda and Gina are talking quietly when we walk into the gallery. Gina gives Avery the Hey, pal, and Avery ignores her and heads to my office. I follow and sit him at my desk so he can play with the computer. At least that’s what he used to do. Now he checks his email. I take another handful of ibuprofen with another swallow of scotch. My heart is racing. In the bathroom I splash a little water on my face. In the mirror there is a vibrating man.
I amble out into the gallery, waving the FedEx tube with Melinda’s rolled up sketch inside. I am Evel Knievel looking over the Grand Canyon from a motorbike. I am Siegfried stepping into the lion cage. Gina announces that she’s going out for coffee. I tell her to give me half an hour, and she’s gone, out the door.
“Afternoon,” Melinda says.
“I just taught my son how to drive.”
Melinda’s hair is in a bun, bouncing on the top of her head as she nods. She’s measuring her words. The trim of her black tank top is torn at the hem. Through it I can see skin that should have remained a mystery to me.
“How many stitches?” she asks.
“Fourteen.”
“Bullshit.”
I toss her the tube.
She pulls the drawing out and unrolls it on the floor, holding it partially flat with her charcoal-soot fingers. I can see the outline of the Zippo in her pocket. I know what she’s going to do. I knew it when she called me. I could try to stop her, but then what? I’m going to drown. What’s the use in paddling around anymore?
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“It’s all right.”
She takes the lighter from her pocket and ignites her curled end. It burns slowly, bright embers crawling out over the white page. I kneel and push a strand of coiled hair back behind her ear.
“It was a gift,” she says, and it keeps burning, smoldering now, hot in our faces.
Avery walks up and kneels beside me. Black ash rises in the heat.
“It was a gift,” I tell him, and he nods, eyes widened by the danger. I take his hand to let him know it’s all right, that I’m the one who makes it all right.
The paper curls, shedding its cinders until all that’s left are the sketched lines of my palm encircled by a perfect halo of ash.
“Avery, this is Melinda,” I say.
“Hello,” he says, watching the floor.
“Hello,” Melinda says, and smiles. “It’s nice to meet you.”
I wrap my arm around Avery’s neck. We watch, the three of us, silently, until the whole thing burns to smoke.
Alex Dezen is a writer and songwriter from Los Angeles, CA, and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Jeffrey G. and Victoria J. Edwards Fellow. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, and other publications. As the frontperson and songwriter for the New York City band The Damnwells, he has released several albums—both with the band and as a solo artist—and toured extensively. He has also composed music for theater, television, film, and various popular artists. In addition, he co-founded the literary and arts journal Nulla, where he serves as co-managing editor. Recently, he was a finalist for the 2024 Missouri Review Perkoff Prize. He is currently working on a collection of short stories and a novel.