The Masters Review editors selected Clayton Bradshaw-Mittal’s “The Two Things Blassie Knows” as the honorable mention for the 2023-2024 Winter Short Story Award for New Writers. In this off-kilter story, our narrator is on a bar trivia team with Blassie, a man of indiscriminate age who seems to know something of the future: one day, his back will break, and “when it does,” our narrator tells us, “he will live almost exactly two years beyond that.” Over the course of the story, Blassie finds himself in a kind of love triangle with the trivia host and Alice, a temporary sub for their trivia team, as our narrator searches for signs of Blassie’s premonitions coming true.
Blassie really only knows two things in life: that his back will break and when it does, he will live almost exactly two years beyond that. Don’t ask him how or why he knows. He says he just does. Personally, I think a fortune teller told him, one of those with a table wedged between St. Louis Cathedral and the black-painted fence around Jackson Square, but when I mention this, he says he never goes down there, too many tourists and everything’s way overpriced; besides, why would he believe what those con artists have to say? Then, he pinches my earlobe and asks me to stop guessing. I just know, he says.
On Thursdays, Blassie sits at the bar next to me and three of the guys from work to play trivia on a team named E=MC Hammered. He orders a light beer in an iced glass, six wings in mango habanero sauce, and a side of fries, knowing full well that he won’t be able to finish the fries before they grow stale and Styrofoam-like in the AC air blowing on the basket. On nights we don’t win, he’s still snacking on them until around 11, chewing harshly two hours after trivia ends, but at that point it’s only to slow the beer down as it absorbs in his stomach a little quicker than he likes.
Our team wins trivia a lot. The whole game is engineered to benefit regulars who know that two of the answers each week can be found on the trivia company’s social media pages and sharing the event page nets them three extra points. Plus, we’ve found the perfect balance for a winning team. One of us is a welder over sixty, so he can answer questions about pre-1990 pop culture. Another is a fantasy football player who can answer all the sports questions. The third guy is a college dropout who says he was doing great in school, that he just couldn’t handle all the libtard professors. This guy handles the history questions, though he’s only half-adept at this. I’m not much of an expert in anything, but I fill in the gaps with the kind of general knowledge that kept me a B student in high school. You know, that mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell and there’s two-hundred-and-seventy-two words in the Gettysburg Address kind of knowing.
And Blassie himself is the science and literature guy. During trivia, he transforms into one of those brainy types who read too many books as a kid. He isn’t a physicist or a literary scholar or anything, and most of what he knows about science he learned reading Star Trek novels as a kid, but the questions aren’t written by physicists or literary scholars. They’re written by folx who read too many Star Trek novels as kids.
This Thursday, the college dropout can’t make it, which Blassie has complex feelings about. Blassie can do the math—he only lets the kid handle it so the kid feels valued and keeps coming. The truth is Blassie doesn’t care about the $50 gift certificates we sometimes win. Those don’t spread well across four people after the last year’s inflation. Blassie just likes doing trivia with other people. He gets to feel smart, but more importantly, he gets to feel smart in the company of smart people. He says there’s something gratifying about knowing his karass—though I don’t really know what he means by his karass—is on the upper end of the neighborhood’s intellectual spectrum. On some Thursday nights, really most Thursday nights, the exception to our gifted karass is the college dropout, who struggles to say smart things. We only keep him around because every once in a while, he unintentionally spouts something brilliant.
Blassie doesn’t talk about this, and we generally ignore that it happened, but the kid caught Blassie making out with the trivia host one time. They were sitting on the tailgate of Blassie’s truck, and Blassie’s beard intertwined with the trivia host’s beard until the two braided into a loose tangle of gray and brown hair. The college dropout pulled up in his car, and Blassie tried to break away from the trivia host, which resulted in their foreheads bumping into one another before they leaned in close to extricate the strands from one another’s bodies.
The college dropout pointed a finger and laughed and called Blassie a fag, before walking inside. Just before the trivia game started, the college dropout asked the rest of the team if we knew Blassie was a fag, to which we all shrugged and said it’s none of our business where the others stick their dick, or who they let stick a dick in them.
The Thursday night the college dropout doesn’t show up, Blassie sighs in relief because he can protrude from the closet a bit more than usual and asks if we should find a stray player to replace the dropout. The others shrug and say no, that it might disrupt our chemistry bringing in a noob. I disagree, say maybe we’ll get lucky and find a permanent replacement. Maybe we can begin to push the dropout away.
Blassie calls that thought horrifying, says we’re better people than that, at least he likes to think we are, but the other three say, hey, maybe we’re not.
There’s a woman who sits at the end of the bar when we play trivia. She’s around Blassie’s age, which is to say non-discriminate; we can’t quite place the decade during which either of them were born. I think Blassie was born in the late 70s, but he knows the answers to too many SpongeBob-related questions to be Gen X and is entirely too familiar with Michael J. Fox’s career to be completely entrenched in Gen Y. Maybe he’s one of those Xillenials, or what the trivia host calls the Oregon Trail generation, that in-between set of contemporaries who grew up with both cassette tapes and the internet. But even this feels strangely off-beat.
The woman usually listens to the trivia questions with a bright intensity in her eyes and bobs her head with the music between questions and we can tell when she gets an answer right in her head because she makes two fists and moves her arms parallel to the floor in a circular yet fluidly staccato motion in front of her body, that universally cringey movement of celebration for white people who believe they are ironically cool. The host always asks her if she wants to play, but she shakes her head and whispers something that makes the host laugh. She seems obsessed with the quiet knowledge of her brilliance, which is really a mythology of her own private creation that she wouldn’t want to fracture by testing it against the half-drunk mettle of the rest of the bar.
Blassie grumbles on his walk over to her and taps her on the shoulder. Her forehead creases when he speaks, but she nods and walks back with Blassie, takes up the dropout’s seat at the table. She introduces herself, says her name is Alice and she hears we need a little help, adds that there isn’t much reason for us to get to know each other and the deal is she gets to take half the gift certificate if we win. We all nod in agreement since none of us really care about the prizes anyway.
What happens during the game is largely immaterial, since the only difference is that Alice answers a few more questions correctly than the dropout ever does. She brings a much-needed feminine energy to the team and she’s incredibly smart, which we already knew. We asked her to be on our team because we’ve created our own mythology—one that just happens to be true—around her brilliance. We end up in second place and let Alice have the entire second-place gift certificate, which is $25, so the outcome isn’t far off from our standard end-of-the-night. But it’s what happens after the game that concerns me.
Blassie and Alice walk outside to the patio for a smoke. It’s cool for September, and the post-hurricane humidity is making Blassie and Alice sweat in spite of the temperature. We can see through the door that Alice is touching Blassie’s shoulder with an open palm, which makes him blush. See, Blassie isn’t gay, he’s bisexual, and the trivia host only fucks him when we win. Blassie thinks this is what constitutes a relationship, and while he’s certainly smart enough to know the trivia host has some sort of winner fetish and isn’t only fucking Blassie, he has conflated the trivia host’s behavior with legitimate affection and his sexual proclivity with an unacknowledged but consensual polyamory. And maybe it is, but I don’t see the trivia host around much when we lose. Honestly, a deep darkness growing inside me is curious about what it looks like when the trivia host gets jealous. Maybe, I think, a fight between them is what breaks Blassie’s back.
When Blassie walks back inside, Alice doesn’t come with him, and he sits at the bar, sipping on another beer, until she leaves with her purse. Blassie tells me she wants to play on our team again, but he doesn’t think that’s a good idea, especially if the dropout comes back next week. One of the other guys says we need some feminist energy if we’re going to keep finding success, says it’s good to shake things up if we’re wanna stay relevant. I ask why we don’t just kick the dropout off the team.
The next week, Alice waves us away from the bar to a table. The college dropout isn’t showing up again, so we abandon our usual seats. We take third place, win $10, which we forfeit to Alice, and, as the trivia host makes out with a guy from the winning team next to the front door, Blassie walks hand-in-hand with Alice to the parking lot.
* * *
A week later, the dropout is still missing, and one of the other guys jokes that maybe he’s quitting us like he did school. Alice is on fire, and we win first place, which means Blassie has to make a choice. While he’s at the bar ordering a victory beer, Alice places a hand on Blassie’s ass, and from the other side, the trivia host places a hand on Blassie’s cock. I can see Blassie’s hand shaking, the beer in his glass splashing. It’s never occurred to me that Blassie might be conflict avoidant and hasn’t told the trivia host about Alice.
When Alice kisses Blassie’s left cheek, the trivia host’s eyes go wide, and he kisses Blassie’s right cheek, which prompts Alice to turn Blassie’s head with her hand so she can insert an outstretched tongue into Blassie’s mouth. Not to be outdone, the trivia host turns Blassie’s head back and sticks his tongue in Blassie’s ear. One of the other guys at my table notes Blassie’s erection and places a $5 bet on Blassie going home with the trivia host. I know better than to take him up on it, but someone at the next table overhears this and places their own $5 bill on our table. Blassie chugs his beer, pays his tab, and walks out with the trivia host. Alice sighs and stays at the bar, motions for me to bring her purse to her.
I figure Alice won’t join us at trivia anymore, that she’s only been helping us out because she thought Blassie was cute, but she plays on our team six more weeks. During this time, we win first place twice, after which Blassie goes home with the trivia host while Alice sits alone at the bar. The rest of the time, Alice and Blassie walk out, hands and lips locked, as the trivia host hooks up with a member of the winning team in the corner. It’s like a dysfunctional polyamory, like a high school ruleset for hookups, like something these people are all too old to be engaging in, but no one ever seems to get upset, and we don’t really know what the arrangement is because Blassie never talks about it, so we take the opportunity to place bets with people unfamiliar with this trivia game’s ecosystem on whom Blassie hooks up with. We make more money this way than we ever did in trivia gift certificates.
At least until the college dropout, like a scorned bout of syphilis, decides to randomly return.
Alice has joined us at the table, sitting next to Blassie, not leaving much room for Jesus, and I think I see her fingernails dig into the seam running down the side of his blue jeans. I’ve started to realize that while blue jeans offer immense protection against grease and stray splinters, they offer little safeguard against the frenzied lust of French-manicured fingers.
The college dropout shows up unannounced and slams his fist on the table, asks who the woman is, says we have too many people on our team so she’s gonna have to go. Says he’s glad Blassie isn’t as much a fag as he thought, though he’s certain Alice can pass for a man if she wants to.
Blassie stands up quickly, and I’ve never noticed just how broad his shoulders are, just how tall he is when he wears his work boots. His cheeks look like hot coals and I can feel the heat from his blood blasting across the table like a furnace pressurized by clogged arteries. I realize I’ve never seen him angry before and, in this moment, I finally see Blassie’s youth catching up to him. Blassie’s never had much of an ego, and he typically lets crass comments about his waistline and his sexuality go without so much as a raised eyebrow.
I used to think this is because he’s older, because he grew up in an era where such vulgarity was more commonplace, before the internet and social media helped us realize just how queer people in the world really are. But now, I see that Blassie had to earn his calm, earn his peace-of-mind, earn the right to show kindness to others around him. This moment of toxicity isn’t anything new for the college dropout, but it is another weight snapping against the taut line of Blassie’s hard-fought patience, a patience permitted him by virtue of being just young enough to become open about who he is, who he fucks, who fucks him, without losing the ability to function in a society that’s perpetually in love with hate.
The table grinds across the floor in the direction of the college dropout, pushed by Blassie’s gut, and the beers atop the table rattle and spill though none of the glasses tip completely. The dropout picks up the canvas backpack he brought with him and walks out the door. Blassie grunts, and Alice pats him on the shoulder, says, I guess that resolves that.
One of the other guys says good riddance but reminds Blassie he’s still gonna have to deal with that prick at work. Blassie nods, an exhaustion solidifying in the droop of his eyelids, says that’s a problem for Tomorrow Blassie, and moves the beer glasses to another table before pulling ours back into place.
That’s when it happens.
Mid-jerk, Blassie’s body straightens and he groans something awful, like wooden stairs in a building on the verge of collapse. He sits against the high back of his chair and says, Fuck, is this how my back breaks?
One of the other guys laughs and tells Blassie that this is a sprain or a strain or a hernia or something, some inevitable part of getting older, that it can’t be a broken back, there’s no blunt force trauma, but Blassie groans again and says he needs to sit. In the chair, he keeps his back straight, breathes in heavy, struggles to breathe out slow. I realize I’ve never seen him hurt—not even at work when he fell off the ladder while connecting the frames of two walls at the corner—that his old age is catching up to him, and maybe he’s from the 70s after all and that accrued patience is really just owl-like wisdom. Or maybe sudden lower back pain is just part of the compensation for working construction.
Alice offers to drive Blassie home, but he says a beer will probably help him relax, and as the night goes on, his body loosens until he is back to his regular slouch. At least, until the game is over, and we have to help him outside to a car belonging to Alice, who has once again offered to drive him home. I point out that we don’t know her too well yet, but Blassie says he trusts her, that he knows her better than the rest of us, and the trivia host has been ignoring him tonight since we came in fifth place.
Blassie doesn’t show up to work the next day or the next week, and he doesn’t answer any of my texts. It’s while I’m working the nail gun, framing studs into a wall right after lunch, that the foreman says Blassie’s in the hospital, that after Alice dropped him off, Blassie tried to walk around the block to loosen up his back, but some asshole driver rolled up on the sidewalk where Blassie was walking and now Blassie really does have a broken back.
I stop by the hospital on my way to trivia, still in my work clothes, figuring that the smell of sweat and sawdust won’t impact my ability to recite Fermat’s theorem four beers in. He’s trapped in a back brace, says it’s just a fracture, but it will take a few months to recover. It’s just his luck that it didn’t happen at work, so he doesn’t get workman’s comp an`d since the car that hit him drove off, he doesn’t even have anybody to sue. The insurance won’t cover much of the treatment, he says, but Alice is offering to help pay. It had never occurred to us to ask what she does for a living, but apparently she’s an executive at the Boeing plant in town and has so much in savings that the money for Blassie’s recovery won’t even put a dent in it.
The trivia host asks where Blassie is, and there’s a clarity, a transparency, in his pupils as I realize Blassie is the only one of us who has never missed a Thursday night game. When I tell him Blassie is in the hospital, the host cancels the game on the spot and buys a round for everyone who shares the event page post and shows it to the bartender. He tells me that will keep him in everyone’s good graces, then leaves to drive to the hospital.
* * *
It’s three weeks before we see Blassie again. He comes to trivia, his body erect, supported by the back brace. The trivia host checks on him after every round of questions. Alice won’t let him drink beer, but he’s on so many muscle relaxers, he isn’t complaining. And there’s a ticking sound.
It’s vague at first, blending into the roar of the bar. I think it might be a pocket watch, like an old, gold-painted wind-up number. The other guys pick up an odd hobby every few months, and I figure someone’s gotten into cheap pocket watches that tick too loudly, but both of them are also searching for the source. Alice says she’s been hearing it for weeks, that every time she’s been around Blassie, the ticking has been in the background, even and methodical. She says she keeps asking Blassie about it, but, until Sunday, he hasn’t been coherent enough to answer.
Have you asked him since Sunday?
Yeah, she says, but he just claims it’s the timer for his death. He’s been very high.
I place my chin in my palm and stare at Blassie. He doesn’t feel like Blassie anymore. He seems restless in his paralysis, like there is a movement in his mind, but he can’t move his body in the brace. He hasn’t spoken yet, and I ask him about the ticking, if he bought a pocket watch to measure out the next two years. He says no, says the ticking’s not real, that it’s a collective hallucination brought on by all the stories he tells about his death, that the answer to Question 11 is Othello. Blassie might not seem like our Blassie—the one who eats mango habanero wings and gets fucked by trivia hosts—this night, but he is on fire. We win first place, and the trivia host drives him home.
* * *
After Blassie’s out of his back brace and he’s recovered enough to drink again, he starts on a hot streak. I don’t know if he’s picked up reading again, but he answers every question right, even ones way outside his area. Honestly, I don’t think he even needs the rest of us anymore. We win first place every week, and he goes home with the trivia host after every victory, leaving Alice at the bar. After the thirtieth week of this, I hear her begin to sob. She comes back to our table and tells me she loves Blassie, but things are out of balance. She doesn’t own him, own every minute of his time, own every tentacled segment of his affection, but before he healed up, there was an evenness in her relationship with him and in his relationship with the trivia host that’s simply missing now that she only spends time with him every other weekend and the trivia host fucks him every Thursday. It’s the damn ticking, she says.
Apparently, Blassie has it in his head that the ticking is some sort of supernatural countdown and not a collective hallucination after all. He’s begun measuring it and has noticed that it isn’t even at all and is slowly speeding up. If it continues to increase at this rate, he’s been claiming, it will cease to occur at intervals, become a single, streaming sound, flatlining almost exactly two years after his back broke. I tell Alice that’s ridiculous, that Blassie’s just engaging in confirmation bias and how the hell is he measuring something that cannot possibly be real?
She says she doesn’t know, that she took the next day off and wants to get too drunk to hear the ticking in her ears that no longer dissipates when Blassie leaves her presence.
I pause a moment, then ask her what she means.
I mean, I hear it all the fucking time too, she says. The last two months have been driving me nuts and I can’t even take a shower without whatever part of this slow march to Blassie’s death is haunting the shit out of me. I hear it at work. When I’m trying to sleep. It emerges from the bagel I slice open for breakfast every morning and taps a puddle into my glass of wine every evening.
* * *
The next week we begin a losing streak that lasts four months. We never finish above seventh place, but Alice is happier than I’ve ever seen her. I think she might be bombing answers on purpose, but that doesn’t explain what’s going on with Blassie. Maybe he and the trivia host are having a spat. When we were winning, there were a lot of softball questions, ones lobbed up in our direction, questions that matched Blassie’s strength. Now, they’re thrown hard, curveballs at the edge of our strike zone, just out of Blassie’s reach. But Blassie’s not frustrated, which is odd when we have moments like this, when the beer strains between his clenched teeth a little faster and the wings on his plate are ignored. He might be missing the questions on purpose too.
The other guys have lost the ability to speak in the aftermath of these massacres. When the final standings are read, they no longer stick around, but stand, grunt three syllables, and leave the cash for their bill on the table with ten dollars extra for a tip. One week, one of them even asks, only half-jokingly, if we should call the college dropout to come back.
Towards the end of the losing streak, I notice the trivia host sitting at the bar, alone, one finger twirling his beard, another dipped in his beer, not flirting with whomever he plans to take home. I ask him if he’s feeling OK, that if he’s sick he needs to tell me because I can’t afford to miss work right now.
He says, It’s the damn ticking. I can’t get it out of my head. I think I fucked Blassie too much after the accident, that maybe it’s hurting his back, and the ticking is nagging me for contributing to his pain. At first, I thought it was a collective hallucination, but we measured the ticking together, the one he hears and the one I hear, and they happen at the same intervals, decreasing at such a rate, it will merge into a single tone exactly two years after the accident. I thought if I stopped letting your team win, if I stopped fucking Blassie so much, then maybe it would stop, but it just goes on and on and on.
The trivia host’s eyes shift into a rounded, reddened state, and I notice the blue-black rings hanging from his eye sockets with a cartoonish emphasis. I want to tell him it will be OK, that though the signs might point to Blassie’s death, all this is probably the work of a cook putting mushrooms or some other hallucinogenic in the wings, but the fact is that I too believe the ticking is real.
* * *
We hit a balance a year-and-a-half after Blassie’s accident, winning first and second place in alternating weeks. It feels like the game is fixed, that the trivia host is exploiting the game to balance out the polyamory of the whole situation. Someone complains to the trivia host’s boss, who comes down and supervises for a month. The alternating victories don’t change, and I begin to realize it’s Blassie who is manipulating the game.
He tells me he’s been studying trivia games from across the country in his spare time, learning the unspoken strategies employed by hosting companies, memorizing entire Wikipedia pages. Alice has made sure he doesn’t have to work, she’s taking care of his bills, medical and grocery and utilities and even rent, so all he does every week is prep for trivia. And he and Alice and the trivia host have gotten so used to the ticking—which has gotten so fast it sounds like a rotary saw—they barely hear it anymore. He’s learned so much he just tosses a few wrong answers out there every other week to make sure we lose and that he goes home with Alice. Life, whatever I have left of it, he says, needs balance.
This sounds unreal and entirely too cocky, and part of me feels left out, like I’ve lost any real agency on our team, as though Blassie no longer values me as part of his karass. I mean, I love that that Blassie finally feels confident in himself, but maybe this is a bit much. That maybe Blassie finally believing in himself has come at a cost to me and to Blassie’s sense of community, as though all of us had tied our own senses of self-worth to the way Blassie had cemented us together.
The other guys grunt and quit answering answers altogether. They don’t seem happy, they don’t even take bets on Blassie’s nightly outcomes, but coming to trivia is their routine, and they watch enough baseball to know such streaks, even alternating ones like this, never last. Consistency, one of them tells me, resides in the act of showing up, not in whatever happens when you arrive.
I ask them if this makes coming to trivia a type of streak, and if so, does that mean even consistency is doomed for failure, to which they both grunt and shrug their eyebrows.
* * *
Then it happens. Twenty-four months after Blassie’s injury. Almost two years exactly. I hear the ticking at the bar, but there’s no trivia game that night. The trivia host has cancelled and Blassie and Alice don’t show up. But the other guys are there. And I am there. And even though Blassie is not, the ticking is there and it won’t stop.
It’s almost a blur of sound, like a metronome where the needle is about to fly off its hinge, and we are frozen, listening to what we hope is a collective hallucination, and at seven o’clock when the trivia game would normally start, there is nothing.
All sound stops. The ticking, the talking, the clicking of glasses on tables. I try to speak, but no sound comes and the other guys can’t even grunt. Yet, my ears are ringing with a blankness, with a nothingness, as though the veil between the living and the dead has been pierced, maybe by Blassie’s bearded body passing from this world to the next.
Clayton Bradshaw-Mittal (they/them) is a queer, previously unhoused veteran, a MASS MoCA fellow, an alum of the Vermont Studio Center, and an alum of the Tin House Winter Workshop. Their fiction can be found in Story, Fairy Tale Review, F(r)iction, South Carolina Review, and elsewhere. Other work appears in The Rumpus, Barrelhouse, Consequence, and additional journals. They teach creative writing at Gannon University and are the Managing Editor of New Ohio Review and the “No Place is Foreign” editor for Another Chicago Magazine.