preamble

AN OPEN INQUIRY INTO BARTENDING, TAI CHI, PARENTAL USE OF GENERATIVE AI, POORLY WRITTEN UN-AUTO-BIOGRAPHICAL DIALOGUE SCRAPS THAT NONETHELESS STAR US, OLD CROISSANTS, THE GENTRIFICATION OF HOMELESSNESS (I.E. NOT BEING ABLE TO FIND A SUBLET IN A MAJOR CITY), THE LETHAL POTENTIAL OF MICROWAVE OVENS, AND TAR

Honorable mentions: the lack of inspiration or drive necessary to plan, outline, begin, and finish a debut novel and the jaw-breaking accompanied fear when there’s not even the meager wisp of a story currently trying to jump out of you. What to do when there’s not a story to be told. Sat in a puddle of water writing about nothing because there’s nothing in the world left to talk about. Lots of tin and metal cans smashing together out the window. The San Pellegrino sweating profusely onto the table and Mother’s going to shout at me in a second for not using a coaster. What to do when I don’t even think I understand the mechanism of the novel, the appendages sticking out, the blood thumping, the nature of the novel as something, like, wholly alive. It’s more foreign than it should be. 

The afternoon when I said, ‘Do you know Jorja Smith?’ and he said, ‘Yes, I know Jorja Smith,’ and then I said, ‘Do you know Joy Crookes?’ and he said, ‘Yes, I know Joy Crookes,’ and we sat there in silence thinking about Jorja Smith and Joy Crookes, him firmly holding the back of my thigh, keeping his hand kind of (must have been uncomfortably) wedged between the back of my leg and the carpeted seat, those carpeted seats that definitely don’t get vacuumed enough, kind of holding my leg up for no reason, as I contemplated Joy Crookes and the differences between Brighton, Brixton, and Bristol, if they exist at all outside of semantics.

How my brain and body seem to get factory reset when transported through time zones, in an extremely violating and non-consensual way—that is, I am one person with this list of desires before taking off and then upon touchdown I become a, forgive me, a caveman version of myself with those elevated, intellectual, passionate desires now perverted into crayonified mimicry of themselves. If I didn’t understand myself before the journey, I’ve certainly no hope now. The limbo state of being in the air, strapped into the metal tube, everyone lined in livestock-ish rows, all inches away from their corresponding glowing screens, immersed eternally in whatever slop has been downloaded by the airline prior to takeoff, that strange media middle ground of things people have heard of but never watched, that range of the 48-72% on Rotten Tomatoes that you’d never pick as a first movie night option, but they keep their eyes peeled despite, absently forking rubbery chicken or microwaved tortellini into a mouth that never fully closes. My brain and body working so out of unison they might as well be separate parts, legs fully in the aisle, vertebrae compressed into a thick, textured, unbending stick, my face a milky pallor with wide enough eyes to alarm, the flight attendants when they hand over my sixth cup of tea (with powdered creamer, the barbarians) kind of avoiding my gaze, and me, well, little, old me—I just keep looking around at the vegetables on their screens, the icy stomach existential horror following the hyperspecific not-in-here-alone-but-might-as-well-be awareness that rears its head not only in airplanes but also in metros, trams, grocery stores, some house parties, some cars, some people’s beds, the doctor’s office waiting room, and, of course, the line for the post office desk. 

The desperation-heavy annoyance when inspiration is striking (as a present-tense verb, because it rarely strikes once, instead striking as a, I’ll have you think of the Doppler effect, wherein the siren is at first far away and then approaches, coming close up and passing quickly, with a sort of swelling quality, and then the car comes and swells the soundwaves again, ad infinitum) in an inconvenient time or place, such as when the dental hygienist has her entire hand in your mouth or perhaps in the midst of a serious enough conversation with your Mother that you can’t just pull out your phone, so you have to keep repeating various lines over and over in your mind in hopes they’ll just iron themselves into the cracks, so you won’t forget. The ironic sister situation of when you’re parked in an empty, quiet room with a pad of paper and freshly-sharpened pencil and probably couldn’t even muster up the desire to write the whole alphabet before likely getting bored and leaving.

The question of what will happen once the city walls are breached. The question of courage, insanity, desire, solutions and problems, thumbtacks messing up the sheets, me and my capacity for avoiding the truth, the unknowable outcome, the unknowable nature of someone else’s mind at any given time. The unavoidable leap of faith it’ll have to be. The tin can with the string I’ve tied to another tin can, and I’m breathing into it, can’t you hear—can’t you hear my whisper in the middle of the night, skeletons of questions I haven’t the courage to repeat even now in the harsh light of day—what will we do, how will we brave the—how will I, is the more likely reality. How will I swallow my own tongue deep enough to just grin and bear it, or actually, swallowing your tongue is also necessary for the leap, the question, the laying-it-all-out-on-the-line type of thing, type of horrendous thing we won’t be able to avoid, probably. Humanity getting their wires crossed, humanity tacked up helplessly on God’s corkboard, choked out with red string. But, humanity, the beautiful brutes. At least they prevail, or something. 

Sam Backlund-Clapp is a graduate of the University of Amsterdam, writing on napkin scraps in her spare time. The lead on her chain is planted in rural middle America, where she learned the love language of desolate wastelands and dried corn husks. She has been printed in Notch Magazine, Pacific Review, and Bending Genres Journal, and others—her piece ‘Film it next time’ was nominated for the 2025 Best of the Net Anthology. 

She is presently, and always, in search of Las Vegas and precocious realism.