Page 74 - WTP VOl. XIII #2

Red Hammers (continued from preceding page)
train. She draws for ten or fifteen minutes, shaping the eerie vehicles almost perfectly, and then some- thing miraculous happens.
The phone rings.
“Hi,” the caller says. “I hear you’re selling drugstores? Can you tell me what I’d need to do to buy one?”
Marissa bristles, stutters slightly. She recognizes the voice immediately: tightly wound, female, pitching upwards like an over-tuned guitar string. She takes a deep breath and pulls the script back out from beneath the keyboard. It’s time to sell an asshole a drugstore.
The caller doesn’t seem to recognize her voice, so Marissa doesn’t disguise it. She raps Shelley straight by the book: creates urgency, builds a vision, calls her to action, and within five min- utes has collected all of her credit card informa- tion. She wonders why on earth her former boss would feel compelled to buy a brick-and-mortar drugstore, why she would play along with such an obvious scam, but maybe that doesn’t matter. Maybe they’re both just trying to shake off the same goddamn numbness. Or maybe Shelley re- ally believes that no one wants to buy toothpaste online anymore.
After the call, Marissa spends a few more minutes working on her picture. It’s almost finished, but she needs more information from Deven. For example, would he prefer to see the cars demolished by a standard carpenter’s hammer or by something more cartoonish, like a mallet?
She punches in the next number on her list. While waiting for someone to answer she hears a loud thump, then someone yelling “fuck!” from the direc- tion of the breakroom.
A full minute later, the phone is still ringing. She won- ders if anyone will answer it. She intentionally skipped the 1 before the area code, hoping to be transferred to an internal line.
Culleton is a fiction and nonfiction writer from southeastern Penn- sylvania. His work has been featured in Marrow Magazine, Floyd County Moonshine, Confetti, and several other publications, and was nominated for a 2021 AWP Intro to Journals Prize. Malcolm earned his MFA from Chatham University in 2023 and currently lives in Pittsburgh, where he teaches writing.
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Ganggangsullae
ink and high fluid acrylic on canvas
48'' x 60''
By Youngheui Lee Lim