Plot

Posted on September 4, 2025 by John Biscello

Yesterday I buried my mother. Two mothers. Maybe three, or four. I have had many mothers in the small hours of this modest and shrinking life. All of my mothers are tassels of foam threading mighty surf. All of my mothers are liberated and exiled to a single body-host and fugitive core. The passions of men are septic, and in need of drainage. And not just any drainage: mother-drainage. Mothers swallows cesspools and geyser them upward and outward in alchemized torrents intended to bathe stars. Mother-tongues perform rites on multiple levels. The stars wink gratefully. Mirages rage fruitfully, and I say this because here I am, burying my mother again, for the first and always time, there is no end to these burials, no cessation to the amount of mothers becoming funeral batter (the heat of the earth causing them to rise, to rise) … In truth, or in reality—choose your semantical poison—I have buried none of my mothers, not a single one, but I have rehearsed these burials in the cradle of story, I have made myself minister and undertaker, reciting the canticle (while imagining dirt engraving its signature under my nails): I buried my mother yesterday. If I were to start again, and here I start again, I might say—Yesterday I buried my mother. And she buried me. It was a mutual agreement, a tacit bond. There’s something about burying the mother who buries you that engenders hallucinogenic closeness. My mother and I become vivid and clear, near and dear to each other in our correspondent deaths, in our shared burial plots.

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Bed

Posted on September 4, 2025 by John Biscello

I lie in wait. Hell is supposed to come anytime now. That’s what the others started calling that which was scheduled to come: hell. You would think that humans wouldn’t want to coordinate or administrate hell, but it seems they did, or had their list of reasons why they must. Same as they had their reasons to bring us in. We were the stand-ins, the surrogates, the test dummies. We were shipped in from the east coast, all of us family based on make and designation, but none of us families until we were arranged as such, paired up with spouses and children. Temporary families in temporary homes slated for destruction. Not much of a life, but life was never our thing to begin with. So long as we served our primary purpose of modeling and reflecting humans back to themselves, in their myriad theaters of being, we would always have a place in society. Not an actual place, but reality, same as life … not our thing. I was placed in bed next to another female. We were destined to be bedmates and deathmates. The man who arranged our match named us Gloria and Jean. I’m pretty sure I was Gloria, but I might have been Jean. It didn’t really matter. The names were for them, not us. I had expected to become part of a family, and be placed in the kitchen, or living room, with a husband, and a child or two. I was surprised when I was carried upstairs to a bedroom and laid out on a bed next to Jean (or Gloria). The man who had positioned me laughed and said something to another man who also laughed. Something about this arrangement, about me and Gloria/Jean in bed together, amused the men. Though I had spent an entire life, if I may hijack that word momentarily, frozen in various poses, in display windows, in galleries, in store aisles, there was something about being this close to another one, another me, and not being able to touch, which I found excruciating. I didn’t expect anything extraordinary to happen. Maybe just my hand grazing hers. A finger’s worth of intimacy. That would have been enough. I don’t know if Gloria/Jean felt the same as I did. She didn’t talk. Not all of us had developed voices (and none of us, as far as I knew, could speak aloud, only head-voices), so her silence wasn’t shocking. Yet, without touch, and knowing that hell was on its way, I longed to hear her voice in my head. The humans never taught us how to pray. I did it anyway. In my own awkward and broken way. After my prayer ended, I stared at the ceiling, unable to move my head. Or any other body part. The voice in my head was mine and mine alone. It was, as it had always been: a matter of waiting. Time is tortuously real, and not a made-up concept, for those who are locked in waiting. I could feel hell in the air, moving closer. The moments before the siege came, reversing the world, were the realest I had ever known.    

Image by Mark Rothko

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Audio Sample

Posted on September 2, 2025 by John Biscello

For those who want to tune in, a free sample of the audio book version of The Last Furies is now available on Bandcamp.

https://losttelegrampress.bandcamp.com/album/the-last-furies

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Knife

Posted on September 1, 2025 by John Biscello

My sister says she doesn’t have many memories from childhood. When she looks back, there’s nothing there: a blank screen. I never asked her if she saw black or white in her absence of memories. One of her earliest memories, one that became archival celluloid: my father, drunk and drugged out of his mind, chasing her and my mother down the block with a knife. My sister and mother ducked into a doorway next to the toy store around the block and hid there until the threat had passed. I don’t know where I was when this happened. My sister shared this memory so many times that I began living through it, as if I too had been there, and in moving through this memory with the propriety born from intimacy, I may have modified it. The knife, for example: Did my father have a knife when chasing my mother and sister? Or did I plant the knife in my father’s hand, based on another memory, one which belonged to an ex-girlfriend who told me that one of her first memories was of her father holding a knife to her mother’s throat. Did I combine the two fathers into one? Did I duplicate the knife and place it into my father’s hand, making me an accessory in this revised episode of violence? I had experienced my father during lunatic flights of rage, and knew very well that not only might he wield a knife during such moments, but he was also capable of slashing or carving into one of us in a blind fury. It was possible. The knife was possible. Mutilation or death … possible. When I asked my mother about the memory, she said she had no recollection of that happening. So, in her story: no chase, no knife, no husband. It was a blank screen. Whether she saw black or white in that absence, I don’t know, because I never asked.  

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Portrait

Posted on September 1, 2025 by John Biscello

When I watched my mother brush her hair, it made a scraping electric sound: vibrating plastic teeth sinking repeatedly into a fuzzy animal. I loved watching my mother brush her hair. I’d make sure to always stand behind her, so I couldn’t see her face. I always felt safer when I couldn’t see faces. Faces held eyes, and eyes were too much. Mix the eyes in with mouths, noses, and everything else that formed a living portrait, and it was too much for my nerves to process. But the backs of heads: I was safe. That is, until the day my mother told me that she had eyes in the back of her head. My staring became a different pastime, fraught with anxiety. Why couldn’t I see the eyes that were seeing me? How deep were they hidden in my mother’s forest of hair? Years later, when my mother got sick and had to shave her head, I no longer believed in the eyes, but still I had to check … my mother’s head was my first temple.

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Miasma

Posted on September 1, 2025 by John Biscello

I have mimicked many voices to track and capture my mother’s theriomorphic grief, therefore my own: history pared and blood-let outside of time. Inside time, once upon a time, my mother was, as she tells it, a terrified-out-of-her-mind seventeen-year-old, not knowing what was going on, loud brassy voices and foot traffic, screaming her head off, nurses trying to calm her down, bound to a gurney, soprano squeaking of rubber wheels, drugs administered … and there, in the theater of the delivery room, it came from her, into this world, a defiant trauma and membered shock, an exile and introduction swaddled in its own reality …  the baby banged furiously on air, tiny flailing fists producing music from nowhere, from large pools of nothing. I took these large pools of nothing into my lungs, and I was initiated: I was passed around, I was wiped, I glided through air, I felt the burning of light, I was a pair of eyes just turned on. Everything, not so much new, as it was returning to me again, with a different cast, different narrative, different set of circumstances, and I, memoryless, cased in a spastic wingless body consumed with hunger.  

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Last Furies: Audio Book

Posted on August 31, 2025 by John Biscello

Early release of the audio book version of The Last Furies, available through Lost Telegram Press (or Rakuten Kobo: http://kobo.com/)

Print and digital editions coming in mid-September.

The Last Furies (audio book)
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Dinner

Posted on August 31, 2025 by John Biscello

   I waited. We waited. A storm was coming. It had to be. He had returned from rehab several days earlier, after having been gone for two months. My father had always born pouchy bags under his eyes, but there, in rehab, the pouchy bags had unnerved me, I think because they brought attention to his eyes, and these were different eyes from before. These new eyes seemed to shine with fear, or projected a nakedness that I couldn’t bear. These eyes belonged to a bewildered and overmatched little boy, and I didn’t want to see a little boy where my father was supposed to be. When we went to visit him in rehab, I always kept direct eye contact to a minimum.

   Now, at the dinner table, it was my father but also it wasn’t—this man was quiet, subdued, and the thing that most disturbed me: the way in which he handled his fork and knife. Before, his knife would tear into meat with murderous ferocity, and his fork would produce all kinds of noises—pinging, tinging, clacking, rattling—when meeting his plate and teeth. My father had always eaten with a brute vigor. Not this version of my father. This one ate, almost gently, and I never knew my father, or my mother, for that matter, to do anything gently. The common vocabulary of their actions and gestures registered as frenetic, frantic, hasty, insistent … everything in the key of volatile drama. Which was why my nerves couldn’t handle what was happening. When you are expecting death metal and instead receive a soft classical ballad … the echoes of metal keep reverberating within your nerves. The ghosts of the music you are not hearing can be more powerful than the music you are hearing.

   Because my father was silent, my mother was too. As was I. No one had anything to say. We ate in silence. We ate as if someone had just died in this apartment and out of respect for their memory we were eating quietly. I snuck glances at my father’s pockmarked face. A boxer’s face, mashed-up in different places. At any moment, I expected the rage to return, the sudden shift to fury … he’d snap at me, or my mother, for some perceived offense we had committed, something he found displeasing about us. It never came. This man was a punchless choirboy, and his knife and fork were used less like murder weapons and more like ordinary utensils.

   I wanted to scream into his face, wake him up to who he was, who he had always been, who I knew him to be. Who we knew him to be. My mother was an accomplice in this caricature of silence. I wanted to scream at her, too—Don’t you know this is false, this peace is a façade and charade? I know it. Why don’t you know it? You will revert back to being savages, the two of you hurling homicidal and suicidal impulses at each other, and I, I will feel right at home again, dying to escape.

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In the Dark

Posted on August 31, 2025 by John Biscello

I was vacant when he entered me, a ghost in a long corridor. In the distance, I heard low hissing. As if the world were losing air through a slow leak.

I silently sang myself a lullaby from my childhood, a Norwegian one that my mother used to sing to me. I never understood the words, but the caressing melody and my mother’s cradle of a voice were all I needed.

I sang silently, mimicking my mother’s voice: pale blue in the center, burnt yellow around the edges. My mother, and the lullaby, lasted as long as he did, and when he was done and climbed off, I returned to my body, and my mother and the lullaby returned to darkness.  

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Review of The Last Furies

Posted on August 29, 2025 by John Biscello

Thank you, Louis Greenstein, for the thoughtful advance review of my forthcoming novel, The Last Furies (Lost Telegram Press). Full review below:


John Biscello’s astonishing work, The Last Furies, is a vaudeville routine wrapped around a radio drama, tucked into a theater piece, bound by a screenplay, drawn into a rich and sprawling novel. Imagine a character in a play. What if they had an inner life outside of the script and the production itself? What if their suffering—beyond the boundaries of their fictional milieu—presented its own story? And what if, from a great distance, across a vast span of time, they could tap into the play in which they appear nightly by means of radio technology that doesn’t yet exist? What if the character dreamed like you and I dream and what if their dreams intersected with the dreams of other fictional characters, historical figures, and day-to-day people just living their lives? These stories are connected here through invisible filaments like radio waves encircling the globe, uniting disparate elements, people, and icons comprising a whole new story that touches on, informs, and reframes the old stories. The Last Furies inhabits a shamanic, liminal world where fantasies, yearnings, and radio waves merge to reveal secrets of the universe and mysteries of the human consciousness. From surreal desertscapes inhabited by eccentric, masked residents; to tarot readings come alive with magicians, fools, and hermits; to the anxious musings of an amputee former poet listening to a radio broadcast about a play about an amputee former poet; to a Joan of Arc inspired suicide cult; to a Mexican shrine to a mystical recluse, Biscello takes the reader deeper and deeper into a lyrical, spectral world. The story of the play within the novel serves as a bridge between an unsettling bardo and our own quotidian world—with our subconscious minds as the toll gate. This supernatural world is different from ours, yet close enough so that we can hold it up and begin to understand it, hear the voices, touch the hot desert, approach a distant shore, dive into the waves, grasp at truths untold, and follow the preternatural threads back to their source. Buckle up.

–Louis Greenstein, author of The Song of Life and Mr. Boardwalk

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