A Transience
Benjamin Ficklin| Fiction, Summer 2026
After Camp Rainbow, The Bosk moves into a houseshow house simply called Reynolds House (because of its location at 909 SE Reynolds Street in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Portland). Their bedroom is one of two in the basement, & tonight, high on a little bit of mushrooms with their sorta-girlfriend sorta-not-girlfriend Xela Hampton (who moves to Portland to escape the ever-increasing rent of her hometown San Francisco), The Bosk begins a painting to give to Imogen for her birthday tomorrow. The Bosk is currently so broke that the only material they have to paint on is a rectangular piece of cardboard, which actually isn’t the worst—they like how it absorbs watercolors, & over the next three hours (listening to beautiful songs by Vashti Bunyan & talking to Xela about where in the world will be the safest places to live during climate collapse) they paint a human in anguish, some hairless form with their eyes clenched, their mouth slightly agape, face grimaced, arms reaching desperately for the upper-right corner of the cardboard as if escaping the painting might offer salvation, but—beginning at their chest—this person is being sucked or consumed by some pull from the bottom-left-hand corner of the cardboard, & down at their feet, the hyperrealism of the face has dissolved to whorls of color, veiny puddles of dark green, maroon, & cobalt blue, & embracing this deleterious feeling, The Bosk uses their fingernails to scratch the cardboard, they spit on it (even after Xela groans, “Gross”), pour some of their beer on this wretched person, & the next day, now sober, The Bosk decides to pick Imogen a bunch of flowers instead of gifting this hideous image on cardboard. The Bosk doesn’t want Imogen to think this wretched image is any reflection of her. Instead they put the painting on the front deck of Reynolds House, nailing it right into the wall above the cigarette-burned couch, & at the subsequent shows, people say things like, “That’s such a brutal painting” or “Yikes! What the fuck is going on there?” or “Wow, his face looks so realistic,” & the painting stays here even after The Bosk moves out, & on April 2nd, 2013, a leak in a basement water pipe causes a space heater to spark, starting a fire on a pile of junk mail that burns down most of Reynolds House. Jessie Thorpe (one of the current roommates; a gaunt, gangly white guy) flinches on the sidewalk, watching the house burn, feeling like the flames indicate some honest & immovable axiom of existence, but, noticing The Bosk’s painting, he feels commanded to save the repugnant image. Maybe persevering the painting will prove that axiom wrong! He leaps onto the porch & tears it off the wall. None of the current roommates even know The Bosk. It ends up with Jessie for three years, moving from house to house with him, usually resting on the wall of his otherwise undecorated bedrooms; in 2015 the landlord of Jessie’s current house kicks out all the tenants to turn the building into an Air BnB, & because Jessie also just lost his job, he decides it’s a good time to sell his current car, his two synths, & his computer to buy a van to live in, so he piles all his extraneous belongings outside the house: his mattress, his bedding, his extra clothes, his Super Nintendo & its games (which are snagged immediately by a departing roommate), & this painting, & two people stop to consider taking the painting, but both can’t think of where they would place an image that hurts so much to behold, that truly is so ugly, & tonight it rains, & a week later the angry landlord calls a dump company to remove this pile of wet objects, & so this painting that’s now wilted on all sides but somehow still vivid (at least vivid in the face of this desperate person—a face that might be a representation of pure pain) is hauled to the trash processing facility in the NW Industrial District, & though it’s pushed by bulldozers amongst the huge expanse of trash for several days, it manages to stay on the periphery, not buried in the immensity of waste, until today when Catherine Baptiste, a 42-year-old Black woman who works helping people unload their junk, sees the painting, beholds this face, & she pauses from throwing gently-worn office chairs out of a trailer, she considers grabbing it for herself, but now she notices a shiny red ooze seeping onto the painting from the trash above, & this thick liquid almost makes this thing—this face—more alluring, but after helping unload all the unwanted (but perfectly functional) office equipment, Catherine can’t locate the painting. Nobody ever sees it again.
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Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?
“Art published, art printed, art on the internet, art preserved—categories of privilege, categories that have happened to survive The Chaos. Of the functionally limitless artworks across human history, it’s overwhelmingly likely that the one that would have most impacted you is gone. You will never know it. A book burned in a library, an oral tradition eradicated by colonial violence, manuscripts nabbed in stolen luggage, local bands too broke to record an EP; artistic impermanence that undermines the pseudo-totality of the internet age. Some of my most profound artistic experiences were during the Portland houseshow scene of the mid-00s. Few of those bands recorded albums. Many of those poets sacrificed their practice to full time jobs. One of my best friends from those days, a drummer with big eyes & dreams of writing sci-fi, is dead. This fleeting fiction is a love letter to that era & its dissolving art.”
Benjamin McPherson Ficklin will never surrender—Benjamin McPherson Ficklin will always love you. They are the author of the novella The West & the collection A Cynical View of Dystopian America. Among various publications of fiction, poetry, & journalism, their work has been recognized in The Best Small Fiction and The Best American Essays.
A Transience
Benjamin Ficklin | Fiction, Summer 2026
After Camp Rainbow, The Bosk moves into a houseshow house simply called Reynolds House (because of its location at 909 SE Reynolds Street in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Portland). Their bedroom is one of two in the basement, & tonight, high on a little bit of mushrooms with their sorta-girlfriend sorta-not-girlfriend Xela Hampton (who moves to Portland to escape the ever-increasing rent of her hometown San Francisco), The Bosk begins a painting to give to Imogen for her birthday tomorrow. The Bosk is currently so broke that the only material they have to paint on is a rectangular piece of cardboard, which actually isn’t the worst—they like how it absorbs watercolors, & over the next three hours (listening to beautiful songs by Vashti Bunyan & talking to Xela about where in the world will be the safest places to live during climate collapse) they paint a human in anguish, some hairless form with their eyes clenched, their mouth slightly agape, face grimaced, arms reaching desperately for the upper-right corner of the cardboard as if escaping the painting might offer salvation, but—beginning at their chest—this person is being sucked or consumed by some pull from the bottom-left-hand corner of the cardboard, & down at their feet, the hyperrealism of the face has dissolved to whorls of color, veiny puddles of dark green, maroon, & cobalt blue, & embracing this deleterious feeling, The Bosk uses their fingernails to scratch the cardboard, they spit on it (even after Xela groans, “Gross”), pour some of their beer on this wretched person, & the next day, now sober, The Bosk decides to pick Imogen a bunch of flowers instead of gifting this hideous image on cardboard. The Bosk doesn’t want Imogen to think this wretched image is any reflection of her. Instead they put the painting on the front deck of Reynolds House, nailing it right into the wall above the cigarette-burned couch, & at the subsequent shows, people say things like, “That’s such a brutal painting” or “Yikes! What the fuck is going on there?” or “Wow, his face looks so realistic,” & the painting stays here even after The Bosk moves out, & on April 2nd, 2013, a leak in a basement water pipe causes a space heater to spark, starting a fire on a pile of junk mail that burns down most of Reynolds House. Jessie Thorpe (one of the current roommates; a gaunt, gangly white guy) flinches on the sidewalk, watching the house burn, feeling like the flames indicate some honest & immovable axiom of existence, but, noticing The Bosk’s painting, he feels commanded to save the repugnant image. Maybe persevering the painting will prove that axiom wrong! He leaps onto the porch & tears it off the wall. None of the current roommates even know The Bosk. It ends up with Jessie for three years, moving from house to house with him, usually resting on the wall of his otherwise undecorated bedrooms; in 2015 the landlord of Jessie’s current house kicks out all the tenants to turn the building into an Air BnB, & because Jessie also just lost his job, he decides it’s a good time to sell his current car, his two synths, & his computer to buy a van to live in, so he piles all his extraneous belongings outside the house: his mattress, his bedding, his extra clothes, his Super Nintendo & its games (which are snagged immediately by a departing roommate), & this painting, & two people stop to consider taking the painting, but both can’t think of where they would place an image that hurts so much to behold, that truly is so ugly, & tonight it rains, & a week later the angry landlord calls a dump company to remove this pile of wet objects, & so this painting that’s now wilted on all sides but somehow still vivid (at least vivid in the face of this desperate person—a face that might be a representation of pure pain) is hauled to the trash processing facility in the NW Industrial District, & though it’s pushed by bulldozers amongst the huge expanse of trash for several days, it manages to stay on the periphery, not buried in the immensity of waste, until today when Catherine Baptiste, a 42-year-old Black woman who works helping people unload their junk, sees the painting, beholds this face, & she pauses from throwing gently-worn office chairs out of a trailer, she considers grabbing it for herself, but now she notices a shiny red ooze seeping onto the painting from the trash above, & this thick liquid almost makes this thing—this face—more alluring, but after helping unload all the unwanted (but perfectly functional) office equipment, Catherine can’t locate the painting. Nobody ever sees it again.
______________________________________
Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?
“Art published, art printed, art on the internet, art preserved—categories of privilege, categories that have happened to survive The Chaos. Of the functionally limitless artworks across human history, it’s overwhelmingly likely that the one that would have most impacted you is gone. You will never know it. A book burned in a library, an oral tradition eradicated by colonial violence, manuscripts nabbed in stolen luggage, local bands too broke to record an EP; artistic impermanence that undermines the pseudo-totality of the internet age. Some of my most profound artistic experiences were during the Portland houseshow scene of the mid-00s. Few of those bands recorded albums. Many of those poets sacrificed their practice to full time jobs. One of my best friends from those days, a drummer with big eyes & dreams of writing sci-fi, is dead. This fleeting fiction is a love letter to that era & its dissolving art.”
Benjamin McPherson Ficklin will never surrender—Benjamin McPherson Ficklin will always love you. They are the author of the novella The West & the collection A Cynical View of Dystopian America. Among various publications of fiction, poetry, & journalism, their work has been recognized in The Best Small Fiction and The Best American Essays.