TOUCH THE EVIDENCE

Nothing happened. That is exactly what it wants you to think.

PRESS FOR REASSURANCE

Too late. You are already reading Broken Zine.

BROKEN ZINE: The tape starts in the middle of a sentence.

L. CRANE: Most lives do.

BZ: You disappeared from publishing for nearly twelve years.

LC: I stopped mailing things to strangers and asking permission to exist in stapled form. It was restful.

BZ: What did you do instead?

LC: Delivered appliances. Fixed screen doors. Read books after I had forgotten the author photograph. Wrote sentences on receipts and lost most of them.

BZ: Do you regret losing the work?

LC: I regret keeping some of it.

BZ: What brought you back?

LC: Somebody found a poem of mine in a box of records at a yard sale and mailed it to me. Twenty-three years after I wrote it. I didn’t recognize the handwriting at first.

BZ: Was it good?

LC: No. But it was alive.

BZ: Is that different?

LC: Completely.

Vic Sloane keeps the odd files, damaged evidence, and stories that should probably have remained in the drawer.

Push something. The magazine is poorly supervised.

PUSH THE WEIRD BUTTON

A small bureaucrat somewhere just stamped APPROVED FOR NONSENSE.