Mike Panasitti

“When Two and Two Make Five” by Mike Panasitti

Submitted to Contest #250

“Crazy people can do the damnedest things.”That’s what I remember overhearing Max say to mother in a voice just above a whisper before the cops arrived. He had had one too many glasses of Conundrum wine, and I had ripped up all the carpeting in his house.Mother, born Maria Elena Grimaldi, had been seeing Max for fourteen months and twelve days, little under thirty-seven million seconds. I know because I remember her telling me she met Max when he started working with her at Caesars Palace and I have some obsession with figuring out...

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“The Dawn of My Discontent” by Mike Panasitti

Submitted to Contest #236

Stephanie Bournias was a spicy Greek-American girl who enjoyed doing something none of my previous girlfriends had. It was one of the reasons I loved her and she was kind enough to love me back. I had hooked up with her after starting a fight that almost became a riot at a Greek dance party in L.A. The shindig was held at the El Rey, a venue where I had seen Human League, a musical group from Britain, when I was in high school.  With “Don’t You Want Me,” Human League was one of many 80s New Wave one-hit wonders....

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“Doctor D. and Mr. Hyde” by Mike Panasitti

Submitted to Contest #215

You stood me up. Or at least Freud would’ve said you stood me up. Me, a former client forking over a check in the high triple digits every week hoping that I’d hear a different existential interpretation than my own, expecting that somehow your take on things would open my eyes to something new, like some kind of salubrious psilocybin trip. I decided to terminate therapy because you disclosed something you perhaps shouldn’t have. “I took ayahuasca in the Peruvian jungle, four years ago,” you confessed. “When I was un...

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“To Lay It As It Plays” by Mike Panasitti

Submitted to Contest #206

There’s something terribly pretentious about a poem, but there’s no better voice in which to tell us when it all started than a poet’s voice.It started with the joyful wisdom and some dismally smart hypochondriac who hypothesized the death of divinity as well as the related curious notion that everything recurs. It started with him, Freddie, and with Stevie, some wheelchair-bound brainiac, who wrote a book claiming that in the instant before time and space commence, all matter is undifferentiated.One numerological year before a brief hi...

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“A Prisoner's Apostasy” by Mike Panasitti

Submitted to Contest #205

Gershom Fish never imagined he’d ever respect anyone as bigoted as Leo Stolz. When he arrived to prison, Gershom made a “fight or die” decision. He was given a shank and ordered to stab a Correctional Officer that Stolz, the Aryan Apostates shot caller, did not deem sufficiently compassionate toward White inmates. In exchange for his decision, a decision motivated more by fear than by courage, Fish was not forced to renounce his Judaism, but after the bloody ritual of initiation, Gershom Fish’s name became “Gerry Ish.” To...

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“Neptune's Lair” by Mike Panasitti

⭐️ Shortlisted for Contest #201

When I met her, word on the street was that Esmay was beyond help.Her friends called her “crazy” and “borderline.” By the religiously-inclined of former times, she might’ve been thought of as demon-possessed.During drunken fits she’d get into fist fights or threaten to throw herself from freeway overpasses.She walked a thin line and repeatedly upset rumors of her demise, taking immense pride in being what she called “stronger than dirt.”She had a breathalyzer in her car. Two years ago, she’d overturned her Hyundai in an incident where s...

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“Happiness: A Prickly Predicament” by Mike Panasitti

I am looking forward to hearing the lecture by the latest candidate for the tenure-track position in the department. Ira Hughes is known to be somewhat of a maverick professor of African-American and Black Studies at the University of Chicago who holds unconventional, perhaps even blasphemous views, on various hot-button scholarly topics.He is also a stalwart Lacanian, which means he’s probably going to couch much of what he is going to present in obscure psychoanalytic jargon, but that’s nothing new. I am, after all, a Ph.D. stude...

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“The Uncanny Career of Harry D. Moore, Rock 'n' Roll Simulacrum” by Mike Panasitti

Submitted to Contest #197

Disclaimer: The following article exploring the imbrications of the keywords “cloning” and “celebrity” is the product of a joint venture between creators of BuchGeist, a German AI program for ghostwriting, and Beijing University’s faculties of computer science and history who are behind the ongoing development CHROnicler, a virtual historian AI construct. Any stylistic inconsistency, or errors of narration, grammar, diction, or historical accuracy are not to be attributed to Harvard University’s Professor Emeritus Hank Sterling, an...

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“The Epiphanies of Jubu Djanx: A Speculative Book Review” by Mike Panasitti

⭐️ Shortlisted for Contest #195

The Epiphanies of Jubu Djanx is Michael Pizanti’s first novel. It recounts the life of the eponymous character who considers himself a perennial wanderer, a drop-out scholar, an aspiring, but luckless, singer, a dubious saint. Djanx’s adventures are frequent and often triggered by aberrant sensorial impressions: by something seen that feels like it has already been seen. By words heard that have a double, and usually troubling, meaning. Adding flavor to the novel's 27 chapters are a collection of colorful mental heal...

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“Atlas Rises” by Mike Panasitti

Submitted to Contest #189

It was December 2066. It was so terribly cold. Snow was falling, and it was almost dark. I was 14 years old and my mother was driving me to my father’s house in rural Wisconsin, outside of Madison. There was no way I was going to spend the obligatory Gift Exchange and New Year’s holidays with him again. Last year instead of getting me presents, he smashed my guitar against the fireplace then put the mangled remains of it as well as the notebook where I kept my musical scribblings into the burning hearth. “That’s abou...

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“To Make Molehills of Mountains” by Mike Panasitti

I first participated in an Indigenous People’s sweat lodge, a religious ritual of cleansing and communion, while in rural Montana, where I had gone to support my friend, Domenico Manioc, in his fourth Sundance ceremony. My sweat lodge experience was anything but pleasant. Ten minutes into the ritual I felt a desperate need to urinate. As water continued to be poured onto the red-hot rocks shoveled into the unlit lodge, generating chthonic breath-taking steam, I began to feel faint and wanted little else than to make a break fo...

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“Resolutions to Keep” by Mike Panasitti

I’m up at close to 3 a.m., again. It’s December 31st, and I’ve got a resolution to keep: I want to fly out of California and meet the woman of my dreams. I haven't accomplished either goal yet, there’s twenty-one hours to go, and this time I’m not holding back. I’m getting on an early morning plane bound for New York City. I’ve got enough cash to buy a one-way ticket, take a cab to Manhattan from JFK airport, eat, drink myself stupid, ride the subway to Times Square, find her, my soulmate, there, and kiss her as the ...

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“Memoir of a Madman” by Mike Panasitti

It’s December 2017, before CoVid, before Black Lives Matter, before the Trump administration was plagued by the worst of its scandals, and I’m in my cell in solitary confinement.Solitary. Colloquial for administrative segregation, or prison housing for inmates who are having difficulty conducting themselves in a way that does not endanger their own or another prisoner’s safety or imperil institutional security. It’s Christmas, or near Christmas, and I’m expecting a visit. If things go as planned, I will meet with my mother—who has ...

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“Going Dutch” by Mike Panasitti

Submitted to Contest #177

It’s a Willy Wonka world out there. Dis-ease is sweeping the country. Not just the mutating variants of CoVid, but the malaise of racial discontent. Liberals and conservatives stoke the fires of cultural animosity. The left tries to bridge the interests of educated college kids and the urban underclass. This is the case, even though your average inner-city dweller, especially if they have criminal experiences, will rip off a bubbly idealistic undergraduate for their undergarments if given the chance. The right h...

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“Nino” by Mike Panasitti

Submitted to Contest #176

I remember the days I used to smite the females with reckless abandon. Despite my having French origins, Becca, my bubbly owner, had a penchant for double-syllabic Italian appellations. She named me Nino, after a poem-composing boyfriend she once had, but who had drowned in the ocean seeking the poetry of a watery death. She kept his memory alive through me. Humans can be sentimental that way.  Before I was four years old, Becca had me inseminate half a dozen French Bulldog bitch-dykes with my potent sperm. The dames...

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