Today, we’re pleased to present an excerpt from Alex Behr’s forthcoming book Animal Kingdom, which 7.13 Books will publish on November 3, 2026. Here’s a short description of the book:
With piercing humor, the collection explores a couple bonding over alien visitations, the brutal accommodations in a marriage between musicians, sexuality during menopause, and a teen girl’s bruising path to feminism via her Fender guitar.
Cold Plum Wine
Originally published in two-authored chapbook of the same name (Picture Frame Press)
I tested stress. I am stress. That’s what my wife told me. I stressed her out. Airplane wings have flex. Otherwise, the planes wouldn’t fly. At LAX, when I crossed the threshold to the 737-MAX, I paused, almost the last one onboard, and peered into the cockpit.
At Boeing we put airplane wings into fatigue state. If people saw the corners we cut, they’d see why I don’t like to fly. Plus, human error. Pushing planes to their limits. Commerce. Profit. It’s numbers. It’s numbers. The right number comes up, and we fall into the sea.
The captain and co-pilot, both men, both with reg haircuts, had their backs to me. I wore my Boeing windbreaker, the one my wife had wanted to donate because it didn’t fit so well. I’d gained weight on Olanzapine. Her concern touched me. I didn’t let her know. I had a hard time expressing myself verbally, or I’d talk too much. I’d brought her something, though. In the duty-free bag was a bottle of Japanese plum wine.
Boeing’s swag jacket and lanyard made me seem more official than I deserved, considering I snorted amyl nitrate for fun in my twenties and, when arrested as a teen, smoked a joint laced with PCP in the holding pen. I also took PCP instead of going to algebra class. My wife was in first grade at the time, sucking on a braid or trying not to pee through her tights. Maybe gluing hearts on doilies. But I was pimply and high as fuck, and I hallucinated people were perched in trees. Hostile. Wanting to swing down and slit my throat.
I fumbled with the duty-free bag and my computer bag. The wine purchase had delayed my boarding. I wanted something for our deck, even though my wife let my former buddy, Maurice, lick her neck at our last party.
My wife called me Clutch. I used to fix cars and smell like axle grease. Oil. She fed off that buzz, holding my waist when I drove my Honda GB500 to the Washington coast. I was her pitstop at the Island of Lost Boys. But she wanted money and status, so I finished my engineering degree and garaged the bike.
The captain’s and co-pilot’s monitor screens were yellow, waving, like the ocean. Like a kid would draw. I would move my hand to show my wife. If she were here. I didn’t want to call her with my fears. She’d get irritated.
“Captain?” I asked. He didn’t answer. I said it again.
My boss, in first class, said, “Tim, c’mon. You’re embarrassing us. Take your seat.” He wore a Boeing tie clip, already into his glass of wine.
I didn’t want to lose another job. Not one that paid so well. Kept my wife in plum wine and turquoise. Kept her amused. Seattle was not like San Francisco, when we were young and did acid with roommates and messed around naked.
I ignored my boss and asked the pilot, “Sir, are you testing for that persistent noise issue?”
My boss stood up, smiling, but the smile was a threat. “Go to your seat.”
I wasn’t an authority. I was another passenger, seated in the back of the plane. Shouldn’t that tell me my days at Boeing were numbered? Maybe my life, too. Boeing was a living death. Back pain. Long commute. Wondering who my wife was flirting with. Wondering if she was sleeping with someone at her graphic design firm. Maybe the guy she’d skinny-dipped with at a conference. Jerome. She laughed when she told me. But I cried.
I was gripping the fucking duty-free bag with the plum wine. Yamazaki Distillery Reserve. That shit I buy after every work trip. I didn’t enter the cockpit to pursue my theories. But some-thing was wrong. Those yellow lines. Could I avert a disaster? “Captain, that noise problem.” I said it loudly as I moved through the curtains to the main cabin.
There’s pressure for Boeing to pass jets, get them out, get them in service.
“Boeing exists to support the war machine,” I announced. A cabin flight attendant moved toward me. Her name tag: “Autumn.” Her uniform tightened across her breasts. And she had Invisalign on her top row of teeth. Maybe she wanted to live. She’d invested in her teeth. My teeth were worthless. All that cigarette smoke and speed.
She said, “Sir, take your seat now. Follow me.” She touched my elbow. I shuddered. I had a vision of her with a gun against her neck. Was she raped once? Should I tell her I sympathized? That I’d been through tough times, too? I shook my head. No, don’t be a fucking wacko.
I sweated but kept my Boeing windbreaker on, and I nodded to a co-worker in the emergency exit row. An ass who cheats at cards. Day after day, sucking the dick of the war machine. Even my patent, registered with my cohort, was repurposed for a Boeing Integrated Defense Systems weapon.
And a baby wriggled on his mother’s lap in the row ahead of mine. Drooling. When you’re a baby, you’re kissed all the time, kissed like you’ll never be again, not in public at least. And you don’t kiss back so much as suck, like a sucker fish. Strangers would hug the dough coating your bones if it were culturally accept-able. Primates. Vestigial tails. Infant primates are passed around, cuddled, picked over for lice. Suckled by family teats. Auntie’s. Mother’s. Sister’s. And the baby will forget this kissing, as he’ll forget shitting himself.
I scanned the rows, memorizing the faces of the future dead.