Written By: Spose
You might need to be high for this.
Imagine you’re a magazine about weed and beer that awakens from a coma. As you come to, you grab for your phone with your papery little magazine hands. The lowercase letter Es in “Beer & Weed” blink themselves into four eyeballs. The eyes bulge at the date, overtaking the nearby letters on your face: It’s the fall of 2024. You’ve been out for over a year!
You fold your pages inward and collapse to the hospital bed.
The letters inside you tornado into a montage of questions: A whole year? The world isn’t over? What happened? Is Trump in jail? Did the Jets win the Super Bowl? Did Porzinigis stay healthy? How am I still here?
Exasperated and overwhelmed, you flop to your back page.
The Maine rapper Spose appears, like a scrawnier, whiter Jake from State Farm, summoned by a magic phrase. He is halfway through what appears to be a pink can of some raspberry IPA from Bissell Brothers Brewing. There is a stabbed man on the label.
“What is that beer?,” you whisper like a rustle of leaves.
“It’s…,” says Spose, sipping. “It’s something from 2023. You missed it.”
Your pages flip in a whoosh of confusion.
“What happened to me?”
“Well, you’re a print magazine in the 2020s,” says Spose, finishing the beer. “Also you had almost no online component, so you inevitably got into financial trouble and fell into this coma.”
“That,” you crinkle out, “makes sense. And now I’m back?”
“Yeah.” Spose extracts a few nugs from out a strange container labeled Preposterously. “You have new owners. You’re back.”
The face on your cover sniffs in a flutter of pages. Ink softens and blurs on your pages and reforms brighter and clearer than ever.
“What is that?”
“I’ll tell you about it soon,” says Spose, disassembling the flower. “You missed a lot. I
gotta catch you up.”
You mockingly flip to your Table of Contents.
“Right so,” says Spose. “Trump got shot.”
You flip to your cover and bulge all four eyes.
“No, he lived. I’m not even sure he got shot or it was shrapnel but yeah it was crazy. Lots of crazy memes about it. What else?” Spose rips open a fresh package of Backwoods. “Umm, let’s see … the Chiefs won the Superbowl again. Israel has been genociding Gaza with American weapons. The prices of everything are still going up.”
You fold yourself from the top down in a nod.
“Sounds about right,” you croak. “So … not much has changed.”
“Oh!” says Spose, looking up. “Kendrick dissed Drake.”
You rustle your pages quizzically.
“This shit was crazy,” says Spose. “Kendrick basically baited Drake into getting destroyed, ended up calling him and all his boys pedophiles, and dropping the most fun diss song of all time. It went number 1 like … multiple times.”
Your flip open and your text morphs into a picture of Millie Bobby Brown from Stranger Things.
“Exactly,” Spose laughs. “Oh! The best thing happened. I should’ve led with this. The Celtics won the championship.”
Your pages flip wildly.
“I know dude,” says Spose. “It was amazing. I cried.”
You bend your top left corner to look at Spose as if he’s a little bitch for crying about men playing sports.
“Oh!” Spose remembers something else: “Biden dropped out of the race.”
You flip to halfway through your pages then back to your cover as if to say, “Wait, what?!”
“Yeah, he was looking real old, they forced him out,” says Spose, licking a Backwoods leaf. “So now the overlords have chosen that our two choices are Kamala Harris or Donald Trump in the latest battle of who’s gonna represent the weapons companies and investment firms.”
You nod your cover again. Sounds about right. Spose holds up Backwoods he rolled perfectly without using scissors, a hint that this story may be fantasy.
“So basically, same old shit,” says Spose. “But now you’re back. And your articles will be online. Here’s to being back from the dead!”
Spose lights the woods and hands it to you, the resuscitated, rejuvenated magazine.
