I want to invite you all to come out and support PERISCOPE CITY: WHERE THE LONELY GO TO LIVE ALONE with our Valentine’s evening “Love Stinks!” reading and open mic.
Join Zoom Meeting
Meeting ID: 886 1135 6295
Passcode: 090540
Ben’s book is, “A captivating series of short stories, both dramatically and philosophically enthralling.”
KIRKUS
“Ben Talbot excels at depicting a world both alien and familiar at the same time.”
MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW
Welcome to Periscope City, Welcome to a place where nothing is quite as it seems—a city inhabited by those with no one to love, caught between escaping loneliness and embracing it. Here, human emotion flickers and fades, and love is merely a transaction.
Each story in this collection explores the complexities of solitude through unforgettable characters: a writer torn between fleeting validation and the comfort of isolation, a former college football star trapped in nostalgia, and a young runaway drawn to a town of loners, where even the service workers are machines.
Prepare for an emotional gut-punch as you step into this strange, unsettling world—where the broken-hearted choose to stay broken and solitude is both a refuge and a curse. Talbot’s haunting, satirical, and often absurd interconnected tales examine self-destruction, longing, and the ever-elusive hope of redemption. Periscope City blurs the line between reality and fantasy, immersing you in a place where love and loss intertwine.
Join us for a live reading from Ben, followed by an open mic for poetry, flash fiction, and nonfiction. Add your voice to the conversation about love, loss, and loneliness, and help us answer the age-old question: What becomes of the broken-hearted?
If you’re not a pro at reading aloud, this is the perfect night to step up and give it a try. Let’s be awkward, clumsy, lonely, and literary—together.
Meet me in Periscope City Friday night:
8P Eastern
7P Central
6P Mountain
5P Pacific.
Hope to see you there, and hear you read. We’ll be sad without you….
In the meantime, enjoy this excerpt from the book!
Periscope City
A sign greeted me at the border: Periscope City: Where the Lonely Go to Live Alone.
It spoke my language, so I crossed in by foot, to the nearest place it took me to. That place was a one-story house with a long driveway called the Institute. There, they asked me dozens of questions about my immediate past and made me take a personality exam. I told them the truth: that I was a thirty-four-year-old loner whose friends had deserted him for marriage or death. They set me up in the Cramden Hotel.
During the first week, I interacted with only housekeeping and the concierge. They were all robots. It was the best the town could do to live up to its tagline.
—
Although I loved loneliness, I was still lonely as hell. After months of wallowing about my life situation, sinking into the lack of fellow humans, there was nothing I wanted more than to mix it up. I thought being lonely among robots was a different lonely as being lonely among humans. The scratch needed to be itched.
The concierge suggested a dating app called Loner, and the concierge said it had the best reputation for keeping the lonesome lonely. I filled out a profile and submitted it to the AI gods for review. It matched me with Raylene, a blonde Puerto Rican who stood over six feet. Her profile said very little about her beyond the fact that she’d moved from Buffalo, New York, and loved pets over people. In her picture, she sat on a snowy park bench and wore a fleece jacket. A French bulldog sat in her lap, and it wore a black-and-white dog poncho. It looked like a staged photo, like something in an L.L. Bean catalog, but where L.L. Bean was trying to pull off cozy, it was a cold, plastic, disconnected photo. I assumed her entire profile was an attempt at sarcasm.
Do you want to meet or not? she wrote.
Because of my lust for tall women, I wrote her back: Yes.
I have tickets to The Late Show, she wrote. Meet me at Geraldine Park at eight. I’ll be at the corner of Alaska and Winter Bear. And don’t be awkward.
—
When I showed up, Raylene was sitting on a snowy park bench in the same jacket as her photo, with her service bulldog in her lap. The dog even wore a black-and-white poncho. Raylene’s smile was all the picture was missing.
“Joe?” she asked.
Her perfume was cedar, or maybe it was the trees. Whatever the case, the scent had found its way to me, and it smelled lovely. The Loner profile was missing a smell.
“Raylene?”
“No,” she said. “Of course it is. How would I know your name was Joe?”
The bulldog barked at me.
“Sheepshead, knock it off,” she said.
Sheepshead? After Raylene fed her a pill, the dog calmed down. The pill must’ve been a fast-acting depressant, which they sold over the counter here in Periscope City. I know because of my own dog, but he didn’t need medication like me.
“You look different from your picture,” she said.
Ditto. Not only did she frown but her hair wasn’t blonde. It was purple. “How so?” I said.
“I thought you were taller,” she said.
I ignored her comment (let’s call it an insult), already being my tallest.
“Ask me something,” she said.
She was testing me, but then I remembered how sarcastic her profile had been attempting to be. The memory of it made me sweat a little with anxiety because I tried to think of something witty to say quickly, so I used a cliché. “If you could have dinner with anyone, who would it be?”
“Come on, dude,” she said. “Ask me something else.”
I gestured out to the surrounding park with my hands as if that were the explanation. “It was all I could think of,” I said.
“I told you, don’t be awkward,” she said. “What about you? Who would you have dinner with?”
I hated the question, too.
“Abraham Lincoln,” I said, and the words tasted like tinned fish.
“Why?”
“He was the first person who came to mind,” I said.
“Lame,” she said. “Now ask me a good question.”
“Okay,” I said. “Why did you name your dog Sheepshead?”
“Sheepshead Bay was the last place where I went with my husband,” she said.
“Did you separate?” I said.
She pressed her beanie down to her eyebrows, and I did the same with my trapper hat. We shared an awkward silence. It was what I got for asking a good question.
