Our Zine Died. The Friendships Didn't.
Six issues, forty copies each, and a bond that outlived the stapler.
We held the funeral in Dev's kitchen, with samosas, and the deceased was a stapler.
Not just the stapler, obviously. The stapler stood in for the whole thing: Wet Cement, our zine, six issues, forty copies each, two years, four friends, one long-arm Kangaro stapler we had named Officer, because it was the only member of the collective with any authority.
Officer got a eulogy. Dev delivered it holding the stapler up like a relic. "He never jammed when it mattered," Dev said, voice breaking theatrically. "Except always."
Let me back up.
Wet Cement started the way most good things started in our twenties: as a complaint that went on too long. The four of us, me, Dev, Anouk, and Ritz, met in the back row of an evening poetry workshop above a pharmacy, and afterward we would stand on the pavement for an hour saying goodbye without leaving. Our poems kept getting rejected everywhere that mattered, and one night, outside the pharmacy in light rain, Anouk said the sentence that cost us all so much money and gave us so much life... "What if we just printed them ourselves?"
The name came from Ritz. Wet cement, because you only get a minute to write in it before it sets, and because everything we made was unfinished on purpose. Our motto went on the inside cover of every issue: Printed before we could change our minds.
The production process was a religion with terrible rituals. Last Sunday of every second month, Dev's kitchen. Anouk brought her ancient inkjet, which printed every seventh page with a mysterious pink stripe that we eventually declared a design feature. Ritz did layout with actual scissors and a glue stick, because he did not trust computers with anything he loved. I wrote the editor's letter and made chai and misspelled at least one contributor's name per issue, a tradition I maintained with perfect consistency across all six issues, an achievement nobody has ever congratulated me on.
Forty copies. That was the print run. We chose forty because that was how many the budget allowed if we all skipped one dinner out per month, and because Ritz said, with the gravity of a man quoting scripture, "Forty people is a village. You can matter to a village."
We left copies in laundromats, at the pharmacy downstairs (the pharmacist demanded two, one to read and one to keep clean), in the workshop, on the 6:40 bus. Issue three had a poem Anouk wrote from a line she found in a book of poetry prompts, something about writing to the house you grew up in, and a woman none of us knew mailed the pharmacy a reply poem addressed to "the wet cement people." We printed it in issue four. She became our fifth contributor and we never once met her. She signed everything M.
That was the whole economy of the thing. No money, no metrics, no audience numbers. Just evidence, passed hand to hand, that we existed.
We were never building a magazine. We were building an excuse to stay in each other's lives, and it worked long after the magazine stopped.
The dying was slow and completely ordinary, which is the part nobody warns you about. Nothing dramatic killed Wet Cement. Anouk got into a master's program in Rotterdam. Ritz's daughter was born three weeks early, in the middle of laying out issue six, and he finished the layout in the hospital waiting room with the glue stick, which is why two poems in that issue are very slightly crooked, and why none of us will ever fix them.
Dev's restaurant shifts changed. My mother got sick and I moved home for a while, writing at night in a diary on my childhood bed with a pen that was running out, which felt symbolically heavy-handed even at the time.
We kept saying issue seven was coming. We said it for fourteen months...
Then Dev, who is the honest one, called a meeting and said, "Lads, the cement set."
So: the funeral. Samosas, chai, Officer the stapler lying in state on a tea towel. We read our worst poems from issue one out loud, the truly bad ones, and laughed until Anouk had to leave the room. We split the archive four ways, ten copies of history each.
Then Anouk flew to Rotterdam, and I braced for the second, quieter death, the one where the group chat goes from daily to weekly... to birthdays only.
The Part I Got Wrong
It never happened.
The chat is still daily, eleven years later. It turns out the zine had trained us in something without telling us. Every second month for two years, we had practiced showing up for each other's small, unprofitable things. That muscle doesn't atrophy just because the print run stops.
When my mother died, the three of them arrived within a week, Anouk from another country, and Ritz brought the glue stick, and I laughed for the first time in a month at the sight of it in his hand at the airport, held up like identification.
Dev opened his own place; the menu's first draft was workshopped in the chat like a poem, and we were savage about the font. Anouk published a real collection with a real press, and in the acknowledgments, before her parents, it says: for the wet cement people, who printed me before I was ready. Ritz's daughter, the one born into issue six, is eleven now and makes her own zine about insects. Print run: forty. She didn't ask us why forty. She just knew the family scripture.
And M, our fifth member... the stranger? Two years ago a poetry site profiled a retired schoolteacher, one of those pieces about writers nobody had heard yet, and there was a photograph, and behind her, framed on the wall, was a pink-striped page we all recognized in under a minute. The chat detonated. Anouk found the contact form. M wrote back one line... "You found me. Took you long enough."
She's in the chat now. She still signs everything M.
Last spring, the four of us, five counting M on a video call propped against the chai pot, gathered in Dev's kitchen again and made issue seven. One time only, eleventh anniversary of nothing, forty copies, pink stripe added deliberately now because the old printer is dead and the new one is depressingly reliable. My editor's letter was one sentence long: We regret to inform you that we are still here. I posted a scan of the cover on a community wall for poets, mostly so M could show her grandchildren without surrendering a physical copy, and strangers asked where to subscribe.
Nowhere. You can't. That was never what it was for.
People my age get sad about their twenties in a soft-focus way, and I understand it, but I've stopped grieving the zine, because I finally did the math on what actually ended. The paper ended. The staples ended. The rest of it, the Sunday kitchen, the showing up, the forty-person village, just took off its costume and kept going. Some things die and turn out to have been the container all along, and what they were holding doesn't even spill.
Officer sits in a drawer in Dev's restaurant kitchen, retired, still slightly jammed. Dev refuses to throw him out and refuses to fix him.
"He earned the rest," Dev says.
So did we. We just never took it.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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