Notes from the Overflow
Editiorial reviews of V.3--James Worth, Caleb Caudell, NJ, Nick Winney & William Pauley III
Warning: If you haven’t read “The Weeping” or “Gobla” yet, turn back now. These notes are full of spoilers and strange pipes you can’t unlook into.
The texts in this volume refused containment: they leaked into the room, contaminated the ordinary, turned the reader into witness or host. Whether through vengeance, psychic backflow, or pure existential pressure, each piece breached its own frame and reached off the page. What emerged wasn’t merely a collection of stories on the theme of Plumbing, but a strange and unnerving architecture of overflow.
’s The Source
When I first read The Source something caught in my gut—and stayed there. The piece moved me deeply, not just as a reader, but as a writer. It reminded me of what I reach for in my own work: language that doesn’t just describe sensation, but becomes it. There’s a word I’m reaching for—mimetic might come close—but what James does goes deeper than imitation. His imagery doesn’t mirror sensation; it transmits it. The piss-colored light, the overfull swelling, the refusal of release—it’s all so exquisitely uncomfortable. We are packed tight with tension. He stretches the skin of the narrative until it aches.
And yes, the prose is nearly flawless, so tightly wound it denies us the satisfaction of any exhale. It’s almost punishing in its beauty. But I wonder—does that beauty, that sensory overload, keep us from seeing what this story is truly about?
At its core, The Source seems to interrogate our relationship with the body—its needs, its refusals, its betrayals. There’s one word that jumps out, almost hidden: ejaculation. It appears unexpectedly, and cracked the story open for me. Is this, in part, about sexual denial? The animal impulse we’re trained to suppress? Is the cult in the story a mirror of our society—teaching us to hold it in, to pretend the body doesn’t speak, doesn’t need?
The Source—what is it? Something that’s supposed to connect us ends up isolating the narrator entirely: from others, from his own body, from any release. What happens when we stay full forever? What happens if we keep holding it in?
’s Treatment
Caleb Caudell’s writing gives no permission for slack. Treatment demands you meet it at its level. As an editor and fellow writer, I felt flayed reading it—stripped of illusions, implicated and recognized.
It is, frankly, an honor to publish this piece in SUM FLUX. Not only because of its excellence, but because of the way it incriminates us. Because it reads us, too. Treatment might be the most elegant provocation we’ve featured: a philosophical lancing of digital creative life. It begins in the gut—with intestinal distress—and proceeds to map out the whole psychic digestive system of writing online. Not metaphor layered over meaning, but meaning rendered in excretion.
There’s a remarkable line: “If you write a book … it’s a septic tank.” And another: “You’re squeezing yourself into dirty copper tubes and absorbing the excretions of numberless others.” And yet the tone is oddly calm. Not cynical. Not snide. Just ... bereft. Honest. Like someone staring down the shower drain and seeing all of us down there—tangled in hair and soap scum. Peering into a place you should never look.
In my time on Substack, I’ve noticed the most digestible work gets the most response. But the best work—the difficult, the strange, the unflinching—often meets only silence. Treatment asks a lot. Not with fists curled. Not with rabid mouth-froth. And certainly not with the honeysuckle glaze of platform-optimized kindness. It speaks straight. No la-la-la to drown the toilet flush.
If, as the therapist in the piece suggests, the writer is a kind of pipe—something waste flows through—then the reader is just another conduit, splashing around in the byproduct of someone else’s surplus. Not communion. Not reward. Just mess, pressure, and relief.
So why didn’t this story spark rage? Why wasn’t it met with the scorn we saw when Novalis wrote that Substack “popularizes the almost-smart”? (Link here.) Maybe because Caudell’s critique wasn’t shouted or sneered. It was true. And if you’re going to engage with it, you have to stop humming and listen. You have to hear the soft plops in the bowl.
Caudell names something writers struggle with: the cycle between too much and not enough. Between diarrhea and constipation. Between silence and overflow. His image of the patient flipping awake—“like a burger patty turning over”—captures this violent, bodily threshold where the pressure turns and the self feels like it might explode.
And in the center of it all is a restless, unresolvable contradiction: “My heart aches to be understood. I’m pretty sure that’s why I bother with all this.”
Between shit and sunlight, septic waste and radiant oil. Between what we hope for and what we get. The therapist offers one lifeline: generosity. A willingness to lift others even while knowing the system is broken. And in publishing this piece with us, Caudell performs that gesture—plugging his pipe into ours, letting his hot runoff pool into our collective basin.
Brock Eldon put it plainly, saying the piece was: “… a surreal, razor-sharp conversation about art, failure, recognition—and the plumbing of the human soul.”
Nick Winney admired the analogy of creativity as “pointless energy that needs to exit us thanks to the sun.”
Clancy Steadwell noted the brilliance in applying plumbing to “the creative/literary pipeline.” And Jesse Hilson reminded us: “We want recognition for expelling the mental waste—it’s often a social act, not just an intrinsic one.”
In the end, Treatment didn’t just match our plumbing theme—it unclogged something. It asked for nothing. And yet it gave.
And it leaves me wondering—not just why we write, but what kind of system we think we’re part of.
Are we writers, or just digestive systems—systems of pipes and pressure? Or are we creating meaning?
Are we just managing release? Is the real work just to keep expelling—quietly, precisely, maybe even beautifully—into the void?
If it's just pressure and release, why does it matter so much to us?
The Weeping
From the first line—“It started with a gentle tip tap on the day baby Friya died.”—we are dropped into something unbearable. But the tone is cool, the language distant. And that’s the trick of NJ’s story. Like the slow heat behind a wall, The Weeping builds a quiet pressure that doesn’t release so much as resonate.
There’s something here that reminded me of One Hundred Years of Solitude, that sense that the rules of this world are one tick to the left of our own—we can feel it even before the supernatural elements start to show. Even before the house starts weeping, we know this world is not exactly our own. In this world sorrow might seep from the pipes.
Though the story opens with tragedy, it does not ask us to feel it directly. There’s a deliberate distance between the reader and the couple at the center of the story. It grants the story the aura of a fable or a parable. We’re not invited into the psychology of grief—we are invited to observe it refracted through structure. Through walls and water.
And what begins as grief seeps into something stranger. As the house itself becomes a witness, its agency awakens. Its plumbing is not passive—it is accusatory. It weeps, yes, but it also investigates. And when justice arrives, it is not triumphant. The baby's death, we learn, is not just a tragedy but a consequence, siphoned by human greed, summoned by old magic.
And what’s left inside that crack is what turns this story outward—toward us. The walls are the real witness, the real storyteller. We, as readers, become a part of the story’s architecture. The text becomes the walls.
As we witness the guilt left floating in the water, we are not given closure—the story refuses to close. The final note is not catharsis but warning. The walls are still listening. What did the parents do? What did they allow? What have we allowed?
The Weeping leaves behind a residue—a slick, wet floor.
Has the house finished weeping?
Or have we only just begun to hear it?
King Crocodilo
King Crocodilo slips all the way down the drain—and not metaphorically. The plumbing, at first, feels like a curious prop in the theater of magical realism. But the story doesn’t stay quirky for long. It dives headfirst into a pulsing emotional conduit—an underground pipe clogged with memory, obsession, and the murk of childhood fears.
Aren’t we all haunted by the sediment of our early years? The dreams we carry as adults are so often staged in those same warped topographies: suburban lawns, unfinished basements, lakes thick with silt. The subconscious—a black aquarium—houses the beasts we never quite learned to name. For me, it’s the catfish: hulking, slithering things under the surface of my grandparents’ lake, whiskered and prehistoric. Just the thought of them still lifts the hair on my arms.
That’s the frequency King Crocodilo is tuned to. A kind of psychic sonar pulses through the prose—strange and personal, lyrical and grotesque.
This story doesn’t just describe a liminal space—it is one. A membrane between waking life and dream, between metaphor and object. Winney doesn’t construct a fictional world so much as allow fiction to infect his own. After writing the piece, he began receiving letters from the neighborhood plumbing council. He started finding mysterious green string on his walks. The uncanny didn’t stay contained—it seeped into the mundane.
And what makes the piece so powerful is that it doesn’t feel written—it feels survived. You get the sense the author had to keep every light on just to stay one step ahead. That this story clawed its way through the walls and pipes to reach the page. It reads like a dream, half-translated, half-exorcised.
In King Crocodilo, Winney opens a trapdoor to his own liminal world—and something slips out. Not quite fantasy, not quite memory, but something wet and flickering that slides, quietly, into ours.
Gobla
In response to William Pauley III’s Gobla, I wrote an off-the-cuff letter to Sylvia—from her mother. I felt the story left a whispered question. It haunted me, and not just because of the stench, the curlicue hairs, or even the idea of an entity living in the last place you want a creature living.
I think Pauley left us the hint of a doubt.
We hear early on that Sylvia is a drug addict. At first, it feels like texture, part of the grime-colored world. But in the end, as Sylvia insists just a little too much that she’s not using, something starts to stink in a different way. My read is that none of this happened. It might all be the invention of a manipulative (and imaginative) woman seeking another payout.
And if that’s true—something seismic has shifted in the 8th Block.
If you don’t know this about Pauley, he writes inside an entire universe of his own making: the 8th Block, a haunted, grimy, psychically toxic space where vacuum cleaners can suck in stardust, ancient gods might dwell in the heating ducts, and it’s not always clear whether what’s biting your face is a hallucination or a neighbor. But in Gobla, by placing the story inside Sum Flux’s apartment complex instead of the canonical Block, something else seems to be happening.
Maybe the 8th Block has started writing its own fiction. What if this isn’t just a story from the 8th Block—but by the 8th Block? Is the 8th Block trying to get out of the 8th Block… and come home with us?
That’s the real nastiness of Gobla—not just the rot or the sewage or the crawling thing below, but the epistemological sludge it leaves behind. Because whether or not the creature is “real,” we feel it. It gets inside.
And Gobla has restraint. The horror doesn’t always get to be seen. Sure, we get the devoured plumber—but not the system that pulled him in. Not the source. That means we, as readers, have to imagine it ourselves. And that means we’ve taken it home. Our own imaginations are seeded with this toxin.
“He attempted to take the entire drainage system apart, but as he tried, he found it was unlike any he’d seen before—whatever that means.”
That “whatever that means” is the story’s trapdoor. And we fall straight through it—into a network of imagined horrors, into something living that’s been there all along, just beneath us.
The idea that a creature is not just lurking but feeding—growing stronger on our waste—isn’t just disgusting. It’s profound. We want our furniture and our plumbing to stay silent, passive, and invisible. We don’t want to believe they might start growing teeth. Or talking back. Or writing their own stories.
This is not how you want to feel the next time you’re in the shower:
“It felt as if I was standing naked inside some sweltering mouth. As if I was some kind of sacrifice.”
And that’s one of the real gifts of the Pauley world: it gets to you banally. It shows up when you’re just living your life, doing your boring daily tasks, and suddenly the inanimate things around you seem… awake.
Pauley wants to disgust us. And he succeeds. Reader comments confirm it—people recoiling in real time, regretting their oatmeal, and side-eyeing their own bathtubs. But this isn’t just gross-out for fun. This is Pauley doing what he does best: sliding something under your skin and leaving it there to fester. He wants it to be contagious.
Even his joke in the subscriber chat—a graphic with “charts/statistics revealing how many tub gobblers are in the average apartment building”—wants us to take it home, and not just leave it on the page.
The 8th Block has moved in. It’s leaking through the plumbing. And it’s thirsty.
Pauley wakes the mundane up and gets under our skin in the worst way.
Ok, Pauley. We’re awake. Thanks for that.
Here’s the letter I wrote: From the only person who might really know whether Sylvia is lying or not:
Dear Sylvia,
I told you last time—no more money. It’s a difficult thing for a mother to say, but I warned you. I’ve dug you out of so many holes, and every time I fill them in, you dig them up again.
This time, you're on your own. It may seem cruel, but I see who you’re becoming—and that person feels like poison in my bloodstream, breaking down every organ in my body.
My doctor advised me to answer this letter and refuse to accept another. I’m terribly sorry about the man living in your drain.
But I don’t believe that’s the real reason you’ve asked for money. I don’t know what’s worse anymore—watching you destroy yourself, or realizing I can’t even bring myself to hope you’ll stop. I don’t believe a single word you say.
So, with a shattered heart, I say goodbye.
Have a wonderful life,
Mom
See you in early July, 2025 for V. 4
-Sandolore Sykes
A huge thanks to all the writers who participated in V.3. Visual adapted by
of ’s beautiful graphic.
so cool this gif !