Lunch Ticket
  • Current Issue
  • Archive
    • Issues Archive
      • Issue 27: Summer/Fall 2025
      • Issue 26: Winter/Spring 2025
      • Issue 25: Summer/Fall 2024
      • Issue 24: Winter/Spring 2024
      • Issue 23: Summer/Fall 2023
      • Issue 22: Winter/Spring 2023
      • Issue 21: Summer/Fall 2022
      • Issue 20: Winter/Spring 2022
      • Issue 19: Summer/Fall 2021
      • Issue 18: Winter/Spring 2021
      • Issue 17: Summer/Fall 2020
      • Issue 16: Winter/Spring 2020
      • Issue 15: Summer/Fall 2019
      • Issue 14: Winter/Spring 2019
      • Issue 13: Summer/Fall 2018
      • Issue 12: Winter/Spring 2018
      • Issue 11: Summer/Fall 2017
      • Issue 10: Winter/Spring 2017
      • Issue 9: Summer/Fall 2016
      • Issue 8: Winter/Spring 2016
      • Issue 7: Summer/Fall 2015
      • Issue 6: Winter/Spring 2015
      • Issue 5: Summer/Fall 2014
      • Issue 4: Winter/Spring 2014
      • Issue 3: Summer/Fall 2013
      • Issue 2: Winter/Spring 2013
      • Issue 1: Spring 2012
    • Genre Archive
      • Creative Nonfiction
      • Essays
      • Fiction
      • Flash Prose
      • Interviews
      • Lunch Specials
      • Poetry
      • Translation
      • Visual Art
      • Young Adult
  • About
    • Mission Statement
    • Lunch Ticket Staff
      • Issue 27: Summer/Fall 2025
      • Issue 26: Winter/Spring 2025
      • Issue 25: Summer/Fall 2024
      • Issue 24: Winter/Spring 2024
      • Issue 23: Summer/Fall 2023
      • Issue 22: Winter/Spring 2023
      • Issue 21: Summer/Fall 2022
      • Issue 20: Winter/Spring 2022
      • Issue 19: Summer/Fall 2021
      • Issue 18: Winter/Spring 2021
      • Issue 17: Summer/Fall 2020
      • Issue 16: Winter/Spring 2020
      • Issue 15: Summer/Fall 2019
      • Issue 14: Winter/Spring 2019
      • Issue 13: Summer/Fall 2018
      • Issue 12: Winter/Spring 2018
      • Issue 11: Summer/Fall 2017
      • Issue 10: Winter/Spring 2017
      • Issue 9: Summer/Fall 2016
      • Issue 8: Winter/Spring 2016
      • Issue 7: Summer/Fall 2015
      • Issue 6: Winter/Spring 2015
      • Issue 5: Summer/Fall 2014
      • Issue 4: Winter/Spring 2014
      • Issue 3: Summer/Fall 2013
      • Issue 2: Winter/Spring 2013
      • Issue 1: Spring 2012
    • Achievements
    • Community
    • Contact
  • Weekly Content
    • Friday Lunch Blog
    • Midnight Snack
    • Amuse-Bouche
    • School Lunch
  • Contests
    • Diana Woods Award in CNF
      • Issue 27: Summer/Fall 2025
      • Issue 26: Winter/Spring 2025
      • Issue 25: Summer/Fall 2024
      • Issue 24: Winter/Spring 2024
      • Issue 23: Summer/Fall 2023
      • Issue 22: Winter/Spring 2023
      • Issue 21: Summer/Fall 2022
      • Issue 20: Winter/Spring 2022
      • Issue 19: Summer/Fall 2021
      • Issue 18: Winter/Spring 2021
      • Issue 17: Summer/Fall 2020
      • Issue 16: Winter/Spring 2020
      • Issue 15: Summer/Fall 2019
      • Issue 14: Winter/Spring 2019
      • Issue 13: Summer/Fall 2018
      • Issue 12: Winter/Spring 2018
      • Issue 11: Summer/Fall 2017
      • Issue 10: Winter/Spring 2017
      • Issue 9: Summer/Fall 2016
      • Issue 8: Winter/Spring 2016
      • Issue 7: Summer/Fall 2015
      • Issue 6: Winter/Spring 2015
      • Issue 5: Summer/Fall 2014
      • Issue 4: Winter/Spring 2014
      • Issue 3: Summer/Fall 2013
    • Gabo Prize in Translation
      • Issue 27: Summer/Fall 2025
      • Issue 26: Winter/Spring 2025
      • Issue 25: Summer/Fall 2024
      • Issue 24: Winter/Spring 2024
      • Issue 23: Summer/Fall 2023
      • Issue 22: Winter/Spring 2023
      • Issue 21: Summer/Fall 2022
      • Issue 20: Winter/Spring 2022
      • Issue 19: Summer/Fall 2021
      • Issue 18: Winter/Spring 2021
      • Issue 17: Summer/Fall 2020
      • Issue 16: Winter/Spring 2020
      • Issue 15: Summer/Fall 2019
      • Issue 14: Winter/Spring 2019
      • Issue 13: Summer/Fall 2018
      • Issue 12: Winter/Spring 2018
      • Issue 11: Summer/Fall 2017
      • Issue 10: Winter/Spring 2017
      • Issue 9: Summer/Fall 2016
      • Issue 8: Winter/Spring 2016
      • Issue 7: Summer/Fall 2015
      • Issue 6: Winter/Spring 2015
    • Twitter Poetry Contest
      • 2021 Winners
      • 2020 Winners
      • 2019 Winners
  • Submissions
  • Click to open the search input field Click to open the search input field Search
  • Menu Menu
  • Link to Facebook
  • Link to Instagram
  • Link to X

Runaway Regression

November 10, 2021/ Ahsan Butt

It suddenly comes back to you late one night as you struggle with a story about a haunted house. You’re writing in that way where you’re fixated on the next line, but nothing feels right, because deep down you’re expecting that next line to fix everything that’s wrong.

You’re in your apartment bedroom, lit by your laptop, Pandora-supplied tunes leaking out of its cheap speakers. What starts it all is hearing Soul Asylum’s Runaway Train. You haven’t heard the song in almost two decades, but as soon as that scratchy voice begins singing, almost crooning, the video comes to mind—those missing children. You YouTube the video to be sure, and yes, you’re right. Interspersed with anguished shots of the band and melodramatic yet disturbing dramatizations are pictures of real missing children. School photos, glamor shots, candids, all sepia-saturated, each followed by a name and “missing since” caption in white text on a black background.

The video came out in June 1993, you would have been nine. Your teenage sister listened to a bit of Alternative. You associated it with the sadness you sensed in her. The way she went quiet listening was the same way she went quiet with the family sometimes, her being suddenly elsewhere.

You now remember watching the video with her, a lot. Despite its staginess, the video moves you, the older you watching in the dark on your laptop. When the first photo appears just as the chorus rings out, and there’s these big eyes and big dimples and cute teardrop earrings—”Wilda Mae Benoit, missing since 1992”—it’s all startlingly real.

Feeling moved suggests that prior to that feeling you were in a state of stillness, inertia, maybe even numb. The sensation is as much about the emotion that’s being felt as the surprise that you’re feeling it. You know you aren’t feeling what nine-year-old you felt. Nine-year-old you wasn’t numb the way adults become. Nine-year-old you wasn’t moved by those photos; you were scared. All these people missing from homes that, at least from the photos, seemed just like yours.

And you were already a scared child, weren’t you? Lying awake whole nights, staring vigilantly at your window, bathed in a light that was almost purple. You can’t remember all the things that churned in that mind those nights, there must have been so many—how you’ve managed not to think about them for so long is unsettling—but you are somehow certain that one of those things was a moment from a trailer.

You go to YouTube before you know what to type, but by the time the cursor is in the search bar, your fingers already know—Fire in the Sky. It was released in March 1993. You’re surprised by the ponderous opening voice-over and the laser-show anatomy. You don’t remember it all, but then a beam of light hits a young denimed man like a spasm, his shoulders cracking back in a rigid paralysis, and then again, from overhead, and you see his mouth hang uselessly open and his eyes roll up into his head. This you remember, though it still isn’t the moment. There’s a frantic sequence in which the denim man’s gurney ride down a hospital hall is spliced with him being dragged through some metallic tunnel; then he’s on a table and spindly aliens throw a sheet over him, though in the next shot, we see it’s not a sheet, it’s clung to his arm like a pink membrane, and his fingers twitch against its webbing. Then the moment comes: his upper body and head wrapped in this new skin, he writhes into a suctioned scream.

A good sequence. It doesn’t terrify you now, but you can see how it had. The story was based on the account of Travis Walton and his six friends, though one can assume loosely, since the director chose not to use Travis’ account of the abduction and drew instead from his own dreams. Whatever the source, the abduction scene was quite an escalation of what you’d seen. Your family used to watch Unsolved Mysteries together, which frequently featured UFO encounters including dramatizations, but those scenes had nothing on Travis screaming into the void.

But more than an escalation, perhaps it was a culmination. Unsolved Mysteries and other nineties  shows sometimesplayed actual audio from hypnotic regression sessions. Hypnosis was how many people came to believe they had repressed abduction experiences. Some accounts were exacting and clinical, while others were pained or hysterical to the point of collapse. These sessions felt real to you, beyond science. The voices didn’t seem to be performing. They seemed glimpses of a raw private self that you, at nine, already believed in. You knew even loved ones didn’t say aloud the things they felt most deeply. How shocking it must have been then, to witness Travis screaming in his alien skin.

So much had felt real to you at nine. It seems naïve to assume those fears you had are gone now, mere memories you can deconstruct with distanced fascination, as if they’re art objects.

You can’t remember what happened the rest of that night you were trying to write, where the remembering went from there, or what came of that story. You doubt you ever came up with the next line.

Ahsan Butt, Author Headshot
Ahsan Butt was born in Toronto, is of Pakistani descent, and currently lives in Los Angeles. His short-fiction and essays have appeared in West Branch, Barrelhouse, The Massachusetts Review, The Normal School, SmokeLong Quarterly, Blue Minaret, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Also, he is currently a Senior Editor at South Asian Avant Garde: A Dissident Literary Anthology (SAAG).

Midnight Snack Archive

  • 2025
  • 2024
  • 2023
  • 2022
  • 2021

Friday Lunch Blog

Friday Lunch! A serving of contemporary essays published the second Friday of every month.

Today’s course:

Behind the Eight Ball: How to Become Homeless in the Richest Country in the World

June 13, 2025/in Blog / Valerie Nyberg
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Valerie-Headshot-2.jpg 2000 1500 Valerie Nyberg https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Valerie Nyberg2025-06-13 11:55:462025-06-17 17:55:59Behind the Eight Ball: How to Become Homeless in the Richest Country in the World

Meeting My Child Self at the Trauma Play

May 9, 2025/in Blog / Gale Naylor
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Gale-Headshot-01July2024.jpg 1791 1587 Gale Naylor https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Gale Naylor2025-05-09 11:55:262025-06-17 18:07:25Meeting My Child Self at the Trauma Play

Products of Our Environment

March 14, 2025/in Blog / Mitko Grigorov
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Mitko_Grigorov.jpg 378 300 Mitko Grigorov https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Mitko Grigorov2025-03-14 11:00:082025-03-31 11:51:57Products of Our Environment

More Friday Lunch Blog »

Amuse-Bouche

Little bites every third Friday to whet your appetite!

Today’s plate:

Tale of the resistant apple tree

June 6, 2025/in Amuse-Bouche / Tahar Bekri, translated by Patrick Williamson
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/TaharBekri.jpg 512 340 Tahar Bekri, translated by Patrick Williamson https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Tahar Bekri, translated by Patrick Williamson2025-06-06 11:00:072025-06-17 18:56:48Tale of the resistant apple tree

Talyshi Wall Graffiti and other poems

May 30, 2025/in Amuse-Bouche / Ghazal
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Ghazal-headshot.jpg 867 590 Ghazal https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Ghazal2025-05-30 11:00:492025-07-08 06:08:58Talyshi Wall Graffiti and other poems

we don’t spend our lives in the belly of the fish

May 16, 2025/in Amuse-Bouche / translated from French by Gabriella Bedetti and Don Boes
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/headshot-translator-Gabriella-Bedetti.jpg 400 400 translated from French by Gabriella Bedetti and Don Boes https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png translated from French by Gabriella Bedetti and Don Boes2025-05-16 11:00:362025-07-08 07:33:51we don’t spend our lives in the belly of the fish

More Amuse-Bouche »

School Lunch

An occasional Wednesday series dishing up today’s best youth writers.

Today’s slice:

I’ve Stayed in the Front Yard

May 12, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Brendan Nurczyk
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/SL-Insta-Brendan-Nurczyk-2.png 1500 1500 Brendan Nurczyk https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Brendan Nurczyk2021-05-12 10:18:392022-02-01 13:24:05I’ve Stayed in the Front Yard

A Communal Announcement

April 28, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Isabella Dail
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/SL-FB-Isabella-Dail.png 788 940 Isabella Dail https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Isabella Dail2021-04-28 11:34:132021-04-28 11:34:13A Communal Announcement

Seventeen

April 14, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Abigail E. Calimaran
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/SL-Insta-Abigail-E.-Calimaran.png 1080 1080 Abigail E. Calimaran https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Abigail E. Calimaran2021-04-14 11:22:062021-04-14 11:22:06Seventeen

More School Lunch »

Word From the Editor

The state of the world breaks my heart every day. Broken hearted, I stay online. I can’t log off. Because my career and schooling are all done remotely, I tend to struggle with boundaries regarding screen time, with knowing when to break away.

Like many of you, I have been spilling my guts online to the world because the guts of the world keep spilling. None of it is pretty. But it’s one of the things that, having searched for basically my entire life, I found that tempers the chaos that lives rent free inside my head.

More from the current editor »
Current Issue »

Connect With Us

lunchticket on facebooklunchticket on instaX
Submit to Lunch Ticket

A literary and art journal
from the MFA community at
Antioch University Los Angeles.

Get Your Ticket

We’ll keep you fed with great new writing, insightful interviews, and thought-provoking art, and promise with all our hearts never to share your info with anyone else.

Newsletter Signup
Copyright © 2012-2025 LunchTicket.org. All Rights Reserved. Web design and development by GoodWebWorks.
Scroll to top Scroll to top Scroll to top